Play as · WW2 1939 · L2 · Occupied Protectorate

Bohemia & Moravia - September 1, 1939

Bohemia and Moravia in 1939 is what is left of Czechoslovakia after eleven months of dismemberment, and it is not a country. Munich took the Sudeten borderlands and the fortress line built to hold them in September 1938; Poland and Hungary took their pieces; Slovakia declared independence on 14 March 1939 under German sponsorship; and on the morning of 15 March the Wehrmacht drove into a snowstorm and occupied Prague against no resistance at all, after President Emil Hacha was kept awake in Berlin through the night and signed his country away. The Protectorate was proclaimed the next day. Konstantin von Neurath is Reich Protector, Hacha remains State President of an administration that governs nothing Berlin cares about, and Alois Elias runs a cabinet quietly in contact with the exiles. What the Germans have acquired is not territory so much as capacity: the most advanced heavy industry in central Europe, taken intact, with its workforce, its engineers and its order books. The strategic identity of the position is an occupied asset - enormous productive value, zero political existence.

Starting position

The starting board is an industrial economy under new management. Skoda at Plzen, the Bohemian-Moravian machine works that used to be CKD in Prague, and Zbrojovka Brno are among the best arms plants on the continent, and they now build for the Reich: the light tanks the Germans classify as the 35(t) and 38(t), which will make up a serious fraction of the panzer divisions that overrun France, plus artillery, small arms and vehicles in quantity. The Czechoslovak army's stocks were handed over intact - enough equipment to fit out several German divisions - and the national gold reserves were extracted through the Bank for International Settlements. The Protectorate keeps a police force and a token Government Army of a few thousand men with obsolete rifles, ceremonial in purpose. Against that, the German position has a weakness it will keep all war: the Czechs are needed as workers. Wholesale terror would cost production, so the occupation runs, at first, on managed collaboration - the protectorate administration, the trade unions, the pay packet - while the Gestapo builds its files. Resistance is already forming in the Obrana naroda networks of dismissed officers and in the intelligence links running to Benes in exile. The pieces are factories, skilled labour, a compromised government and a population that has not been defeated in battle and knows it.

What turns the campaign

There is no front here and no campaign in the ordinary sense; the war in Bohemia and Moravia is fought over output and consent. The German need is simple and unrelenting - keep the tanks and the machine tools coming - and every other question follows from it. The Czech answer takes shape in the first months and stays: work slowly, spoil quietly, remember. Autumn 1939 sets the pattern brutally. The banned independence-day demonstrations of 28 October are broken up, the student Jan Opletal dies of his wounds, his funeral becomes another demonstration, and on 17 November the Germans close every Czech university, execute nine student leaders and send more than a thousand to Sachsenhausen - a date the exiles turn into International Students' Day. From there the campaign turns on the terms of an impossible bargain. Push resistance hard and the reprisals fall on a population with no army to protect it, which is the arithmetic that produces Lidice and Lezaky after Heydrich is assassinated in 1942. Push it too little and the Protectorate ends the war as the Reich's most reliable arsenal with no claim on anybody's gratitude - which is precisely the problem Benes in London needs solving, because a government-in-exile with no visible resistance behind it has nothing to trade for the restoration of the state and the reversal of Munich.

Signature challenge