Timeline-191
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Timeline-191 is a fan name given to a series of Harry Turtledove alternate history novels.
TL-191 includes the novel How Few Remain, and the Great War, American Empire, and Settling Accounts trilogies. It has run from 1862 to 1942, and is likely to continue after the 1940s.
It is named after Robert E. Lee's Special Order No. 191, detailing the Army of Northern Virginia's invasion of the Union in September 1862 during the American Civil War. In reality the orders were lost and recovered by a Union soldier, allowing General George B. McClellan to surprise Lee and force the Battle of Antietam.
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2.1 The Road to War |
The Wars between States
In TL-191 the orders were never lost, and McClellan was caught by surprise. Lee forced him into battle on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and destroyed the Army of the Potomac in the battle of Camp Hill. Lee went on to capture Philadelphia, winning the Confederate States of America diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France and winning the war.
Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party were defeated in the 1864 elections, and would not elect another Republican president until 1880. James Blaine was a hard-liner who almost immediately precipitated a war against the Confederate States over the "coerced" purchase of the Mexican provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua.
Due largely to spectacular leadership from Confederate general Thomas Jackson against his counterpart William Rosecrans and the assistance of Great Britain and France, the United States was once again defeated and the Republicans turned out in the 1882 elections. In return for British and French assistance, Confederate President James Longstreet was obliged to propose the nominal manumission of the country's slaves, which proceeded throughout the 1880s.
A single battle in the Montana Territory against the British produced two American heroes who would become rivals for another forty years: General George Armstrong Custer and Theodore Roosevelt, colonel of the Unauthorized Regiment.
Witnessing the collapse of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, now an orator, made common cause with American socialists and led the left wing of the Republicans into this new party.
- How Few Remain (1997)
Great War
- The Great War Trilogy
- American Front (1998)
- Walk in Hell (1999)
- Breakthroughs (2000)
The Road to War
For the next thirty years, the Democratic Party dominated the politics of the United States. The Socialists eventually displaced the Republicans as the opposition party, and the GOP devolved into a small regional party of the Midwest. The United States economy and military ware reformed along Prussian lines: peacetime conscription and a naval buildup began, and resources such as coal, kerosene, and food products became subject to rationing. Large trusts held untrammeled power over the economy, with government encouragement, and labor rights largely ignored. The US eventually formally allied with the German Empire and joined the Quadruple Alliance.
A racial caste system similar to apartheid had been instituted in the CS, where Negroes were second-class citizens, who could not vote or even move freely about the country. Under the weight of this oppression the socialist theories of Karl Marx had taken hold among southern Negroes. White politics, meanwhile, was dominated by the Whigs, a conservative, mostly upper-class party, opposed by the Radical Liberals, a small opposition party which was popular in the fringes of the Confederacy, such as in Louisiana, State of Sequoyah, Sonora, Chihuahua, and the state of Cuba.
Canada was largely unchanged, except for the Anglo-Quebecois rivalry being overshadowed by fear of the United States, and universal conscription for the armed forces.
Overseas little seems changed, except that Japan, in addition to holding Chosen and Formosa (Korea and Taiwan, respectively), had also seized the Philippines from Spain during the Hispano-Japanese War (c. 1905). There was no Russo-Japanese War.
Relations between the two American nations had been tense since the Second Mexican War of 1881–1882. The Confederates joined their traditional allies Britain and France alongside the Russian Empire in the Quadruple Entente. Incidents such as border raids and the Anglo-Confederate proposal for a Nicaragua Canal nearly brought the two alliances to war many times. But when the spark for war comes, it is not in America but in the distant Austro-Hungarian Empire.
1914: Declaration and Invasion
The Empire's Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his family were killed by a terrorist bomb while touring the town of Sarajevo in June 1914. The Austrian government quickly learned that a Serb group was responsible, and accused the government of nearby Serbia of colluding with the terrorists. The Russian Tsar Nicholas II backed Serbia, and German Kaiser Wilhelm II backed Austria-Hungary, and the major powers of each system mobilized their militaries, effectively signifyng their intent to go to war. The Great War began in August 1914, initially pitting Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Across the Atlantic, Democratic President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the US military to mobilize in late July, following Germany's lead. In response Confederate President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Confederate military to do the same, and fighting soon broke out on their common border and on the high seas. The two countries officially declared war in early August; Wilson's speech, given in a tightly-packed public square of Richmond, Virginia decorated with statues of southern war heroes George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston, became particularly famous.
Hoping to emulate General Lee, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia launched a massive invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania in August, targeting the northern capital of Philadelphia. The ANV quickly overran the old capital of Washington, D.C. and pushed on through Maryland.
The US Army took a different approach, and ordered First Army under Lieutenant General George Custer and Second Army under Major General John Pershing to cross the Ohio River and invade Kentucky. Although Confederate resistance was high, especially from river gunboats modeled after the original Monitor, they succeeded in establishing a bridgehead on the southern bank. A US invasion of Sonora, intended to capture the Confederacy's sole Pacific port of Guaymas soon bogged down. A young army captain named Irving Morrell was wounded in this venture, and spent much of the next six months in Tucson, New Mexico Territory recuperating.
The US also launched attacks on the British dominion of Canada, specifically in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Perhaps the most successful maneuver during these early stages was the US Navy's capture of the British base at Pearl Harbor in the Sandwich Islands in a surprise attack.
1915: Stalemate
Most of these offensives soon stalled, however; the US armies found it difficult to push south, and the ANV was slowed by the 1914–15 winter and the invasion of Pennsylvania ground to a halt at the Susquehanna River, only a few dozen miles from Philadelphia. From that high-water mark, US forces slowly pushed them back into Maryland.
Although the US forces easily conquered the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River, crossing it proved another matter. The geography of the Niagara Peninsula soon bottlenecked the invading army, and though Winnipeg, Manitoba, a major rail junction, lay relatively close to the US border, the War Department allocated too few troops to capture it.
Trench warfare became ubiquitous as each side dug in for protection from machine-gun fire. Troops huddled in these trenches as heavy artillery in their rear pounded the enemy lines night and day. They dreaded the order of "Over the top!" which meant that they would have to leave the safety of their lines to charge into No Man's Land, in the hope of capturing the enemy trenches on the other side. Far from the quick, glorious conquest that each side had imagined, the Great War became a long, bloody stalemate.
Early in 1915, another front was opened when the Mormons of Utah seceded from the US and declared themselves the independent nation of Deseret. Mormon relations with the rest of the country had been hostile since the Utah War of the 1850s and the brief uprising during the Second Mexican War, and they believed that the distracted US government would be unable to subdue them. They were wrong; Utah sat on one of the major transcontinental rail lines, and President Roosevelt stated that the US would not tolerate unlawful rebellion. The Mormon rebellion raged until mid-1916, when it was finally crushed and Salt Lake City captured.
In the autumn of 1915, with the armies of the Confederacy locked in mortal combat with those of the USA along the border regions, the CSA's blacks rose up in revolt. Bitter over their treatment by the whites, and fueled by rhetoric of Marxism and the teachings of Abraham Lincoln, the blacks declared Red revolution in several areas across the CSA and established "socialist republics", while massacring whites and obtaining "justice" against their former white masters and overlords. These rebellions were gradually crushed by 1917, although white justice mellowed out a bit as thoughts were preoccupied with winning the war. White revenge would come later.
1916: Slaughter
Taking advantage of the Confederacy's plight, the US First and Second Armies completed the conquest of Kentucky and marched into Tennessee, while the CS Army of Northern Virginia was pushed south toward Washington. In mid-spring of 1916, a new armored technical advance called the "barrel" (called a tank by the British) was introduced to combat for the first time by US forces operating in the Roanoke Valley. In Tennessee, General Custer transformed his tactics for cavalry into a doctrine for the new barrels, but the War Department would hear none of it. When Custer's summer offensive opened that summer, tens of thousands of US soldiers were lost attacking Confederate lines, and the new barrels broke down in the hilly terrain, not being used the way Custer thought they should be.
The lack of British and Empire troops in Canada meant that the USA, while initially held back by the Canadians, would slowly advance toward their triple objectives of Quebec City, Toronto, and Winnipeg. Largely thanks to the efforts of Irving Morrell, US forces pushed up to Banff in the Canadian Rockies and cut the Pacific coast off from the rest of the country. At sea, the great Battle of the Three Navies between the USA one one side, and UK and Japan on the other, prevented the Entente from recapturing the Sandwich Islands. With the Central Pacific safely in US hands, a US Navy flotila made its way south toward the Cape of South America and the Atlantic on the other side, with the intent of cutting off Argentine grain and beef shipments to the UK.
On the Maryland front, the state was cleared of Confederate soldiers save for those holding Washington, the nominal US capital. In Tennessee that autumn, more attacks toward Nashville gained the USA nothing but a possible Democratic loss at the polls, with the possiblity that a Socialist President would seek peace with the CSA and throw away all that had been gained with blood. Save for a local attack on the Roanoke Front that pushed the USA out of western Virginia, the Confederates stayed on the defensive that autumn and attempted to drain the USA dry, hoping to sicken the US population of war.
Nevertheless, for all the machinations of the Socialist Party, and those of the Confederates, Theodore Roosevelt was re-elected. In Richmond, the hopes of President Gabriel Semmes and his Cabinet were dashed. The USA had another four years to crush the CSA, and the Confederates were already running out of white men to fight. A bill was passed authorizing the training and arming of bodies of Negro troops who would serve in the lines, with civil rights to be given after the war.
In Europe, the war seems little changed from our world, with the exception of Verdun's capture by the Germans, and an apparantly heavier use of African infantry by the French Army.
1917: Breakthroughs
General Custer secretly developed a scheme to quickly end the war in the USA's favor, using a massed-barrel (tank) formation that was forbidden by War Department staffers. Disguising his true intentions to all but Lieutenant-Colonel Morrell and his own adjutant, Major Abner Dowling, and lying about it to the president, Custer launched his Barrel Roll Offensive on Remembrance Day—April 22, 1917—and quickly broke through the Confederate trench lines north of the Tennessee capital. The Southerners withdrew to a line centered on Nashville, where Custer hit them again three weeks later by outflanking the city using a plan concocted by Morrell. Nashville fell, despite the best efforts of the newly formed CS colored regiments to stave off Custer's barrels, and the state capitol became First Army headquarters. From there, in July, Custer attacked in the direction of Murfreesboro, and near Nolensville received a Confederate request for a local armistice. President Roosevelt assented, and peace on the North American front came to Tennessee a week before the rest of the US-CS frontline. At the same time, mutinies in the French Army led to that country's exit from the war, while Russia collapsed into revolution and anarchy.
On the same day that the Barrel Roll Offensive began in Tennessee, the US Army in northern Virginia attacked southward toward Manassas at the same time as US troops entered occupied Washington DC. The de jure US capital was recaptured after several days of intense street fighting, which leveled most of the city and its famous landmarks. In northern Virginia, US attack after US attack forceed the CS Army of Northern Virginia to retreat south. In battles at Round Hill, Centreville, and Bull Run creek, rear-guard actions led by a few battered batteries of the First Richmond Howitzers prevented the complete destruction of Robert E. Lee's fabled army, but it was obvious that the war was on the verge of being lost—a notion that did not bode well with several Confederate soldiers, who reckoned that the war was as good as won only months before.
In Canada, Custer's methods were used to break through the Anglo-Canadian lines south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the provincial capital was taken in late May. The same strategy was used by US forces battling their way into Toronto, Ontario, the fall of which precipitated a British Empire request for a cease-fire with the USA on all land fronts. The armistice was granted in early June, and, with US-German naval operations cutting off Great Britain from its Argentine and Australasian food suppliers, the United Kingdom sued for peace later that summer—the last opponent of the Quadruple Alliance still in the war.
The Confederate States of America started sending peace feelers to Philadelphia as early as the fall of Nashville, but Theodore Roosevelt refused to grant a cease-fire until he was certain that the CSA was severely hammered elsewhere. The last hammers on the Confederate Army came in late July, when fighting reached the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, which was only about fifty miles from the Confederate States capital. With a cease-fire already in effect in Tennessee, Sequoyah overrun, and fighting out west in Texas and Arkansas sputtering down, the CSA agreed to a general armistice on land and at sea. For the first time since August 1914, the guns fell silent in North America.
At sea, however, the submarine CSS Bonefish, led by a Confederate Navy man named Roger Kimball, carried out a sneak attack on the USS Ericsson even though he was fully aware of the end of the war. For a long time after the war, both North and South were led to believe that the ship's destruction was a work of the Royal Navy, as the war between the USA and the British Empire at sea had not yet ended.
The American Empire
- The American Empire Trilogy
- Blood and Iron (2001)
- The Center Cannot Hold (2002)
- The Victorious Opposition (2003)
1918: Old Animosities Rekindled
The United States celebrated hard during 1918 as it reveled in the euphoria of having won revenge on the Confederate States, with parades and parties lasting well into the autumn of that year. President Roosevelt and General Custer (general being his true rank now, as Roosevelt promoted the aging officer in Nashville as the war was ending) rode together in the Philadelphia Remembrance Day Parade—the biggest one to date. The tradition of showing the national flag upside-down to show distress was put aside to show that the USA had reversed the outcome of 1882. But,the U.S. and C.S. navies still had to deploy minesweepers to de-mine their harbors,which kept them busy almost until the end of the American Empire trilogy.
Not everyone celebrated hard, however. Returning veterans found scabs working for cheaper wages in the factories and mines that they themselves had worked at before the call to arms during the war. More veterans found themselves being put down by capitalists and factory owner, and went on strike in industrial centers like Pittsburgh and Toledo. The owners sicced the Pinkertons and police on the strikers, but were repulsed by the war veterans, having faced far worse challenges in the trenches. The country seemed to be on the verge of revolutionary upheaval, and the Socialist Party capitalized on their gains among the lower classes. In November 1918, they captured the House of Representatives for the first time in their history, upsetting several of Theodore Roosevelt's plans for domestic and foreign affairs.
Citizens of the defeated and truncated Confederacy were hardly in a mood to celebrate that fall of 1917 and into 1918. President Roosevelt had forced humiliating terms upon them in return for his peace, and President Semmes had no choice but to agree to it. Kentucky was lost to the United States. So was Sequoyah, and also western Texas—which the USA had admitted into the Union as the state of Houston, with its capital at Lubbock. Pieces of Arkansas, Sonora and Virginia that were being held by US troops at armistice time were also admitted into respective US states. The CS Army and Navy were severely curtailed and shrunken, and massive reparations to be made to Philadelphia. These terms angered Confederates hither and yon, but they had no choice. It was Roosevelt's Peace or the war renewed, and they were in no condition to fight. Due to the payments being sent North, the Confederate dollar spiraled out of control, as hyperinflation ruined the CSA economy. In reaction, hatred against the USA went up among the white population, with several reactionary political parties sprouted up across the South. One of these fringe groups was the Freedom Party, founded by Anthony Dresser in Richmond, Virginia.
As for the British Empire, the Dominion of Canada included, President Roosevelt forced recognition of the Republic of Quebec (established in April 1917 as the war in Canada was drawing to a close) and the Republic of Ireland out of London, along with relinquishing claims to the Bahamas, Bermuda, and the Sandwich Islands, and to all of Canada. The Dominion government was made an illegal assembly, with US Army authorities setting up occupation headquarters in Winnipeg and turned each province into a military district. Occupied Canada was declared to be US territory as part of the new American Empire, "stretching from the Gulf of California to the Arctic Ocean." In 1919, General George Custer requested and was granted the post of governor-general of Occupied Canada, mostly in retribution for what he perceived to be a Canadian "murder" of his brother Tom in the fighting of 1881.
1919-1924: American Blood & Iron
The Freedom Party was doing well for itself in Richmond. Its chief speaker, a vengeful, spiteful and bitter ex-sergeant named Jake Featherston, harangued crowds at public meetings and squares on how the Confederacy had been "stabbed in the back" by the Whig Party, the War Department, and, most of all, the black minority, who had risen up in Red rebellion in 1915. His angry mannerisms connected him and his Party to the masses, and soon the Freedom Party became the white man's proto-version of the Socialists that were popular with the Confederate blacks and the Northerners in the USA. Everyone who knew better saw Featherston as the Party's true leader, and the "Sarge" won leadership in a power struggle against Dresser in mid-1919. Once he was comfortably settled in his new office, Featherston reorganized the Party into a political party revolving around his goals and ambitions, and white-shirted "stalwarts" were soon elected into the Confederate Congress, while their assault squads took on Featherston's pronounced enemies.
The victorious United States, with its American Empire, took no notice of political events occurring down south, save for a worried Representative from New York City named Flora Hamburger. Despite her calls for action, her party took no notice, preferring on ousting President Roosevelt out of office in 1920—which it did, when Upton Sinclair becoming president of the United States on March 4, 1921. That same year, Jake Featherston ran for office against Wade Hampton V of the Whigs and Ainsworth Layne of the Radical Liberals. He lost by a narrow margin but resolved to fight on. In the meantime, a deranged stalwart assassinated the new president in Alabama, and the Freedom Party immediately began to lose support—which hurt the Party a lot in the elections of 1923 and 1925. Another factor that limited the Freedom Party's chances for success was President Sinclair's lifting of the war reparations, which took the meat out of the Freedom Party's platform. Featherston and his most ardent stalwarts had nothing to look forward to for the next several years.
In Canada, Governor-General Custer ruled the former dominion with an iron-felt glove, surviving several assassination attempts by a Manitoban farmer named Arthur MacGregor, whom he killed in the farmer's final attempt as Custer was parading through his town. At that point, the war hero was retiring, having been forced out by the new Socialist administration, who wanted to shelve the USA's militarist-feel and go back to the days of peace, hoping that by treating its neighbors with respect that there would never be another war. Sinclair was popular enough to win re-election in 1924—the same year that the Freedom Party started involving stalwarts in the Mexican Civil War, an action the USA did nothing to stop.
1925-1933: Freedom on the Brink of Power
The media medium of radio had just been uncovered, and was now starting to reach to the people. Jake Featherston was the first politician to realize its potential, and soon people sitting in their homes could hear his raspy, thundery voice shouting from their radio sets, telling the Confederate people the "truth" about the Yankees, Whigs, and blacks. Even with this broadened appeal to the masses, the Freedom Party's hopes ebbed further with Featherston's defeat at the polls in 1927 against incumbent Burton Mitchel III. The Confederate people were just starting to enjoy the fruits of peace and prosperity, and the war and black uprisings were just mere events of the past—despite Featherston and his stalwarts doing their utmost to remind them. It seemed that nothing could ever change the fortunes of time, and then in 1929 the world's stock markets crashed.
In the CSA, Burton Mitchel III was blamed. In the USA—having just come out of the properous 1920s with a booming economy and a Canadian revolt having just been crushed in 1925, newly elected President Hosea Blackford took the heat. Millions lost their jobs, and in Utah, occupied since 1916, Mormon fanatics gunned down Governor-General John Pershing. When Japan and the USA went to war in 1932 after Japan was caught smuggling weapons to Canada by the USS Remembrance, and Japanese bombers attacked Los Angeles, Blackford was turned out of office by Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Coolidge died before he could hold office, and Hoover installed his platform policy of government non-intervention in the economy.
Things were happening in the CSA, however. Whole cities echoed to the boot-steps of marching stalwart formations as the Freedom Party, whose ranks were flowing once more with the angry and the wrathful, prepared for Election Day 1933. Jake Featherston attacked the Mitchel Administration with the most vulgar venom and hate, blaming Mitchel for the crash and his response to the floods that had devastated the Mississippi. Millions of Confederates lapped it up and shouted for more. And he had more to give them. When he took the oath of office on March 4, 1934, the world held its breath. "Freedom" was on the march.
In Europe the storm clouds were also beginning to gather. The final vestiges of Bolshevik revolution were crushed by 1927; among the last holdouts was the Volga town of Tsaritsyn under the "Man of Steel" and his second in command the Hammer (Molotov). Under Tsar Michael Russia remained a primarily agricultural, backward country. Frequent anti-Semitic pogroms and foreign loans managed to deflect further restlessness, but the latter contributed to the Business Collapse in 1929 when Austria-Hungary demanded the repayment of a loan that Russia was unable to fulfil.
Austria-Hungary itself remained a united empire, but none save the Austrians and Hungarians felt any loyalty to the Hapsburg monarchs. In fact, the multi-ethnic federation seems to have been held together only by German aid and bayonets. The Ottoman Empire also appears to be in the same boat, undertaking the ethnic cleansing of its Armenian population. Despite strong censure from the US and more lukewarm protests from Berlin, the killings continued until there were hardly any surviving Armenians.
Kaiser Wilhelm II ruled a strong Germany, and his troops continued to occupy Belgium, the Ukraine and the puppet Kingdom of Poland, but post-war relations with the US was such that many on both sides of the Atlantic believed that the two countries would come to blows someday. The Collapse put an end to that, however, and the old enemies reasserted themselves once more.
After the Collapse, France found itself under Action Francaise and its figurehead king Charles XI, who began making noises about the return of Alsace-Lorraine to French rule. In Britain the Silver Shirts under Oswald Mosley held the same views and popular support of Action Francaise, though they never became more than a minority in Parliament. Italy never came under Mussolini's rule; not much else is known about it.
Japan did not remain quiescent either. Prior to the Pacific War with the US, she 'persuaded' France and Holland to hand over Indochina and the East Indies. Though there were fears in Britain that Hong Kong and Malaya would also be annexed in this way, Japan showed no interest in doing so. Japan also gained much influence in China during this period, and seems to have annexed Manchuria as well.
1934-1941: The Victorious Opposition
The Depression lingered on in the USA and Occupied Canada through 1934 and 1935, with millions of men out of work and productivity down. President Hoover's only highlight during this time was ending the war with Japan, but many people still questioned why it had been fought in the first place. In Congress, Flora Hamburger Blackford questioned why Hoover and the Democrats were allowing the Confederate States to enlarge its army in violation of the peace treaty. At the same time, she had to deal with several Freedom Party congressmen from the former Confederate states of Kentucky and Houston (formerly part of Texas), who stalled Congressional sessions with calls for a plebiscite in their home states. When Socialist Al Smith was elected over Hoover in 1936, the Freedom Party's shouts started to get heeded.
The Freedom Party in the Confederate States had already turned the government into a one-party rule, with the Confederate Congress passing laws proposed by President Jake Featherston. He faced no opposition from the Confederate Supreme Court because he manuevered the high court into making its position vulnerable, whereupon he merely extended executive power and abolished the judicial branch. Forced-elections in 1935 and 1937 solidified and confirmed Freedom control of the House and Senate, while state legislatures and governorships were captured. The Army had been purged in 1936, and conscription renewed in 1938. The troublesome Vice President Willy Knight was removed from office after his attempt on Featherston's life later that year, and was soon imprisoned. The police was slowly padded with stalwarts, and soon, with a nod from the national administration and Attorney General Ferdinand Koenig, the states were installing correctional camps for "rioteous" and "unruly" Whigs and Radical Liberals. Radical Liberal Louisiana was toppled by Freedom stalwarts, with Huey Long's regime replaced by a more agreeable administration with Featherston's interests in mind. And, with black rebellion flare-ups popping up all over the CSA, the president had begun looking for quiet and suitable places to exact revenge for wrongs, real or (mostly) imagined, that the blacks had done. Louisiana was the perfect place to begin "reducing population."
Al Smith finally agreed to hear Jake Featherston's demands for the former Confederate states. In the resulting plebiscites of January 7, 1941, Kentucky and west Texas voted to return to the CSA, with promises from Featherston to not remilitarize them, or to ask for Seqouyah (which had voted pro-USA) or any other former CSA territory. Within weeks, Featherston broke his promise and planted his modernized and expanded Confederate Army on the Ohio River, convincing Smith that the time to face Featherston down had finally come. When Germany's longtime ruler died, tensions rose in Europe. The new Kaiser Friedrich I refused to return French territory that France's ruling party had demanded. Britain, France and the CSA soon declared war on Germany, with Russia joining in days later. With war breaking out in Europe, Jake Featherston felt it was time to have his revenge against his greatest enemy: the United States of America. On the first day of summer in 1941, he ordered Operation Blackbeard to begin. The Confederates open World War II in North America with a surprise attack on Philadelphia and Ohio the next day, June 22, 1941.
Settling Accounts
- The Settling Accounts Trilogy
- Return Engagement (2004)
- Drive to the East (due for 2005)
- To Be Announced
1941-1942: From Columbus to the Ukraine
At 3:30 am the North American war kicked off with massive bombing raids on Philadelphia and military installations all over Ohio. In an immediate joint session of Congress, President Smith called for - and received - a unanimous declaration of war against the Confederate States. Soon afterwards Churchill and the rest of the Entente announced hostilities against the USA.
Philadelphia had expected Featherston to strike in the east as the CS Army had done in the last war. Though Brig. General Abner Dowling and Colonel Irving Morrell knew better and had prepared for the coming strike as best they could, US forces in Ohio simply did not have the equipment or manpower that were needed to halt the Confederate army under George Patton. Within two months Sandusky on Lake Erie fell to CS soldiers, preventing raw materials in the west from reaching the factories of the east (See Operation Blackbeard for a detailed description of the campaign). Just before Sandusky fell, radical Mormons armed with Confederate weapons began a new drive for independence in Utah, capturing the settlement belt from Ogden in the north to Provo in the south (see Utah Troubles).
At sea the US fared little better although neither side won control of the sea lanes. In July the Royal Navy lured the carriers USS Remembrance and Sandwich Islands away from Bermuda. The island, a strategically valuable submarine and air base, fell to a joint Anglo-CS task force as a result. The Bahamas soon followed, the US Marines fighting island by island before surrendering. Stalemate characterised the war in the Pacific, until December 1941. At the Battle of Midway the Remembrance, sent around the Horn earlier that year, was sunk and the island itself taken. Although Japan also lost a carrier and had another one damaged, the US Pacific Fleet was left devoid of carriers and reliant upon land-based air cover.
The war in Europe spawned less triumph for the Entente. In the Ukraine, the local soldiers and population welcomed the arriving Russians as liberators, ensuring that most of the German satellite was lost. But elsewhere the manpower-swarming tactics of the Russians, unchanged from the last war, ensured that they suffered heavy losses for small gains. The Kaiser's army, particularly its panzers and 88 mm gun flak cannons, proved instrumental in preventing the loss of East Prussia and Poland.
In the West the French Army swiftly recaptured Alsace-Lorraine and stood on the Rhine. Ireland was overrun by the British, while the Anglo-French thrust through the Low Countries succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. The Belgians welcomed the Entente as liberators. The Dutch, though more pro-German, were brushed aside, and some of the North German Plain was overrun.
Yet victory did not follow. The British end-run through Norway, made for unclear reasons (Swedish iron-ore through Narvik? Naval bases? Both?) failed spectacularly. Churchill's bright idea did nothing more than drive the furious Norwegians into the Central Powers' camp. France proved unable to cross the Rhine and the Germans on that front soon rallied. Austria-Hungary, despite its clear weakness, remained united, and though Bulgaria wavered as a German ally she never abandoned Berlin entirely. Only the Low Countries campaign still showed promise by the end of 1941, but Hamburg still remained unconquered. By February 1942 the German Army felt confident enough to launch counter-offensives against the British outside Hamburg and the Russians in the Ukraine.
In North America the post-Blackbeard season proved uninspiring for both sides. Shortly after Sandusky fell, Jake Featherston declared that he would make peace with the US if his 'reasonasble' demands were met. All the 'unredeemed territory' was to be handed back, the post-WWI reparations that had destroyed the CS economy were to be repaid and the Northern (but not Southern) side of the border was to be demilitarized. Smith replied that night with the heaviest air raid on Richmond yet, before announcing on the wireless "I have not yet begun to fight!".
Yet despite his bravado, the situation for the US seemed bleak into February 1942. The counter-attack in northern Virginia under Daniel MacArthur soon bogged down. With too many men sandwiched between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, the US Army crossed the Rappahannock River but were held at the Rapidan line. A subsequent Confederate counter-attack under Patton failed to dislodge the Americans, and both sides settled in for the winter. Featherston realised that another knock-out blow was needed, and began planning for a drive eastwards for the spring of 1942. Ohio remained quiet, with nothing more than local offensives. The revolt in Utah showed no signs of ending; by Christmas American forces were stalled within Provo.
Neither side achieved a decisive advantage in the air war. Characterised by Clarence Potter as a "duel with machine guns at a pace and a half", both air forces soon resorted to night attacks only on the east coast, as flak and fighters made daylight raids too costly. Farther west, daytime raids still went on. On a tactical level, dive bombers proved damned effective at hitting ground targets and hideously vulnerable to fighters and flak; Confederate 'Asskickers' suffered enormously from both. Neither American Wright-27's nor Confederate 'Hound Dog' fighters had any great advantage over the other.
It was during this time that the 'population reductions' in the South began in earnest. Any black man whose passbook was out of order was immediately arrested and shipped out to a camp; in the cities Negroes were used as war plant labour while suffering reprisals for black car bombs and other terrorist acts. In the Lousisiana camps the slaughter had begun with submachine guns, a method that proved inefficient. The camps simmered at the edge of rebellion, while most guards couldn't stomach the job and some suicided. Soon gas was found to be easier, both for the guards' minds and for order in camps. Sealed trucks were ostensibly used to transfer blacks between camps; in practice the fumes would leave them dead and ready for disposal in mass graves.
Despite the Freedom Party's best efforts, news of the killings reached Philadelphia. Congresswoman Flora Blackford announced to the world Confederate crimes...only to receive scathing comparisons with Utah from the Entente and sympathetic but indifferent reactions from US citizens.
In February 1942, Confederate bombers, bombarding Philadelphia since the war's beginning, managed to hit the Powell House. Al Smith at the time was in the building and was killed. His vice president Charles La Follette was sworn in as president. La Follette vowed to continue the war and win it for the United States.
