A Timeline In A Month: The 1827 Shuffle.

[The Uchronian]

1923, and a comment regarding it.

TBH, it looks like 1923 is shaping up to be one of the longest updates in a while, so I'll go ahead and split it in two.

1923 (Part 1)

The Great War-Winter 1922/1923: The Ottomans, despite their recent successes in Palestine and Bulgaria, were facing trouble elsewhere: In mid-January, two entire naval task forces were sunken at once by the Royal Navy, not far off the northwest coast of Cyprus; another one was destroyed by a combined Greek and Italian force about 20 miles northeast of Iraklion in Crete, including one of the country's four new dreadnoughts, on the 31st. On the land front, their assistance of the Bosnians hadn't gone as well as planned, and the rebels in southern Mesopotamia continued to hold out as well, as did the partisans in Lebanon.

The Indo-Chinese Front saw some more advances by the Chinese, slowly inching towards the Ganges and also beginning to approach Bengal in the north and east. They also had a little help in the east: the Germans, who had been in regular contact with Beijing since 1915, offered to help stir up some of the more conservative Muslims in the west of India, who had become unhappy with what they perceived as oppressive Hindu rule. As a bonus, the Turks, who had been informed by Berlin of a potentially lucrative geopolitical opprotunity, themselves offered several thousand volunteers from the Arabian territories, as well as some accompanying Wahhabists from the Sheikhdom of Saudi Arabia[a vassal of Turkey, currently under the rule of the rather reactionary and thoroughly corrupt Al-Saud family], to further these aims. As a result, the Indians found themselves dealing with a rapidly growing insurgency in their western states starting in the middle of January, and throughout February. But all was not unwell for the Indians; the battles of Roorkee and Bareilly both ended in their favor, and the British were sending reinforcements of 100,000 men from Malaya and Borneo to back them up; the Afghanis also lent a hand to the Indians by way of 10,000 Pashtun warriors volunteering to fight the reactionary Muslim Mujihadeen. Even the Shah of Persia, whose own country still remained neutral, gifted some volunteers from his own country, to be sent to Karachi.

Back across the Urals, in Europe, the Western Europeans continued to try to hold out against the Germans. With Antwerp having been under siege since September, the Belgian government, now sheltering in the western town of Roeselare, was all but powerless at this point, and the Dutch were also still losing a little ground, even as the Germans were being forced to hold down more and more positions to the north and east of them, as well as trying to break through the Vernay Line in France, itself remaining a difficult task.

Britain rode out through yet another series of German air raids, designed to incapacitate as much of their Army and Navy as possible, during the month of January; 1,800 British sailors and soldiers were killed, along with 300 civilians, in several areas from Ipswich, in East Anglia, to Portsmouth, with many times more injured.

The Ukrainians continued to have substantial amounts of trouble taking out the Slovak partisans during this time, and many men were lost in futile attempts to smoke out said partisans. Despite growing concerns, however, Kiev pressed on anyway, upon the insistence of Tsar Michael himself.

And then there was the Soviets: although they chose to remain neutral, many of the leadership couldn't quite help but sympathize with Poland in particular; after all, the Poles had been the first country to recognize their nation.....so, although no declaration of war was made, Moscow approved a plan submitted to the Politburo by Valeriya Polanskaya and Rostislav Lysenko, to raise tens of thousands of volunteers to not only help the Allies win against Germany, but also to assist the growing number of anti-establishment elements within Germany itself.....

The Great War-Spring 1923: The Germans ground along the Vernay Line, determined to break through and drive all the way to Paris and beyond, if need be. They also continued making more progress in the Low Countries, as well, even if slowly; the Dutch, in particular, still had a fair bit of fight left in them, and Belgian partisans began to cause quite a bit of trouble behind the Ghent Line. Poland was also becoming a great challenge to hold down, as both they and the Ukrainians discovered; many Polish partisans had begun to figure out that they could steal weapons from dead enemy soldiers for a quick rearming, whenever they needed to do so, and the fact that the partisans were quickly adapting to the situation, to their complete advantage, was now becoming a significant problem for both of the invading countries. Their Austrian friends, meanwhile, hadn't had much luck with Hungary or Croatia themselves, during this time; although the erstwhile capital of Zagreb was essentially all but ruined, this did little to deter the Croatians from fighting off either Austria or Bosnia. And speaking of Bosnia, the patriots in that country continued to use auto-bombs as a tactic, sometimes with assistance from the Turks who had snuck over across the Adriatic; this did little, however, except to not only anger many of the Serbo-Croatian conscripts, but also to provide significant fodder for various instances of propaganda in both of these countries.

The Indo-Chinese Front continued to ever slightly move forward in the favor of China; much of the East Bengal region had fallen by spring's end, and the Chinese were also coming close to Amritsar and Lucknow. Islamic extremists funded by Beijing, and covertly armed by Germany and Turkey, were also causing trouble in the west of the country; they actually seized the town of Kuchlak, and raised the small village of Mastung entirely, during the month of March. Some of the worst of these same groups also later terrorized the cities of Quetta and Bhakkar in April and May, killing as many as 4,000 civilians.

Further to the south and east in Asia, Thailand, having been sandwiched in between two major Western powers for four whole decades, and feeling more than a little bullied, themselves felt it necessary to make their anger known, and invaded both British Burma and French Indochina on March 20th, causing both powers to have to declare war on Thailand; requests for a diplomatic meeting were rejected by Bangkok.

Back in the Middle East, the Ottomans just couldn't catch a break; their rebellious Mesopotamian provinces continued to prove a challenge to hold down, and Lebanon remained free of Turkish occupation. And they now faced air-raids on their few major towns in Libya, with Bani Waled and Benghazi being targeted by British airships and even the occasional carrier-based bomber-fighters, mostly based out of Malta. So, as part of a retaliation strategy, the Ottomans began to go after the Cypriots, who'd betrayed them nearly a decade earlier. On the last day of March, the port town of Famagusta was subjected to a nearly ten hour long bombardment by a small group of Ottoman ships; dozens of military men(including several Britons and Italians), along with dozens of civilians, were outright killed, and hundreds more maimed. The following day, the provisional government of Cyprus was warned that if they did not surrender to Turkey, that more bombardments and an invasion would follow. Nicosia, however, refused to cooperate, and contingency plans were made with Greece, Britain and Italy, in case the Turks were more than just bluffing.

Things had been going a little better for them in Eastern Europe; the Bulgarians had made a number of mistakes during the spring of 1923 that allowed the Turks to gain a substantially greater foothold than they had had just that winter; by the end of May, a few of the Turks had crossed into Romania and their comrade would begin direct operations there, in the not too distant future. They had also managed to take the Greek islands of Astipalaya and Amorgos, and were rapidly moving westward. Even so, losses continued to mount, and at home, civil unrest started to become a serious problem indeed.....

South America didn't see much major action just yet, although Peru and Colombia were indeed fighting Brazil; the city of Acre had fallen to Peruvian forces on April 1st , but the Brazilians had damaged several small settlements in the southeast of Colombia as well. Meanwhile, Uruguay faced an uphill battle as both the Brazilian and Argentine armies began to amass on their borders; of course, it did help that Montevideo had instituted a national conscription program in 1920, but this idea would soon be put to a real test.

The Great War-Summer 1923: The Germans made little progress in France; the Vernay Line continued to hold fast. And their problems in Poland continued to mount even with the help from their Ukrainian friends, with Czechia also proving to be a major pain, even with their troops almost on Prague's doorstep. Even the Danes, normally well-known for being a peaceful folk, were putting up a resistance to Germany's occupation, which, by the end of July, stretched as far north as Fredericia and Odense. The Baltic states were also starting to become a nuisance, ever since Lithuanian nationalists had started harassing the border guards in East Prussia starting in March; that was put to an end in July, when the Germans decided to invade the country, though without help from the Ukraine, which had a substantial Lithuanian minority that it could not afford to anger at this point in time.

The Austrians, at least, had a slightly better time in Hungary and Slovakia; by the end of August, Budapest was within reach and Kosice would also soon fall. They also retained control of Croatian Carniola[OTL's modern Slovenia]....but they had lost most of their gains elsewhere in Croatia and Zagreb was close to being liberated.

Auto-bomb usage dropped off during the summer of 1923 in Bosnia, with the exception of a brief spurt in the middle third of July, including one attack in Travnik targeted against the anti-war faction of the Bosnian military, killing not only many of their functionaries, but dozens of innocent civilians as well.

Further east in the Balkans, Turkey continued marching on, it's armies having officially crossed the Dunarea River in the middle of June. The Romanians suffered two major defeats in July, one at Mangalia on July 10th, and at Constanta a week later; Babadag was later razed, by the Romanians themselves, rather than let the Turks make any use out of it. Cooperating with the Ukraine, the Turks took whatever was left of the Romanian coast, effectively cutting off the Navy. Giurgiu and Slobozia would themselves both fall on August 7th and Budesti just two days later. And by the end of the month, they were within 40 km of Bucharest.

Back over in Bulgaria, the town of Plovdiv had been badly wrecked by a nearly three-week long siege, and when it was over on July 31st, the few surviving Bulgarian soldiers either surrendered or withdrew further to the west, though the local commander refused to allow his men to harass the civilians. People in Sevlievo were less fortunate, with some of the Turks setting themselves loose, and pillaging whatever homes & businesses they could find.

Greece also lost some more of it's islands, with the Cyclades falling by the end of July, as had Mykonos. Tinos and Syros were captured by the middle third of August, and by the end of the month, only Therasia, Santorini, Milos, and Crete remained free of Turkish occupation, and the Turks were beginning to prepare for an attempted invasion of the Greek mainland.....

The British had gotten a bit of a break from air-raids between mid-May and late June, but it started all over again on July 6th, when several German airships dropped bombs over one of the Royal Navy's shipworks facilities near Gillingham in Kent; the town of Gillingham itself also suffered notable damage from these same airships. German bombers later raided Lincoln, Norwich, Ipswich, Hastings, Southampton, Hull, and Grimsby, during the rest of July, further damaging Britain's industrial capabilities. There were also a number of naval battles just off the coast of Continental Europe, including one engagement in the English Channel that resulted in 2,000 British naval deaths, and the losses of the battleships HMS Bombay and HMS Cardiff (although the Germans did lose the Schleswig in return, with 735 men killed, almost three-quarters of those who died on the two British battleships combined).

Portugal's own participation in the war had been limited, thus far; primarily a support role for their old friends in Britain, and France as well. But that would change after July 18th, in which a Portuguese destroyer, the Joao dos Santos, was hit by a torpedo from a German submarine at around 21:25 Greenwich Time, about 180 miles due northwest of La Coruna, in Spanish Galicia. After this, the lawmakers in Lisbon began to demand that the government play a larger role in the war. As part of this, Lisbon began negotiations with the Spanish government in Madrid to allow the Portuguese military to use their ports; although Spain was neutral, there was much sympathy for Italy and Greece in particular, so they agreed to do so, although this decision was met with concerns that Germany and Turkey might turn their navies against them. Nevertheless, this deal was finalized on Sept. 1st, and ten days later, the first Portuguese troops actively deployed to the south of Switzerland began to arrive in many of Spain's coastal cities, many ultimately destined for the Balkans.....

Meanwhile, in South America, most of the fighting between Brazil and Peru + Colombia had come to a standstill, temporarily, as neither country could actually spare many men or much matériel for the moment. The fighting in Uruguay, however, began to become a full-blown conflagration in July, as the first major wave of Uruguayan soldiers arrived at the border to defend their homeland; the most notable of several skirmishes were at Fray Bentos on July 14th, and Rivera on July 26th.

And finally, the Indo-Chinese front saw little in the way of major events, with the exception of the Chinese capture of Lucknow on July 18th, and the rout at Asohar on July 29th.....as well as the destruction of a major hiding spot for Islamist terrorists just outside Larkana on August 7th. Thailand also saw little in the way of significant fighting, as many British and French troops were still having to stave off the Germans in Europe. Needless to say, however, there were some rather nervous officials in Bangkok questioning whether or not entering this conflict had been a wise idea.....

Okay then. Comments welcome, as always.

 

[The Uchronian]

I apologize to my faithful readers.....this took a day longer than expected. Not the worst delay I've ever had, of course, not by a long shot, but I hope you'll be happy regardless.

1923-Part 2

The Great War-Autumn 1923: This may have been the bloodiest period of the entire conflict.

The Germans continued to push against the Vernay Line, in the fervent hopes of many commanders that perhaps they could push all the way back to Paris, before forcing a French surrender.....even as Poland continued to wrestle free of their grip, and as their efforts in Denmark began to falter. And then, on Sept. 11th, the warhawks in Berlin got the news they'd been waiting for; they had finally breached the line, near the tiny town of Juniville, three days earlier, and were headed straight for the city of Reims, a manufacturing hub of nearly 45,000 people; a week later, they had captured the city, and a few more breaches had been reported. Their attempt to land some paratroopers in Norway, planned since June, was also a success. What wasn't mentioned, however, was a developing problem in the Low Countries, and one that could potentially offset any of the gains made in France....

During the second half of July, and through the month of August, the militaries of the United States and Great Britain, with help from Norway and Portugal(and a token force from the defacto independent Irish Free State, and even about 25,000 volunteers from the Soviet Union), a plan was put into play, in which the four nations would attempt a landing in the general area of the coast of North-West Europe between Dunkirk in Belgium, and Zevenbergen in the Netherlands, with most of them being concentrated between Terneuzen and De Haan. The first wave of about 100,000 men landed late on Sept. 7th, around the town of Knokke-Heist, about half of them British[and a few Western Australians and Tasmanians besides]. Unfortunately for the Dutch, however, this plan ran a serious risk of convincing the Germans to push much harder onto their side of the line; this, however, was a gamble the Allies were willing to play. By the time the Germans began to respond to any significant degree, the few Wehrmacht personnel and colloborationist militiamen who'd been stationed in the Belgian rump had already either died, fled eastward, or been captured by the Allies, and the Allies were already on Antwerp's doorstep, and Brussels wasn't far behind. In the hopes of countering this, Berlin did indeed order their forces to push harder towards the Netherlands, as had been suspected; from then on, until the end of the war, it was Holland that would now take the brunt of the German offensive in the Low Countries. But the plan still worked as intended: by the end of September, both of the aforementioned Belgian cities had been liberated by the multinational Allied task force, and further landings had occurred near The Hague and Calais to assist the Dutch and French militaries.

However, though, even with the successes in Belgium, things began to go terribly wrong for the Dutch; one of their top generals, Franck van Schenck, was killed on September 27th when a German artillery shell landed in front of his tent, about 15 km northeast of the badly besieged city of Breda. As Van Schenck had been one of the top strategists for the Dutch Army, this proved to be a major setback for them; he had been behind many of that nation's defensive strategies. Though Breda was relieved on Sept. 30th, the Germans levelled their fallback there with a thrust in the north, capturing Assen on October 9th, and Deventer two days later; the next two months would be utterly exhausting for the Dutch military. By the middle of November, most of the north of the country had finally fallen to the Germans and the Army was becoming increasingly fragmented, even despite the assistance from the other Allied powers. There was some good news for them, however: the Allies, along with the recently revitalized Belgian Army, were able to liberate most of the Limburg region, all the way up to Sittard, and soon, even the far east of Belgium would be liberated, and a drive could be made for Germany itself. Furthermore, despite increasing amount of German air-raids on Dutch cities, the Germans again found themselves

And despite the breaches of the Vernay Line, the French were themselves ultimately able to hold Germany back from the Seine River defensive line. Despite the fact that Reims, Laon, and several other towns had been reduced to rubble, the French, with help from their allies, continued to push eastward; by the end of November, nearly all of even eastern France had been liberated, and soon, Alsace-Lorraine would be in danger of being taken itself.....

The Austrians had made one final bit of major progress during the fall, when they managed to capture Budapest, after a tough battle. But then, just as that was over with, things began to fall apart; just before the siege of Budapest began, the Hungarian government got in touch with both Slovakian and Croatian officials and partisans alike, and put together a plan in the hopes of getting the Austrians to back off. A weak point had been discovered in the Austrian line, and if they could punch through that, then the Austrians would have to work quickly to try to sew it back up again; and if they couldn't, their entire army east of that point would be in serious danger of being destroyed.

It was a tough mission, but they managed to pull it off; by October 20th, the Austrians east of the Tatabanya line had found themselves cut off from all supply routes. Their defeat followed only a month later, after several disastrous battles; Budapest would be liberated on November 8th, as part of one of them, and Tatabanya was also freed just four days later. After a three-day siege, Bratislava was also liberated on November 19th, and, as a bonus, top Austrian general Heinz-Wilhelm Krebs even surrendered to the Slovak Army and accompanying partisans.

And as for the Ukrainians, they began to deal with their own problems, with massive amounts of unrest at home, and even the occasional pro-Soviet rebellion in the eastern half of the country. One incident near Luhan'sk in September, 1923, forced them to have to withdraw 40,000 troops from the front so they could deal with the problem.

Britain went through it's worst spate of air raids yet during the fall of 1923; perhaps the worst of them started on November 7th, when the Germans launched three dozen airships and fighter bombers to attack factories supplying weapons for the military.....in London itself. The cities of Birmingham. Portsmouth, York, and Coventry were also attacked. Over 20,000 civilians were killed during a five-day long campaign, and in retaliation, the British launched their own attacks on Hamburg, Kiel, Lubeck, and Bremerhaven, not only to damage German factories, but also to cripple their Navy as well; one run on November 9th over Kiel was so successful that the Aerial division of the Royal Navy even managed to sink the notorious dreadnought, Henry the Lion, which had only been there for minor adjustments.

The Norwegians, although initially stunned by the German landings in the southeast of the country, were able to control the situation quickly, despite having a smaller active army than all but Poland at this point, and one of Norway's three operating submarines, Jormungandr, even managed to sink a German troop transport that was intended to reinforce the paratroopers, on October 17th; 5,000 German soldiers were lost that day, with few survivors. By the end of November, the last officially operating German troops were either dead or captured[though some men would continue fighting for some time; this actually happened after WWII in our world].

Ottoman Turkey found themselves an increasingly precarious position in the fall of 1923. Firstly, in Eastern Europe: despite their most strenuous efforts to take Bucharest from the Romanians, they were able to hold their national capital, even to the point of much of it being reduced to ruins-Turkey was finally forced to withdraw from there, three weeks after the siege had begun on September 4th, having accomplished nothing, and losing over 40,000 men in the process. The war in Bulgaria went somewhat better for them in September; Pleven and Samokov had fallen by the 15th, and one army group got within 40 km of Sofia, but that wouldn't be enough; one attempt to attack the Bulgarian capital with a few long-range artillery pieces, the type nicknamed The Pasha's Judgment by the Turkish military, managed to cause a fair bit of sporadic damage to the city and a few of the surrounding towns and villages, but it didn't actually impact more than a few targets that were intended to be destroyed, mainly thanks to the Turkish inexperience with such weapons, as only the year prior, did Turkey build their own long range guns; this one had also only been guaranteed for a 20 mile range, which complicated matters.

[The first long-range artillery battery was invented by the German Army in 1917 ITTL, but not used until 1921; nicknamed the “Bismarck”, it had an effective range averaging about 25 miles, and some designs could go up to 50 miles. Amazingly, the real world “Paris Gun” of 1918 was actually able to hit it's targets from an incredible distance of as much as 75 miles, just over three times that of the Turkish “Pasha's Judgment” guns, mentioned above...themselves based on the real-world “Langer Max” design, also pressed into service in 1918, the last year of our reality's World War I.]

But it was in October that things began to fall apart; their plan to take Kustendil hadn't counted on the possibility of Serbia assisting the Bulgarians in a counter offensive. And when it did, it wasn't just Serbia; the militaries of Greece, Macedonia and even Albania also came to the rescue of the city. Seeing that many of them were coming thru the city, the Turkish commander ordered his artillery to begin a general bombardment of the city. As many as 30,000 of the intervening Allies were killed by the Turkish attack, but it came to an abrupt halt on October 15th, when the artillery was apparently destroyed by sabotage; in fact, several hundred Bulgarian partisans from Sapareva Banya, Tsarvenyano, and several other nearby towns and villages had located the Turks, and managed to kill over a thousand of them in various firefights.

At least their invasion of mainland Greece had started out well enough, or so they thought. The island of Euboea, not far from Athens, was overrun within a matter of a couple of weeks of the first Turkish landings. However, though, it turns out that they actually ended walking into a trap. Greek partisans hiding in the mountains snuck up on the rear flanks of the occupying Turks in Euboea, slaughtering over two thousand of them in just a week and a half, including one of Turkey's top generals. Several attempts at landing beach-heads at Galatas, Ermioni, Skiathos, and Githio all ended in disaster, with only the entry at Pireas on 27 September being successful. The fighting that followed saw a significant amount of damage done to the surrounding areas, including Athens itself, and for two weeks, many Greeks feared that the capital might fall after all. But the Greeks were able to hold their own, and by November 15th, the Greeks had liberated the homeland, and were swiftly working on the islands.
Things hadn't gone well in the Middle East, either; Britain had landed at Misratah and Al Bayda September 4th, and quickly seized both. And Tripoli and Benghazi were not only subject to the attacks of British fighter bombers and airships, but the Royal Navy only added to the damage; by the end of the month, both cities had been devastated, and the British were able to take over both cities by October 7th, and by the end of the month, had overrun the entire coast.

In a last desperate attempt to bring Lebanon to heel, the Turks began to resort to mustard gas to try to clear out Lebanese partisans; they also launched a massive bombing raid on Beirut on September 17th and also used mustard gas there on top of bombs, repeated with Sidon on October 4th, Tyre on October 13th, and Balbeck[Baalbek], on October 17th. And in retaliation for this, the Italians planned a massive air-raids against Homs, Aleppo, and Damascus, the most loyal of the significant Syrian cities, and launched them on the 7th, 8th, and 9th of November; all three proved to be devastating to their targets, and nearly every single Ottoman factory was destroyed, although 70,000 people had died as collateral damage. And what made matters worse is that one of the Italian commanders had apparently seized some of his own mustard gas, and even used it for the opening act on his raid on Jableh on November 15th. The city of Tartus was also besieged, but by the Italian and Greek navies; when the guns stopped on November 26th, over 20,000 Turkish soldiers, and another 10,000 civilians, lay dead, or dying.

And, finally, the revolt in Mesopotamia had all but driven out the Ottoman authorities there, and even their Arabian holdings were beginning to revolt by November, and despite the help of the Saudis, much of the Red Sea coast had been lost by November.

The Indo-Chinese front saw the peak of combat when New Delhi was subjected to a nearly two-month long siege, beginning on September 15th, and lasting until the 9th of November. Though over a hundred thousand soldiers and 50,000 civilians had died, the Indians were able to hold out, and with some last minute help by British Commonwealth forces, drove the Chinese out of town altogether.

And, on a closing note, the Uruguayans continued to try to hold fast in South America against both Brazil and Argentina. However, though, many began to realize this might not last forever, and this would come to pass sooner than many thought.....

So, there we are. Comments, etc. are certainly welcome.

 

[The Uchronian]

First part of 1924's here.

Okay, I'll be splitting this up as well.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } 1924 (part 1)



The Great War: Winter 1923/1924-The winter of 1923-24 was perhaps the final turning point in the war; it was becoming increasingly obvious that the Entente powers were steadily losing their grip on the war.


The Ottoman Empire was in serious trouble by February; if the pullouts off of the westernmost Greek islands that had begun in December wasn't humiliating enough, the Romanians and the Bulgarians began to push back hard, and by the end of January, nearly all of the gains made in the prior year had been reversed, and the city of Edirne was on the verge of being seized. What was even worse, however, is that the Greeks, in collaboration with Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Cyprus, and Bulgaria, were planning yet another major strike, but this time in Anatolia, the heart of the Ottoman Empire. And with all of coastal Syria having been occupied, and with almost two-fifths of the Turkish Navy now in a seaborne grave, things were looking dire indeed. It hadn't helped, either, that Britain and India, with the assistance of Persia[in the sense of allowing them to use their ports, Bandar Abbas in particular], was taking decisive control over the already rebellious Gulf Territories, and were making a beeline for Mesopotamia from there. But what may have been the most humiliating circumstance yet, was the fact that Lebanon and Palestine were themselves not only holding off the Ottoman advances, but even helping their liberators seize more of Ottoman territory!


The Chinese themselves experienced a significant number of losses during the winter of 1923-24, and one particularly humiliating defeat not far from Patna on 30 January resulted in 40,000 dead troops. Making matters worse was that Britain and France both officially began their own offensive against China as retaliation for having assisted Thailand in it's battle with their Southeast Asian colonies, starting in January, one week after New Year's Day. But perhaps the one thing Beijing feared the most was the increasing amount of domestic unrest, as many began to question whether or not Emperor Guangxu, or his current Prime Minister, Deng Yaoching, were actually capable of running the country at all, let alone decently.


Back in Europe, things had gone a little better for the Ukrainians, but not by much. The Poles had largely been liberated by February, and some Polish generals & partisans were beginning to hunger for a drive to the east just so they could take down the Tsar, or at least attempt to do so. Romania had liberated Moldova by now, and Bucharest now had their sights set on Odessa, the third largest city in the entire country and also the Ukraine's most important port. An increasingly restless public demanded an end to the fighting, and several demonstrations were held, including the largest one in Kiev on Feb. 18th.


Bosnia continued to slowly shrink back as the Croatians and the Serbians continued to whittle down it's territory. The usage of auto-bombs began to increase massively again in January and Feb. 1924, as the partisans became more desperate; this was only met with harsher reprisals against the partisans, and those who aided them.


Britain endured one last major air raid on London on January 30th, as German bombers attempted to destroy as many factories as they could set their sights on, regardless of how big or small they were. But one Luftwaffe squadron, the Eisener Adleren, sought to go farther and even attacked several government buildings, including even a couple of bombs on Buckingham Palace: the King escaped serious injury, but several guards and servants were killed, as well as his eldest son, James George Michael, the next in line for the British throne. The next day, a strike of similar effect on Hamburg, Kiel, and Lubeck was authorized; amongst the 8,000 people who were killed, was the mayor of Hamburg, Dieter Wiedemann. Around that same time, the British were also putting the final pieces together for a plan to ultimately bring the war home to Germany itself....


Meanwhile, the Germans had suffered a humiliating drawback when they'd been forced to withdraw from northern France and Belgium by the end of 1923, even just after they'd broken through the Vernay Line. But by the end of January, the situation was even more dire; Alsace-Lorraine and Luxembourg were now in the hands of the Allies, and on the same night after the Hamburg attack, Britain, with the help of France, Portugal, Norway, and the United States, as well as a few token forces from the Irish Free State, Finland, and even the Soviet Union, launched the first part of “Operation Downfall”, which had, as it's goal, to occupy as much of Germany as possible, before forcing a surrender from Berlin. And as news of the bombing of Hamburg reached the rest of the German public, it energized much of the populace; unfortunately, however, it wasn't always quite to the effect that Berlin had hoped. Rather strongly upset at what they saw as Berlin's unending folly, a very large number of protests and demonstrations broke out in much of the rest of the country over the next month, some of them reaching the level of outright revolt; and amongst those revolting, were a still small, but rapidly increasing number of anarchists, Socialists, and even dedicated Communists.....


Back in South America, the Uruguayans continued to hold out hope that they could beat back the Brazilians and the Argentines with just enough drive, devotion, and extra German weaponry. Their luck, however, began to run out in late January, after the battle of Tacuarembo ended in total disaster, and by the end of February, they were in a full scale retreat. And then Peru and Colombia continued fighting Brazil as well, but made no real progress. And concerned with a possible American invasion, many in Bogota in particular began to beg President Miguel Garrido Schulein to end the war with Brazil, protests that only got stronger as time went on.....

Hopefully, I can finish this by no later than Tuesday. Any comments appreciated.

 

[The Uchronian]

And so ends the Great War.....

And here we are.

1924 (part 2)

The Great War: March/April 1924-As the fighting began to wind down in Europe, more than a few German officials began to realize that their efforts to fight this war had been all in vain, as Allied troops occupied ever increasing portions of much of the north and west of the country, and rebellion began to become an almost universal problem. The core of the Ruhr Valley gave way in March, after just over a month of fighting, and by April 1st, the British were within fifty-five miles of Berlin. And to the horror of many German strategists, one of their worst fears was about to come true; the British had apparently built a copy of their “Bismarck” supergun, and it was about to be used on none other than the capital of Berlin itself. And on the morning of the 2nd, the gun began to be used, along with over a dozen bombers from the Royal Air Force, accompanied by half a dozen American, four French, and a Dutch + a Belgian aircraft; the war truly had come home. Just two and a half weeks later, a good part of Berlin was a terrible, ragged mess: the “Berlin Gun”, as it had been colloquially named, had done a more effective job than London had expected. During this same time period, more regular artillery bombardments affected Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Neuwied, Remscheid, Dortmund, Brunswick, Bielefeld, Hanover, Brunswick, and Munich, and aircraft bombing raids were carried out over Augsburg, Leipzig, Stettin, Konigsberg, Gedingen[Gdynia], Danzig, Nuremberg, Dresden, and Erfurt[Munich, like Berlin, was actually affected by both]. Over 160,000 German civilians died in total, with over a million more injured, and by the middle of April, many of those areas not under Allied control had largely been overrun with Communists and other anti-establishment agitators, and whatever law enforcement still existed was virtually powerless to combat this.

The Austrians hadn't fared much better; the Italians had been able to break through their defensive lines in the west of the country in late January, and by mid-March, every bit of that area was under Italian control. Meanwhile, Klagenfurt and Villach in the southeast of the country had fallen to the Croatians, and not only this, but Graz was soon to be endangered as well. And, furthermore, the Hungarians had retaken the Burgenland region, and with the help of their Czech and Slovak allies, were heading straight for Vienna.....

And the Ukrainians, themselves dealing with an increasing amount of political violence at home, began to pull out of the war in March, essentially conceding their portion of the Entente war effort; it would take a full six months afterwards, to put down all the worst of the radical Marxist, anarchist, etc. revolts.

The civilian government of Bosnia, their country all but devastated by the war, relayed their wishes to surrended to a joint Serbian-Croatian task force in the small town of Stranjani on April 2nd; although most Bosnian troops put down their weapons over the next week, some units, perhaps driven to the edges of desperation by blind patriotism, kept going for almost nine months afterwards, and one last major wave of auto-bombings killed over a thousand Allied troops. But for Bosnia, the battle was permanently lost.

The Ottoman Empire, now all but crumbling at it's foundations, had not only lost nearly every gain they had ever made, but now faced a full-blown Greco-Italian invasion force hell-bent on seizing as much of Anatolia as possible. And the fact that widespread ethnic unrest, including several armed revolts, had broken out in the west of the country only made things much worse for them in that regard. And coupled with aerial and naval raids occurring just about all the way across the coastline, and the Sultan's stubborn refusal to surrender, drove some Turkish troops to outright mutiny, and more than a few defected to other countries, mainly the Soviet Union or Persia, but quite a few to Britain and the United States as well. But the final breaking points came when Istanbul started being directly targeted by the Allies' bombers and airships on the first day of April, and with the humiliating Turkish defeat at Antalya not long after, in which not one, but two of Turkey's top generals died in battle, on April 8th. And what may perhaps have been the final crushing blow to the Turkish campaign, was when one member of an Italian air squadron dropped several bombs on the heavily guarded Dolmabahçe Palace on April 17th, not only killing several of the functionaries inside, but the attack even claimed what may have been the most important possible victim; the Sultan himself was found lying under a pile of rubble the next morning, as crews worked to assess the damage. And upon the revelation of the death of Sultan Abdurrahman reaching the rest of Turkey, many military units surrendered rather than continue an increasingly unwinnable conflict; with help from some sympathetic generals, a provisional government was installed on April 30th, and they quickly entered formal talks with the Allied Powers.....

Meanwhile, back over in Asia, it was over for China; by mid-April, their forces had been beaten back from India and British and French troops now held much of Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces, as well as a good portion of Guangdong Province. Unrest was becoming widespread and many in Beijing feared that the West would take advantage of this if something did not change, and quickly. So, on April 18th, Prime Minister Deng was removed from office via a swiftly planned and stealthily executed military coup, and the Emperor warned that he would lose the Mandate of Heaven if he tried to bring his former subordinate back into power. Emergency Prime Minister Yang Cheng-Li began talks with both Britain and France on April 29th in the Soviet Russian city of Vladivostok.

And, finally, the South American fighting had largely died down, with many Peruvians and Colombians demanding a cease fire and Uruguay having lost just about all but the capital city of Montevideo and it's environs; President Alvaro Boeller had signed their own ceasefire with Argentina and Brazil on April 22nd, and Peru and Colombia followed on May 12th , and June 2nd, respectively.

As it stands, the date that generally came to be accepted as the end of the Great War was the morning of April 20th, when the Basel Accords were signed by a majority of the nations on both sides of the conflict; although some low-level fighting continued for a while yet, the conflict as a whole had indeed come to a veritable close, and now the world could begin to try to pick up the pieces.....

 

[Unknown]

You forgot to add the Tokyo earthquake to the 1923 update (part 2).

Good updates, though.

 

[The Uchronian]

You forgot to add the Tokyo earthquake to the 1923 update (part 2).

Good updates, though.

Okay, thanks. I've since added other events of that year to the story.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } Other events of note in 1923:


March 7th: During another bone-chillingly frosty winter[Technically spring, at this point in time, if not going by the astronomical definition], a major blizzard wreaks havoc on the northern Plains of North America, with temperatures in Victoria, Canada, occasionally dropping to 40 degrees below zero! Interestingly enough, on this same day, the U.S. state of West Florida recorded it's second warmest ever March temperature: 85*F in Blakemore, about 30 miles north-northeast of Mobile.


September 1st: On this day, the Great Kanto Earthquake devastated Tokyo, beginning only a mere minute before noon. Over 180,000 people were killed and over a million left homeless; amongst those lost, were the second eldest son of Emperor Tsukihito, as well as former Prime Minister Takeshi Wakamatsu. The nation went into mourning for a whole week as a result of this.


November 17th: Several ships of the American and British Royal Navies are wrecked off the coast of Bermuda during the afternoon and evening hours on this day during a major hurricane, resulting in over a thousand dead.

 

[The Uchronian]

And here, folks, are the other events of 1924. What a year this has been, too!

Other Events of 1924:

[Speaking in general, the situation after TTL's Great War wasn't too much unlike that of our own; some two dozen Eurasian states attempted secession from their parent nations during the 1924-1929 period and some of them actually survived for a time before going under, such as the Bundsrepublik Deutschmahren, in the northeast of what is now the Czech Republic in our world, Haute-Savoie near Geneva, and, perhaps most famously, the Anatolian Free State in the southwest of Turkey. And even a select few, mainly Galicia and Belarus, have survived to the present day.]

April 9th-16th: An unusual late season blizzard affects a good portion of the southern half of Canada's Northwest Territories during this period, dumping as much as 8 feet of snow on some isolated towns, and farming communities.

June 2nd: The last non-citizen Native Americans, mainly a few of the Western tribes, and the Cusseta Creeks in Mississippi and Alabama, are officially given citizenship by an executive order issued by President John Preston on this day-two months later, Congress passes a series of laws putting into place a modern legal framework for the government to be able to deal with Native issues. [A little background on the Cusseta Creeks: as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 had failed, the “Trail of Tears” didn't unfold quite as in our world. Some incidents did unfortunately happen about 20 years later, but in 1854, President William Dayton approved a request to set aside a small amount of land on the border between Alabama and Mississippi, for the Cusseta Band; the Confederacy later attempted to remove them during the Civil War, but failed to expel them entirely. Further attempts to expel them westward in 1887, 1894 and 1907 were also unsuccessful. Also, it can be noted that Canada gave full federal citizenship to all of it's Indigenous residents willing to register with the government in 1870]

June 12th: A major tornado outbreak in the Midwestern United States, centered on Illinois and Indiana, killed 148 people on this day; one tornado took the lives of seventy people when it tore across several counties in these two states. Also, on this day, an originally peaceful demonstration in Weimar, in Germany, went awry when counter-demonstrators attacked the crowd; local police eventually found themselves unable to handle the situation, and the counter-demonstrators were eventually forced out of town.

August 7th: On this day, an Imperial German sympathizer from West Texas named William Kuehne, and an accomplice, David Durkweiler, detonated an auto-bomb in front of a community events center in the primarily Italian-American Chicago neighborhood of Nolan Avenue, killing 55 people, and injuring over two hundred more. (Neither of the two men were captured until October, but both were sentenced to life in prison; Durkweiler died of a heart attack in 1949, and Kuehne of cancer, in 1957.)

September 11th: The German government, after failing to come to a consensus in the 1924 elections, shuts down completely. On this same day, a protest in Coburg, in Bavaria, turns nasty when police open fire on pro-Communist labor protesters, killing 15 people. The police are quickly overwhelmed when the mob turns violent, and some armed members of the crowd burst into the police station, and the city hall, demanded a recompense; the city is essentially held hostage for over a month. And when the Wehrmacht tries to take control of the situation, the revolutionaries turn their guns on them; most of the Communists are eventually killed, or captured, but at a heavy cost to the Wehrmacht; thus being the first major battle of the German Civil War.....

October 18th: A particularly radical Alawite Syrian Muslim sect brutally attacked an Orthodox Church in Safita this afternoon, murdering half a dozen people, before the joint Greco-Italian police force in the city was able to stop the terrorists.

The U.S. Presidential Elections, 1924: John Preston, although he had lost some support from the anti-war contingent for entering America into the Great War, was still well regarded by many people otherwise. And, furthermore, neither the Southern Democrats or the Republicans had enough political clout left to be able to really challenge him. Although the Southern Democrat ticket of William Chandler/Robert Bowen managed to win most of their home turf, they were clearly lagging in East Texas and West Florida, where they only won 18% of the vote each. The New England states, Pahasapa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Chippewa, and Chihuahua went for the Republican Matthew Norton/Andrew Garfield ticket, and the Socialist-Progressive fusion ticket of William Harte & John L. Jenkins managed to win over Kansas, Sonora, Cascadia, Juarez, and Puerto Rico, but even with that, Preston still had the momentum left over from his initial success, and with that, became the first president in U.S. history to win three terms in office.

December 30th: On this day, a rather rare South Atlantic hurricane made it's landfall in southern Brazil, with winds of over 100 miles an hour. 460 people were killed, and over 80,000 left homeless.

As is the usual, any comments welcome.

 

[The Uchronian]

1925 and 1926.

We are getting very close to the centennial of the POD here, by the way.

1925

In March, the first regular-production passenger car equipped with a Davidson[Diesel] engine goes on sale in one of the Communist-held areas of southern Germany. The car is modestly successful but doesn't see large-scale production. Nevertheless, it sparks a significant amount of renewed interest in this engine type.

Severe weather takes the lives of 142 people in the United States during the month of May. Also, in May, two major battles, one in Dresden and the other in Hamburg, proved to be vital turning points in the German Civil War, as the Communists badly humiliated the Wehrmacht in both.
18 people died on June 29th, after a rather significant earthquake struck the Santa Barbara, California area, right around a quarter before 8 a.m., wrecking a good portion of the city.

On July 11th, an auto-bomb explodes at the Greek embassy to Spain in Madrid, killing 33 people, including two policeman and the young son of a staff member. The bomber is revealed to be an ethnic Turkish refugee in Spain turned radical mainly thanks to extreme nationalist literature, whole volumes of which are found in his apartment in Toledo.

On July 31st of this year, William IV of the Netherlands dies after a long illness. His eldest son, however, declines to take the throne, prompting discussion on whether or not to acquiesce to the growing Republican movement in the country, to form a brand new government.

George V, the now largely unloved king of the British Empire, dies at the age of 82 on September 15th. His youngest brother, Edward Charles Joseph, takes the throne as Edward VII.

An anti-Catholic demonstration in Columbus, Ohio, turns violent on November 4th, after a brief exchange of words between demonstrators and local polices, and 30 people die during the next 12 hours, into the early morning of the next day.

1926

On April 17th, after just a little less than two years' worth of fighting, the last active German “Edelweiss”[Pro-Imperial, similar to the Whites in the Russian Civil War in the real world] contingent officially surrenders just outside of Berlin. And with this, the German Civil War comes to a final, decisive end. Two days later, the new revolutionary administration coalesces in Weimar to begin to try to rebuild the nation's government. A significant amount of concern begins to build up in much of the rest of Europe, as there was already one revolutionary power in that area of the world; but later, a 1924 proposal by a Polish writer and sometime political activist named Andrzej Walesa is mentioned at a diplomats' conference in Zurich, Switzerland and it begins to make the rounds.....

Severe weather takes the lives of 114 people during the month of June in the United States.

The U.S. sesquicentennial celebrations take place over the weekend of July 4th, and is one of the most festive yet, especially as many Americans try to forget the horrors of the Great War.

On September 7th, as a result of the rapidly deteriorating sociopolitical situation in the Ukraine, Kiev is forced to grant Belarus it's independence so that the government may try to better deal with the problems at home. Also, on this same day, the Republic of the Netherlands is formed, and the Dutch monarchy dissolved.

It's almost there.....

 

[The Uchronian]

After 100 years......

And here we are! 100 years in the making.

1927


On January 30th, the creation of an “Inter-Sea Union” is formally proposed by Viktor Sienkiewicz, the outgoing Polish President, in Zurich, Switzerland, as a buffer between Germany and the Soviet Union; Amongst those other countries with the most interest in this new project are Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Romania. The representatives of Hungary and Slovakia, however, politely decline, and the Ukrainian representative is conflicted, given his country's current troubles at the moment. Five months later, the organization is officially created, with it's headquarters in Warsaw, and Sienkiewicz as it's first chairman.


During the late afternoon hours of April 16th, a devastating tornado ripped thru a large portion of the northern half of Nashville, Tennessee, killing 48 people and injuring over sixteen hundred more. Although tragic, the event does prompt this state's government to draw up plans to keep residents better informed of severe weather emergencies, with cooperation from the National Weather Service. Also, in this same week, the first experimental television station goes online in Southern California, in a town 20 miles southeast of Los Angeles, on the 19th; it also happens to be the same day in which the Irish Free State is officially recognized by the U.K. as a sovereign state.


A major general outbreak of severe weather claimed 240 lives during the months of July in the United States and Canada[184 in America alone]; one particularly devastating tornado that levelled the town of Hannibal in Missouri killed just over a hundred people; also, 46 people died in the Canadian city of Sherbrooke, Victoria, when a tornado struck that community, late in the month.


After a few years of occupation, the governments of both Argentina and Brazil agree to pull out of Uruguay by no later than 1 April, 1929, as per an agreement signed in Asuncion, Paraguay, on September 4th of this year. Also, in this same week, a hurricane with winds of over a hundred miles an hour makes landfall in southern Louisiana, and forty people die there; the storm later causes a significant amount of flooding in Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, in it's extratropical phase.


A rare tornado strikes the city of Mendoza in Argentina on October 30th, killing 56 people there. The event is sensational enough to be covered in newspapers across the Americas.


On November 4th, a major earthquake[measuring about 7 on the OTL Richter Scale] devastated much of the town of Chadwick in western Santa Barbara County, California, killing 35 people there; five others also die, including a man killed in an auto accident 10 miles north of town[amazingly, the real world earthquake may not have caused any deaths at all; perhaps Point Arguello was virtually uninhabited at the time?].


1928


An unusually powerful winter storm strikes western Europe on the 4th thru 8th of January, with the most significant snowfall and wintry mix falling in the south of England and the northern third of France, though western and central France, the Low Countries, Germany, Ireland, and Switzerland are also affected significantly.


The February 7th bombing of the offices of a particularly well-known Italian cultural association in Montreal, Quebec, killed at least 40 people, including sixteen innocent bystanders.


On April 10th, the now largely Christian Latakia Free State, with the majority of it's more conservative Muslims[including some of the Alawites] having been deported to the Syrian Mandate area temporarily administered by Britain, is recognized as a nation-state at Geneva, by thirty different nations, including Japan, Canada, and the Soviet Union.


On June 4th, the Anatolian Free State, primarily inhabited by persons of Greek extraction, is officially recognized as a nation-state. Also, in this same week, the world is stunned to hear that the people of Hungary have actually elected a Communist government into office, on June 9th. Seeing this unfold, the Marxist parties of several other countries engage in a huge propaganda blitz, and to a fair degree of success, at that; by the end of the year, Slovakia and Belgium both had elected Revolutionary governments to the forefront and they would only enjoy more success as time went on.


The “Wacker Avenue Massacre” occurred in Chicago on August 7th,after members of the Brodie Ave. Syndicate, a predominantly Irish-American street gang, and members of the Italian-American Three Families crime outfit engaged in a gunbattle in the Harvey Road area of downtown; after the Irishmen had lost, the survivors were forcibly disarmed and then executed on the spot. This sensational event horrified people across America, and Congress was urged to redouble Federal efforts to combat the Mob.


On October 7th, a majorly destructive tornado ripped right through the heart of downtown St. Louis, Missouri, killing 168 people in total, and destroying thousands of homes and other businesses.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } The U.S. Presidential Elections, 1928: John Preston, after three terms in office, was feeling weary with politics by now, so he decided not to run this year.


In a rush of desperation, both the Southern Democratic Party and the Republicans tried to take advantage of the vacuum that was developing, hoping to claw back some of their lost influence, knowing that, if they failed this year, they might never get the chance to rebuild. And the Socialist-Progressive fusion ticket went up for one last round, with their first ever female Presidential candidate, Anna Taylor, a community organizer from Cheyenne. Charles Matarelli, the former mayor of St. Louis, Mo., was nominated for the Vice-Presidential slot.


But there was a dark horse in the race that nobody knew about for a while.....William J. Clayton, the former governor of Oklahoma, and one of his political friends, Patrick Graves, who had only ever served in the state Senate of Missouri, proved to be a surprisingly dynamic pair, and running on a no party “Independent” ticket, and a campaign centered primarily around isolationism and protecting farmers ended up appealing to many Americans. And to nearly everyone's surprise, they actually won over a wide swath of the country from New York all the way to California and back.


The Southern Democrat campaign of Lorenzo Colvin/John Setters proved to be utterly disastrous; losing West Florida to the Republicans was something they'd hoped wouldn't happen, but even more humiliating was when Tennessee went for the Clayton ticket. But their failure primarily hinged on the fact that they had very little to campaign on, other than keeping the post-reconstruction system in place, and Colvin's pro-corporatist stance, although nearly universal amongst conservative Southern politicians, only proved to be a bane for the So. Dems., a good number of whom simply stayed home.


The Republicans, to their credit, tried something a little different; for the first time ever, a Hispano candidate, Patrick Roscoe, the former Senator from Coahuila, had been nominated President, and William Houlihan, two-time Illinois Congressman, was the first Irish-American Catholic to be nominated Vice-President by any party.[It can be noted that although Patrick Graves was also of Irish heritage, he was a Protestant]


And they actually did make a decent comeback: most of New England voted for them, as did Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Chippewa, and even West Florida, out east, and Utah, West Texas, Baja California, and nearly all of the old Mexican states save Sonora, out west.....but even then, it couldn't quite save them, without the key states of New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Michigan, all of whom had placed their bets for Clayton. (This would later be regarded by many future historians as the final beginning of the downfall of the Republican Party, just as the resignation of Mark Cooper had been for the national Democrats)


And the Socialist-Progressives, for all their efforts, did manage to win a not-insignificant amount of the popular vote, although only actually taking a few states, those being Sonora, Arizona, Puerto Rico, Havana, Holguin, Vermont, Cheyenne, and Cascadia. And although this would be the last fusion ticket for many years, the Socialists and the Progressives would continue to build a working relationship with one another throughout the years.

On December 4th, a congressional inquiry in Washington raises some serious concerns about several billions of dollars' worth of funds that may have been lost by major American banks from not only just before and during the Great War, but also the Communist takeover of Germany as well.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } Popular actress Clarice Tipton, beloved of the vaudeville circuit, slips and falls eight stories from one of her favorite eateries in Manhattan on the night of December 30th: she dies of her injuries a few days later, at the young age of 44, causing many to mourn a career cut short, and, in the eyes of many, a wonderful woman lost to the world, all too soon. Her death is the first one of a celebrity to make headlines worldwide.

Edit: And there it is, folks. You just saw a Sooner pull a Perot in the '28 elections.

 

[The Uchronian]

And now, having gone thru 101 years of this timeline's progression, would anyone like to make any requests? I could try to take a better look at both Africa and Asia in particular, especially towards the '40s and '50s, when decolonization would start to become a real major issue: I have a few plans for Liberia and South Africa in particular, that some folks might be interested in.

 

[The Uchronian]

And so, ends what may have been the most tumultous decade in modern history, ITTL. But not everything is going to be all nice all of a sudden, just because nobody's fighting anymore.....

1929


Eugene I, the King of Sweden, dies on January 9th at home. Eugene's brother Gustav Carl Adolf takes the throne as Gustav VI Adolf.


On March 11th, the German government finalizes a land deal with the new government of Czechia; Western and Northern Bohemia are to be returned to Czechia by no later than September 15th; the deal makes headlines as it is one of the first peaceful transfers of land in Europe in many years.


The “April Fool's” blizzard strikes much of the states of Chippewa & Minnesota, as well as parts of Pahasapa and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, dropping record amounts of snow in many of these regions as well as parts of Ontario and southern Manitoba in Canada.


On April 17th, an American mechanical enthusiast named Jack Griffin completes work on the world's first Davidson-cycle motorcycle, in his Iowa garage, and successfully test drives it two days later, earning him the praise of many a motoring magazine across the United States. And during a visit to the U.S., German industrial entrepreneur Rudolph Diesel hears about the machine and asks Griffin if he can see how it works; Griffin agrees, and by June, Diesel is working on his own motorbike project.


An unusually warm summer occurs across much of northern Europe, with average high temperatures in a few spots going as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm, especially in July. Meanwhile, much of western and southern Europe, as well as Turkey, is unusually wet, and major flooding occurs in Croatia, Spain, and Italy.


In September, Rudolph Diesel submits a prototype to the Transportation Engineer's Society in Berlin, to see if either the German government or German manufacturers might be interested in mass-producing such machines. While the publicly-owned T.E.S. does show genuine interest in the project, they inform Diesel that extensive amounts of research & development may be needed, before it can be surely made available for either military or public consumption.


Haakon VII, king of Norway, dies unexpectedly in his sleep from an aneurysm on September 20th. His brother takes the throne as Edward I. Also, on this same day, the U.S. and Liberia under President T.C. Buckland finalize dwhat they hoped would be a highly lucrative trade deal.....[however, though, some elements of the government who had been opposed to the U.S.'s slowly increasing economic influence in Africa, did not take to this well and one man in particular, already well known in the country for his associations with elements of the old Turkish Sultanate and various Islamist groups, and his previously known dislike of what he saw as “racist” socialism, as well as modern Western liberalism, sought to make his opinion known, through any means possible.....]


The last living veteran of the Mexican-American War passes away in Monterey, California, on September 27th, making national headlines.


On October 17th, the current President of Brazil, Vittorio Mendes, dies in an auto accident just outside of Rio de Janeiro. Many suspect foul play may have been involved, but there's no evidence to substantiate this one way or the other. Nonetheless, his successor, Gustavo Vargas, institutes a day of mourning, as all government offices, except those of the police and fire brigades, are closed.


The U.S. stock market shows signs of trouble in the first week of November when the stock market begins to fluctuate significantly, after news begins to slowly leak out about the possibility of massive losses of now unaccountable funds in dozens of American banks. Not many pay much attention at first, but the gravity of the situation makes itself clearer as the next few months pass by.....


On New Year's Eve, Charles I abdicates the throne of Denmark, leaving it to his younger brother, who becomes Frederick VIII.

Yes, folks, things are going to get interesting once again.

 

[The Uchronian]

Indeed, things have gotten interesting.....Liberia itself has been in a fair bit of trouble of it's own. And guess which OTL famous figure's ATL sibling started it all?

1930


In March, after several years of concerns of a possible major collapse, the American stock market finally does implode, causing the worst crash in several decades. The Clayton administration quickly found themselves having to take quick measures to prevent the economy from imploding even further.


An unusually dry and varied summer occurs in much of North America, as high temperatures fluctuate between 10 degrees below, and as much as 15 degrees or more above, normal in some places: Fort Duluth, Chippewa, records an all-time high of 97 degrees on July 15th. Record high temperatures also occur in Salmon Lake, Ontario, and Fort Mandan in the Northwest Territories in Canada, of 95 and 92 degrees on the 17th and 18th of July, respectively.


T.C.[Taylor Charles] Buckland, the President of Liberia, was murdered by a package bomb on September 24th of this year; his son Thomas, a respected former ambassador to Great Britain, was also killed, and his daughter Louisa injured. It was soon revealed that Yahya Mohammed, formerly John Barabbas, Garvey, a Liberian-born businessman turned extremist, masterminded the plot, the results of which were apparently intended as a stark warning to future Liberian presidents: Do not engage in commerce with the United States, Britain, or France. Do not tolerate Western liberalism. And do not promote the doctrines of socialism in Liberia, Soviet or otherwise. [For a little background: The late President Buckland was an early socialist thinker in West Africa, and was a longstanding member of Liberia's National Labor Party, a social-democratic party founded in 1897, largely inspired by the now-defunct Unionists in Britain. Mr. Buckland had been a tradesman before his political career began, and became the head of a cooperative union. Buckland, inspired by socialist thought, had encouraged many mixed-race persons, liberals and progressives, to come to Liberia and help build up the country, even if they did not necessarily agree with socialism. He was also a staunch critic of Islamism and, to a lesser degree, the small, but growing black nationalist movement in America. Garvey, originally from Jamaica but who'd lived with some family America for 20 years, before converting to Islam and moving to Liberia, had built up a small fortune thru his dealings, including with the Irish Mafia and even a few white supremacist racist outfits, and was angered by Buckland committing acts that he believed were causing Liberia to fail; he'd also managed to gain a not insignificant following amongst culturally conservative Liberians who also felt betrayed not only by Buckland's socialism, but disgusted by his alleged hypocrisy, in their view, in signing a trade deal with not only the United States, Britain, France, but also including Germany and the Soviet Union as well]


Volunteer guards of some of the New Israeli communes and Syrian [mainly Islamist] nationalists led by Tawfiq Hawwa clash in the Golan Heights area of Palestine proper on November 6th, and again on the 9th. Hawwa, however, is killed, and the Syrians are forced to flee the area, back to their home base in the Damascus International Zone. Two and a half weeks after this, a bomb explodes at a cafe in the New Israeli-founded city of Tel Aviv, killing fifteen people, and injuring thirty more. The Turkish State agrees to cooperate with the Palestinians to help bring Hawwa's group to justice.


1931


An unusually chilly, although abnormally dry, winter strikes in North America; during the month of January, average temperatures drop as much as 15 degrees below normal in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic East, and as much as 10 degrees in the southern states. California, meanwhile, is slightly warmer than normal along the coast, and suffering a significant drought.


On July 9th, Liberian president David A.T. Mitchel, the former Vice-President of the country, and who succeeded upon T.C. Buckland's death, signs a bill submitted thru the National Congress that allows for a significant crackdown on the Garveyites and other extremist groups seen as a threat to the security of the people of Liberia.


In Sweden, a package bomb explodes at a post office in Stockholm on September 17th; nobody is seriously harmed, but it causes much concern in the area. As it turns out, a 22 year old college student named Jo Bystrom admits to being the sender, but had intended the device as a joke, and didn't expect it to be nearly as damaging as it was. Bystrom spends two months in jail, and the news briefly makes European headlines, and on that of a famous New York tabloid.


1932


On the night of February 16th, several members of the Milwaukee based DiPietro crime family engaged in a drive-by shooting of a popular Lakeville, Indiana street cafe, killing nine people, including the current mayor, James Agnelli, and Alfred Van der Beek, an off-duty police officer whose brother George was a former mayor of the nearby town of Griffith. Police in Illinois later engaged in pursuit of their sedan, which crashed just outside of Waukegan; the driver, Thomas Cracchiolo, was shot and killed by police, and two accomplices, Joseph Franzese and Frederick Leghieri, were captured by the end of the month.(One of the shooters, Francis Trebiano, allegedly the man who supplied the machine guns used in the attack, died in an auto accident in Mexico on February 29th, 1948.).


Vicksburg, Mississippi, was devastated by a tornado on April 16th; 42 people died, and over 5,000 were left homeless. Two days later, dozens of white Protestant residents were caught looting black and Irish Catholic homes and businesses that were damaged by the tornado, several arrested by the National Guard.


A bombing at a synagogue in southern France killed a rabbi and his son, and maimed his wife and her cousin, on May 7th of this year. The attacker, a rightist anarchist of Swiss extraction named Fritz Zenger, did not appear to have overtly anti-Semitic motives, but did admit to having had some personal quarrels with the man over his support for the Communists in Germany; Zenger also claimed that the rabbi's son had made previously disparaging comments about his sister, a patient in a mental institution in Zurich. (This case later became notable for energizing the small, but growing Fascist movement in Europe, especially amongst German exiles, some of whom had anti-Semitic tendencies as well as many being strongly anti-Marxist.)


An unusually wet and slightly warmer than normal summer strikes much of Europe and western Russia this year; of the biggest note is the tropical storm that makes landfall in Brittany in France in late June, that eventually brings heavy rains to the southern British coast and much of northern France, including Paris and the Lower Seine valley.


The New York based Michelini crime family launched a major attack on their Chicago based rivals, the Santacroce Syndicate, in Warren, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, on August 4th; the Michelinis were able to take out the head of the Santacroces' Detroit operation, John “the Hammer” Martelli, and his brother-in-law, James “the Jew” Ferrigo, and force them out of that part of the state. This news raised much concern in the Midwest, because the Michelinis were known to be particularly well-connected and slick operators, who were even coming close to taking over entire towns in Long Island.


On September 16th, the secretary to Liberian President David Mitchel opened a letter, which warns, “Beware, traitors of the Afrikan people! We are coming.”, and informed him of such; the letter appeared to have been mailed by a man identifiying himself only as “Phineas”.
Later that afternoon, two massive explosions ripped thru the most important police station in the capital city of Monrovia, killing 36 police officers, including the head constable, Thomas Morrison. It was quickly discovered, however, that the sender of the letter had unwittingly identified himself;


Popular American actor Thomas Killigan is shot and killed in Omaha, Nebraska, during what initially appears to be a robbery, while visiting his father, on October 6th. However, though, as it is revealed, the killer, one Lewis Billings of Tunnel City, Wisconsin, had been involved in a dispute with Killigan over a financial deal gone wrong.


On October 24th, members of several coordinating Salafist groups began to launch a campaign of terror across much of the Middle East, including, and perhaps especially, in Lebanon and Palestine; auto-bombs exploded near a popular restaurant in Beirut, and a college in Haifa, respectively, killing 54 people in total, including Pierre Massouk, one of Beirut's former mayors.


Members of the Chicago Santacroce Family raided the secondary headquarters of the Salvaggi Family in Houston, East Texas, on November 7th of this year; Thomas “Tommy the Rug” Ruggieri, one of the top men in the outfit, was killed, although with Francesco “Frankie Needles” Sciortino, their head accountant.


The U.S. Presidential Elections, 1932: Despite all the unforeseen problems he'd encountered in office, and a few recurring health troubles, Will Clayton ran for office again anyway, convinced he could still do the job he set out to do, with Patrick Graves as his running mate.


His main opponents were the Socialists and the American Liberty Party, but the Republicans also threw their own hat into the ring, while Progressives were divided between the first two.


Clayton primarily campaigned on the continuation of his isolationist policies, as well as his willingness to get tough on the financial sector; he also (privately) promised to step up efforts against the Mafia in the United States, and to continue helping farmers deal with the recession. The Socialist ticket of Louis Trevisano/Matthew Dickson, however, took some of Clayton's plans and went further; Trevisano, the former vice-mayor of Chicago, whose boss was gunned down by members of the DeFelice Family in 1928, had a fervent dislike for all things Cosa Nostra, and actively campaigned on a primarily anti-mob and anti-prohibition program—especially as some of the organized crime syndicates had been making massive profits off of cocaine in particular—which earned him a lot of respect, even in New England, a region of the country which still largely held on to the now almost-defunct Republicans.


The American Liberty Party didn't really have all that much to offer this year, except with a focus on improving America's infrastructure and keeping the public school system in shape, amongst a few other things; Joseph Tarleton, longtime president of a well-respected Northern California public college, and one time Congressman, was selected for the Presidency, while Eduard Bevelman, who had been the first Wisconsin state Secretary for Public Works[established in 1924, seven years after the federal office, and they and California were the first two states to have such officies], received the Vice-Presidential slot.


Although Clayton won in the end, the Trevisano/Dickson ticket still managed to make a pretty good sized dent in his margin of victory; the Midwestern states of Michigan, Indiana, Maryland, Iowa, Minnesota and Kansas all went for the Socialists, as did Maine, Coahuila, Puerto Rico, Sinaloa, Colorado, Sonora, Cheyenne, and Baja California. And the Tarleton ticket won out in Chippewa, Louisiana, Florida, Havana, Holguin, and Delaware, as well as Victoria, Nevada, California, Shoshone(by a hair!), Oregon, and Cascadia.
And the Republican ticket of David Collins/James Berkleigh got were the New England states, Pennsylvania, and Chihuahua, and that was it for them, and didn't even get a solid majority in any state outside of Massachusetts.


Despite their losses, however, the real overall winner of the 1932 season may have been the Socialists, because this year, they not only showed the country that they had staying power in American politics, but had some real potential to become a truly major force, possibly even to the point of winning the White House.


On November 24th, the Japanese Minister of Economic Affairs, Toshino Murayama, warns that the recent recession in America may have significantly negatively affected the Japanese economy and warns that a major recession may possibly begin in their country within another year. This report is largely ignored by the fiscal conservatives, but the Emperor and the


An unusually powerful snowstorm strikes the heart of Russian Central Asia in early December, dropping as much as seven feet of snow in some areas, over the next week and a half, just as temperatures in Siberia begin to dip almost to record lows; meanwhile, around this time, Japan and many parts of North America are experiencing a warmer-than-normal period, with temperatures going as high as 80 degrees along the Rio Grande Valley and Central East Texas, as well as 70 degrees in Cordova, Tenn., St. Louis, Mo., and Denver, Colo.


On December 16th, a “Hawaii'an Express” storm, and a particularly powerful one at that, began to affect the states of Alta and Baja California[Just a little cultural trivia: often, when both Californias are referred to at once, the “old” California is referred to as “Alta” Calif., to both rhyme with, and distinguish it from, Baja Calif. to it's south.]; although it provided a lot of valuable relief from the drought that had plagued the state since 1930(1931 was the third driest year on record, and the fifth mildest), a significant flooding problem eventually began to develop, including the causation of mudslides: one particularly disastrous event on the night of Christmas Eve washed away a popular upscale social club in Los Angeles; tragically, 66 people, including the proprietor of the establishment and both of his sons, lost their lives that evening.


On December 27th, the last of the men who fought for the Loyalist side in the Canadian Revolution, dies peacefully in his sleep in British Jamaica, aged ninety-six.

 

[The Uchronian]

Here we are.....1933 thru 1935.

1933

America came into in the New Year in a striking fashion, but not quite in a pleasant way, unfortunately; torrential rainfall, along with heavy snowfall in the higher elevation and strong thunderstorms further east, plagued much of eastern Colorado and New Mexico as the same storm system that caused the major floods in California moved into the very foothills of the Rocky Mountains; daytime temperatures reached as high as 75 degrees close to the Oklahoma and East Texas borders, respectively, and there was even including a report of a possible tornado just west of Tucumcari, N.M. late that afternoon(the only other time a tornado had been reported on New Year's Day in this universe was in 1896 in Florida). Meanwhile, further north along the Rockies, Denver was hit hard with freezing rain, and major snowfall was reported across not just much of the west and far north of Colo., but also in southern Wyoming and western Nebraska as well.

Later on, this same storm system also caused some major havoc east of the Mississippi, producing a damaging squall line that produced up to eleven total tornadoes, including one that unfortunately produced a fatality in a small unincoporated town just northeast of Tallahassee, Florida, on the 3rd and the 4th, with seven of them on that Wednesday alone.

On February 8th, a rare tornado touches down in southern Cascadia, just after 4 p.m. on an unusually warm afternoon; the twister is photographed by two different individuals, one a National Weather Service employee for the Brockton, Oregon office, and the other an amateur artist.

The spring of 1933, and especially the month of March, proves to be abnormally warm across much of the United States with average temperatures occasionally going to 10 degrees above the norm in some places. Inclement weather was also a major issue in March, and over 80 people were killed by tornadoes in the Midwest and Southeast.

The Golden Beach[OTL's Long Beach, Calif.], California earthquake killed over 180 people and badly wrecked a good part of the L.A. and Orange County area coastline just before 6 p.m. on the evening of March 10th; the city the tremor was eventually named after took two years to recover from the disaster.

Members of the St. Louis Mastretta crime family engaged in a shootout with the Cordova, Tenn. based Sheehan Syndicate, in downtown Louisville, Ky., on the afternoon of March 17th, in which 42 people, including a handful of civilians and over a dozen policemen, were killed. The next day, Charles Sheehan, a nephew of the founding godfather of the Irish mob family, and three other men, drove by the Lexington, Ky. home of a Mastretta family associate, James W. Barkett, and riddled his home with gunfire, killing both him and his father as well as badly injuring his wife.

On March 24th, the Toledo, Ohio, based “Prussian Mob” crime gang, headed by Thomas and Herbert Wertke, masterminded an assault on the headquarters of the Bowery Street Bombers, a small-time mainly mixed Irish-Italian syndicate in the nearby city of Clarkville, Michigan, after said group robbed and raided several Toledo-area businesses owned by them. The Bombers were apparently so thoroughly destroyed, that rumors abounded that the U.S. Marshals or the National Anti-Crime Task Force had taken them out; to the dismay of some, however, the truth soon came out, and one particularly xenophobic newspaper had to retract their last front page issue altogether. The “Prussian Mob” soon gained much notoriety because of this incident, and began to make connections with other Protestant German-American gangs across the Midwest.

U.S. President William J. Clayton suffers a significant stroke early on the morning of March 31st; it's not fatal, but raises many concerns about his health. Later on this same day, Liberian Garveyite extremists attacked and badly damaged a popular Monrovia cafe well-known to European tourists, killing two dozen people, including two off-duty policemen and Mary Ann Stanforth, the British-born wife of a Western Australian factory magnate, who had been visiting her brother, James Harrow, himself an attache to the British embassy there.

On April 16th, an auto-bomb exploded next to a cafe in the Serbian town of Novi Sad, killing two dozen people; a Bosnian nationalist, Ilham Ahmetovic, was allegedly found to be responsible for the attack, and was later shot dead as he tried to flee to Albania.

The French ambassador to Liberia, Louis-Joseph Clouteau, is shot dead by a Garveyite, American-born Elisha Williams, in the British city of Hastings. Williams will avoid capture for several months, until he's apprehended on Christmas Eve, 1933, just outside of Llandudno in Wales. Three days later, Garveyite Simeon Tuthill assassinates Joseph Stanford, the mayor of Dover, County Kent, over his sympathies to the new Liberian government; Tuthill, however, is cornered by police in Portsmouth the next afternoon, and is gravely injured in a shootout in a pub; his injuries prove to be fatal, and dies not long after midnight on the 9th.

On May 25th, a group of about a hundred of the Liberian Garveyites launched an attack on a militia station in Greenville, killing 42 people, thirty off-duty soldiers and a dozen civilians.

June saw another peak in severe weather in North America, and over a hundred people were killed, 77 in the United States, and two dozen in Canada.

The important Liberian port town of Harper Town was subjected to a major attack by a particularly fanatical group of the Garveyites, on June 6th of this year; several dozen people were killed when the terrorists shot up both the local police station and militia garrison, as well as the offices of a liberal newspaper in the city; they also detonated bombs at the port itself, badly damaging several ships and rendering parts of the harbor unusable for several weeks.

Rene Fossler, the noted Franco-German scholar from Switzerland, dies in his longtime hometown of Winterthur on June 16th of this year at the age of 63; he is best known for having invented the ideology of corporatism in his 1896 treatise, “Thoughts on a Corporate State: A Fourth Way Is Possible” an accompaniment to the fascism originally thought up by the German Junker Hans Keitel(who himself died in 1929), which itself was an answer to Communism, though Fossler's work was also a critique of both modern democracy and monarchy, whereas Keitel's original fascism rejected democracy altogether, but left room for the monarchs of old.

One of the most serious incidents involving organized crime to date in the U.S., occurred when Theodore “Ted” Collins, Sr., the mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, and Walter Salomon, the chief of police, were both assassinated by a member of Joseph Fahey's gang on the afternoon of June 27th in a popular Greek restaurant on the ritzy south side of town. Timothy Gallagher, a native of the East Texas side of the Texarkana tri-state area, was tracked down to a safehouse just outside of Gilmore Township, Chippewa, in September, and arrested, and after serving his 18-month sentence for auto theft, would be tried in March, 1935.

A freak localized, but rather strong heat wave strikes much of the U.S. states of Illinois and Missouri for about ten days in late June, early July; in some locations, temperatures come close to 110 degrees on two separate days, actually breaking a few records altogether, most notably in Quincy, Ill.

On August 7th, Ottawa, Ontario records a high temperature of 96 degrees, breaking a record for the month that was set on the 4th in 1905, bested only by nearby Montserrat, Quebec(97 degrees); interestingly enough, the same high pressure system that caused the heat wave in eastern Canada(centered over the Temiscaming area, right on the border between Quebec and Ontario), also helped a cold front produce a derecho further south in the northeast U.S.

72 people died on August 10th after a hurricane with winds in excess of 100 miles an hour slammed into the Mosquito Coast in Nicaragua; an entire village of 1,000 people, where two thirds of the deaths occurred, was reportedly swept into the sea.

Members of a Salafist extremist group terrorized several small villages in the northwest of Anatolia, in what was currently the Inter-Straits Neutral Zone, on the 24th through the 27th of August, killing forty people, mainly Jews and ethnic Greeks.

On the afternoon of September 4th, members of two notable Jewish Mob families, the New York Goldstones and the Atlanta Tannenbaums, sat down for a spirited discussion at an upscale kosher restaurant in Richmond, Va.; unfortunately, however, things didn't go well for either side, and one argument over the arrest of a Goldstone associate versus the death of one of Morris Tannenbaum's sons, eventually devolved into a gunfight in which 18 people were killed, including a hapless civilian, a businessman from Charlotte named Joel Weinman, hit by a stray bullet(though his wife Sasha survived her own injuries).

Members of a radical Islamist Garveyite sect attacked a small mixed-ethnicity synagogue in northern Montserrado County, Liberia, on the afternoon of September 9th; the attack was unsuccessful, but it sent a message to the small Jewish community: Do not promote Western internationalism---this particular temple had been well-known for it's multicultural membership, even including a few members originally from the United States and Germany, amongst other places.

Thomas F. Douglass, a well-respected longtime member of Liberia's National Congress, and the grandson of the famous American abolitionist Frederick Douglas, was subject to an assassination attempt on September 16th, four days after his speech condemning the Garveyites' Sept. 9th attack on the synagogue in the north of Montserrado Co.; the man who tried to murder him, identified only as “Waleed”, fled the scene, but dropped his weapon on his way out of town. Douglass, although he disagreed with the Socialist ideology of the Buckland administration, had supported several public works projects in the country, including one designed to help the poor of Monrovia, as well as an expansion of the laws allowing refugees, regardless of nationality, to settle in the nation.

The Salafist extremist group known as the “Al-Sayyid Brotherhood”, an organization known for strong fascist sympathies as well as hardcore fanaticism, attacked several New Israeli kibbutzes and Lebanese villages during the period of 2-7 October, murdering over 160 innocent people, many of the victims themselves of the Islamic faith. There was much shock and horror over this event, including amongst the Islamic community, and increasing calls were made to fight harder against the extremists.

240 people were killed in Florida on the 7th and 8th of October as a hurricane with winds of over 140 mph made landfall near Miami, then cut due northwest across the state; it then re-landed in West Florida on the night of Oct. 9th, right around the Mobile area; 40 more people were killed, and the damage around Mobile would take a year and a half to clean up.

William Clayton, the President of the United States, suffered another major stroke on October 16th, due to being overworked and overstressed; this one was worse than the last, and some doctors feared it might have taken his life. Eight days later, he voluntarily resigned the office to Vice-President Patrick Graves, so he could go home and try to recuperate.

A rare strong autumn tornado hit the town of Hansard, Assiniboia, on October 27th: four people were killed, and many of it's 10,000 surviving residents were left homeless, and in many cases, jobless as well.

Unusually heavy snowfall occurred in portions of subarctic Northern Canada during a blizzard in mid-November; one small village in the Peace River District of the Northwest Territories reported that almost 4 feet of snow had fallen in one day: Nov. 16th.
On November 25th, a man named Thomas W. Ford, an associate with a Boston based Afro-American syndicate, the Black Warriors, robs, and then trashes, a brewery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, along with a couple of tag-along partners, in broad daylight. The story makes headlines across New England due to the nature of the crime, and the rarity of organized crime problems in the Granite State. Partly because of this, Ford quickly rose through the ranks of the aforementioned organization and would later become notorious nationally.

The December 4th shooting of reformist rabbi David Perlstrom in Boston raised serious concerns, after it was discovered that he may have been murdered on the order of the Donovan brothers, who ran a small-sized, but wealthy contraband operation in Providence, R.I.; Perlstrom was a currently serving Socialist councilman from the northwest side of town, who had blown the whistle on several mob activities in the area over the past few years.

A plot to detonate a massive bomb in the basement of the famous Hotel Havana in Monrovia was foiled early on the morning of December 27th, after a young associate of one of the plotters, known only as “Mathew”, confessed to the police; one of the intended targets was John Miller, a former mayor of the city who also operated a gynecological clinic in the Northeast Quarter.

1934

On April 6th, an American actor named John Dillard is abducted and murdered near Aberdeen, Michigan; investigations will later reveal that the Iowa native had run into trouble with members of the Omaha Fahey crime family.

The July 17th bombing of a Monrovia Indian restaurant by Garveyites killed 26 people, including the son of a Soviet Politburo secretary, visiting on holiday.

An unusual weather event occurs in Scotland on September 22nd, when a trace amount of snow falls on the tiny northern village of Thurso; the news makes headlines across the U.K.

All three of the U.S. state of Ohio's largest cities, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus, all experienced close to, or reached, record low temperatures on the 5th thru the 10th of November as an unusually powerful cold weather system plowed thru the state from the northwest to the southeast; the cities of Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit and Indianapolis also reported far chillier temperatures than normal during this time.

1935

On January 25th, the Soviet Union signs a historic friendship treaty with Liberia, and offers some token military support against the Garveyites, which is accepted by Monrovia.

The Gantler crime family of Little Rock, primarily better known for their shipping of black-market alcohol to areas under prohibitionary laws, makes their first move against one of their rivals, the Bosniak Turkovich family of Houston, on March 5th; the news makes headlines because two undercover Federal agents were killed during the shootout that occurred.

Severe weather claims 110 lives in the United States during the month of May.

An unusual heat wave occurs across parts of the Midwest and Northeast U.S., as well as Ontario, during the period of July 8th-20th: notably, the state of New Hampshire manages to record it's hottest day ever: 109 degrees for a high at Nashua on July 12th, with a low of 76 that morning.

The Garveyites stormed the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia on September 12th, in what might have been their most brazen act of terrorism yet: dozens were killed, including 22 civilians, a pair of guards, and one of Ambassador Joseph Bush's entourage, a man by the name of Alfred Heinz from Worcester, Mass., the son of a well-known meat canning magnate[BTW, this fictional character is indeed from the same Heinz family that gave us the famous condiment brand, in our reality].

Members of the Tannenbaum crime family robbed and trashed two major banks in the Philadelphia area on October 7th, making away with over half a million dollars in cash[About $6.5 million in OTL 2010 dollars!].

An early November snowfall came to the South Plains on November 22nd/23rd as temperatures plummeted to as much as 20 degrees across much of northern East Texas and Oklahoma in particular; further east, severe weather became a major hazard in much of West Florida and Georgia and portions of southeast Alabama and the Carolinas, and several dozen people were killed by destructive tornadoes in those states, including 18 people who died in McRaeville, Georgia, on the afternoon of November 24th.

 

[The Uchronian]

I normally don't post just one year, but here's 1936, to renew interest in this TL.

1936

What was to be an unusually cold winter in the Plains, and an rather snowy one in the eastern Midwest and Northeast, saw many records broken, even as far south as Austin and New Orleans; unusually cold temperatures even managed to penetrate as far south as Hermosillo and Tampico on occasion, during January.

Alberto Genovese, the Italian ambassador to the United States, was assassinated in Baltimore on January 24th, after attending an anti-Mafia fundraising party in town. Also, on that same day, the town of Cassidy, Iowa, records the state's all-time January low of 48 degrees below zero, with an all-time December low also having been

The Los Angeles based Mantovani syndicate pulled one of the strangest heists in history when two dozen high-end luxury automobiles were stolen from a Phoenix, Ariz., dealership late on the night of February 24th; news of the theft made headlines across America.

The well-respected Czech film director Frederik Janosek dies in an auto accident in New York, while finalizing a deal for the North American distribution of his latest picture, “The Man With Two Mothers”, on March 12th, along with Julius Berkman, one of his lawyers. His death makes headlines in nearly every major newspaper from San Francisco to Vladivostok, and is especially devastating to many Czechs, who looked upon him as a national treasure; his body is shipped back to Czechia, where he is buried on April 9th, following a rather modest[as one would expect in a Communist country], but well-attended funeral.

What was to become a historic tornado season kicked off in the United States in April, after virtually no activity in March, and that itself preceded by an unusually chilly January and February; several individual outbreaks of severe weather lead to 144 total deaths in the Midwest and southeast.

Come June, another, even worse, episode of severe weather causes much in the way of destruction across a wide swath of the country from Lower Michigan and Indiana, to Cheyenne and Colorado in the West, with nearly half a thousand tornadoes reported(most eventually confirmed), and 242 deaths from those alone.

Also, the summer of 1936 proves to be one of the warmest on record for much of northern North America, as from late June to early August, average temperatures consistently stay between 5 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit above the norm in much of sub-Arctic Canada and adjacent areas of the northern Midwest U.S.

On Sept. 4th, several divisions of the Liberian National Defense Corps. engaged in a shootout with the forces of Jeremiah Garvey, a younger brother of Yahya Garvey, in a rural area of Harbel County, about fifty miles east of Monrovia, after having discovered his primary safehouse. Garvey himself was able to escape, but his 18-year-old son, Hezekiah, was killed. Twelve days later, in retaliation for this, a faction of the Garveyites particularly close to Jeremiah Garvey, attacked the Frederick Douglass Memorial College in Mossville[Harbel, in the real world], on the first day of classes, killing forty students and teachers, as well as two guards. In a public radio address on the night of Sept. 16th, Liberian President William C.R. DuBois strongly condemned the attack, and urged the people of Liberia to not allow themselves to be intimidated by these terrorists.

Members of the Goldstone crime family and the New Jersey based Januszewski Syndicate engaged in a large-scale shootout in Baltimore on Oct. 7th of this year; 24 people were killed, including two policemen sent to break up the fighting, and a hapless civilian cut down by crossfire.

Jeremiah Garvey, the mastermind behind the Douglass College attacks in Liberia, is shot and killed by the Liberian National Defense Corps. on the night of October 27th, while attempting to flee into French Guinea. When he hears of his brother's death, Yahya Garvey swears vengeance on the Liberian government.....

The Caporetti crime family of New Orleans, longtime enemies of the Corbeau “Florida Cajun Family” outfit from Mobile, West Florida, met up in near an abandoned antebellum plantation in southern Mississippi on November 4th of this year; the shoot-out that followed a long and drawn-out argument concerning each other's contacts in the federal government, was one of the deadliest Mob incidents to date: 48 of those present died, including Francesco Mazzini, the top caporegime of the Caporetti Family.

The U.S. Presidential Elections, 1936: Having been largely on his own since Clayton's stroke and unexpected retirement, Patrick Graves faced an increasing number of serious domestic issues, not the least of which included the increasing violence from organized crime, but the rise of a small, but growing fascist movement in the U.S. also had many concerned. There was also the matter of the extremist black nationalist Garveyites in Liberia, whose terroristic activities had stunned the world for several years, and there were, by this time, increasing cries for the United States to help intervene in Liberia.

Although the American Liberty Party's main leadership decided to endorse the Patrick Graves/Victor Mitchell ticket, Sylvester Connell, state senator from Illinois, had run on a splinter ticket anyway. The Republican Party also endorsed Graves as well.

The Southern Democrats, primarily focused their '36 campaign on isolationism and actually strongly warned against intervening on Liberia's behalf; unfortunately, this also played into the overt racism that was still not all that rare in their neck of the woods, as many hardcore social conservatives had no love for Liberia, or even blacks in general, regardless of whether they lived in the Americas or not. For their ticket, they ran Alan L. Ketrick, a charismatic South Carolina congressman noted for his fancy outfits, and his unusual persuasiveness, for President, and Eli Collins, an upper-middle class preacher from Paducah, Ky.

The Progressive Party, back from their hiatus, made a comeback in the '36 elections, pressing for the establishment of more economic and political reforms, as well as support for intervention on the behalf of the Liberians, and against the Garveyites. For their ticket this year, Albert Savitich, currently serving as the Congressman from Michigan's Lansing-area district, was nominated for the presidency, and Juan Alvarez, the former governor of Coahuila, ran for Vice-President unopposed. The Socialists nominated the Progressives, and so didn't run their own candidate.

Ultimately, Patrick Graves won out; his willingness to compromise appealed to a wide spectrum of the American public and he won nearly every Midwestern and Western state, as well as Arkansas, West Florida and Kentucky. The Progressives won Louisiana, Minnesota, Vermont, Coahuila, and Victoria, as well as Puerto Rico, Havana, and Holguin, while the Southern Democrats had to make do with the Deep South, and a plurality in North Carolina.


A major terrorist plot that was planned for a Christmas Eve gathering in the Monrovia City Hall is broken up by Liberian authorities on Dec. 21st.

During Christmas Eve, a major windstorm wreaks significant havoc across much of the Southeast, from Arkansas and Louisiana to the coast of the Carolinas, dropping two dozen tornadoes and with winds occasionally exceeding a hundred miles an hour; 47 people died.

Notice, by the way, that the 1936 heatwave wasn't nearly as intense as in OTL? That's partly because the Dust Bowl hasn't happened just yet.....but it will happen sometime. When? Stay tuned, dear readers.

 

[The Uchronian]

With sincere apologies to readers for the unexpected delay, here's 1937 and 1938. Guess what happened to Yahya Garvey and company?

1937

On January 25th, an unusual phenomenon began to unfold over central East Texas: numerous severe thunderstorms, some capable of dropping tornadoes, erupted across this part of the state as humidity spiked and temperatures jumped into the seventies—one tornado that hit Wharton killed 18 people---but later that night, the cold front that caused the inclement weather passed through, and temperatures began to plummet; by the next morning, many towns were reporting temperatures below the freezing mark(even Houston further south and east briefly went below the 32 degree mark!), and, on top of that, snowfall occurred in many places, as far south as the West Texas/East Texas border not far north of San Antonio. The most notable temperature jump was in Chomatoff, in Coryell County, which went from 79 degrees at around 4 p.m. on the 25th, to only 17 degrees just before 3 a.m. on the 26th.

On March 4th, as President Graves is being re-inaugurated, a major U.S. marshals raid is undertaken in Philadelphia against several of the crime syndicates there; it's a risky move, and some of the gangsters do fight back, but ultimately, the raid results in the deaths of twenty of the gangsters, and dozens of arrests, including the original godfather of the Rinaldi Family. Other crime families affected were the Monaghans, Cohens, Wahlstroms(A Swedish gang, mainly known for importing gray-market booze and small-time racketeering), Goldsmiths, and a primarily “White Russian” syndicate called the “Vozhdan Brotherhood”, originally of Perth Amboy, N.J., but with operations in Philadelphia, New York, Dallas, and Atlanta, as well as connections to a few Canadian crime families in Ontario, such as the Bronffman syndicate from Ottawa.

William Mabank, governor of South Carolina, was assassinated in Columbia, late on the morning of March 8th, as he stepped out to fetch the latest copy of his favorite weekly newspaper, by two members of the Charleston based Mazotti Family. Two days later, dozens of Italian-American families would be chased out of their homes as angry mobs marched across the streets of a large number of towns across the state in response to this.

Two members of a particularly anti-French branch of the Garveyites detonated an auto bomb in the middle of a crowded market in the middle of Conakry, the capital of French Guinea, on March 18th; 23 people were killed, including a young boy and his father, and dozens more were badly injured in the blast. One perpetrator, known only as “Thomas Phineas”, was captured by the gendarmerie, and later tried and convicted of his crimes; he would be executed by the French government in Sept. of 1938. The other man tried to escape, but was killed in combat with a police vessel.

A coordinated joint Franco-British raid(with assistance from the government of Lebanon) on a major Salafist hideout in Turkish Syria on May 9th, resulted in the netting of Mohammed Al-Hamzah, a particularly dangerous terrorist noted for his extreme anti-Italian prejudice, and the deaths of two dozen of his comrades.
Due to the growing cultural wars blooming in the United States, support for marijuana prohibition in particular begins to approach an all time high during the summer of 1937; so much so, that conservative Virginia congressman Peter Grisham actually introduces a bill on July 2nd, which would place a nationwide ban on marijuana growing and distribution; many states in the eastern half of the country [except parts of New England, New Jersey, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan and Illinois] have already either banned or heavily restricted marijuana use, as well as a number of states west of the Mississippi-Missouri divide as well, namely Oklahoma, East Texas, Chihuahua, and Utah, with varying degrees of punishment. Institutional gambling has also come under fire, and it has been banned altogether in New England, as well as the rest of the Northeast, Ohio, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, as well as Utah, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Wyoming, Utah, and Shoshone.

On July 15th, the Manchester, Ala. faction of the Black Warriors crime gang pulls one of the most daring heists in it's history when it cleans out a major bank in Jackson, Miss., and taking out two well-armed guards on their way out; the fact that every one of the gangsters was armed with a submachine gun only adds to the fear that begins to develop in much of the South as the news leaks out. In response to this, the Mississippi state legislature swiftly approves not just a massive expansion of local and state law enforcement powers, but also a significant upgrade in equipment as well, including some leftover U.S. Army equipment from the Great War era. Three days later, several of these same robbers are involved in a gun battle with members of the Atlanta Cahill crime family; two of them die, but three others escape. The state government of Georgia also later approves it's own expansion of police powers within it's borders.

On September 4th, a hurricane with winds of about a hundred miles an hour makes it's landfall in Tamaulipas, just south of the Rio Grande; several dozen die, mainly around the area of San Fernando, including John Ybarra, the former mayor, whose car was swept into the Gulf of Mexico.

During the middle and latter part of September, the Liberian government engaged in several major gunfights with the Garveyites, including one that spilled over into the Sierra Leonian border town of Gbarnga, and which required British assistance to stop. Unfortunately, even with several defeats, the Garveyites, by this time, still had a strong grip on much of northern Liberia and parts of Guinea and the Ivory Coast as well, and their activities were beginning to spread into Belgian Senegal and the Portuguese Togoland. Their increasingly consistent cooperation with Salafists in the northwest of Africa and the Turkish nationalists in Libya began to raise further concerns.

The Pepper River Massacre occurred on October 22nd when dozens of Kpelle people were murdered by Garveyite fanatics, after residents of a nearby village helped authorities capture Alfred Watkins, an American expat who had been known as an arms dealer in the region, and one particularly friendly towards the Garveyites;

Chattanooga, Tenn., was struck by a deadly tornado on November 14th; 42 people were killed, along with 34 other deaths that were reported that day from other tornadoes in half a dozen other states(and two early the next morning in S.C.).

On Christmas Day, an unusual frost event will be reported in much of northern Florida as temperatures drop to just below freezing as far south as Homosassa Springs; there was even actual snowfall just north of the border, in southern Georgia, as well as adjacent parts of West Florida; further north, low temperatures dropped down into the teens, as far south as Jackson, Miss., and came close to zero in many of the northward-facing outlying portions of West and Middle Tennessee.

1938

Mississippi Congressman David Hankins was assassinated by members of the primarily Italian-American Riverside Syndicate on the particularly cold afternoon of January 17th, as he tried to exit a restaurant in the town of Sidonia in Tunica County; another victim, Thomas Hurd, an off duty state patrolman, died of his wounds early the next morning.

In Liberia, a group of three Garveyites attempt to kill Michael Tubman, a grandson of Harriet Tubman, the renowned African-American abolitionist, on February 27th, for his support of a bill further restricting the activities of groups like the Garveyites and their sympathizers, as well as inviting American Ambassador Joseph Bush to a Liberian-American Friendship Society assembly. The attempt fails, but Frederick Tubman, Michael's younger brother, is shot instead; he will survive the initial shooting, but dies of complications from his wounds in late September.

An auto bomb detonated near a car factory in Dusseldorf in Communist Germany, killing some 17 people, on March 8th; although rumors emerged that the Garveyites were behind the bombing, it was actually carried out by a Bosnian nationalist, Jibril Islamovich, who had intended to target Ivan Dobric, a Croatian car magnate, visiting the area on business; Dobric was not harmed, however.

On March 17th, a local spin-off of the Black Warriors crime gang became involved with a major fight with the Tullamore Family regarding a dispute over thefts from a local soup factory in Mansfield, N.J.; 42 of the gangsters were killed, along with 4 policemen, and news of the attacks terrorized hundreds of thousands of people throughout the Garden State. A week after this, another Black Warriors faction robbed a higher-end grocery store in Tilden, West Florida, murdering the proprietor and running off with nearly $2,500 in cash[about $35,000 in today's money, IOTL].

Three members of a Black Warriors branch from Galveston, East Texas, robbed and cleared out much of a convenience store in Sidonia, a small town located about 10 miles northwest of there, before shooting and killing a pair of deputies who'd responded to the crime scene, on April 6th.

A Salafist terrorist group brutally massacred several dozen Lebanese Christians in a church just north of Tripoli, almost on the border of Lebanon and the Latakia Free State, just after the end of the Sunday services on April 17th; the fact that the church was burned down afterwards, with some shooting victims still alive(a couple of fortunate people managed to escape, undetected), shocked and horrified the Western World when they were revealed during the following week.

A major labor strike in Chicago results in the arrests of dozens of railroad workers on June 20th; this action proves to be rather controversial from the start, and the lawsuit that follows eventually goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

On August 7th, the state of Iowa records it's hottest temperature for that month to date: 114 degrees near Fraley, thirty miles northwest of Keokuk, just before 3:30 pm. Extremely high temperatures are also recorded in Hannibal, Mo.(112 degrees), Quincy, Ill.(111 degrees), Maryville, Mo.(111 degrees), Denison, Iowa(110 degrees), Columbia, Mo.(109 degrees), Rock Island, Ill.(108 degrees), Galena, Ill.(108 degrees), Dixon, Ill.(107 degrees), and Tutnall, Wis.(106 degrees); but St. Louis and Chicago don't escape the heat, either, with temperatures hitting 108 and 102 degrees, respectively, and both Kansas City as well as Omaha record highs of 105 and 101 degrees. Even St. Anthony and Detroit both reach the 90s as well.

Several dozen people die starting on August 30th as flooding from a tropical storm devastates parts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic from that morning, until sunset the next night; amongst the dead, are Pedro Trujillo, a famous baseball player, and Jacques Boigny, who was once the president of Haiti(1920-23).

The most successful raid against the Garveyites yet carried out in Liberia occurs on September 12th, following a failed plot to assassinate Stephen Reventlow, the current ambassador from Britain, in Monrovia, the day prior; fifty Garveyites were killed in firefights with Liberia's national militia corps., but a few of the survivors, in exchange for mercy, gave up crucial details as to where more Garveyite compounds could be found, as well as another proposed terror plot.....

A major hurricane, with sustained wind gusts exceeding 140 miles per hour, struck the Canadian province of Nova Scotia on September 24th, killing just over four hundred people and wrecking much of Halifax and several other cities; this same storm had also wiped out a good part of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, only the day prior. This system later caused significant flooding in Newfoundland, killing several dozen more people, before being pushed out to the North Atlantic, where it died out, over the Shetlands, in mid-October.

Salafists attempted to attack a Druze commune in northern Lebanon on the 6th and 7th of October of this year; the attack failed miserably, and all but a handful of the Salafis were killed. This made headlines across the world for a few days, as the Druze were primarily known for their peaceful nature in the West.

The final major blow to the Garveyites in Liberia would come after Yahya Garvey's most ambitious plot, the November 7th attempt to blow up the Communal Meeting Hall(a building popular for fundraising events and non-government organizations, such as the Red Cross or the Liberian Welfare Society, to hold meetings, etc.) failed; an off-duty policewoman happened to catch one of the saboteurs in the act, and shot down another when they tried to attack her, and she was able to track down the licence plate number of the getaway vehicle. Two days later, the Liberian authorities tracked the car to one of the last remaining holdouts of the terrorists, in which Yahya Garvey himself just happened to be located. A desperate firefight broke out between the militias and the Garveyites, but the terrorists were quickly outgunned; Garvey himself attempted to flee the area, but just before 3 p.m., his flight was cut short when a sniper's bullet caught him in the back of the neck-he died a few minutes later, along with a hundred of his comrades, including his cousin, Walid Garvey.

In what was to be a stunning blow in favor of cannabis advocates, a particularly notorious bill that was introduced by South Carolina Congressman, William E. Blease, and co-sponsored by conservative Nebraska Republican Ronald Wiedenmeyer, which would have criminalized possession, distribution, and even personal consumption of cannabis, was defeated in the Senate on November 22nd, thanks to an unofficial cross-table coalition between the Progressives(the vast majority of whom were opposed to outright prohibition), the Socialists(concerned about rumors that the tobacco industry could have made significant gains from this), and many members of the American Liberty Party, who argued that such was a waste of federal resources.

Not a few Americans applauded this, especially given how much of an utter failure alcohol prohibition had been for most of those states, cities and counties that had tried it. However, though, not everyone approved; many more reactionary outlets decried “Progressive hedonism”, and riots broke out in at least two Southern cities(namely, Columbia, S.C., and Vicksburg, Miss.)when the news was broken. Regardless, this moment marked a high point for prohibitionism of any sort, and would begin to slowly decline for several decades afterwards.


On December 26th, a historic cold snap begins to take hold in much of the eastern Midwest in the United States, with nighttime temperatures dropping well below zero in many parts-some places in Ohio and Indiana record temps of minus 30 and lower. Although it doesn't last for more than 4 days before things return more to the norm, it still goes down in the history books; the same system that was responsible also causes Montreal to record a low of minus 40 degrees on New Year's Day.

There we go. I hope you guys liked it.

 

[The Uchronian]

Hey, folks.......

I know it's been forever, but I recently remembered this TL, and I thought I'd try to finish it sometime.

Would anybody like to make any suggestions as to where to take the TL? I'm definitely open to any ideas.