Well this is the plan for Yugoslavia this morning.
Two armies main pressure on their front line across the river, while the armoured and Mountain forces try and hook round through Slovenia.
Cavalry push on the other flank as a possible alternate breakthrough.
It's kind of working. Managed to break through in the east before the Romanians could take too much ground.
Cavalry are advancing and we're hooking round the Yugoslav front, while 2nd Army has been quickly flipped back to face the Romanians.
If they hold, we'll win this.
BREAKING: There's fighting in the suburbs of Budapest but Yugoslavia has surrendered!
Just the Romanians and the small matter of the French to worry about now.
Right. Took the coastline and released Serbia (with Sarajevo) as a puppet.
NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG WITH THIS PLAN
Now to try and force back the Romanians.
Right. Time to try and push the Romanians back. I'd really like to wait but I need them gone, or at least on the run, before Italy starts getting aggy.
The good news is the Germans have sent troops down to support me in the south, so I'm trying the trick with the cavalry again:
Try and break through on the flank and push through to Bucharest, this time hoping the Germans hold the salient opened up.
NEW PLAN! The unexpected success of 3rd Army in the South means that if 1st Army can pin the main Romanian forces in the West, we MAY manage to pocket their entire force.
That's if 3rd Army can maintain momentum and break through to the mountains...
Partial success! The Romanians spotted the plan and started pulling out what they could, but we still managed to pocket seven divisions. Including, crucially an armoured division.
Time to close out the pocket then flip 2nd Army down south to try and resume the breakthrough there
Bucharest is under serious pressure now...
Bucharest has fallen!
Time to just attack on all fronts. They don't have the logistics and resupply now to keep their armies in strength. Time to just hammer them.
If you're wondering what the French and Germans have been up to for this entire war, btw, the answer is:
Staring at each other angrily from their respective forts.
The French did manage to send an expeditionary force to Yugoslavia early on, but I pushed them into the sea.
Romania are crumbling now, and the Germans have sent a force south again to try and bask in the glory.
Six more divisions pocketed, but it's pretty much a full retreat now.
Capitulation soon.
And that's Romania out.
Took the Black Sea ports and oil fields. Left them as a puppet state on the Russian border.
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It's June 1999 and a NATO peacekeeping force (KFOR) enters Kosovo under a fragile peace, brokered to end the brutal Balkans wars.
When the first recon elements reach Pristina, though, they find that a small Russian force has also crossed the border and seized the airport.
The Russians (not unfairly) believe they have been cut out of the peacekeeping. But this seizure is an attempt by rogue elements within the Russian government to either provoke an engagement, or secure concessions.
They were FM Ivanov, General Ivashov and FSB head...
I'll NEVER tire of the fact that Uber were so desperate to avoid giving drivers sick days in the UK that they accidentally convinced a tribunal they were a cab firm.
Obscure autobiography arrived yesterday. Been trying to hunt down a copy of for years.
Tiny volume. Person who thinks he's unimportant. Arguably helped save thousands of Jews in WW2.
As is always the case, doesn't credit himself. Blames himself for not somehow saving more.
Flicking through it now and it's heartbreaking. As with Smallbones' papers or Mary Burchill's writings, just good people who stood up, but then cannot forever escape the guilt of thinking they could have done more than they did.
Even as they were doing more than anyone else.
We have a tendency to see 'heroes' as larger than life, and I hate it.
Nearly always they are just regular people who decide they will not accept what is happening, and who they're told to hate, and do what they can.
To understand Musk's renewed obsession with X and focus on financial services, you REALLY need to understand the X/Confinity merger that became PayPal.
And, particularly, the Peter Thiel-led coup that kicked Musk out as CEO/Chief Strategist.
Here's how that happened. 1/🧵
In early 2000, X hits the news for a vulnerability that allows money to be moved between accounts with just account details. This is fixed, but spooks investors.
Elon agrees with investor Mike Moritz from Sequoia to become CTO while Bill Harris (ex-Intuit) becomes CEO.
Meanwhile, over the road (literally), a startup called Confinity is making waves. It's funded by Peter Thiel, who is also its CEO, but is the brainchild of Ukrainian Max Levchin its CTO.
Backed by Nokia, Confinity is making a way to 'beam' money between PalmPilots by infrared.
Thread on history of X dot com and Melon Husk will have to wait until tomorrow as need to stream.
But in the meantime here is a quick story called:
That Time Elon Totalled his McLaren F1 While Trying to Show Off in Front of Peter Thiel 🧵/1
Year 2000. X and PayPal are fighting over the pay-by-email market. Both are burning cash so fast that a merger becomes inevitable (I'll cover all this in tomorrow's thread).
Musk (X) is REALLY not happy about this. He wants to WIN. Thiel (PayPal) is happy. He HAS won.
Thiel saw the writing on the wall, as did Bill Harris (formerly of Intuit) - X's CEO after Elon (biggest investor) stepped back to CTO . They have created this merger to save both companies and make lots of money. Harris has bullied Elon into it by threatening to quit otherwise.
I'm old enough to remember when the Rail Delivery Group insisted that Oyster Cards were the spawn of Satan.
They've never deliberately made one pro-passenger ticketing decision in their ENTIRE existence.
Best to assume, with ticket office closures, that this is still true.
If you're wondering why the RDG (or ATOC as it was then. They rebrand whenever the brand becomes toxic for being anti-pax) hated Oyster, it was because IT HELPED PEOPLE PAY THE RIGHT FARE.
The operators make a fortune, every year, from people overpaying for tickets.
This is why smartcard rollout is still shite outside London. There's zero financial benefit to the government or the TOCs in easy, transparent ticketing.
The only person who benefits from that is the passenger, and they aren't shareholders.