This page contains analysis of the world and story of Valkyria Chronicles 4. There are unmarked spoilers for 4 as well as all previous games in the series.
Operation Cygnus: Problems of Nuclear Warfare and Diplomacy
Operation Cygnus is the kind of fictional military operation that makes for an exciting story: overmatched heroes using a high-tech secret weapon and a daring plan to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But looking at the events of the game through the lens of realistic military and political principles, it’s also interesting to ask: why did it work? Or to put out another way: should it have worked?
This is a work in progress
According to the in-game glossary, Operation Cygnus was originally intended to assist the main war-winning plan of the Atlantic Federation, Operation Northern Cross. Northern Cross was already being formulated prior to the beginning of the Second Europan War: in order to avoid a repeat of the First Europan War's attrition-heavy trench warfare and stalemate conclusion, the Federation planners prepared to seize the initiative with an all-out offensive that would strike deep into the Imperial heartland and end the conflict quickly. Unfortunately, the Federation took so long to unite and organize for war—a process that involved months of backroom deals and secret treaties between the members of the alliance—that the Empire struck first. In the beginning the Federation's forces were spread too thin in an attempt to hold as much Federation border territory as possible, which resulted in the Imperial forces smashing through and capturing a full third of the Federation's territory within three months. This put the Federation in danger of being utterly conquered if something didn't change quickly.
When General Headquarters finally announces the beginning of Operation Northern Cross on March 2nd of 1935 EC, the hopes of the Federation are riding on it. The Federation throws all of its manpower and resources into the counter-invasion of the Empire, which aims to capture the Imperial capital of Schwartzgrad and thereby force the Empire to the negotiating table before the end of the year. If we take the perspective of the planners there's more than one way in which this Capital Offensive could turn out successfully for the Federation, and they are listed here roughly in order from most to least optimal:
- Ideally, the Empire's leadership (presumed in this case to be the Emperor, the military high command, and maybe the Imperial Parliament for good measure) is captured alive and forced to agree to an immediate ceasefire. This is the best outcome because Imperial troops across Europa are more likely to obey a "stand down" order that comes from their own chain of command than they would be to submit to an ultimatum from the invader. This will be followed by, if not the total dissolution of the Empire, then at least a very one-sided negotiation in which the Federation has the Empire bent over a barrel due to holding its leaders and capital city as hostages. In this circumstance the Federation can make the Empire submit to demilitarization, territorial downsizing, and constitutional reforms in order to create a new balance of power where the Empire is no longer capable of threatening its neighbors.
- If the Empire's leadership is killed in the process of capturing the capital—either as collateral damage or as a consequence of them making a last stand in combat—the Imperial military may go into a death spiral: the morale blow of this national disaster combined with the loss of the command and control structure will leave the Decapitated Army vulnerable to subsequent defeats by the now-triumphant Edinburgh Army, which will destroy morale even more and lead to whole units deserting or surrendering. Whoever in the Empire's line of political succession inherits this mess will see the hopeless military situation and realize that negotiation is the only option, and they will have much more leeway to abandon the original war goals than the previous rulers did because they can say, "[Previous leader] lost the war, not me; Now that victory is impossible, I’ve got to do this to save the people." Ideally, this pro-peace leader will be recognized and obeyed by the whole empire instead of being contested by rivals. Refusal by the Imperial military to obey the ensuing ceasefire agreement shouldn’t be a problem, because the army will be so beaten up by all the defeats that the remaining generals will start begging their civilian government to enter negotiationsnote .
- Alternatively, killing the leadership may set off a Succession Crisis between the different claimants to the Imperial throne, or ignite a Civil War when territories and populations that resent Imperial rule (such as the Kingdom of Fhirald, the Nord republic, and the Empire's Darcsens) rebel against the weakened Empire. In a sense this is not as desirable an outcome as the first two—since there isn't one unified government left that can command all Imperial forces to stop fighting the Federation, and some scenarios such as a Darcsen uprising might backfire by spilling over into the Federation as wellnote —but it reduces the pressure on the Federation while giving them a chance to divide and conquer.
- Even if the enemy leadership escapes the fall of the capital by fleeing, their inability to protect the seat of government will cause their subjects to lose faith in them and strike a great blow to national morale. Furthermore, a huge hub of population, industry, communications, transportation, and military power will fall into the hands of the victors, which could enable the Federation to dig in along a new front line while starving the Empire of economic and military resources. Under these circumstances, it may be only a matter of time before the Empire's leaders are forced to seek negotiation after all.
Perhaps just as important as capturing the capital are the accomplishments which must necessarily precede it. Considering the technology and resources of the setting, raising a ground army of six million people and successfully advancing it 1,500 km into the heart of another country would count as a logistical triumph by the Federation even if it literally met no opposition. But in reality, the Empire can be expected to allocate every available division to protect the motherland and use every defensible feature of their territory, meaning a Federation spearhead which reaches Schwartzgrad intact enough to conquer it is almost by definition a force that defeated everything the Empire could possibly throw at it.
If the Empire uses up everything trying to prevent the capital from falling, and ultimately fails, then even if there's a vast expanse of Eastern territory for what's left of the Empire to fall back into and keep up the fight, it will be hard for them to regenerate enough combat power to kick the Federation out again. Along the road to Schwartzgrad, the Federation will end up capturing vast territories and thus denying vital resources to the Empire, including farms, factories, mines, power plants, rail lines, road networks, military bases, communication infrastructure, and populations full of workers and potential soldiers. The line of Federation advance would also eventually cut off the Imperial invasion of Gallia from resupply, while at the same time encircling all the Imperial territories along the western coast. To sum it up, Operation Northern Cross can hypothetically end the war because it combines the seizure of the Empire's seat of government, the defeat of its armies in battle, and the capture of much of the territory and resources it needs to keep fighting the war.
With hindsight and through comparison to its historical inspiration Operation Barbarossa, we can say that Northern Cross was too optimistic of a plan. The most obvious problem is how a force that stretched out its numbers and logistical train over such a long distance, and which took such a long time to reach its objective, was undoubtedly vulnerable to getting bogged down and then counterattacked at its most vulnerable moment. The point of this breakdown is not to say that Northern Cross was the best plan the Federation could have come up with; rather it's to show why victory in a war is normally pursued through a campaign of sequential actions rather than just hitting one decisive target, and to introduce a number of strategic aims that are thrown into jeopardy when the Cygnus Fleet is left as the only tool for winning the war.
It's somewhat unclear how the Cygnus Fleet was supposed to be integrated into Operation Northern Cross. Captain Morgen says that Operation Cygnus was supposed to be a "contingency plan" for Northern Cross, while the glossary notes that it was "merely considered a decoy to aid in the success of Operation Northern Cross." The last statement at least confirms that the cruisers were supposed to cross the Crystal Sea while the Edinburgh Army was on the road to Schwartzgrad, while at the same time implying that the Cygnus Fleet was not supposed to explode any Valkyria Bombs as long as the Edinburgh Army remained capable of capturing the capital city. The word "decoy" implies that at some point the ships were supposed to reveal themselves to the Empire to force a diversion of troops and resources away from the front lines, thus easing the way for the Edinburgh Army. What's not clear is the exact timing, and how aggressively the ships were supposed to be used. Ideally the ships would avoid detection until the land army came under pressure and needed a distraction.
While the following ideas may not be what the Federation's strategists had in mind, it's easy to think of creative ways that the Cygnus Fleet could help the army in Operation Northern Cross, particularly in connection with the final assault on Schwartzgrad. The Edinburgh Army is travelling a tremendous distance through hostile territory, making the transportation of supplies and heavy artillery extremely difficult. At the end of the campaign, the troops will be arriving at an enormous city surrounded by towering stone walls and garrisoned by the Empire's best forces. To solve these problems, the snow cruisers could link up with the army and act as giant breakthrough tanks: they would plow over enemy trenches and minefields, use their amp cannons to suppress enemy artillery batteries, and perhaps even break open the city gates by ramming to let the army stream in. Depending on exactly how durable their hulls and drive systems were, the cruisers might even be able to crash through the harbor gate from the seaward side, steamroll all of the buildings and fortifications in three lines across the city, and then burst out through the opposite side to let the army in through the resulting breach. Furthermore, the ships would provide a great relief to the troops at a critical moment by granting access their armories, kitchens, sick bays, and repair facilities. This infusion of help might give the army the last "oomph" required to take over the capital.
The Cygnus Fleet and the Edinburgh Army can help each other even as they approach Schwartzgrad by different paths, because as long as both are in play the Empire cannot concentrate all its resources on just one threat at a time. When they converge on the city, they can be even more synergistic: the ships by themselves don't carry enough troops to take over a city, and are vulnerable to concentrated enemy attack because of the large target they present, but they will become less vulnerable and create more opportunities as part of a combined arms force. It's likely that the Edinburgh Army plus the non-WMD abilities of the ships would get more useful work done than the ships by themselves could do with their Valkyria Bombs.
At the start of October, despite having penetrated the Siegvall line and gotten tantalizingly close to the Imperial capital, the forward elements of the Federation's invasion force experience a disastrous reversal of fortune. Cold temperatures and snowfall come two months early in the Empire, debilitating the troops who lack winter clothing and forcing already overstretched supply lines to a screeching halt. At this fateful juncture the Empire makes a massive counterattack, destroying Lindberg Base and routing the Edinburg Army. Operation Northern Cross has failed.
Thankfully, there is a contingency plan: Operation Cygnus. With the help of the United States of Vinland, the Edinburgh Navy has constructed a trio of "Snow Cruisers" whose special propulsion system allows them to move as easily over land as they do through water. With this ability the three warships can cross the frozen-over Crystal Sea and reach Schwartzgrad by a method the Empire wouldn't expect. Northern Cross, which had started as Plan A, will now be converted into a giant diversion to draw attention away from the Cygnus Fleet.
When the remaining Rangers under Claude Wallace board the flagship Centurion, they are led to believe that the ships will attack Schwartzgrad using conventional artillery and by deploying ground forces, but the truth is much darker: the ragnite reactor inside each ship contains a Valkyria, whose final flame can be used to turn the reactor into a Fantastic Nuke. The detonation of one of these Valkyria bombs inside Schwartzgrad would destroy it completely, taking out all the government and military leaders then in the city. The Cygnus plan anticipates that the highly centralized Imperial war machine will fall apart when its leadership is eliminated, allowing the Federation to force the Empire to negotiate for peace.
If we set aside our foreknowledge of the outcomes—namely that Northern Cross fails while Cygnus succeeds—Operation Cygnus is a riskier plan on a conceptual level. This is because:
- It relies upon technologies so secret that many of those executing the plan aren't allowed to know how they work, and which might not be entirely reliable or predictable when used;
- All of the payload and personnel for the operation are concentrated into just three ships, putting all of the Federation's eggs in a very small number of baskets;
- It is extremely dependent on operational secrecy for its best chance of success, since the Snow Cruisers face a high risk of destruction if intercepted, and the enemy can do a lot to prepare against it if they're tipped off;
- Because it lacks the capacity offered by Northern Cross to coerce the Imperial government from a position of physical control over captives and territory, Cygnus must instead hinge upon a Batman Gambit that won't work unless the planner(s) assumptions about Imperial politics and national morale turn out to be correct.
Points 1 through 3 are all problems that could potentially prevent the Cygnus team from blowing up Schwartzgrad. Indeed, they all explicitly come up during the canonical version of the game's events. But because the canonical game story sees Claude Wallace overcome all those challenges only to abort the A2 bomb detonation at the last minute, we never get to see any version of what might have happened if Schwartzgrad had been blown up according to plan. That is to say, we don't get to see whether successfully blowing up Schwartzgrad would have produced the political and strategic effect that the creators of the plan assumed it would.
Around October of 1935, when the Snow Cruisers embark on their mission, the Cygnus planners must have reason to believe that Schwartzgrad remains the nerve center of the Imperial military and government. Otherwise, Lieutenant Haddock wouldn't express such confidence that blowing up Schwartzgrad would end the war. However, just like any other piece of intelligence, this one has a short shelf-life. As soon as the Cygnus Fleet initiates radio silence and ventures into enemy territory, they are cut off from recieving intelligence updates about what's going on in the Empire and can do nothing but hope that the Empire doesn't do anything unexpected that would screw up the plan.
For example, there's a risk that one or more leaders capable of taking over command of the Empire's armed forces will avoid death by sheer coincidence. Blowing up the buildings and inhabitants of Schwartzgrad is not the primary goal; the Empire's leaders are the main target, and it just so happens that destroying the whole city is the most reliable way to kill them. Unfortunately, it's hard to be sure that specific high-value leaders such as the Emperor, Minister of War, or Chief of Staff of the Army will be in Schwartzgrad at the time when the Snow Cruiser(s) happen to arrive. Even if Schwartzgrad is the main center of government activity, at any given time there's a significant chance that one or more top leaders will be "out of town" on business when the bomb is detonated. We have no indication that any Federation intelligence service has real-time surveillance on these leaders or even intercepted communications revealing the timing of their movements, which would be necessary in order to guarantee the death of those targets. Even if they did, the Cygnus Fleet has no way of receiving those updates without giving the game away to the Empire. Therefore, they are forced to go in blind and hope that none of the Imperial leaders are saved by luck.
Sound bad? It gets worse. Operation Cygnus relies upon the element of surprise to blow up the Empire's leaders before they know what hit them. After the discovery of the Cygnus Fleet by Imperial forces, and especially after the highly-visible explosion of the Cavalier on the Crystal Sea, it seems silly to think that the Emperor and the staff of the military will politely remain in Schwartzgrad so the Centurion can blow them up. Yes, it's understandible that the highest figureheads would stay in Schwartzgrad for as long as possible: Joseph Stalin remaining in Moscow throughout 1941 despite the approach of German armies helped to reinforce the credibility of the Soviet government and preserve morale. But even in that case the city of Kuybyshevnote was being frantically prepared as a backup capital in case Moscow fell, with much of the government staff being evacuated there even while Stalin stayed in Moscow. A special bunker was constructed in Kuybyshev for Stalin to use if he had needed to evacuate, and we can be sure he would have gone there if he ever really thought that Moscow was about to fall.
The Centurion must really be counting on the Imperials to pick up the Villain Ball like Grand Moff Tarkin in A New Hope, refusing to leave their Death Star out of hubris. The narration notes that as news spreads of a Federation warship approaching Schwartzgrad, millions of civilian inhabitants are already starting to flee. For all that Claude knows, the Imperial leadership will already be gone by the time he arrives, and there's an even higher chance that the bureaucratic apparatus of the military had already started being moved out of the city just in case. Even if we assume that the Emperor and other politicians are still there at the moment the Centurion crashes through the walls, the plan that Claude enacts contains an obvious last chance for them to get away: if Claude has any hope that his own force will be able to flee the blast radius after starting the explosion sequence, then the Imperial bigwigs are almost guaranteed to escape the city if they commandeer cars or trains and start speeding away. They will already be booking it out of there while Squad E is bogged down in fighting to clear their escape route, and might already be out of the blast radius by the time Claude pulls the lever to start the countdown.
So, killing a critical mass of Imperial leadership is far from guaranteed. But what's supposed to happen even if the Emperor, the high command, etc. are successfully blown up? A decapitation strike to blow up Schwartzgrad and the Empire's leadership is a very different proposition from the Northern Cross plan of trying to capture the city and its leaders intact using a massive ground army. The latter is a hostage-taking gambit which deliberately keeps the enemy's hierarchy of command intact, precisely so the captured leaders can be forced to command the orderly surrender of their armed forces. Once the Edinburgh Army was routed by the Empire's winter counterattack, that option was off the table. Decapitation is different because it tries to take advantage of the enemy being thrown into paralysis by leaving no-one in charge, and is usually paired with a plan to attack on all fronts with conventional forces while the enemy is leaderless and bewildered.
The problem is that by now the Edinburgh army is in no fit state to go on the offensive, as it's on the verge of not even being able to hold its ground. The UKE Times estimates that over two million out of the original six million Northern Cross troops have died. This isn't given as the number of total casualties including dead, wounded, POW, and MIA; this is the number believed to have died. One cannot overstate how catastrophic this loss rate is. In Chapter 17, an Edinburgh Army scout notes that, "We're short on winter gear, our supplies are low... more of our troops have died to frostbite than combat! Operation Northern Cross is dead, sir... and if we stay, so are we!" It would be one thing if this were Northern Cross success scenario #2, in which the Edinburgh Army had kept on winning after the battle of Siegwall and kept advancing into Imperial territory. In that context if the Cygnus Fleet blew up the Emperor and the generals together with Schwartzgrad, then the Imperials wouldn't be in much of a position to retaliate, and the flames of righteous anger would be at least partially doused by the sheer depression and hopelessness that would set in for many. But blowing up Schwartzgrad will have a very different result if it happens in the context of the Edinburgh Army being in the desperate and losing position it actually is.
Even if Schwartzgrad gets blown up, causing the Imperial troops attacking the Edinburgh Army to stop recieving orders from high command and face an interruption of supplies, this will probably not lead to a severe short-term loss of combat effectiveness, let alone an immediate loss of will to fight. On the contrary, Imperial troops will view the bombing of Schwartzgrad as a cowardly act of terrorism which the desperate Federation must have committed because they knew how badly they were losing, and these Imperial troops will want to take out their rage on the Edinburgh army that's right in front of them. The fact that they were already fully engaged with the enemy means that local Imperial commanders will know what to do without needing strategic guidance from above, while the fact that they're still fighting fairly deep within Imperial territory will help cushion them against any logistical fallout caused by the Schwartzgrad attack. Meanwhile, the Edinburgh army is so degraded that it's unrealistic to think they can launch a successful attack purely off of the initial morale boost from hearing that Operation Cygnus succeeded. Hell, even if the damage to Imperial logistics proves bad enough to delay a full attack against the Edinburgh Army, it might be sufficient for the Imperial army to just keep the Edinburgh troops pinned in place so that more of them will freeze to death, die of their wounds, or succumb to hunger until they are forced to surrender to harsh captivity—if they're lucky. After the majority of the Edinburgh Army is destroyed, the continental part of the Federation will have precious little power to defend itself against a renewed Imperial invasion, although the start of that invasion might be significantly delayed by the losses the Empire sustained during Operation Northern Cross.
Within the Federation, the Valkyria Bomb is supposed to be a tightly controlled secret. This is not only necessary to prevent the Empire from discovering and countering the threat of the bomb, but also to protect the extremely sensitive diplomatic secret of the USV's involvement. Captain Morgen and Lieutenant Haddock are the main keepers of the secret. No members of the Edinburg Army troops led by Claude are told what's really at the heart of the Centurion, or what a child like Angelica is doing on board the ship. Even Chief Engineer Andre Dunois is not permitted in the restricted area of the engine room, which seems quite illogical; whether it's him or a different person, there's clearly an unmet need for someone to know enough about the special engine to repair it if there's a problem.
During an interlude between chapters 13 and 14, called "The Witch and The Wolf", Dr. Belgar informs Forseti that Prince Maximilian has fallen in battle (an event which occurrs on October 10, 1935 EC), and that the Empire is withdrawing from Gallia. Furthermore,
Belgar thus clarifies to the player that the Imperial high command knows about the snow cruisers traversing the Crystal Sea, but they do not know about the Valkyria Bombs they carry, apparently because Belgar deliberately hasn't told them.
Belgar was Crazy-Prepared to either use the Valkyria Bomb or have it used against him, since both his submarine Orcinus Magnus and the Lophius amphibious tank were designed to be survivable against such a weapon of mass destruction. It seems his plan all along was to capture a snow cruiser and make it self-destruct in a situation where he could analyze the explosion, which he must not think the higher-ups would give him permission to do. That may be because if the leadership really knew how dangerous the snow cruisers were, they would consider a plan to capture them intact unacceptably risky (either because a ship might evade the capture attempts and succeed in blowing up the capital, or because the X-0 ground force might get wiped out by a self-destructing cruiser), and therefore demand that the ships be destroyed on sight.
Belgar's obsession with capturing the secret technology causes him to repeatedly fight with one hand tied behind his back, by using the heavily-armed Orcinus Magnus merely as a stealthy troop deployment vessel and by instructing that Crymaria hold her power back. Crymaria was able to single-handedly destroy the Comet and partially cripple the Centurion when she disobeyed the order to leave them intact, so Belgar could have easily stopped the threat to the capital if he had not been pursuing his own selfish agenda. It must also be said that Forseti's concern for the Valkyria girls' safety causes him to miss some opportunities: for example, it should have been pretty obvious that the Centurion would come crashing through the harbor gate of Schwartzgrad, so all Forseti would have needed to do was plant a giant heap of explosives under the gate to blow up the Centurion as it came through. But he never would have considered that, because such a blunt method would have probably blown up Angie with the rest of the ship.
As a result of Belgar's rogue scheming, it isn't until the explosion of the Cavalier on the Crystal Sea at the end of Chapter 14 that the Imperial leadership learns about the nature of the threat to themselves. We can note lastly that Forseti would never knowingly consent to letting Belgar explode a Valkyria bomb, since the whole reason he threw in with the Empire was to save Angie and the other Valkyria girls. If Forseti had not died in his attempt to secure Angie, there inevitably would have been a conflict between his and Belgar's plans. Perhaps that's exactly how Belgar planned it: pull an Uriah Gambit in which Forseti serves as the disposable distraction, while Belgar himself goes for the prize.
One sign that the secrecy around Valyria-induced ragnite implosion is a bit leaky is the presence on the Centurion of Azusa Tsukikage, a spy from an unnamed far-eastern country who tries to access the restricted area of the engine room. While the USV and Federation are apparently the first side to put the technology into practice, it's likely that the other major powers have understood for a while that such a thing was theoretically possible (as was the case for atomic science in real life), and are thus eager to obtain that practical knowledge through espionage.
The Valkyria bomb is based on the ragnite compression research pioneered by the late Gallian inventor Albert Miller, which his daughter Riley developed upon and shared with the USV during her university studies in Vinland. Unbeknownst to Riley, this academic work was folded into the research on weaponizing Valkyria which the USV and the Federation started collaborating on after the First Europan War, and was turned into the technology for the Ragnite Implosion Turbine and the Valkyria bomb. There’s reason to think that the government of Vinland did not share the full knowledge required to produce the bomb with its Federation partners, but they nevertheless installed such reactor/bombs in three ships that were to be crewed and controlled entirely by the United Kingdom of Edinburg's armed forces, with not a single supervisor from Vinland on board.
In one sense Vinland's scheme could be considered a form of "nuclear sharing" such as the United States practiced with its allies since the Cold War. For example, the U.S. did not give Canada or West Germany the means to produce atomic bombs for themselves. What those countries did do was operate aircraft and other systems which were capable of delivering US tactical nukes, and hosting United States Air Force facilities which stored such tactical weapons. The weapons and their arming codes were guarded by the U.S. in peacetime, but if Soviet nuclear bombers had started flying towards the U.S. through Canadian airspace, or Soviet tanks had started pouring into West Germany, the U.S. intended to give nuclear weapons and their codes to those host countries for use against the attackers. This was an integral part of the mutual defense pact which sought to deter the Soviets from invading the members who didn’t own nuclear weapons by putting them under the protection of those that did, while at the same time avoiding the need for the US to start recklessly giving away nuclear weapons technology or for those countries to start researching and building their own bombs.
What Vinland is doing is much more radical, though. They aren’t just letting the Federation host a nuclear insurance policy that will only be transferred to them in the event of war; they are giving fully functional Valkyria bombs and the keys to use them with no strings attached, no additional layer of supervision or permission. Furthermore they are giving these weapons while the Federation is in a state of active war with the Empire, but the USV is not.
It would be one thing to sell or give conventional weapons to the Federation without declaring war on the Empire. Before Pearl Harbor the United States government sent a lot of weapons for the British Empire to use against the Germans, first under "cash-and-carry" rules and then under the "lend-lease" act. But for a non-belligerent country to provide what is essentially an atomic bomb for the specific purpose of blowing up the other side’s capital city is something we’ve never seen in real life during an active war. It would be almost comparable to the United States spending the 1930s developing an atomic bomb, and then giving it to Nationalist China as part of an operation to blow up Tokyo, all before Japan and the U.S. had declared war on each other.
Presumably, the reason that Vinland did not declare war against the Empire from the beginning is that the public was against it. However, there is obviously a government in Vinland or at least a faction within it which is far more aggressive in supporting the Federation than the average citizen is. So far this is pretty similar to America before the attack on Pearl Harbor, in which the Roosevelt administration viewed war with the Axis powers as unavoidable but was restricted in its actions by the public’s isolationist feelings. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declarations of war by Japan and Germany solved Roosevelt's problem in this regard, as they provoked the American people into fully supporting a war which they had originally wanted to avoid. But instead of waiting for the Empire to give them an excuse, it seems the Vinland government is willing to fire the first shot of what could turn into a wider war.
The glossary notes that Vinland has received some criticism for using the war as a testing ground for its new military technologies. Surely the Vinland side of the Operation Cygnus plan is looking forward to real-world data about the performance of the snow cruisers in combat. This perhaps leads to the disturbing thought that they regard using the bomb not merely as a last resort, but rather the outcome that they’re hoping to see. If Vinland had merely wanted to judge the effectiveness of the Ragnite Implosion Turbine as a means of ship propulsion, there would have been no need to give it to the UKE; they could have simply run those tests with their own ships on their own territory. Even if they had wanted the Federation to sail the Snow Cruisers around on the Crystal sea in order to test less obvious qualities like how well they could avoid detection by the Empire, the Vinland engineers could have installed the engine in a way that simply omitted the mechanism and controls by which the bomb sequence is activated. If they provide the activation lever and the keys to unlock it, then it stands to reason they want to it be used.
Another problem—and one that particularly applies to alternative delivery methods—is that of arming and fuzing. In real life the options are fairly convenient: an atomic demolition munition can be placed at the target and set to explode either by remote command or on a timer, while a nuclear gravity bomb or a missile warhead can be programmed to explode when on-board instruments detect it has reached a specified velocity and altitude. Because the nuclear explosion occurs pretty much instantaneously after the chemical explosives inside the device are triggered, it's perfectly fine for the explosion not to be triggered until the last fraction of a second of the bomb's flight, and even by contact fuze if necessary. In contrast, the process of activating a Valkyria bomb is depicted as something akin to deliberately starting a meltdown in a nuclear reactor, so there is a long delay between pulling the activation lever and getting the big explosion.
This excessive "lock time"—and what's worse, the fact that the exact length of time between triggering and detonation doesn't seem to be predictable in advance—means it would be very difficult to know when to start the cook-off of the bomb before dropping it out of an airplane, let alone trying to nail the timing on a missile payload flying at supersonic speed. The final nail in the coffin is the need to keep the Valkyria girl inside the payload alive until the moment she goes critical; since a high-speed flight/fall that ended in a sudden stop would presumably kill her and turn the bomb into a dud, the mechanism would need to be able to guarantee the correct timing for an airburst or else it would be useless. Given these constraints, maybe the ships were the only practical option from the start.
Interestingly, the Valkyria bombs and their delivery method resemble the hypothetical atom bombs described in the 1939 Einstein-Szilard letter
to President Roosevelt: "A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air." At this time Szilard and others assumed the amount of fissile material needed for a fission chain reaction might be several tons; it would not be until the Frisch–Peierls memorandum seven months later that this estimate would be reduced to less than 10 kilograms, which meant that an air-dropped weapon could be feasibly developed. In an alternate universe where the laws of physics were different and tons of fissile material actually were required, a self-destructing boat may have been the only way to deliver it. As far as manned delivery systems go, a bomber aircraft has the obvious advantage of dropping the bomb from a great height and while moving at a decent speed, so that by the time the bomb falls to the designated altitude and explodes the plane will have handily escaped the blast zone. Meanwhile, the snow cruisers basically turn themselves into time bombs and force their crews to flee for their lives. The final mission of Cygnus as directed by Claude Wallace involves ramming the Centurion into the center of Schwartzgrad, disembarking the ground troops, fighting in the streets to secure an escape corridor, and then setting the bomb to explode while all personnel except Angie make their escape. This mission somewhat resembles Operation Chariot
in which British sailors and commandos rammed an explosive-laden destroyer into the gates of the Normandie Dry Dock at St. Nazaire, disembarked to demolish additional targets, and were supposed to escape in motor launches after blowing up the docks. The St. Nazaire raid is very apt as a comparison, because it succeeded in putting the dry dock out of commission, but the part that went wrong was the extraction: the escape boats were mostly destroyed and more than half of the British personnel were captured or killed. The Schwartzgrad attack is actually even riskier, since the city is garrisoned by the strongest military forces of the empire (including X-0), and the distance the Centurion crew must flee to escape the blast radius of the A2 bomb is much longer than for the British sailors and commandos to avoid the explosion of the HMS Campbelltown. The Cygnus plan would have worked better if at least two Snow Cruisers had made it to the objective, so that the first ship could be set to explode while the second ship could take on the crew of the first and escape out to sea by going back through the initial breach in the harbor gate. But since Claude was forced to engage in urban combat so that his troops could escape on foot, the plan was very nearly derailed.
If we suppose that the Empire is not so weak that it would have collapsed merely from the capital being destroyed, then its willingness to sue for an armistice would depend a lot on the threat of subsequent attacks using more Valkyria bombs. But since each ship carries only one built-in bomb that cannot be shot as a projectile—meaning the speed and range of the bomb is merely that of the ship itself—the Empire can easily count the number of Valkyria bombs the Federation has ready to use simply by counting the number of snow cruisers in theater. If Schwartzgrad gets blown up, then whoever’s left in charge of the Capital region’s military defenses will probably activate every scouting and observation unit available to scour the Crystal Sea for Federation ships. The absence of more Snow Cruisers coming across the Crystal Sea will signal to them that the Federation doesn't have a follow-up attack immediately prepared, from which they might conclude the Federation has used up its trump card and is vulnerable to a retaliatory counter-offensive.
Contrast this with the real-life nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Atomic bombs developed by the United States were small enough in size and weight for their components to be transported quickly and secretly from the United States to the American airbase on the island of Tinian, and dropped on the enemy by modified versions of the same B-29 Stratofortress bombers that had already been dropping high explosive and napalm bombs on Japanese cities since 1944. On August 6th, 1945 the Japanese had no way of guessing that the B-29 Enola Gay was carrying a real, working atom bomb, which Japan had failed to produce and assumed was beyond even the United States' ability to deploy in the timeframe of the current war. Yet after August 9th, when the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, they had to accept that the Americans had not only built the bomb but done it more than once. Without intelligence sources inside the U.S. nuclear bombing operation the Japanese were left with a paranoia-inducing lack of knowledge about what the Americans were capable of doing next. For all that Japan knew the Americans could just keep cranking out copies of Fat Man at a steady pace, and as a matter of fact there were more in production. Every B-29 that flew over Japan was potentially carrying one, and the next attack could hit almost anywhere in Japan with hardly any warning. This new American capability invalidated the Japanese strategy of forcing the United States to launch a bloody invasion of the home islands, and directly threatened the lives of the Emperor and main war leaders. The fear of further atomic bombings helped to motivate the Japanese decision to stop holding out for more favorable negotiation terms and finally just surrender.
The characteristics of the Snow Cruisers—including the fact that they're Powered by a Forsaken Child—have various negative impacts on their viability as weapons, especially when compared to nuclear weapons in real life. The problems are not only tactical and industrial, but also psychological and ethical.
The fact that the bomb is driven along the ground into the midst of its target city presents a psychological problem when it comes to using it. Thomas Feribee, the bombardier on the Enola Gay, looked down at Hiroshima from a plane flying at 31,000 ft and picked the Aioi bridge as his aiming target; pretty soon it became possible for an operator in an underwater submarine or an underground launch control center thousands of miles away to kill millions of people without seeing their city, let alone the whites of their eyes. That kind of psychological distance is beneficial if you want the order for a nuclear attack to be obeyed. The fact that Claude was able to look down from the bridge of the Centurion and see a little boy in the street crying for his mother helped to make the moral decision real for him, which from a heartless military perspective is a glaring design flaw in the delivery system. Then again, it may be a reminder that people need to be selected for their psychological profiles: Claude was unlikely to go through with the explosion because of his humanistic ideals, while the grimly determined Brian Haddock or the vengeful Minerva Victor would have done it without hesitation if it had been up to them.
The immorality of kidnapping innocent children and causing their deaths through both the development and use of the bomb creates even more risk that someone involved will disobey an order or even mutiny against the military. This is illustrated by the fact that Kai Schulen (later known as Forseti) betrays the Federation in a quest to liberate as many Valkyria girls as possible, and that Claude struggles with guilt over the idea of sacrificing Angelica to destroy Schwartzgrad.
During the real-life Manhattan Project, the US government needed to worry about the secrets of atomic bomb construction being leaked or stolen, and perhaps whether the people responsible for dropping the bomb on cities would get cold feet over the idea of killing so many enemy civilians, but at least they never had to worry about one of their people developing a Companion Cube relationship with the inanimate uranium and plutonium that served as the fuel. They also never had to worry about not being able to operate either the delivery system or the bomb without the willing cooperation of the power source, because unlike Angelia a real atom bomb or nuclear reactor doesn't have a mind of its own.
Forseti says the USV conducted numerous "Valkyria Hunts" to find girls with Valkyria powers all over Europa. There was apparently also recruitment of girls in Vinland, one of whom was Angie. The glossary reveals that the Federation started a secret collaboration with the USV on Valkyria research in the aftermath of EWI, suggesting that these abductions and experiments have been going on for a long time already. By 1935 EC, "Over 100 girls were taken in the hunts. Because awakening a Valkyria requires a near-death experience, very few survived the horrific process. Those who did were so physically and mentally traumatized that most of them took their own lives." This horrific casualty rate might actually be no worse than the Empire's results, since Dr. Belgar mentions having worked on hundreds of Valkyria himself.
It's unclear whether the Federation could have sent more than three Snow Cruisers if not for lacking more than three usable Valkyria to power them, or whether they could only produce three snow cruisers despite being able to get more Valkyria. If the limiting factor is Valkyria numbers it would be very hard to increase 'production' in the future, since there's a finite number of Valkyria girls to recruit or kidnap, and the awakening process inevitably culls out most of them. With that in mind, it would be very strategically limiting if the USV could only produce single-digit numbers of bombs for the foreseeable future—in contrast to the thousands of bombs produced by the USA and USSR during the Cold War—and needing to kidnap hundreds of girls on a regular basis just to accomplish that would increase the chance of the dirty secret leaking out to the public and becoming a scandal. Also, since the Snow Cruiser's ragnite implosion turbine engine is produced in the USV and then provided to Edinburgh for installation into the ships, that line of supply creates delays and vulnerabilities.
The Valkyria bomb works by injecting highly compressed ragnite into the Valkyria inside the reactor as she unleashes her Final Flame, which increases her Final Flame's destructive power several times over. However, the self-destruction of the Cavalier creates an explosion that looks about as big and powerful as Selvaria's Final Flame that destroyed Ghirlandaio in Valkyria Chronicles. At first glance this result might seem disappointing, since this reactor technology could only boost the Valkyria inside to the explosive power that Selvaria achieved with no weapon but her own body. Of course, the Snow Cruisers are ultimately required as the delivery system to transport the Valkyria to the destination and force entry into Schwartzgrad, which is necessary in order for the explosion to have any strategic impact. It also makes sense that a child Valkyria like the one inside the Cavalier wouldn't be able to produce an explosion as large and destructive as Selvaria's without technological assistance, since a Valkyria's power might depend on several factors such as age, training, medical enhancement, and the purity of her Valkyria lineage. At the same time, an immature or lower-powered Valkyria who wasn't capable of producing a large final flame by herself would probably perform even less effectively as a warrior on the battlefield. The glossary says that the USV's Valkyria research prioritized reliable weaponization in the form of a bomb, unlike the Empire's focus on making super soldiers. It's unclear whether this means the USV and Federation couldn't have produced a strong Valkyria warrior if they had set out to do it, but in any case developing the bomb allowed them to use their limited "human resources" in a way that didn't depend as much on finding "unicorns" among the candidates.
In a way, it's similar to the doctrinal adaptations of Imperial Japan during the last years of World War II: since they had lost most of their experienced pilots and could only train new ones to a sub-par standard—and since American anti-air defenses had become so fearsome that flying in to drop bombs or torpedoes on American ships was practically a suicide mission already—they started using kamikaze attacks with explosive-laden planes so that even unskilled pilots could potentially sink an enemy warship with their deaths. If the USV reactor technology can boost even a weak and untrained Valkyria into a Final Flame that matches a hero like Selvaria, it can be considered very effective. Ironically, Maximilian was following the same logic when he ordered Selvaria to die for him: despite how powerful Selvaria was, Alicia proved to be even stronger, thus effectively neutralizing the advantage that Selvaria provided on the battlefield. That being the case, Maximilian coldly decided the only way to get some last use out of her was to use her Final Flame to destroy the greater part of the Gallian regular army, thus clearing the way for his thunder run toward Randgriz in the Marmota.
While it certainly wasn't the only factor, the Imperial government's realization that the explosion on the Crystal Sea was caused by the detonation of the Cavalier seems to have panicked them into initiating diplomacy with the Atlantic Federation. Clearly, whoever held the most sway decided that the Empire's maximalist war goals needed to be sacrificed in order to prevent Schwartzgrad and whatever leadership remained in the city from being blown up. With Operation Cygnus it seems the Federation politicians successfully pulled off a controversial technique called "escalate to de-escalate", where an escalatory threat that raises the stakes for both sides is used to shock the opponent out of complacency and make them willing to come back to the negotiating table.
On one hand, the East Europan Imperial Alliance wasn't as beaten and battered as the German Empire in the autumn of 1918 or the Japanese Empire in August of 1945. While those real-life entities had reached a point where they were too weak to keep fighting even if they'd wanted to, the EEIA had a real option to dig in and double down against the Federation if the political will could be found. Even after a hypothetical destruction of Schwartzgrad, the EEIA was probably better able than the Federation to sustain a war of attrition as long as a post-decapitation succession crisis or civil war could be averted.
On the other hand, by the time that the Cygnus Fleet reached Schwartzgrad the Federation was much more willing to agree to a ceasefire on terms that would leave the Empire fundamentally intact. At the outset of the war, the Federation surely intended to abolish the Imperial monarchy; disband its armed forces; and break the Empire up into numerous smaller states, perhaps even hoping to absorb the Westernmost ones into the Federation. But after the disaster of Operation Northern Cross—and facing the possibility that the Cygnus attack might either fail to blow up the capital or provoke the Empire into revenge mode if it succeeded—the Federation diplomats were willing to take whatever they could get.
The fact that the Empire would not be forced to abolish the monarchy, disband its military, give up territories it controlled before the war, or submit to a foreign occupation made this ceasefire a much easier pill to swallow compared to the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany or the Potsdam Declaration directed at Imperial Japan. Naturally, these concessions cause dissatisfaction amongst the Federation public who wanted revenge against the Empire and had called for nothing less than its dissolution.
The fact that the Federation was eager to discuss reasonable terms to restore the status quo ante bellum would have made it much harder for the Imperial diplomats and maybe even the Emperor to morally justify refusing the olive branch and potentially letting the Centurion blow up all the inhabitants of Schwartzgrad. For those who wanted to win the war, it might have made cold rational sense to refuse the overtures: as long as the leadership wasn't caught in the blast, the loss of Schwartzgrad would not cripple the Empire and would ensure public support for fighting until the destruction of the Federation. But that is an incredibly cruel and cynical tradeoff to make. While Dr. Belgar is a narcissistic psychopath who would go so far as to destroy his own side’s capital city just to satisfy his scientific curiosity, he is probably an extreme outlier; Punch-Clock Villain and Even Evil Has Standards are probably the more common personality profiles in government. Those people would struggle to live with themselves if they knew they could have prevented the slaughter but decided to let it happen, which is why they probably chose what seemed to them like the only moral option.
An important factor which we have little to no insight into is factional politics within the EEIA. Even within an absolute monarchy like the Empire, there can be factions within the governing elite which advance differing opinions. Rather than a monolithic consensus in favor of fighting on until total victory no matter what the cost, there could be a divide between at least three constituencies:
- The hard-line warmongers, who want the empire to fight for as long as it takes and spend as many lives as it takes in order to totally defeat the Federation. Perhaps they hold an unshakable belief that regardless of present setbacks, the Empire will win eventually as long as they don’t give up. However, it's also possible that some of them are such ideological fanatics that would rather have the whole country fight to the last man rather than sue for peace, even if the empire started hopelessly losing.
- You might assume that the highest leaders of the empire are members of this faction—with Adolf Hitler being a good example of what it would be like to have such a fanatical leader in charge—but that might not necessarily to be the case; there have also been times in history where hard-line junior leadership or public opinion exerted pressure upon more moderate wartime leadership to adopt more extreme policies than they would have otherwise. A good example is Imperial Japan, where the coup that attempted to prevent the surrender to the Allies before it happened was carried out by lower-ranking officers rather than the heads of the armed forces.
- An anti-war party, who did not want to start the present war in the first place. This may contain diverse members who have little in common except for being opposed to a particular war: some of them may think that the war is immoral on principle, while others may pragmatically calculate that the benefits of victory would be outweighed by what they think will be an unacceptable cost. The former will continue to oppose the war even if it ends up being wildly successful (as with Abraham Lincoln against the Mexican-American War), while the latter would have to be shown evidence of costs being far lower than expected in order to change their minds.
- While you might think that these would be the primary source of pressure on the government to end the war, that is probably not the case; the fact that the empire started the war to begin with implies that these people were not numerous or influential enough to prevent it, and they are unlikely to have grown their ranks through persuasion in the meantime because of wartime censorship and legal punishment of dissent. As long as the third group remains in alliance with the first group, the peace faction probably can’t do much.
- The most important group for our analysis consists of decision-makers who agreed to fight the war, but only because they believed that it could be won at a reasonable cost and in a reasonable amount of time, while not putting the survival of the regime at risk. Let's call them the pragmatic war party. This group would like to win the war, and may even be willing to sacrifice a lot of lives and resources to do it, but their tolerance for sacrifice is not unlimited. If the war's costs escalate beyond any benefits that victory could bring, or if the political stability and physical survival of the rulers is put at unacceptable risk by the continuation of the war, then the pragmatic war party might break with the hard-liners and decide to sue for peace.
It's possible that by the time of the A2 bomb crisis in Schwartzgrad, there was already a pragmatic war party in the Imperial government which had been souring on the war due to the unexpectedly high number of defeats, such as the disaster in Gallia and the loss of Imperial territory to Northern Cross before the winter counterattack. There were probably a lot of people who had thought that the war was going to be a cakewalk, and were rudely awakened by the realization that the Federation had the capacity to not just beat them back, but turn the tables and rampage through the Imperial heartland.
Even if Northern Cross was on track to be a strategic disaster for the Federation, and Operation Cygnus was unlikely to knock out the Empire in one fell swoop, the Empire probably would have needed to commit to at least another year of intense warfare in order to conquer the Federation on the mainland. It might actually take two or three years considering the manpower and equipment losses of the war's first year as well as the damage that would result from Schwartzgrad being destroyed. Worst of all, the United Kingdom of Edinburgh could not be feasibly assaulted within a short timeframe due to its island geography and powerful navy, giving them enough time to receive another shipment of Valkyria bombs from Vinland. In light of these daunting challenges, somebody might have convinced the Emperor or whoever held the final say that it would be better to freeze the war at this point, and then start rebuilding the Empire with the intention of re-starting the war in the future when they're better prepared.
Also, up to this point the civilian population of the Empire had not experienced the kind of genocidal brutality that Nazi Germany inflicted on the population of the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa, an outrage that contributed to making a Soviet peace with Germany impossible. Not only did the Federation ground troops treat Imperial citizens reasonably well, but they also did not bomb Imperial cities from the air as the Allies did to Japan and Germany. The Edinburgh Navy was about to cross that line by blowing up Schwartzgrad, after which public opinion in the Empire would have made peace negotiations impossible, but de-escalation remained possible up to the last minute if a ceasefire deal could be rushed through before the A2 bomb was exploded, allowing the truth about the bomb's role in the ceasefire to be covered up with censorship afterwards.
If Claude had gone through with his orders and exploded the A2 bomb, any hope of a negotiated ceasefire would have been dashed. The Empire would have considered the annihilation of Schwartzgrad an unforgivable atrocity that could only be repaid with the total conquest or outright destruction of the Federation, and there would have probably been a surge in Remember the Alamo-style war enthusiasm from the Empire's population, just like there was in the USA after Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001
. It ended up being fortunate that Claude got cold feet at the last minute, because the city of Schwartzgrad would have been worth a lot less to the Federation as a vaporized ruin than it was as a live hostage to be bargained for. At the same time, the Imperial government would have been rocked with scandal when the public found out that it failed to prevent most of the population of the capital city from getting blown up, especially because the evacuation order for Schwartzgrad didn't reveal what the government knew about the Valkyria bomb. While the public's anger against the Federation would have increased overall war enthusiasm, many of the individual leaders of Imperial government departments would have had to be sacked or even executed as scapegoats to deflect blame from the Imperial household, possibly giving those people a strong incentive to bring about a ceasefire to stop the bomb.
Now, the biggest headscratcher about this whole situation is why the Empire decides to honor the treaty even after the immediate threat of Schwartzgrad's destruction is removed. Claude and the rest of the crew should be considered pretty foolish for immediately disembarking from the ship and leaving the bomb unattended as soon as they hear the ceasefire announcement; it immediately allows Dr. Belgar to go rogue and grab the ship without permission from his superiors, but it could have just as easily happened that the Emperor or High Command ordered the capture of the ship as soon as the crew left it unmanned. The high stakes would have justified any reputational damage from breaking the ceasefire, and in fact they could argue they were justified in doing so: a person or state is not obliged to obey a contract that they only signed because they had a gun pointed at their head. They had another opportunity to repudiate the ceasefire after Claude extracted Angelica from the Centurion and the ship sank into the Crystal Sea, but for some reason decided not to take it.
The answer apparently lies outside the Empire itself, mostly with the fact that other countries may have been paying close attention once news of a ceasefire was broadcasted. One interested party would be Gallia, which still held a large number of Imperial soldiers as prisoners of war. The Empire would not want to give the Gallians an impression of bad faith by repudiating a ceasefire while negotiating a prisoner exchange. Gallia was technically a cobelligerent of the Federation. If the Empire broke a ceasefire with Gallia's warring partner, the Gallian government might repudiate its own ceasefire agreement and perhaps invade Imperial territory as retaliation. The other very interested party would be the United States of Vinland, who had built the snow cruisers. It could be that the Imperial Government was frightened to discover how far Vinland was willing to go to prevent the Federation from losing, and that this was a major factor in them wanting a ceasefire. Even if they thought that they could keep their involvement secret, the USV took a giant risk by helping the Edinburgh Navy obtain Valkyria Bombs, since they must have known the Empire would regard it as an act of war if they found out. The fact that the USV was willing to do this anyway implies that if more covert measures had proved insufficient, their government was prepared to drop the pretense of non-involvement and officially join the war on the Federation's side. The Empire might not have been prepared to go to war with the USV so soon, and if they weren't they would have decided to back away from the brink and de-escalate the situation. Repudiating the ceasefire might have caused Vinland to jump into the war for real.
Unlike the Atlantic Federation, Vinland isn't within striking distance of the Imperial military's main forces. Even if one were to assume that the East Europan Imperial Alliance's naval assets haven't been tied down by Federate diversions, threatening Vinland in order to prevent the ferrying of more snow cruisers to the Federation would be pointless since the result would be war, whether or not Vinland was physically attacked.
If the Empire carried out a series of naval strikes on Vinland's shipbuilding facilities in order to stop the production and ferrying of snow cruisers with Valkyria bombs, Vinland would declare war because its territory was attacked. If the Empire decided to use the wrecks of Comet and Cavalier as blackmail against Vinland, Vinland would retort that the Empire's use of superweapons and Valkyria soldiers in Federate territory and in Gallia is no better.
is in effect now: since the Valkyria bomb prevents the Empire from pursuing a total war of conquest against the Federation, and the Federation is prevented from launching a renewed invasion of the Empire either because of its conventional military inferiority or the Empire now possessing comparable WMD, each knows that the other one will not escalate to that point. However, this makes their strongest capabilities Too Awesome to Use against any threat that does not exceed the Godzilla Threshold, meaning that ironically there is potential for them to engage in conventional and limited military conflict over non-existential objectives such as the border regions. This dynamic played out in the various proxy battles of the Cold War.Notes on the Design of the Snow Cruisers
The snow cruisers are often called "battleships" in the English version of the game, but from a historical military perspective this is inaccurate. Battleships during the World Wars were essentially mobile, well-armored platforms for mounting the biggest and most powerful types of naval guns then in use. Such ships were built around their three or four primary gun turrets and magazines, which each mounted between two and four guns. These guns, hooked up to sophisticated rangefinders and fire control, were used to fire salvos of shells to take out even distant and heavily armored enemy surface ships, or to bombard enemy targets on land. Although much bigger than a World War 2 Destroyer, the Centurion at 19,240 tons displacement is lighter than even a Treaty Era battleship or battlecruiser and lacks big anti-ship guns; the Snow Cruisers' four amp cannons aren't even housed in armored turrets, and are essentially infantry support artillery rather than heavy anti-ship guns.
The term "cruiser" is more appropriate for the Cygnus ships, since World War 2 cruisers were similar in displacement and were similarly capable of pursuing long-distance patrol and raiding missions independently from the main battle fleet. If the Cygnus fleet was supposed to be a mere decoy for Northern Cross, such a mission would call for a fast, blockade-running, hit-and-run type design rather than a big gun battleship designed for a long-range slugging match. The ships are also named after three British "cruiser tank" models developed during World War II: the Comet, Centurion, and Cavalier. This fits with the United Kingdom of Edinburg's British-inspired theme and serves as a reminder that the vessels are "half-ship, half-tank."
The snow cruisers appear to sacrifice big guns and heavy armor in favor of two capabilities not possessed by normal naval cruisers, namely overland mobility and the ability to both carry and deploy ground troops. Basically, they're what you'd get if you made a five-way cross between a nuclear-powered cruiser, a nuclear-powered icebreaker, a tank, a screw-propelled vehicle, and an LST or amphibious assault ship.
The design for mobility involves a ram-like bow for breaking ice, a pair of continous tracks in front for propulsion and obstacle climbing, and a pair of cylindrical auger screws in back to provide the other half of the propulsion. The ragnite implosion turbine is necessary to move the ship at full speed, and perhaps also to give it the necessary range of operation if we assume that it gets more power from the same amount of ragnite fuel. Maximilian's land dreadnaut Marmota was seemingly able to propel itself without this specific technology—it is said to use four engines of unspecified design—but then again Gallia is so small that the Marmota's trip from the Imperial border to Randgriz was fairly short. Even if the Snow Cruisers could have technically moved overland at nearly the same cruising speed if they were conventionally powered, they might not have been able to carry enough fuel to make it to Schwartzgrad using such an energy-intensive method of locomotion.
The ships are not very heavily armored, as demonstrated by their vulnerability to Crymaria's energy blasts and the parachute bombs from the battle in the crevasse. The fact that they're not makes sense from an engineering perspective: despite the massive power produced by the ragnite implosion turbine, they would need to be kept as light as possible in order to not wear out the bearings and other load-bearing parts of the drive system while traveling over land. There's also the fact that moving on land exposes the lower parts of the hull that would be safely under water on a normal ship, meaning an armor belt that covered the whole exposed area would be impractically heavy. The snow cruisers also have caterpillar treads and auger screws which are neither fully enclosed in armor nor hidden under the water, making them tempting targets for disabling a ship (which was also a vulnerability of paddle wheel steamers prior to the adoption of the screw propeller).
Judging by the fact that they're troop-carrying ships and at least somewhat armed, the Snow Cruisers were designed not to be limited to just ramming the enemy and blowing themselves up. This is probably partly because they needed to be able to support Operation Northern Cross in a non-WMD capacity if the situation allowed, and partly because attacking Schwartzgrad via the frozen-over Crystal Sea would prevent any normal naval ships from escorting them, meaning they would need to be able to protect themselves if the enemy somehow intercepted them. Hypothetically the builders could have varied the design between the ships so they could cover each other's weaknesses—for instance, building one of the three with better guns and armor in exchange for reduced troop-carrying capacity—but instead they were content to build all three with the same features.
The Strategic and Diplomatic Mistakes of Major Belligerents in EW II
As mentioned in the original Valkyria Chronicles, the Second Europan War is the major event. It was caused by a dispute over resources, namely territory and Ragnite. The primary belligerents are the Federation and the Empire, both of whom had been planning to grab land and resources after declaring war. The Empire makes the majority of the gains due to its emphasis on militaristic build-up and previous experience in conquest (one presumes), while the Federation stumbles, having not really been prepared for a modern war in the context of the times. Gallia, the neutral country that gets caught in the mix, manages to kick the Empire's local invasion army in the teeth while refusing to join the Federation, something that would seem suicidal by today's political standards. Why the heck is the Federation, an alliance of democracies with considerable diplomatic and economic sway, losing to an empire with an archaic semi-feudal form of government? And just why does Gallia cling to its independence and neutrality despite the danger of standing alone? Let's look at the items below:
- The Federation has been accustomed to smaller wars, or even the old concept of static trench warfare that necessitated the development of tanks to break through enemy lines (as infantry support) back during the First Europan War. Gallia, which was concerned only with defending its own borders, banked their hopes on the fortresses securing the borders. The Empire, which has been experimenting a lot behind everyone's backs, manages to surprise everyone else by charging through their turf with a better-developed combined arms strategy. The Federation, having used more traditional doctrines involving infantry as the primary attacking force apart from long-range artillery, gets caught with its pants down. Gallia gets bum-rushed the same way, losing over half its land to mechanized forces. Given the issues of modern warfare, one would think that Gallia and the Federation would readjust their mentalities to force the Empire to a standstill with attrition, since they are fighting defensively at first.
- But no! The Federation insists on more of the same idea of classic maneuver warfare by launching Operation Northern Cross, sending division after division of foot soldiers—with a few tanks for support per company—into the meat-grinder in the hopes of smashing through the Empire's territory, capturing or destroying the Empire's capital city, and then forcing the Empire to give back territory. If that stalls, the secret Operation Cygnus (involving three ships with Fantastic Nuke technology) would take up the task and blow the imperial capital (and government) to Kingdom Come. The problem here is that there is no guarantee that blowing up Schwartzgrad would cause the Imperial Army to surrender. If anything, they might go on a revenge campaign instead.
- Meanwhile, Gallia proves easy prey to the Empire because of its small size and lack of allies, as well as dysfunction in both the government and the military. Chancellor Borg runs the government according to the interests of himself and the Gallian aristocracy with no input from Cordelia or the people, while the blue-blooded General Damon arrogantly looks down upon the militia. Damon proves himself to be cowardly and incompetent when he loses the fortress of Ghirlandaio to Selvaria and Maximilian, who turn it into their new headquarters; Damon and the regular army subsequently lose swaths of northern and central Gallia to Maximilian's mechanized blitz tactics, and fail to hold the Great Vasel Bridge leading to Randgriz. The correct strategy to prevent this outcome would have probably been a better "defense-in-depth" consisting of multiple lines of defense reinforced with minefields, tank traps, and anti-tank guns, which would slow down the enemy advance for long enough to bring in strategic reserves of medium tanks and motorized infantry to neutralize a particular attack before the Imperials could turn a breakthrough into an encirclement.
- The Gallian militia is belatedly mobilized after these failures when it should have called up long before March 15th as a precaution. Then Damon proceeds to let Captain Varrot's 3rd militia regiment take the high-difficulty offensive missions that should normally go to elite military units, while using his professional soldiers to do the kind of defensive duties that can safely be entrusted to less-capable militia troops. This backwards arrangement seems to work out for everybody through sheer dumb luck, since the militia with its ethos of national service and individual creativity apparently escaped the institutional corruption and outdated doctrinal thinking which afflicted the standing professional military. The militia is also better than it sounds because its members are not freshly drafted civilians who never held a weapon before, but rather a reservist force where the youths have gotten military training as part of their compulsory education; the older members are often veterans of the First Europan War; and university students such as Welkin and Faldio have officer training. Admittedly the militia is a bit of a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits which includes people with physical or psychological handicaps, as well as more people under 18 or over 40; presumably the full-time military is pickier and has more prime-age and healthy persons. The full-timers also ought to have more weapons training and large-unit exercises under their belts. But if the army was really as mismanaged as it seems, then the militia might legitimately be the better tool for the job. Varrot's strategic vision combined with Welkin Gunther's skillful command of Squad 7 and Alicia Melchiott's extraordinary Valkyria power—not to mention Kurt Irving and the Nameless working thanklessly in the shadows—manage to turn around what should have been a hopeless situation for Gallia.
- Gallia's use of the Nameless, Squad 422, also calls the competence of Gallian High Command into question. Whenever the Nameless win a battle, some other regular army unit takes credit for the deed only to get wiped out by the Imperial Army. When Squad 422 gets framed for the use of poison gas, nobody actually tries to arrest them realistically, believing that outlawing them and having them die by Imperial bullets will suffice. And when Crowe, 422's handler, has to appear before a tribunal, the units guarding central HQ are essentially told to shoot him on sight, giving away someone's little plan of subverting the entire Gallian government.
- When the Federation's Ambassador Townsend tries to orchestrate the kidnapping of Princess Cordelia as a means of turning Gallia into a protectorate of the Federation, his plan fails and backfires. While news of the kidnapping attempt on Cordelia is hidden from the Gallian public to avoid having to go to war with the Federation, this hostile action causes a breakdown of trust and sinks the possibility of closer cooperation: Gallia will have to continue to rely only on its own resources, of which much will be wasted by the regular army thanks to Damon's incompetence. The war is brought to a close only because the Imperial invasion force ran dry on supplies (owing to Squad E of the Federation Army Rangers destroying their primary supply depot) and then got massacred owing to the fact that the Imperial prince trying to conquer Gallia banked his victory on a stolen ancient superweapon that could be easily destroyed even by conventional forces. As for the Federation, they probably squandered a chance to get Gallia as an official ally, which they very well might have done by invoking the plight of the numerous Gallians fighting with the Edinburgh army in the frozen East. The fact that Gallia ended up with both Alicia and Riela as Valkyria warriors makes this missed opportunity even more unfortunate, since the Federation ended up having to fight the Empire with no Valkyria of its own except the combat-incapable ones on board the Snow Cruisers.
- Even after the war, Gallia remained potentially vulnerable to the superpowers on either side of it. Three individuals—Headmaster Laurence Kluivert, Count Gilbert Gassenarl, and ex-Imperial scientist Clementia Förster—formed the Asgardian Council to develop Artificial Valkyria technology through Project Valhalla. Kluivert thought the ability to create Artificial Valkyria soldiers was going to be the only way to ensure Gallia could protect itself in the future. The Asgardian Council was disbanded in 1937 EC when Gilbert Gassenarl created the Gallian Revolutionary Army and rebelled against Archduchess Cordelia, making use of Artificial Valkyria and accepting covert help from the Atlantic Federation through Ambassador Jean Townsend. While the ostensible reason for the rebellion was objection to having a Darcsen Archduchess and the supposed need to kill or drive out all the Darcsens in Gallia, Gilbert actually made a deal with Townsend that once in power he would rein in the Darcsen hunts and make Gallia join the Federation, for which he would be rewarded with a seat on the Federation Council. Meanwhile, Kluivert and Förster continued to work on Artificial Valkyria for the loyalist side. Gilbert succeeded in capturing Randgriz after the attack on Lanseal Academy, only to be murdered by his son Baldren who was unwilling to give Gallia over to foreign domination or abandon the goal of a racially purified state. Unlike his father, Baldren was willing to bet everything on Artificial Valkyria giving Gallia the strength to hold off both the Federation and the Empire. Baldren loses his gamble, being driven out of Randgriz and defeated by the cadets of Class G before he can escape to the Federation with the Artificial Valkyria research. With his dying breath, he challenges Avan Hardins to protect Gallia's independence without resorting to the same power.
- Even if Baldren hadn't been killed, he put too much faith in the Artificial Valkyria project to consider that both the Federation and the Empire had more than enough conventional weapons systems that could strike from beyond line of sight and more than enough regular forces to attrite Artificial Valkyria into surrender by this point in time. The Artificial Valkyria cannot counter long range artillery (like the Federation's snow cruiser Amp Cannons), nor can they go for long periods of battle without rest.
- Another problem for Baldren is that he continues to use lots of resources and manpower for his ideology of ethnic cleansing. Sure, it's not any worse than what the Empire did years before, but he hasn't considered that using his resources in such a way would rob his army of frontline combat readiness. Not only that, but the Federation has also demanded a complete stop of the Darcsen hunts altogether (presumably because of domestic unrest). Holding Townsend hostage can only do so much before the Federate government decides to consider the ambassador and the entire Gassenarl faction as liabilities to be tossed out. By that point, the Federation might actually be willing to put Cordelia back in charge of Gallia so as not to deteriorate relations further and so that the Empire doesn't swoop in to get a diplomatic (or military) foothold.
- Looking at the whole series of games, we can also say that the Empire's invasion of Gallia was a mistake.
- The Empire was already fighting a big war against the Federation, and although it was winning handily at first, the Federation launched Operation Northern Cross at the beginning of March and started pushing into imperial territory. Then, on March 15th—supposedly still "emboldened" by its momentum and success—the Empire declared war on Gallia and diverted its best offensive military forces to be used against a country that was not directly threatening it. The rational thing would have been for the Empire to leave Gallia alone until it had crushed the Federation's military power, at which point the Empire could easily devour the isolated and friendless state. To be fair, the discovery that Alicia Melchiott and Riela Marcellis were both Valkyria surprised the strategic planners on both sides, meaning the decision to start the invasion in the first place was not as stupid as the decision to continue it.
- The fact that the invasion of Gallia wasn't immediately aborted in order to defend against Northern Cross seems puzzling, if not downright insane. While Gallia's status as the most productive source of ragnite ore made it a prize for the Empire, no one says anything about the Empire facing such an acute shortage of ragnite that its military will be crippled by the end of the year unless it quickly takes over Gallia's mines; the problem is merely discussed in terms of ensuring the Empire's future economic and military growth. The newspaper in the VC I opening cinematic refers to studies talking about depletion in ten years, suggesting a more long-term problem that could probably wait until after the crushing of the Federation. Stopping the Edinburgh Army from penetrating into the Empire's heartland and threatening the capital should have obviously been the higher priority, unless the Imperial brass were simply so dismissive of the early results of Northern Cross that they expected to deal with it easily.
- It might all make sense if Prince Maximilian was the main political manipulator behind both the start and the stubborn continuance of the invasion of Gallia, since to him the capture of Gallia's ragnite mines for the Empire was a mere cover for his real goal: to steal the ancient superweapon Valkof and use it to usurp the Imperial throne. While the following is admittedly Fan Wank because you would think that he'd mention the Federation invasion at least once, Operation Northern Cross would not necessarily be a fatal threat to his plan. To begin with he feels no loyalty to the current government of the Empire, nor does he really care about the suffering of its people. Therefore, it might actually work to his advantage if the Federation was allowed to run wild in the Empire for almost a year, causing both sides to be weakened. Maybe he assumes that once he gets his hands on Valkof, he can turn around and destroy the Edinburgh Army inside the Empire's borders; after letting the sitting government look ineffective, he would come save the Empire and take all the credit, putting him in a position to stage a glorious takeover with popular support. But it all comes to nothing: by caring more about his personal ambition and revenge than giving his country the best chance of winning the war, Maximilian contributes to his side's defeat and gets himself killed in the process.
- Another little problem comes from the secret conflict presented in Valkyria Chronicles 3, namely the actions of Cardinal Gennaro Borgia, who sought to unite the entire continent through religion and covert subversion of the secular authorities. Gallia and the Empire (and we can assume the Federation as well) were supposed to fall victim to having their military leaderships assassinated or manipulated by the Yggist Church, but when that failed, Borgia sought to use the Hammer of the Valkyrur ICBM base to threaten the entire continent into accepting a theocracy under the Church. This plot was thwarted almost purely by Kurt Irving's Squad 422 and Ramsey Crowe's intelligence work, meaning if not for them the Empire would have been in serious trouble. Ironically, the Empire could have won the Second Europan War decisively if they had discovered this wonder weapon inside their own borders before Borgia did, since unlike Borgia and Dahau they had sufficient means to defend the missile complex against attack by ground forces while using the missiles however they liked.
- Despite having a better understanding of mechanized combined-arms warfare, the Imperial Army seems to have floundered in maintaining professional discipline in several units.
- One instance of a lack of overall discipline leading to a pyrrhic victory is the sacking of Bruhl, where Imperial soldiers wantonly destroyed militarily unimportant infrastructure, looted civilian houses, and killed civilians who were either fleeing or hiding from the violence. Had those soldiers been a little more "civilized" as we know it, and therefore concentrated on occupying better strategic positions and communicated better with their regimental command, Welkin Gunther and Isara might not have even gotten the Edelweiss out of its shed. But no, they were too concerned about having "fun" tormenting both the local town watch and noncombatants.
- Blatant war crimes committed by Imperial troops in conquered territories led to resistance movements that willingly accepted help from the Federation.
- The Imperial Army also seems to suffer from corruption and stagnation just like the Gallian Army, leading several commanders to assume that superweapons, superpowered soldiers, or superior numbers alone will win the day.
