Map Thread XIV
- Thread starter MorningDew
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CannedTech
Banned
They're fun innit? It's prolly' one of my favorite recent map fads. There's just so much versatility to it.
Also, that's probably one of the best subversions of the Peoples Republic of Tyranny trope I've seen in a map.
Dorozhand
Banned
Guys, I know this post is ridiculously, absurdly long. This is, however, why I haven't posted much recently, as it is a tale which has grown in the telling. I've been working on this for so long that I need to post something to get some feedback before the home stretch towards completion. When it's done, this is gonna be pretty cool.
Here is what I have so far (very, very unfinished) of the write-up and WIP map of Let the Tempest Come, Strike Harder. A world of conflict, change, uncertainty, multipolarity, collapse, and hope.
The clusterfuck awaits:
France -
Germany outflanked the French in Belgium and broke through the front in a concentrated assault from the north and east at the Battle of Lens. The German army took Calais and the French struggled to plug the gap. The French army began to mutiny in late 1915 after increasingly bloody attacks resulted in few gains. Paris fell in the summer of 1916 and the French capitulated after the Swiss joined the central powers and aided Germany in encircling remaining French forces along the rest of the front.
The remainder of Lorraine still part of France was ceded to Germany, along with it most of metropolitan France's petrol reserves, driving the economy into a steep decline and deep depression. Returning soldiers, angry at the Third Republic for losing the war, formed ultra-conservative catholic paramilitary groups which organized along with conservative peasant groups and overthrew the Republic, inviting Prince Philippe d'Orléans to take the throne of France as Philippe VIII in 1917. The occupying German forces allowed this, given the disorder of the Republic's collapse and the impotence of the French state. A parliamentary government was set up under the complete control of the royalists. Hard right royalists and nationalists constitute the entirety of seats in the Chamber, all of which are united under the control of Chief Minister Longin Durand, an ultra-catholic soldier who became disillusioned with the republic. The ideology of the Kingdom of France is thus to completely erase the revolution and effect a true restoration of the ancien regime and thus a national and cultural reawakening of France and its power.
France has intervened under German pressure on the side of the monarchy in the Spanish Civil War, though the small French Army under the restrictions imposed by the Central Powers, without tanks or aircraft, is limited in its capacity and incapable of deep operations. The intervention has also hampered Franco-British efforts to stem the tide of revolution in the colonies as much as the German restrictions and the HGA's agitation have.
Italy -
Italy joined the entente in late 1914, and achieved early success against Austro-Hungary as France achieved some success at the Marne, but the defeat of France afterward resulted in the full force of the German army coming down from both sides and the Italian army collapsed spectacularly in the Battle of Liguria and the Battle of Venice. While Italian generals put up a spirited final resistance with the Visconti Line and the Battle of Rimini, the tide was too great and the German-Austrian forces occupied the entire country by the end of 1916. Italian unification was dismantled by the occupying Austrian authority which reestablished the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, under Alfonso I, the Papal State, established the Kingdom of Tuscany-Romagna under Joseph Ferdinand of Austria as Ferdinand V and made Piedmont an independent republic, overthrowing and exiling Victor Emmanuel III. Piedmont was ceded Corsica, Nice and Savoy to further neuter France and shore up some Italian support, and the state put under the control of pro-German quislings. Venice and Milan were annexed by Austro-Hungary. After the death of Pope Pius X in 1916, who though having regained temporal power was saddened by the bloodshed whence it came, a somewhat pro-Austrian Neapolitan cardinal was elected to the papacy, taking the name Boniface X.
The UK -
The High Seas Fleet decisively defeated the Royal Navy at the Battle of Holland, while the BEF was defeated, caught up in the chaos of post-war France and surrendered, while the UK was placed under a blockade, bombed by dirigibles and aeroplanes, and the British Army defeated in Ireland as the June Uprising spread. The Republic of Ireland annexed Ulster and the Irish National Army engaged in widespread massacres of protestants and English, dubbed the "Green Terror", which has only just wound down. The dominos soon began to fall within the British colonial empire and by the end of the war in Europe the UK was at the forefront of another massive war in Africa and India even while Communists began agitation in Scotland, Wales, urban England and throughout independent Ireland. The truncated UK largely tolerates them due to its support of the USSR in any effort to weaken Germany.
Germany -
Germany is in a state of extreme prosperity following the end of the war. The calamity of Bismarck was avoided through the martial skill of the German people. The French were neutered as a power after the annexation of Lorraine and a buffer was established against the Soviets. New colonies were conquered and the German state came to dominate Europe.
Still the war was not an easy one. The western front was a brutal push towards Paris, even after Lens and Calais the French seemed entirely unwilling to give up as the bodies piled higher, and the opening of the Northern Front with Danish entry into the war on the side of the Entente aided by a second BEF harried German borders in the north, allowed air bombing of northern German cities and forced the redirection of troops to defend Schleswig-Holstein. This would have been relatively easy were it not for the Swedes, whose colossal failure in their invasion of Finland on the side of the Central Powers prompted Norwegian entry on the side of Denmark. However, just as this spot of hope appeared for the Entente, the back of the French army was broken by the entry of the substantial Swiss army into the fray. After the decisive result of the Battle of the Doubs and the German Lothringen Offensive the French forces in Lorraine were encircled and over 200,000 captured. This disaster was the final straw and by mid 1916 Paris had fallen and the French government now in Tours, faced with a total German march forward, agreed to the Chartres Armistice.
However, cracks have formed in the German leadership now that the war is over and the continent is beginning to rebuild. The obsession with the navy and large battleships under Wilhelm II, seemingly vindicated by the success of the High Seas Fleet against the Royal Navy, has resulted in massive expenditures towards the maintenance and expansion of the newly reorganized Kaisermarine, and the subsequent stagnation of development in the army. The General Staff and the Kaiser have a tense relationship, and talks of a coup have come up but have been suppressed through the Kagepol (Kaiserliche Geheimpolizei), the Reich's secret police force. The Kaiser has used this arm to purge the German officer corps and the government of potential disloyalty to his person and has in effect created an absolute monarchy, which has gone on without complaint from a German populace who worship his growing cult of personality. The portrait of the winner of the two front war, who denied the prophesy of Bismarck and regained Germany's Ottonian glory, can be seen in virtually every large establishment in Germany, sometimes flanked with portraits of Wilhelm I and Frederick the Great. The cult of Germany's naval and colonial prowess has resulted in a new height of nationalism and imperialism, while central Africa is a huge reservoir of raw materials and labour which the navy and the army keep ruthlessly in check, even while they use it to dislodge the colonial regimes of Germany's British and French competitors.
Switzerland -
In late 1915, as trench warfare raged on the western front, fighting spilled over into Swiss territory. Though the Germans and French were equally responsible for the violation of Swiss neutrality, the majority German Swiss government decided that the French were primarily to blame and declared war. Swiss entry was the final nail in the coffin of French hopes for victory and soon the army on the border of Alsace-Lorraine was being encircled.
Meanwhile in the south, several Italian shells that had landed in Swiss territory along the front with Austro-Hungary were used as casus belli for war against Italy. Both of these wars were successful immediately, but greatly angered the French and Italian minorities in Switzerland, as well as pacifists and neutralists among the rest of the populace, who saw the state as far too ready to drag Switzerland into the latest conflict among the great powers which the nation had previously been so adept at avoiding.
Almost immediately there were uprisings among the Italian and French cantons, and after the defeat and dismemberment of Italy these quickly grew out of hand. The Second Swiss Civil War is in full swing and currently ravaging the country, as religious, ethnic and ideological conflicts engulf society. Austria and Germany have both invaded and are helping to crush the revolt, which has established a new confederation and government in Fribourg. Italian rebels in Ticino at first expressed some desire to join the Republic of Piedmont at the end of the war, but seeing the Piedmontine government as mostly Austrian stooges they shunned the new Italian order and threw in their lot with the renewed confederacy.
Austria-Hungary-Serbia -
Austro-Hungary emerged from the war in a far better position than it entered. Remade as a modern state with democratic institutions and a multicultural confederation, the military power of the Habsburg domain brought down Italy and was instrumental in bringing down Russia. Through great destruction at the hands of the Russians in the east the peoples of the empire grew into a camaraderie of arms through bloodshed and war, and in triumph the fruits of prosperity assuaged for the time the forces which sought to tear the state apart. Not to omit, however, that cracks also form beneath the surface, as the military must constantly remain on its toes and mobilized on the border with the USSR in Ukraine, must constantly hold down a massive presence in Italy and the Balkans and fight a bloody war in Switzerland, even the efforts of the Liberal Emperor may not be enough to keep the state together in the long term.
Faced with the monumental task of keeping the Habsburg realm of Austro-Hungary intact, Emperor Charles, who took power after the death of Franz Josef in 1915, has worked tirelessly to liberalize the monarchy and grant autonomy to the Empire's peoples while preserving the institutions of the empire and his own position. Through charisma he has been successful in this, negotiating, with not insignificant but ultimately impotent shock and protest from Prussia, the reestablishment of the Holy Roman Empire, now as a catholic rather than purely German institution, to bind together the Austrians, Hungarians, Croats, Poles, and Italians under his rule to a single national idea. After planning for several years, he declared the monarchy reorganized in a new constitution and new union under new ideals. Pope Boniface X personally crowned him Emperor of the Romans in 1919.
Through the encouragement of trade unions he has stemmed the tide of leftism in the empire as well, though not entirely, and through the elevation of many of the former smaller realms of the empire to larger, more important, and better represented entities he has largely kept in check the force of pan-slavism, though the communist Zapadoslavia Movement is a significant underground force among the Czechs and Slovaks. The military has also become a well oiled machine in anti-insurgency activity and national uprising against the Habsburg Dynasty is crushed while expression of nationalism within the framework of Habsburg rule is encouraged and proliferated. Parliamentary assemblies form the basis of elected government at all levels of the realm.
The abbreviated style of the monarch is Charles VIII, by the Grace of God Emperor of the Romans, Ever Augustus, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of the Czechs, of Venice, of Croats, of Istria and the Slovenes, of Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrins, of Dalmatia, of Galicia.
Bulgaria -
Soon after the Greeks entered the war on the entente against the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria joined the Central Powers. Seeking revenge for the Second Balkan War, they campaigned aggressively, breaking the back of Serbia and annexing the south of the country, as well as completely defeating Greece with the help of the Ottomans, annexing most of Macedonia and wresting Albania from the Entente, while the Ottomans annexed the Aegean islands and the area around Thessaly.
However, this victory would not last. In 1919 the Ottomans declared war on Bulgaria in response to Bulgarian ethnic cleansing of Pomaks, and under Mustafa Kemal executed a brilliant campaign, which with the aid of the Greeks, who have used their meagre victories in the war to help stem the tide of communism and raise up the nationalism which has hit an all time low, and the Romanians, who declared war to reclaim Dobruja, blasted through the lines of the overstretched and exhausted Bulgarians and reconquered much of the Ottoman Empire's pre Balkan War territories in Europe. The Siege of Sofia has just recently prompted the Bulgarians to finally surrender to Kemal and the Army of Rumelia, though the drafting of a formal treaty to keep the Bulgarians in check forever has not yet occurred.
Spain -
Spanish communists have risen up in Andalucia, Valencia, Catalonia, and the Basque Country, setting up a socialist state in the Leninist model and fighting a civil war against conservative monarchists, supported by the Germans, who have occupied Galicia, the French, and the Italian states. Covert shipments of arms have made it to the rebels from the USSR through the UK, as well as Soviet military and economic advisors.
Scandinavia -
During the war, the Kingdom of Denmark joined the Entente and attacked Germany from the north with the aid of an expeditionary force from the UK after French defensive victories at the Aisne and Breteuil. The Danish army was able to push into Schleswig and capture Kiel while the French pushed back and stabilized the front again at the Aisne. However, this would not be enough the save the Entente and the Germans would push back in Jutland. Complicating matters, however, was Sweden, which joined the Central Powers to attack Finland and failed, being defeated by Finnish irregulars and meager Russian forces, who actually moved in and attacked Lulea, prompting the Norwegians to join the Entente to defend Denmark and attack Sweden. Despite all of this, the Germans eventually defeated Denmark, annexing Jutland, and brought the war to Norway, who refused to surrender even after the Entente collapsed. With German defeat of Russia, Finland became independent and Sweden thence reoccupied Lulea and brought all force against Norway. Finland's communist revolution reignited the Lapland Front (also known as the Bothnian War), however, and the USSR moved to help Finland again take Lulea. Attempts by Sweden to negotiate a separate peace with Finland and Norway was met with a German backed military coup and Sweden now has to face the Finnish on one side and aid with the very costly occupation of Norway on the other.
Events in the Americas compounded the complexities of the post-war confusion, as the USSR began to use Norway to ship supplies to socialist revolutionaries elsewhere, resulting in what essentially amounts to a delicate proxy war between Germany and the USSR, neither wanting direct war with the other and both wanting to expand influence.
Russia -
The Russian Empire at first performed rather well in the war, but by 1915 had been driven out of Poland while the army grew increasingly ineffective for want of materiel and food. The only Russian triumph during this time was the defeat of the Swedish invasion of Finland, though this was mostly due to Finnish partisans. However, the Brusilov Offensive, launched in late 1915 across a wide front in an attempt to relieve pressure on the French and Italians by knocking out the Austrians began very promisingly. The Greeks joined the entente in an effort to aid the Russians and attack the Ottomans. However, the offensive eventually ground to a halt and Russia collapsed into revolutionary turmoil in 1916. The Germans supported the revolutionaries and sent a certain Marxist theorist named Vladimir Ulyanov to Russia in a guarded train car to stir up dissent. They could scarce have imagined the scale of the events that this would set in motion.
The March Revolution -
On 13th March, 1916 the monarchy faced popular uprising in Petrograd which soon spread across the country. A "Provisional Government" was established while Russia's future was decided. The provisional regime was highly unstable and soon collapsed, being replaced by a centre-left regime which overthrew the monarchy (reverting the Romanovs to common citizens), and declared the Russian Democratic Federal Republic, under the leadership of President Pavel Milyukov, beginning a process of federalizing the empire and establishing liberal-democratic reforms. However, Miliukov's refusal to end the increasingly bloody war led to massive casualties on the front in human wave offensives in which soldiers often didn't have any ammunition and more died from starvation and disease in miserable conditions than in combat.
With the leftist parties completely dissatisfied with Milyukov's rule, he was replaced as President of the Republic in July by Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky worked to establish soldier-democracy on the front and helped to alleviate some of the worst conditions, but he still did not end the war. Instead he used the progress he had made with morale to launch a final offensive in the north which retook Riga, Vilnius, and Kaunas but was soon driven back by the ever-increasing tide of German reinforcements from the west. Soon, soldiers started to mutiny on the front, and the leftist workers' soviets in the cities organized in an effort to overthrow Kerensky, led by the radical Marxist Bolshevik party, which had outmaneuvered its rivals and taken numerous seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The January Revolution-
While Kerensky was reviewing troops at the front in January of 1917, Army of the Russian Republic General Mikhail Drozdovsky and his force, positioned throughout the interior to prevent rebellions, itself rebelled and attempted a rightist military seizure of power in Petrograd to restore order and prosecute the war more effectively, while the admiral of the Russian Baltic Fleet collaborated and sent ships to blockade the ports and protect the fleet's base at Kronstadt. The coup was thwarted, however, when the Bolsheviks organized popular resistance and much of the brutalized rank and file of Drozdovsky's force refused to fire on their families and mutinied, along with many of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, most famously those of the dreadnought battleship Poltava, whose crew took over operations of the ship, raised over it a red banner, and shelled Drozdovsky's forces. Kerensky returned quickly to find central Russia in chaos once again and fled the country to allied Denmark via Riga instead of trying to enter Petrograd.
On 18 January, 1917 (OS), armed Bolsheviks had occupied the entirety of Petrograd and suspended the Republican government and all multiparty elections, while Vladimir Lenin declared on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies the Petrograd Soviet to be the framework of a new Russian dictatorship of the proletariat. Revolutionary committees sprang up across the country and on 12 May the Bolsheviks had written a new Russian constitution, declaring Russia to be a socialist state with complete control over production in the hands of the worker and peasant Soviets and distribution and large nationalized industries in the hands of state committees coordinated by the trade unions. They also finally made peace with the Central Powers, negotiating the Treaty of Kobrin, which ceded Ukraine, Belarus, Livonia and Finland to German influence and the entire Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire, whose forces had been advancing through the region since the start of the war. During this time the Russian Czar Nicholas II and certain members of the Romanov Dynasty that fought against the revolution were publicly shot after a mass trial. The rest of the royal family was deported.
The Intermarum States -
The Kingdom of Ukraine was established under Archduke Maximilian Eugen of Austria as Maximilian I of the Ukrainians. Ukrainian nationalists largely supported the regime due to the constant threat of Bolshevism. The Ukrainian administration has begun active campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Russians and Jews, and Bolshevism is ruthlessly suppressed.
The Kingdom of Bielorusia was established under Albrecht, Duke of Wurttemberg, who was elected to the title of Czar of Bielorusia by a council of nationalists. Travelling to Minsk he took the regnal name Aliaksandr I of Bielorusia. The country is a nationalist dictatorship devoted to the advancement of the nation's culture and language. The economy has experienced heavy investment and industrial growth, and a relatively strong military is permitted by the Germans. The Czar has even authorized the creation of a national air force, as well as the construction of numerous forts and entrenched positions all along the borders in preparation for a Soviet invasion.
The Kingdom of Estonia was established under Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg as Frederick I of Estonia.
The Kingdom of Latgalia was established under George Ludwig of Oldenburg as George I of Latgalia.
The Kingdom of Finland was established under Prince Frederick-Charles of Hesse as Charles II of Finland, conceding to and recognizing the election of Charles-Peter of Holstein-Gottorp in 1742 as King of Finland, in a subtle attempt to garner further Finnish nationalist support. It was however insufficient to stave off the rise of the Finnish Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Red Guards who in Turku, now the city of Salmela, declared open revolution. Supported heavily by the Bolsheviks the Reds fought a bloody civil war against conservatives and the German occupation force, and capturing the loyalty of the common people in opposition to the foreign occupation regime managed to topple the monarchy and establish the Finnish Soviet Republic. Talks of entering the USSR came to nothing, and while some Bolsheviks supported the idea of an invasion, Lenin accepted Finnish independence and self determination. Though Finland was forced to return the land it annexed from Sweden during the Bothnian War, the Second Bothnian War was fought after the consolidation of the FSR which retook the province from the beleaguered Swedish state. Finland also lends heavy material aid to socialist partisans in Norway fighting the German invasion.
As well, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was restored to its Second Partition borders, and Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony was elected King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, taking the name Henryk V. The Polish-Lithuanian state is on its face a bizarre anachronism, but in the context of nationalist feelings and reawakenings of the time in both countries the union was by many celebrated as the long awaited Restoration. The state is a constitutional monarchy ruled as a federation between Poland, Lithuania and Courland, each with devolved senates. The three entities elect from amongst themselves the Marshal of the Nations, who presides over external and interstate affairs. The Commonwealth has since its foundation undergone two military coups (one instigated by the Germans) and a brief civil war, dealt with ethnic and class strife, is fed purely off of old nationalism and an attitude of gradual but steady independence from the German sphere. The Germans remind the Commonwealth that Germany is their only hope to avoid the looming threat of Bolshevism, though the Germans have been dealt a defeat with the success of the independence faction of the army in the civil war.
The German Army occupied the new states and served to quell nationalist and communist resistance.
The Russian Civil War -
Elements of the army and administration which did not support the Bolshevik cause eventually united to form the White Movement, which put up spirited but doomed resistance. The Bolshevik Red Army, under the command of Leon Trotsky, drove white forces from Petrograd and launched repeated offensives in the south which eventually drove the whites to surrender or flight. By January of 1919 all of former Imperial Russia save the areas ceded at Kobrin had been reunited, and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics formed.
The USSR -
The USSR immediately began to export the revolution, covertly to the kingdoms Germany had set up under German monarchies in eastern Europe, overtly to Mongolia, Uighurstan and Iran, which have turned into ethno-religious and ideological battlegrounds. Nations around the world experienced upheaval as communists took power in many revolutionary organizations. As the civil war has ended, the industry and agriculture of the USSR has recovered under Lenin's administration. The Supreme Soviet of National Economy, containing such brilliant socialist minds as Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, organized nationalized production and distribution of the key industries along the lines of socialist primitive accumulation, while under the New Economic Policy small proprietorships and industries under small soviets and councils were allowed to flourish. After the necessity of War Communism faded after the Civil War, agriculture was allowed to resume as previously, while the peasants' soviets organized production and distribution among the peasantry and to the cities under the supervision of VSNKh, and a gradual voluntary collectivization of agriculture is currently well underway, while electrification, literacy and education programs are being implemented en masse to empower the peasantry and the proletariat. The Sovnarkom system has become a powerful direct state force in the proscription of day to day state affairs, law, and foreign relations, led by Council Chairman Vladimir Lenin, the "Ascetic of the Kremlin", it is a new kind of state. Dominated utterly by a single party dedicated to building socialism, it is a center of discussion and debate over the future of the young USSR, and an organ of decisive revolutionary action.
The Germans and the Soviets stand tall over eastern Europe as both powers prepare for war upon one another. The peoples of the intermarum nations are bracing themselves for the storm about sweep down upon them from both sides.
West Africa -
The French colonial empire is in a state of free fall collapse following France's defeat in the war and the rise of the conservative right. It is not just the massive shakeup and intercolonial war the people's of Africa have recently experienced, nor just the crackdown on nationalism, but also simple want of food, gas, and naval support on the part of the French Army. Along with the UK, whose African holdings are also rapidly collapsing, and Portugal, which emerged from the war neutral and nearly unscathed, they are fighting a desperate war against the reemergence of only recently disestablished polities and recently dismantled structures, the emergence of new ones and the growing power of existing ones.
A republic has been declared in French Dahomey.
The Gonja and Ashanti have reestablished kingdoms in the former Gold Coast colony
The Senoufo have risen to the north of the ivory coast and are giving hell to the British and French intervention forces in the south.
The Malinke and Peul have established conquest kingdoms
The Songhay exploded out of the northern periphery of the French Niger and established a Muslim Caliphate in the region, brutally executing colonial authorities and captured Allied soldiers, waging war on both the French and British through a disciplined and well-armed military, while actually ruling over a somewhat liberal and cosmopolitan Islamic culture from Aoudaghost to Agadez. The Malinke/Mandingo are clients to them, conquering areas south and west, while the Mossi Sultanate and the Senoufo and Gonja are their primary enemies along with the former colonial powers.
The Sokoto Caliphate overthrew British rule under Muhammadu Attahiru II, who reasserted the Caliphal authority and launched campaigns of conquest southwards and northwards.
The Republic of the Niger was a doomed experiment to unify the diverse peoples of the region into a federal union. Some have come together in defense of the idea while the republic has French, British, and Portuguese support, but ethnic strife has resulted in bloody war, secession, and anarchy in many areas.
The Oyo Sultanate's reestablishment was one of the factors in the collapse of Nigeria, while the Igbo Republic was also declared in the Niger Delta region. The Igbo Republic has heavy support from Germany, while Ijaw rebels in the far south are supplied with arms by the allies.
The Republic of Liberia experienced a major crisis when in 1915 the Germans, whose forces in Kamerun were campaigning hard against the allied colonial armies in Nigeria, Dahomey, and the Ivory Coast, and were supplying arms to rebel groups throughout West Africa, were allowed to set up a wireless station in the capital of Monrovia. The French Air Force responded by launching a bombing raid on the city, destroying the station and by chance killing President Daniel E. Howard while he traversed the city for a diplomatic meeting with the German ambassador soon after the station's construction. Vice-President Samuel George Harmon succeeded to the presidency and declared war on the Allies, greatly aiding the German campaigns while the Germans supplied Liberia with arms and invested in domestic industry. President Harmon was, however, a corrupt leader who squandered the nation's finances, made life miserable for farmers through terrible land management and continued the slave-trade out of Liberia with gusto. Eventually, a Soviet-backed Communist movement spread like wildfire and under the leadership of Louis Arthur Grimes lead a massive coup against the True Whig Party. Afterwards Grimes would establish the Worker's Soviet Republic of Liberia, incentivizing farmers to collectivize in a Soviet system through subsidy to collective institutions. Industrial labor was put under the control of urban councils while small proprietors were encouraged and major industries nationalized. The Liberian Red Army is currently waging total war against all colonial powers and the zealotry of the people and the military is becoming worrying.
From the sahel east of Lake Chad have arisen the Ouaddai, whose cavalry soldiers destroyed the ancient Kingdom of Bornu and its French administration, establishing the Great Ouaddai Sultanate while the Bornu escaped and found refuge in Sokoto. Ouaddai society has settled down into the rulership of the conquered lands. The capital of Bol on Lake Chad has grown into a prosperous city while Sultan Ahmad ibn Yusuf Abdul Aziz is a talented conqueror and ruler who has built a new palace in the city and several mosques. The Ouaddai Sultanate is currently facing an all-out Franco-British invasion from the north and western desert, utilizing defecting Songhay, Mali, and Sokoto forces, as well as Tuareg, Libyan, and Algerian cavalry and forces led by the deposed Kanem-Bornu Sultan. The offensive, led by French Field Marshall Guillaume Renault, commander of French forces in Africa, and spearheaded by British mobile forces, has reached the shore of Lake Chad and taken several nearby towns, but has been met with fierce resistance from local irregulars and the Ouaddai Army. The Ouaddai and the Songhay for their part have launched coordinated attacks along the lengthily and fragile Franco-British supply lines and the Germans have supplied the Ouaddai and established ties to the sultanate, even donating several old aeroplanes and sending instructors to train Ouaddai pilots to carry out reconnaissance.
The Moroccans have successfully thrown off French control and have conquered vast areas of the north Sahara while declaring a caliphate. The tide of their campaign has slowly diminished since the rebellion of several southern Mauritanian tribes and a joint Spanish-Portuguese-British invasion.
Central Africa -
The Germans were able to acquire huge swathes of Africa under the Treaty of Reims, with the Belgian Congo, Gabon, and Kenya creating a massively profitable band of precious-metal and petrol producing colonies in the centre of the continent, protectorates and clients flanking all sides, Togoland serving as a base from which aid can flow to rebels in the west, and South-West Africa serving this purpose in the south of the continent. These gains were enforced after the military occupation of France and the conclusion of the war in Russia with the formation of Heeresgruppe Afrika, a large and well trained force intended to invade and enforce the annexation of the territories gained, to crush and stamp out native revolt and to foment it in the remaining allied colonies. The HGA has turned counterinsurgency and genocide into a fine art as well as insurgency and covert operations.
In Central Africa are two Ottoman protectorates. The Sultanate of Darfur, which was reestablished after driving out the French, and the Barid Emirate, which was established after a local Muslim warlord of the Bari clan declared Jihad against the pagan populations of the region and found aid and support in the Ottoman governor of the Sudan.
The Empire of Ethiopia was able to absorb the northern Somali peoples and the Afars through military force and Turko-German aid. The Germans set up a puppet Somali state while the Ottoman Army of Sudan occupied Eritrea, which was annexed.
South Africa -
The Germans have used the Southwest Africa colony as a launchpad and base of operations for the nation's participation in the Third Boer War. An invasion of South Africa has resulted in some native support while the Republic of Bechuanaland has rebelled against German control and launched its own war in Southwest Africa which is, ironically, being funded by the Portuguese. The Germans lent heavy aid to the rebels who reestablished the old Boer Republics, which are in the process of waging war upon the old British administration in South Africa as well as newly emerged native states like the Republic of Griqualand, the Kingdom of Basutoland, the Kingdom of Swaziland, and the Empire of Zululand. The Republic of Natalia was declared early in the war but fell to civil conflict between British sympathizers, Boers and Zulu and is currently a battleground of a failed state.
To the north lay the Matabele Republic, which was declared by independence fighters after the evacuation of British forces from Rhodesia to fight first in South Africa and then in Nigeria and India. The Portuguese occupied and annexed Zambezia and Nyasaland, creating a corridor linking Angola and Mozambique, fulfilling the dream of the Pink Map and aiding the Franco-British cause. They are currently fighting an extremely bloody war against Matabeleland even as they secretly aid Bechuanaland in its bold fight against the Germans.
The Ottoman Empire -
Perhaps no other nation came out of the war more changed than the Ottoman Empire. When the Empire joined the Central Powers in 1914, it was an ailing former power on its last legs. Only just recently bludgeoned by the first two Balkan Wars, the Italo-Turkish War and the Russo-Turkish War, denied the fruits of its triumph in the Greco-Turkish War, and surrounded on all sides by the encroaching power of the UK, France, and Russia, all waiting to take chunks out of the Empire at a moment's notice, the state's survival rested on throwing in on the side of Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria.
In the opening stages of the war, the Ottomans launched an invasion of Russia under the command of Halil Bey. Halil campaigned aggressively and decisively, utilizing brutality and genocide to rid the Caucasus of resistance and advance through Armenia into Georgia. Using the Armenian Genocide to stir up the anger of the Azeri, uprisings wracked the region and distracted Russia from the front, which along with his innovative use of deep penetration effectively broke Russian lines at the Battle of the Kura. When Russia underwent the revolutions of 1916 and 1917, the Ottomans advanced all the way to Baku and annexed most of the Caucasus as part of the Treaty of Kobrin. With early Ottoman victories in the Caucasus and its credible threat to Persia, the Royal Navy sent reinforcements to the Persian Gulf, which only weakened the Navy's state in the North Sea and was yet another blunder into the disaster at Holland.
When the British attempted to wrest Iraq by landing in and advancing from Kuwait, Nurredin Bey dealt them a crushing defeat at the Battle of Ctesiphon before surrounding the British at Kut, where in 1916 they surrendered.
After his incredible triumph at the Battle of Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal was sent southwards to replace Jamal Pasha, who had been killed in action, in command of the defense of Palestine, and orchestrated the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Gaza and the Siege of Al-Aqaba which secured the Ottoman army's hold on Arabia. As the war progressed and the British colonial empire began to collapse under the weight of rebellion, and the British war effort in Europe began to erode, Kemal orchestrated, with reinforcements from Iraq and the Caspian, a massive new offensive into the Sinai which caught the British forces in Egypt totally wrong-footed.
The Qutuz Offensive, as it was called was very hard fought, but the Ottomans were well supplied, battle-hardened men led by a brilliant tactician. The push towards the Suez steadily accelerated as the British Empire declined, and on the same day the British Expeditionary Force surrendered in France, the Suez Canal was secured. After this came the total collapse of the British Egyptian forces, as the Ottomans took Dammietta, Alexandria, and Cairo against actual resistance, while after the capture of Asyut little resistance followed. Kemal's march down the Nile, gathering supplies and reinforcements along the way, is among the most famed episodes in modern warfare. Khartoum was captured from warring tribes in 1918 while the rest of the Sudan was secured with the support of local powers and through Ottoman support for Islamic rulers and movements against colonialism. Offensives were carried out near the end of the war in 1917 which retook Libya from Italy.
Elected as Prime Minister of the empire in 1916 he reorganized the Ottoman Army into a well oiled and disciplined modern fighting force, nucleated the development of the Imperial Air Force, reinvigorated the navy and aggressively championed Ottoman interests in neighboring countries and abroad.
After the war, the Ottomans consolidated and expanded their control over Arabia. During this process of dividing, conquering, and subduing the local tribes to Ottoman sovereignty, Ottoman surveyors tasked with properly demarcating boundaries of vilayets and municipalities accidentally discovered the uppermost reaches of a gargantuan reserve of petroleum in the Arabian desert. Kemal, who knew that the Germans or another colonial power would try to maneuver their way into control of the reserves, which seemed to reach further and further every day, kept them under close military occupation where possible and under air and naval defense. Setting up the state owned Ottoman Petroleum Company, the nation began to reap extreme wealth. From this constant flow of money and oil, Kemal would build the Ottoman state into a truly powerful player on the world stage.
Mexico -
The bells of the Puebla Cathedral ring out for the victory of divine providence as the brave soldiers of Mexico triumph against the American invaders on the Rio Grande and Veracruz fronts.
The United States stayed neutral during the European War, throwing in for neither side and trading with both. However, the United States would soon find itself embroiled in another war much closer to home, as the Red Scare wracked the country and the government vowed to stymie the spread of socialism.
Mexico during the same period had just wound down from the Revolution, which saw the dictator president Porfirio Diaz deposed, followed by two conflicts between a vast liberal coalition and the forces of the usurper Victoriano Huerta, followed by a split between the leftists, led by Emiliano Zapata, and rightists led by Venustiano Carranza. The leftist coalition won out after Zapata's Division of the South met with Francisco "Pancho" Villa's Division of the North in Mexico City and their subsequent formation of a government and defeat of Carrancista forces in central Mexico. Zapata became the 37th president and under his rule was drafted the 1917 Constitution, which provided for sweeping land reform and the abolition of the semi-feudal Hacienda system in favor of the Ejido system of peasant commons, electrification and industrialization, mass campaigns of peasant literacy and education, controversial suppression of religion, the nationalization of major industries, especially petroleum, the collectivization of large firms and the encouragement of small proprietors.
Villa was made Secretary of War, and the early post-revolutionary period was characterized not just by rapid economic recovery, but militarization as well. Though the army had been the bane of Mexico's civilian government since the days of Santa Anna, the new peasant-raised revolutionary army was loyal to the new state and its extremely popular leaders. Thus, the Mexican People's Army, the amalgamation of the revolutionary leftist forces under a single modern command structure, was expanded and outfitted with modern weaponry provided in part by the Germans, and grew under Villa's aegis to a standing force of 250,000 by 1918. This militarization would be vital in the coming times, as a clash on the border between the Arizona Rangers and the Mexican Army ended with the Mexicans pursuing the rangers across the border and taking them prisoner. Mexico considered the rangers' actions to have been an invasion of Mexican territory, while US newspapers twisted the incident into Mexican aggression and the predicted public outcry allowed congress to declare war.
The Second Mexican-American War would become one of the most storied and legendary conflicts of modern history. At first, Mexico fell back in the north as the US Army marched into Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas with overwhelming force, while Cuidad Juarez was taken in the west and the US cavalry sent in to secure Baja California Territory. However, a force of Mexican infantry armed with the Mondragon rifle were able to travel to the Baja territory by sea before the Americans, cutting down the cavalry at the Battle of Santa Rosalia, Mexico's first victory of the war. Infantry had to be sent from the east to continue the invasion but by this point the Mexican defenders of the peninsula had dug in their heels in the hot desert and gave the Americans hell, while an American attempt to take the city of Chihuahua by rail resulted in Mexico's second defensive victory of the war. During the Battle of Chihuahua, the city was ordered evacuated by General Felipe Angeles and dynamite was placed throughout the city's rail station, which was detonated as the 10,000 Americans were arriving and disembarking in the city. A decisive attack was then staged by the Third Division in which the Americans were besieged and captured.
The Americans also struck at the heart of Mexico with a large-scale landing of forces in Veracruz and Yucatan, while Guatemala, under the military dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, joined the war on the US side, pushing into Soconusco and Chiapas. Guatemala would prove a major headache for the American's, however, as the army was badly equipped and poorly led. The Mexicans soon stabilized the front in Soconusco and drew the war into Guatemala with the capture of the Usumacinta river, allowing the Army of the South (numbering some 40,000) to successfully attack and occupy British Honduras while the colony was undergoing civil unrest in the wake of the British garrison's abandonment for more important fronts.
During this period, Villa, in direct command of the northern armies, fell back in a fighting retreat, drawing as much blood as possible, while major efforts were made to conscript and volunteer as many men as possible. Mexico's factories, many newly built, were nationalized for the war effort to produce rifles, machine guns, armored cars and aeroplanes, while strict rations were put in place. Eventually, Mexico's army grew to nearly a million men, and was able to hold the line in the north, though not before the Americans took Monterrey. In Veracruz, the Americans were halted with tenacious local resistance and disease, especially the pandemic of the Italian Flu, which spread across the world in 1919, affecting millions of people in a global pandemic. Mexican resistance was fierce, with scorched earth tactics and guerrilla warfare bogging the invasion down while the desire of the Mexican people to fight for their revolution and their nation, against the nation that humiliated them in 1848, only grew.
Meanwhile in the US, the standstill of the advances combined with economic downturn proved disastrous to morale and public opinion, which on the left swung almost immediately against the war with the people of the northern and midwestern cities following close after. Mexico's ability to wage war continued to climb after Villahermosa was successfully defended and German arms flowed in en masse. A stalemate had miraculously been achieved, and now an event would shake the world enough for the tide to turn the other way.
The conclusion of the Russian Civil War and the formation and economic success of the USSR changed everything. Soviet aid began pouring into socialist Mexico. Guns, planes, oil, steel, and armored cars were shipped to the Americas via Norway and Ireland, and a foothold in Alaska was established for the same purpose to circumvent the Japanese in the Pacific. Lenin spoke to Sovnarkom and the Soviet people that Mexico was the critical first foothold of socialism in the New World, and that great effort must be made to prevent it from being crushed under the boot of the United States. The Germans, realizing what was going on, switched sides and began to aid the US, while the UK, after signing the Anglo-Soviet Alliance, began to support Mexico as a means to foil German plans.
Not only did the Soviets funnel aid to the Mexican cause, but also the USSR sent funding to Communist and leftist groups across American cities and in the south. This paid off in November 1920, when the US economy collapsed. Trade with Europe had gone down significantly since the start of the war, confidence in the war was beginning to erode, and the war itself (along with the commitment of the US Navy from other tasks in the region) was strangling the country's own lifeblood in Latin America, doubly so as central and South America also began to fall into conflicts. The economic devastation was catastrophic, and soon workers were setting up barricades in major cities as police were ordered to fire on crowds only for the protesting, hungry crowds to grow.
President Woodrow Wilson sent in reserve elements of the army to put down these insurrections, but this only weakened America's leaguer of Mexico and resulted in many soldiers deserting to join their fellow citizens in rebellion. Soon, the movements grew even more powerful, and became united in their anger under the banner of the American Communist Party. Red militias were formed and organized under the ACP into the American Workers' and Farmers' Red Army which took control of the city of Pittsburg in 1921. As cities across the north rose up or were taken, a group of representatives of the ACP, other leftist political parties and the trade unions negotiated the formation of the United Socialist Party of America, drafting a new constitution which provided for an Economic Bill of Rights to which the state was subject and dictated a program of worker collective control over the means of production, with smaller firms operated solely at workers' discretion under the wider aegis of the party and larger industries operated directly under state control. Farmers were guaranteed a living according to quantity of food produced, while planting quotas for necessary foods were put into place, food prices were fixed, and an equal-field system was instituted under state rent. Housing was collectivized and expanded while industry repurposed for war was used instead to create arms to fight the US government. The American Federated Socialist Republic was born.
Meanwhile in the south, events in the north and in Mexico inspired a movement of African liberation from the racialist and economic slavery of the post-reconstruction order. Blacks armed themselves illegally, protecting their plots of land by force when the masters would send stooges to collect their crushing debts, organizing their own red militias, and, with the protection of numbers, began to kill white landowners and divide their estates among them. Soon cities with large black populations began to come under liberationist control, and the entirety of white southern society was drawn into total war against an existential threat. Unhappy with the shaky response of the US government, and blaming the lack of troops sent in to quell the uprisings on unwillingness rather than inability, the radical right, led by the Second Ku Klux Klan, organized counter-rebellions and formed their own armies and militias to put down the insurrections, wantonly take out their anger on black citizens through torture, rape, and murder, and attempt to maintain the order of white supremacy. Now, having loosed the dogs of war with their uprising and fighting for their very survival, the black liberationists began to form their own new socialist governments. The three most prominent being the Socialist Republic of New Africa, the Shiloh Soviet Republic, and the Soviet Republic of the Mississippi.
After this things went downhill for the US quickly. Native Americans in Oklahoma rose up and established the Union of American Indian Soviets, a state created out of the tribal organization of the former Indian Territory and led by the Choctaw and Chickasaw, giving it the widespread nickname "Chocktaw Soviet", while local white settlers attempted to put down the rising. Workers in California rose up and established the California Soviet while reactionaries declared the Second California Republic. Workers of the iron mining and copper country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula rose in revolt and took the mines from their owners, declaring the Escanaba Soviet and joining with the AFSR. After largely non-Mormon workers in Ogden barricaded the city and declared the Ogden Soviet, the Mormons of Utah formed a reactionary ultra-religious militia which has established a poorly organized ephemeral state called the Holy Republic of Deseret. Led by an LDS religious leader preaching the end times against the Communist antichrist, life under the absolute theocracy dedicated to enforcing virtuous religious life at the point of a shotgun is nothing short of hell. The story of the plight of the workers of Ogden, besieged by the ruthless theocrats, has captured the sympathy of the world and is a focus of propaganda in the Communist sphere.
While all this was going on in the US, Canada also experienced labor uprisings. A procession from Calgary to Thunder Bay took the Canadian West by storm as miners, prairie farmers, urban laborers and dockworkers began to wave red banners and in 1921 the Canadian Workers' Soviet was declared and established with its capital at Thunder Bay. The Canadian communists operate on their own brand of peasant oriented folk communism tied to the farmers and the proletariat of the mineral and shipping industries. Daniel Harmon, Chairman of the All-Canada Supreme Revolutionary Council, the farmer-turned-revolutionary leader of the CWS, is a brutally effective political force. His particularly violent retributions against counter-revolutionaries and bloody seizures of land and resources from the wealthy owners to smallholders under state rent and state collective firms have earned him the fear of many throughout the continent, while his and his associates' rhetoric of power to the workers and the farmers has driven many more to fight. So, while the Dominion of Canada fought the revolutionaries in Alaska after the US no longer could, the most fertile and industrial areas of the country rose in revolt and civil war ensued.
Violence from the Canadian Civil War spilled over the border on numerous occasions as the chaos in the US grew, but Montana, a state within Federal control, looked with indignation on the lack of response to Communist raiding parties trespassing on Montanan land and in many cases robbing and stealing to supply the CWSR and its American communist allies. The state had at first prospered from the war with Mexico through its contribution of over 40,000 men and 10,000 cavalry horses to the front. The boon to industry made support for the war high in Montana, and it seemed to the people that the Federal government they had trusted with their sons to the war effort had wasted them and the enemies of the republic were clipping the heels of Montana itself. In October of 1923, the worst raid of all occurred from the north, as a force of 2,000 Red Canadian soldiers and their Indian allies raided the bank of the town of Fort Benton where the fortunes of many miners and businessmen lay, killing 78 civilians during a three day occupation of the town and looting everything of value. When the occupation and subsequent sack and abandonment of the town went unopposed by the federal army, state governor Sam V. Stewart called for the raising of an Army of the State of Montana to defend the northern border. This act was pushed through opposition via judicial fraud and greeted enthusiastically by the population, who clamored for blood in retribution for the massacre.
The federal government took notice of this development but at first did nothing. However, soon after the creation of the ASM, governor Stewart declared his intention to invade Canada if neither faction of the Canadian Civil War extradited those responsible. The federal government's response to this was condemnation and a threat to invade the state if the army were not disbanded immediately. Stewart made an impassioned speech before the legislature and representatives from the ASM that the US had failed its obligations to Montana and Montana's relationship to the US government was void. This was met with cheers and a session a week later to draft a constitution for the creation of the Republic of Montana. On November 23rd, 1923 the new nation was declared and on the same day the US Army invaded Montana to put down the secessionist uprising and roll back the ongoing invasion of Canada. The US could barely afford to send any force, tied down in that theatre alone by the rapidly escalating Dakota Front, and the forces arrayed against the Republic were only enough the contain the state and not enough to stop the Canadian invasion, which had begun immediately right while the whole conflict began to spiral out of control on both sides of the border. A flag of three bands white, blue, and gold with the words MONTANA REPUBLIC in white in the middle bar, sewed by a local working woman and used by soldiers of the ASM during the Battle of Billings was chosen as the national flag in early 1924.
Still the US army did not give up as the corpses piled higher on the northern plains of Mexico and in the forests of Veracruz and the Yucatan. Several victories against the rebellions and a policy of total war executed with ruthlessness and terror resulted in the rebellions being contained and even rolled back in various regions. The AFSR's hold over the west was challenged seriously with the revolt of the Michigan Division after word of the Howell Massacre, the destruction and near depopulation of a Michigan town by a Red cavalry regiment for suspected KKK agitation. The rebels took numerous transportation veins and severely crippled the Red war effort. Secondly came the Walsh Rebellions, which occurred after a Kansas farmer named Virgil Walsh organized a farmer's rebellion in response to instances of corrupt Communist military governors applying War Communism too liberally. Seeing the AFSR as having regressed from true socialism in the name of expediency (notwithstanding that war communism was only applied during active combat and occupation during the civil war and in areas of intense fighting and ephemeral control administration could be rather ad hoc) the farmers began to wave a banner of black and blue in a horizontal bicolor. The rebellion was put down with ruthless force but nonetheless caused the temporary loss of vast swathes of the fertile and vital western prairie.
In the south, the anti-Communist rebellions were contained an vital transport links, ports, and cities of the south were reestablished under federal control and the black revolts besieged, and some semblance of capability was maintained for the US war effort.
With total war, stabilizing frontiers and millions of men on the fronts, the Americans launched the October Offensive in Mexico aimed at quickly ending the war. Monterrey was successfully captured twice by the Americans and the northern and southern armies successfully linked with the Battle of Tampico. However, the Mexican army, making deft use of railroads, cavalry, and mobile tactics, resisted the advance successfully, drawing blood for every inch. The offensive was then halted when US army communications leaked that the offensive's aim was to capture San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas and cut Mexico in half with a naval invasion of Tepic from the other side. With this information, General Amador Salazar set up defensive positions along the routes southward and 300,000 Mexicans dealt nearly 500,000 soldiers of the US Army a crushing defeat at the Battle of Tolentino over a period of 5 days and 150,000 casualties. The third prong of the plan, an offensive from the Veracruz front inland towards Tlaxcala and Mexico City, was defeated with great loss at the Battle of Jalapa, in which Mexican commander Otilio Montaño Sánchez made use of heavy artillery, entrenched infantry and aircraft to stop the US Army under Charles M. Clement from retracing the route of Cortes and Scott into the heart of the country.
At the same time, the US naval force in the Pacific under Admiral Carl Vogelsegang, sent to occupy the city of Chacala, from where would disembark 10,000 men to march inland toward Zacatecas, was defeated when the Mexican Pacific Fleet, consisting of the recently purchased dreadnought battleship Ignacio Zaragoza and few gunboats under the command of Hilario Malpica launched an incredibly daring attack on the old and second-rate ships that the US could spare for the landing. The ensuing Battle of Jaltemba was fierce, but when the powder cache on the decrepit pre-dreadnought ship the Connecticut exploded, sinking the ship and killing the admiral, the Mexican battleship gained the upper hand and the rest of the American squadron surrendered after the landing forces were defeated and captured at the Battle of Altavista and shore batteries brought in and used in Jaltemba Bay.
These defeats greatly demoralized the US forces, growing increasingly low on food and supplies as the war dragged on at home and abroad, and was the immediate spark that caused the Pensacola Naval Mutiny, when sailors of the US Gulf Fleet on numerous ships launched a simultaneous revolt in port, refusing to be sent to die starving and in rags on an under-maintained ship. The mutiny spread to the front itself soon enough, and when ships began to desert the blockade and the
END WIP
Here is what I have so far (very, very unfinished) of the write-up and WIP map of Let the Tempest Come, Strike Harder. A world of conflict, change, uncertainty, multipolarity, collapse, and hope.
The clusterfuck awaits:
France -
Germany outflanked the French in Belgium and broke through the front in a concentrated assault from the north and east at the Battle of Lens. The German army took Calais and the French struggled to plug the gap. The French army began to mutiny in late 1915 after increasingly bloody attacks resulted in few gains. Paris fell in the summer of 1916 and the French capitulated after the Swiss joined the central powers and aided Germany in encircling remaining French forces along the rest of the front.
The remainder of Lorraine still part of France was ceded to Germany, along with it most of metropolitan France's petrol reserves, driving the economy into a steep decline and deep depression. Returning soldiers, angry at the Third Republic for losing the war, formed ultra-conservative catholic paramilitary groups which organized along with conservative peasant groups and overthrew the Republic, inviting Prince Philippe d'Orléans to take the throne of France as Philippe VIII in 1917. The occupying German forces allowed this, given the disorder of the Republic's collapse and the impotence of the French state. A parliamentary government was set up under the complete control of the royalists. Hard right royalists and nationalists constitute the entirety of seats in the Chamber, all of which are united under the control of Chief Minister Longin Durand, an ultra-catholic soldier who became disillusioned with the republic. The ideology of the Kingdom of France is thus to completely erase the revolution and effect a true restoration of the ancien regime and thus a national and cultural reawakening of France and its power.
France has intervened under German pressure on the side of the monarchy in the Spanish Civil War, though the small French Army under the restrictions imposed by the Central Powers, without tanks or aircraft, is limited in its capacity and incapable of deep operations. The intervention has also hampered Franco-British efforts to stem the tide of revolution in the colonies as much as the German restrictions and the HGA's agitation have.
Italy -
Italy joined the entente in late 1914, and achieved early success against Austro-Hungary as France achieved some success at the Marne, but the defeat of France afterward resulted in the full force of the German army coming down from both sides and the Italian army collapsed spectacularly in the Battle of Liguria and the Battle of Venice. While Italian generals put up a spirited final resistance with the Visconti Line and the Battle of Rimini, the tide was too great and the German-Austrian forces occupied the entire country by the end of 1916. Italian unification was dismantled by the occupying Austrian authority which reestablished the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, under Alfonso I, the Papal State, established the Kingdom of Tuscany-Romagna under Joseph Ferdinand of Austria as Ferdinand V and made Piedmont an independent republic, overthrowing and exiling Victor Emmanuel III. Piedmont was ceded Corsica, Nice and Savoy to further neuter France and shore up some Italian support, and the state put under the control of pro-German quislings. Venice and Milan were annexed by Austro-Hungary. After the death of Pope Pius X in 1916, who though having regained temporal power was saddened by the bloodshed whence it came, a somewhat pro-Austrian Neapolitan cardinal was elected to the papacy, taking the name Boniface X.
The UK -
The High Seas Fleet decisively defeated the Royal Navy at the Battle of Holland, while the BEF was defeated, caught up in the chaos of post-war France and surrendered, while the UK was placed under a blockade, bombed by dirigibles and aeroplanes, and the British Army defeated in Ireland as the June Uprising spread. The Republic of Ireland annexed Ulster and the Irish National Army engaged in widespread massacres of protestants and English, dubbed the "Green Terror", which has only just wound down. The dominos soon began to fall within the British colonial empire and by the end of the war in Europe the UK was at the forefront of another massive war in Africa and India even while Communists began agitation in Scotland, Wales, urban England and throughout independent Ireland. The truncated UK largely tolerates them due to its support of the USSR in any effort to weaken Germany.
Germany -
Germany is in a state of extreme prosperity following the end of the war. The calamity of Bismarck was avoided through the martial skill of the German people. The French were neutered as a power after the annexation of Lorraine and a buffer was established against the Soviets. New colonies were conquered and the German state came to dominate Europe.
Still the war was not an easy one. The western front was a brutal push towards Paris, even after Lens and Calais the French seemed entirely unwilling to give up as the bodies piled higher, and the opening of the Northern Front with Danish entry into the war on the side of the Entente aided by a second BEF harried German borders in the north, allowed air bombing of northern German cities and forced the redirection of troops to defend Schleswig-Holstein. This would have been relatively easy were it not for the Swedes, whose colossal failure in their invasion of Finland on the side of the Central Powers prompted Norwegian entry on the side of Denmark. However, just as this spot of hope appeared for the Entente, the back of the French army was broken by the entry of the substantial Swiss army into the fray. After the decisive result of the Battle of the Doubs and the German Lothringen Offensive the French forces in Lorraine were encircled and over 200,000 captured. This disaster was the final straw and by mid 1916 Paris had fallen and the French government now in Tours, faced with a total German march forward, agreed to the Chartres Armistice.
However, cracks have formed in the German leadership now that the war is over and the continent is beginning to rebuild. The obsession with the navy and large battleships under Wilhelm II, seemingly vindicated by the success of the High Seas Fleet against the Royal Navy, has resulted in massive expenditures towards the maintenance and expansion of the newly reorganized Kaisermarine, and the subsequent stagnation of development in the army. The General Staff and the Kaiser have a tense relationship, and talks of a coup have come up but have been suppressed through the Kagepol (Kaiserliche Geheimpolizei), the Reich's secret police force. The Kaiser has used this arm to purge the German officer corps and the government of potential disloyalty to his person and has in effect created an absolute monarchy, which has gone on without complaint from a German populace who worship his growing cult of personality. The portrait of the winner of the two front war, who denied the prophesy of Bismarck and regained Germany's Ottonian glory, can be seen in virtually every large establishment in Germany, sometimes flanked with portraits of Wilhelm I and Frederick the Great. The cult of Germany's naval and colonial prowess has resulted in a new height of nationalism and imperialism, while central Africa is a huge reservoir of raw materials and labour which the navy and the army keep ruthlessly in check, even while they use it to dislodge the colonial regimes of Germany's British and French competitors.
Switzerland -
In late 1915, as trench warfare raged on the western front, fighting spilled over into Swiss territory. Though the Germans and French were equally responsible for the violation of Swiss neutrality, the majority German Swiss government decided that the French were primarily to blame and declared war. Swiss entry was the final nail in the coffin of French hopes for victory and soon the army on the border of Alsace-Lorraine was being encircled.
Meanwhile in the south, several Italian shells that had landed in Swiss territory along the front with Austro-Hungary were used as casus belli for war against Italy. Both of these wars were successful immediately, but greatly angered the French and Italian minorities in Switzerland, as well as pacifists and neutralists among the rest of the populace, who saw the state as far too ready to drag Switzerland into the latest conflict among the great powers which the nation had previously been so adept at avoiding.
Almost immediately there were uprisings among the Italian and French cantons, and after the defeat and dismemberment of Italy these quickly grew out of hand. The Second Swiss Civil War is in full swing and currently ravaging the country, as religious, ethnic and ideological conflicts engulf society. Austria and Germany have both invaded and are helping to crush the revolt, which has established a new confederation and government in Fribourg. Italian rebels in Ticino at first expressed some desire to join the Republic of Piedmont at the end of the war, but seeing the Piedmontine government as mostly Austrian stooges they shunned the new Italian order and threw in their lot with the renewed confederacy.
Austria-Hungary-Serbia -
Austro-Hungary emerged from the war in a far better position than it entered. Remade as a modern state with democratic institutions and a multicultural confederation, the military power of the Habsburg domain brought down Italy and was instrumental in bringing down Russia. Through great destruction at the hands of the Russians in the east the peoples of the empire grew into a camaraderie of arms through bloodshed and war, and in triumph the fruits of prosperity assuaged for the time the forces which sought to tear the state apart. Not to omit, however, that cracks also form beneath the surface, as the military must constantly remain on its toes and mobilized on the border with the USSR in Ukraine, must constantly hold down a massive presence in Italy and the Balkans and fight a bloody war in Switzerland, even the efforts of the Liberal Emperor may not be enough to keep the state together in the long term.
Faced with the monumental task of keeping the Habsburg realm of Austro-Hungary intact, Emperor Charles, who took power after the death of Franz Josef in 1915, has worked tirelessly to liberalize the monarchy and grant autonomy to the Empire's peoples while preserving the institutions of the empire and his own position. Through charisma he has been successful in this, negotiating, with not insignificant but ultimately impotent shock and protest from Prussia, the reestablishment of the Holy Roman Empire, now as a catholic rather than purely German institution, to bind together the Austrians, Hungarians, Croats, Poles, and Italians under his rule to a single national idea. After planning for several years, he declared the monarchy reorganized in a new constitution and new union under new ideals. Pope Boniface X personally crowned him Emperor of the Romans in 1919.
Through the encouragement of trade unions he has stemmed the tide of leftism in the empire as well, though not entirely, and through the elevation of many of the former smaller realms of the empire to larger, more important, and better represented entities he has largely kept in check the force of pan-slavism, though the communist Zapadoslavia Movement is a significant underground force among the Czechs and Slovaks. The military has also become a well oiled machine in anti-insurgency activity and national uprising against the Habsburg Dynasty is crushed while expression of nationalism within the framework of Habsburg rule is encouraged and proliferated. Parliamentary assemblies form the basis of elected government at all levels of the realm.
The abbreviated style of the monarch is Charles VIII, by the Grace of God Emperor of the Romans, Ever Augustus, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of the Czechs, of Venice, of Croats, of Istria and the Slovenes, of Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrins, of Dalmatia, of Galicia.
Bulgaria -
Soon after the Greeks entered the war on the entente against the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria joined the Central Powers. Seeking revenge for the Second Balkan War, they campaigned aggressively, breaking the back of Serbia and annexing the south of the country, as well as completely defeating Greece with the help of the Ottomans, annexing most of Macedonia and wresting Albania from the Entente, while the Ottomans annexed the Aegean islands and the area around Thessaly.
However, this victory would not last. In 1919 the Ottomans declared war on Bulgaria in response to Bulgarian ethnic cleansing of Pomaks, and under Mustafa Kemal executed a brilliant campaign, which with the aid of the Greeks, who have used their meagre victories in the war to help stem the tide of communism and raise up the nationalism which has hit an all time low, and the Romanians, who declared war to reclaim Dobruja, blasted through the lines of the overstretched and exhausted Bulgarians and reconquered much of the Ottoman Empire's pre Balkan War territories in Europe. The Siege of Sofia has just recently prompted the Bulgarians to finally surrender to Kemal and the Army of Rumelia, though the drafting of a formal treaty to keep the Bulgarians in check forever has not yet occurred.
Spain -
Spanish communists have risen up in Andalucia, Valencia, Catalonia, and the Basque Country, setting up a socialist state in the Leninist model and fighting a civil war against conservative monarchists, supported by the Germans, who have occupied Galicia, the French, and the Italian states. Covert shipments of arms have made it to the rebels from the USSR through the UK, as well as Soviet military and economic advisors.
Scandinavia -
During the war, the Kingdom of Denmark joined the Entente and attacked Germany from the north with the aid of an expeditionary force from the UK after French defensive victories at the Aisne and Breteuil. The Danish army was able to push into Schleswig and capture Kiel while the French pushed back and stabilized the front again at the Aisne. However, this would not be enough the save the Entente and the Germans would push back in Jutland. Complicating matters, however, was Sweden, which joined the Central Powers to attack Finland and failed, being defeated by Finnish irregulars and meager Russian forces, who actually moved in and attacked Lulea, prompting the Norwegians to join the Entente to defend Denmark and attack Sweden. Despite all of this, the Germans eventually defeated Denmark, annexing Jutland, and brought the war to Norway, who refused to surrender even after the Entente collapsed. With German defeat of Russia, Finland became independent and Sweden thence reoccupied Lulea and brought all force against Norway. Finland's communist revolution reignited the Lapland Front (also known as the Bothnian War), however, and the USSR moved to help Finland again take Lulea. Attempts by Sweden to negotiate a separate peace with Finland and Norway was met with a German backed military coup and Sweden now has to face the Finnish on one side and aid with the very costly occupation of Norway on the other.
Events in the Americas compounded the complexities of the post-war confusion, as the USSR began to use Norway to ship supplies to socialist revolutionaries elsewhere, resulting in what essentially amounts to a delicate proxy war between Germany and the USSR, neither wanting direct war with the other and both wanting to expand influence.
Russia -
The Russian Empire at first performed rather well in the war, but by 1915 had been driven out of Poland while the army grew increasingly ineffective for want of materiel and food. The only Russian triumph during this time was the defeat of the Swedish invasion of Finland, though this was mostly due to Finnish partisans. However, the Brusilov Offensive, launched in late 1915 across a wide front in an attempt to relieve pressure on the French and Italians by knocking out the Austrians began very promisingly. The Greeks joined the entente in an effort to aid the Russians and attack the Ottomans. However, the offensive eventually ground to a halt and Russia collapsed into revolutionary turmoil in 1916. The Germans supported the revolutionaries and sent a certain Marxist theorist named Vladimir Ulyanov to Russia in a guarded train car to stir up dissent. They could scarce have imagined the scale of the events that this would set in motion.
The March Revolution -
On 13th March, 1916 the monarchy faced popular uprising in Petrograd which soon spread across the country. A "Provisional Government" was established while Russia's future was decided. The provisional regime was highly unstable and soon collapsed, being replaced by a centre-left regime which overthrew the monarchy (reverting the Romanovs to common citizens), and declared the Russian Democratic Federal Republic, under the leadership of President Pavel Milyukov, beginning a process of federalizing the empire and establishing liberal-democratic reforms. However, Miliukov's refusal to end the increasingly bloody war led to massive casualties on the front in human wave offensives in which soldiers often didn't have any ammunition and more died from starvation and disease in miserable conditions than in combat.
With the leftist parties completely dissatisfied with Milyukov's rule, he was replaced as President of the Republic in July by Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky worked to establish soldier-democracy on the front and helped to alleviate some of the worst conditions, but he still did not end the war. Instead he used the progress he had made with morale to launch a final offensive in the north which retook Riga, Vilnius, and Kaunas but was soon driven back by the ever-increasing tide of German reinforcements from the west. Soon, soldiers started to mutiny on the front, and the leftist workers' soviets in the cities organized in an effort to overthrow Kerensky, led by the radical Marxist Bolshevik party, which had outmaneuvered its rivals and taken numerous seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The January Revolution-
While Kerensky was reviewing troops at the front in January of 1917, Army of the Russian Republic General Mikhail Drozdovsky and his force, positioned throughout the interior to prevent rebellions, itself rebelled and attempted a rightist military seizure of power in Petrograd to restore order and prosecute the war more effectively, while the admiral of the Russian Baltic Fleet collaborated and sent ships to blockade the ports and protect the fleet's base at Kronstadt. The coup was thwarted, however, when the Bolsheviks organized popular resistance and much of the brutalized rank and file of Drozdovsky's force refused to fire on their families and mutinied, along with many of the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, most famously those of the dreadnought battleship Poltava, whose crew took over operations of the ship, raised over it a red banner, and shelled Drozdovsky's forces. Kerensky returned quickly to find central Russia in chaos once again and fled the country to allied Denmark via Riga instead of trying to enter Petrograd.
On 18 January, 1917 (OS), armed Bolsheviks had occupied the entirety of Petrograd and suspended the Republican government and all multiparty elections, while Vladimir Lenin declared on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies the Petrograd Soviet to be the framework of a new Russian dictatorship of the proletariat. Revolutionary committees sprang up across the country and on 12 May the Bolsheviks had written a new Russian constitution, declaring Russia to be a socialist state with complete control over production in the hands of the worker and peasant Soviets and distribution and large nationalized industries in the hands of state committees coordinated by the trade unions. They also finally made peace with the Central Powers, negotiating the Treaty of Kobrin, which ceded Ukraine, Belarus, Livonia and Finland to German influence and the entire Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire, whose forces had been advancing through the region since the start of the war. During this time the Russian Czar Nicholas II and certain members of the Romanov Dynasty that fought against the revolution were publicly shot after a mass trial. The rest of the royal family was deported.
The Intermarum States -
The Kingdom of Ukraine was established under Archduke Maximilian Eugen of Austria as Maximilian I of the Ukrainians. Ukrainian nationalists largely supported the regime due to the constant threat of Bolshevism. The Ukrainian administration has begun active campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Russians and Jews, and Bolshevism is ruthlessly suppressed.
The Kingdom of Bielorusia was established under Albrecht, Duke of Wurttemberg, who was elected to the title of Czar of Bielorusia by a council of nationalists. Travelling to Minsk he took the regnal name Aliaksandr I of Bielorusia. The country is a nationalist dictatorship devoted to the advancement of the nation's culture and language. The economy has experienced heavy investment and industrial growth, and a relatively strong military is permitted by the Germans. The Czar has even authorized the creation of a national air force, as well as the construction of numerous forts and entrenched positions all along the borders in preparation for a Soviet invasion.
The Kingdom of Estonia was established under Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg as Frederick I of Estonia.
The Kingdom of Latgalia was established under George Ludwig of Oldenburg as George I of Latgalia.
The Kingdom of Finland was established under Prince Frederick-Charles of Hesse as Charles II of Finland, conceding to and recognizing the election of Charles-Peter of Holstein-Gottorp in 1742 as King of Finland, in a subtle attempt to garner further Finnish nationalist support. It was however insufficient to stave off the rise of the Finnish Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Red Guards who in Turku, now the city of Salmela, declared open revolution. Supported heavily by the Bolsheviks the Reds fought a bloody civil war against conservatives and the German occupation force, and capturing the loyalty of the common people in opposition to the foreign occupation regime managed to topple the monarchy and establish the Finnish Soviet Republic. Talks of entering the USSR came to nothing, and while some Bolsheviks supported the idea of an invasion, Lenin accepted Finnish independence and self determination. Though Finland was forced to return the land it annexed from Sweden during the Bothnian War, the Second Bothnian War was fought after the consolidation of the FSR which retook the province from the beleaguered Swedish state. Finland also lends heavy material aid to socialist partisans in Norway fighting the German invasion.
As well, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was restored to its Second Partition borders, and Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony was elected King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, taking the name Henryk V. The Polish-Lithuanian state is on its face a bizarre anachronism, but in the context of nationalist feelings and reawakenings of the time in both countries the union was by many celebrated as the long awaited Restoration. The state is a constitutional monarchy ruled as a federation between Poland, Lithuania and Courland, each with devolved senates. The three entities elect from amongst themselves the Marshal of the Nations, who presides over external and interstate affairs. The Commonwealth has since its foundation undergone two military coups (one instigated by the Germans) and a brief civil war, dealt with ethnic and class strife, is fed purely off of old nationalism and an attitude of gradual but steady independence from the German sphere. The Germans remind the Commonwealth that Germany is their only hope to avoid the looming threat of Bolshevism, though the Germans have been dealt a defeat with the success of the independence faction of the army in the civil war.
The German Army occupied the new states and served to quell nationalist and communist resistance.
The Russian Civil War -
Elements of the army and administration which did not support the Bolshevik cause eventually united to form the White Movement, which put up spirited but doomed resistance. The Bolshevik Red Army, under the command of Leon Trotsky, drove white forces from Petrograd and launched repeated offensives in the south which eventually drove the whites to surrender or flight. By January of 1919 all of former Imperial Russia save the areas ceded at Kobrin had been reunited, and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics formed.
The USSR -
The USSR immediately began to export the revolution, covertly to the kingdoms Germany had set up under German monarchies in eastern Europe, overtly to Mongolia, Uighurstan and Iran, which have turned into ethno-religious and ideological battlegrounds. Nations around the world experienced upheaval as communists took power in many revolutionary organizations. As the civil war has ended, the industry and agriculture of the USSR has recovered under Lenin's administration. The Supreme Soviet of National Economy, containing such brilliant socialist minds as Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, organized nationalized production and distribution of the key industries along the lines of socialist primitive accumulation, while under the New Economic Policy small proprietorships and industries under small soviets and councils were allowed to flourish. After the necessity of War Communism faded after the Civil War, agriculture was allowed to resume as previously, while the peasants' soviets organized production and distribution among the peasantry and to the cities under the supervision of VSNKh, and a gradual voluntary collectivization of agriculture is currently well underway, while electrification, literacy and education programs are being implemented en masse to empower the peasantry and the proletariat. The Sovnarkom system has become a powerful direct state force in the proscription of day to day state affairs, law, and foreign relations, led by Council Chairman Vladimir Lenin, the "Ascetic of the Kremlin", it is a new kind of state. Dominated utterly by a single party dedicated to building socialism, it is a center of discussion and debate over the future of the young USSR, and an organ of decisive revolutionary action.
The Germans and the Soviets stand tall over eastern Europe as both powers prepare for war upon one another. The peoples of the intermarum nations are bracing themselves for the storm about sweep down upon them from both sides.
West Africa -
The French colonial empire is in a state of free fall collapse following France's defeat in the war and the rise of the conservative right. It is not just the massive shakeup and intercolonial war the people's of Africa have recently experienced, nor just the crackdown on nationalism, but also simple want of food, gas, and naval support on the part of the French Army. Along with the UK, whose African holdings are also rapidly collapsing, and Portugal, which emerged from the war neutral and nearly unscathed, they are fighting a desperate war against the reemergence of only recently disestablished polities and recently dismantled structures, the emergence of new ones and the growing power of existing ones.
A republic has been declared in French Dahomey.
The Gonja and Ashanti have reestablished kingdoms in the former Gold Coast colony
The Senoufo have risen to the north of the ivory coast and are giving hell to the British and French intervention forces in the south.
The Malinke and Peul have established conquest kingdoms
The Songhay exploded out of the northern periphery of the French Niger and established a Muslim Caliphate in the region, brutally executing colonial authorities and captured Allied soldiers, waging war on both the French and British through a disciplined and well-armed military, while actually ruling over a somewhat liberal and cosmopolitan Islamic culture from Aoudaghost to Agadez. The Malinke/Mandingo are clients to them, conquering areas south and west, while the Mossi Sultanate and the Senoufo and Gonja are their primary enemies along with the former colonial powers.
The Sokoto Caliphate overthrew British rule under Muhammadu Attahiru II, who reasserted the Caliphal authority and launched campaigns of conquest southwards and northwards.
The Republic of the Niger was a doomed experiment to unify the diverse peoples of the region into a federal union. Some have come together in defense of the idea while the republic has French, British, and Portuguese support, but ethnic strife has resulted in bloody war, secession, and anarchy in many areas.
The Oyo Sultanate's reestablishment was one of the factors in the collapse of Nigeria, while the Igbo Republic was also declared in the Niger Delta region. The Igbo Republic has heavy support from Germany, while Ijaw rebels in the far south are supplied with arms by the allies.
The Republic of Liberia experienced a major crisis when in 1915 the Germans, whose forces in Kamerun were campaigning hard against the allied colonial armies in Nigeria, Dahomey, and the Ivory Coast, and were supplying arms to rebel groups throughout West Africa, were allowed to set up a wireless station in the capital of Monrovia. The French Air Force responded by launching a bombing raid on the city, destroying the station and by chance killing President Daniel E. Howard while he traversed the city for a diplomatic meeting with the German ambassador soon after the station's construction. Vice-President Samuel George Harmon succeeded to the presidency and declared war on the Allies, greatly aiding the German campaigns while the Germans supplied Liberia with arms and invested in domestic industry. President Harmon was, however, a corrupt leader who squandered the nation's finances, made life miserable for farmers through terrible land management and continued the slave-trade out of Liberia with gusto. Eventually, a Soviet-backed Communist movement spread like wildfire and under the leadership of Louis Arthur Grimes lead a massive coup against the True Whig Party. Afterwards Grimes would establish the Worker's Soviet Republic of Liberia, incentivizing farmers to collectivize in a Soviet system through subsidy to collective institutions. Industrial labor was put under the control of urban councils while small proprietors were encouraged and major industries nationalized. The Liberian Red Army is currently waging total war against all colonial powers and the zealotry of the people and the military is becoming worrying.
From the sahel east of Lake Chad have arisen the Ouaddai, whose cavalry soldiers destroyed the ancient Kingdom of Bornu and its French administration, establishing the Great Ouaddai Sultanate while the Bornu escaped and found refuge in Sokoto. Ouaddai society has settled down into the rulership of the conquered lands. The capital of Bol on Lake Chad has grown into a prosperous city while Sultan Ahmad ibn Yusuf Abdul Aziz is a talented conqueror and ruler who has built a new palace in the city and several mosques. The Ouaddai Sultanate is currently facing an all-out Franco-British invasion from the north and western desert, utilizing defecting Songhay, Mali, and Sokoto forces, as well as Tuareg, Libyan, and Algerian cavalry and forces led by the deposed Kanem-Bornu Sultan. The offensive, led by French Field Marshall Guillaume Renault, commander of French forces in Africa, and spearheaded by British mobile forces, has reached the shore of Lake Chad and taken several nearby towns, but has been met with fierce resistance from local irregulars and the Ouaddai Army. The Ouaddai and the Songhay for their part have launched coordinated attacks along the lengthily and fragile Franco-British supply lines and the Germans have supplied the Ouaddai and established ties to the sultanate, even donating several old aeroplanes and sending instructors to train Ouaddai pilots to carry out reconnaissance.
The Moroccans have successfully thrown off French control and have conquered vast areas of the north Sahara while declaring a caliphate. The tide of their campaign has slowly diminished since the rebellion of several southern Mauritanian tribes and a joint Spanish-Portuguese-British invasion.
Central Africa -
The Germans were able to acquire huge swathes of Africa under the Treaty of Reims, with the Belgian Congo, Gabon, and Kenya creating a massively profitable band of precious-metal and petrol producing colonies in the centre of the continent, protectorates and clients flanking all sides, Togoland serving as a base from which aid can flow to rebels in the west, and South-West Africa serving this purpose in the south of the continent. These gains were enforced after the military occupation of France and the conclusion of the war in Russia with the formation of Heeresgruppe Afrika, a large and well trained force intended to invade and enforce the annexation of the territories gained, to crush and stamp out native revolt and to foment it in the remaining allied colonies. The HGA has turned counterinsurgency and genocide into a fine art as well as insurgency and covert operations.
In Central Africa are two Ottoman protectorates. The Sultanate of Darfur, which was reestablished after driving out the French, and the Barid Emirate, which was established after a local Muslim warlord of the Bari clan declared Jihad against the pagan populations of the region and found aid and support in the Ottoman governor of the Sudan.
The Empire of Ethiopia was able to absorb the northern Somali peoples and the Afars through military force and Turko-German aid. The Germans set up a puppet Somali state while the Ottoman Army of Sudan occupied Eritrea, which was annexed.
South Africa -
The Germans have used the Southwest Africa colony as a launchpad and base of operations for the nation's participation in the Third Boer War. An invasion of South Africa has resulted in some native support while the Republic of Bechuanaland has rebelled against German control and launched its own war in Southwest Africa which is, ironically, being funded by the Portuguese. The Germans lent heavy aid to the rebels who reestablished the old Boer Republics, which are in the process of waging war upon the old British administration in South Africa as well as newly emerged native states like the Republic of Griqualand, the Kingdom of Basutoland, the Kingdom of Swaziland, and the Empire of Zululand. The Republic of Natalia was declared early in the war but fell to civil conflict between British sympathizers, Boers and Zulu and is currently a battleground of a failed state.
To the north lay the Matabele Republic, which was declared by independence fighters after the evacuation of British forces from Rhodesia to fight first in South Africa and then in Nigeria and India. The Portuguese occupied and annexed Zambezia and Nyasaland, creating a corridor linking Angola and Mozambique, fulfilling the dream of the Pink Map and aiding the Franco-British cause. They are currently fighting an extremely bloody war against Matabeleland even as they secretly aid Bechuanaland in its bold fight against the Germans.
The Ottoman Empire -
Perhaps no other nation came out of the war more changed than the Ottoman Empire. When the Empire joined the Central Powers in 1914, it was an ailing former power on its last legs. Only just recently bludgeoned by the first two Balkan Wars, the Italo-Turkish War and the Russo-Turkish War, denied the fruits of its triumph in the Greco-Turkish War, and surrounded on all sides by the encroaching power of the UK, France, and Russia, all waiting to take chunks out of the Empire at a moment's notice, the state's survival rested on throwing in on the side of Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria.
In the opening stages of the war, the Ottomans launched an invasion of Russia under the command of Halil Bey. Halil campaigned aggressively and decisively, utilizing brutality and genocide to rid the Caucasus of resistance and advance through Armenia into Georgia. Using the Armenian Genocide to stir up the anger of the Azeri, uprisings wracked the region and distracted Russia from the front, which along with his innovative use of deep penetration effectively broke Russian lines at the Battle of the Kura. When Russia underwent the revolutions of 1916 and 1917, the Ottomans advanced all the way to Baku and annexed most of the Caucasus as part of the Treaty of Kobrin. With early Ottoman victories in the Caucasus and its credible threat to Persia, the Royal Navy sent reinforcements to the Persian Gulf, which only weakened the Navy's state in the North Sea and was yet another blunder into the disaster at Holland.
When the British attempted to wrest Iraq by landing in and advancing from Kuwait, Nurredin Bey dealt them a crushing defeat at the Battle of Ctesiphon before surrounding the British at Kut, where in 1916 they surrendered.
After his incredible triumph at the Battle of Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal was sent southwards to replace Jamal Pasha, who had been killed in action, in command of the defense of Palestine, and orchestrated the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Gaza and the Siege of Al-Aqaba which secured the Ottoman army's hold on Arabia. As the war progressed and the British colonial empire began to collapse under the weight of rebellion, and the British war effort in Europe began to erode, Kemal orchestrated, with reinforcements from Iraq and the Caspian, a massive new offensive into the Sinai which caught the British forces in Egypt totally wrong-footed.
The Qutuz Offensive, as it was called was very hard fought, but the Ottomans were well supplied, battle-hardened men led by a brilliant tactician. The push towards the Suez steadily accelerated as the British Empire declined, and on the same day the British Expeditionary Force surrendered in France, the Suez Canal was secured. After this came the total collapse of the British Egyptian forces, as the Ottomans took Dammietta, Alexandria, and Cairo against actual resistance, while after the capture of Asyut little resistance followed. Kemal's march down the Nile, gathering supplies and reinforcements along the way, is among the most famed episodes in modern warfare. Khartoum was captured from warring tribes in 1918 while the rest of the Sudan was secured with the support of local powers and through Ottoman support for Islamic rulers and movements against colonialism. Offensives were carried out near the end of the war in 1917 which retook Libya from Italy.
Elected as Prime Minister of the empire in 1916 he reorganized the Ottoman Army into a well oiled and disciplined modern fighting force, nucleated the development of the Imperial Air Force, reinvigorated the navy and aggressively championed Ottoman interests in neighboring countries and abroad.
After the war, the Ottomans consolidated and expanded their control over Arabia. During this process of dividing, conquering, and subduing the local tribes to Ottoman sovereignty, Ottoman surveyors tasked with properly demarcating boundaries of vilayets and municipalities accidentally discovered the uppermost reaches of a gargantuan reserve of petroleum in the Arabian desert. Kemal, who knew that the Germans or another colonial power would try to maneuver their way into control of the reserves, which seemed to reach further and further every day, kept them under close military occupation where possible and under air and naval defense. Setting up the state owned Ottoman Petroleum Company, the nation began to reap extreme wealth. From this constant flow of money and oil, Kemal would build the Ottoman state into a truly powerful player on the world stage.
Mexico -
The bells of the Puebla Cathedral ring out for the victory of divine providence as the brave soldiers of Mexico triumph against the American invaders on the Rio Grande and Veracruz fronts.
The United States stayed neutral during the European War, throwing in for neither side and trading with both. However, the United States would soon find itself embroiled in another war much closer to home, as the Red Scare wracked the country and the government vowed to stymie the spread of socialism.
Mexico during the same period had just wound down from the Revolution, which saw the dictator president Porfirio Diaz deposed, followed by two conflicts between a vast liberal coalition and the forces of the usurper Victoriano Huerta, followed by a split between the leftists, led by Emiliano Zapata, and rightists led by Venustiano Carranza. The leftist coalition won out after Zapata's Division of the South met with Francisco "Pancho" Villa's Division of the North in Mexico City and their subsequent formation of a government and defeat of Carrancista forces in central Mexico. Zapata became the 37th president and under his rule was drafted the 1917 Constitution, which provided for sweeping land reform and the abolition of the semi-feudal Hacienda system in favor of the Ejido system of peasant commons, electrification and industrialization, mass campaigns of peasant literacy and education, controversial suppression of religion, the nationalization of major industries, especially petroleum, the collectivization of large firms and the encouragement of small proprietors.
Villa was made Secretary of War, and the early post-revolutionary period was characterized not just by rapid economic recovery, but militarization as well. Though the army had been the bane of Mexico's civilian government since the days of Santa Anna, the new peasant-raised revolutionary army was loyal to the new state and its extremely popular leaders. Thus, the Mexican People's Army, the amalgamation of the revolutionary leftist forces under a single modern command structure, was expanded and outfitted with modern weaponry provided in part by the Germans, and grew under Villa's aegis to a standing force of 250,000 by 1918. This militarization would be vital in the coming times, as a clash on the border between the Arizona Rangers and the Mexican Army ended with the Mexicans pursuing the rangers across the border and taking them prisoner. Mexico considered the rangers' actions to have been an invasion of Mexican territory, while US newspapers twisted the incident into Mexican aggression and the predicted public outcry allowed congress to declare war.
The Second Mexican-American War would become one of the most storied and legendary conflicts of modern history. At first, Mexico fell back in the north as the US Army marched into Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas with overwhelming force, while Cuidad Juarez was taken in the west and the US cavalry sent in to secure Baja California Territory. However, a force of Mexican infantry armed with the Mondragon rifle were able to travel to the Baja territory by sea before the Americans, cutting down the cavalry at the Battle of Santa Rosalia, Mexico's first victory of the war. Infantry had to be sent from the east to continue the invasion but by this point the Mexican defenders of the peninsula had dug in their heels in the hot desert and gave the Americans hell, while an American attempt to take the city of Chihuahua by rail resulted in Mexico's second defensive victory of the war. During the Battle of Chihuahua, the city was ordered evacuated by General Felipe Angeles and dynamite was placed throughout the city's rail station, which was detonated as the 10,000 Americans were arriving and disembarking in the city. A decisive attack was then staged by the Third Division in which the Americans were besieged and captured.
The Americans also struck at the heart of Mexico with a large-scale landing of forces in Veracruz and Yucatan, while Guatemala, under the military dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera, joined the war on the US side, pushing into Soconusco and Chiapas. Guatemala would prove a major headache for the American's, however, as the army was badly equipped and poorly led. The Mexicans soon stabilized the front in Soconusco and drew the war into Guatemala with the capture of the Usumacinta river, allowing the Army of the South (numbering some 40,000) to successfully attack and occupy British Honduras while the colony was undergoing civil unrest in the wake of the British garrison's abandonment for more important fronts.
During this period, Villa, in direct command of the northern armies, fell back in a fighting retreat, drawing as much blood as possible, while major efforts were made to conscript and volunteer as many men as possible. Mexico's factories, many newly built, were nationalized for the war effort to produce rifles, machine guns, armored cars and aeroplanes, while strict rations were put in place. Eventually, Mexico's army grew to nearly a million men, and was able to hold the line in the north, though not before the Americans took Monterrey. In Veracruz, the Americans were halted with tenacious local resistance and disease, especially the pandemic of the Italian Flu, which spread across the world in 1919, affecting millions of people in a global pandemic. Mexican resistance was fierce, with scorched earth tactics and guerrilla warfare bogging the invasion down while the desire of the Mexican people to fight for their revolution and their nation, against the nation that humiliated them in 1848, only grew.
Meanwhile in the US, the standstill of the advances combined with economic downturn proved disastrous to morale and public opinion, which on the left swung almost immediately against the war with the people of the northern and midwestern cities following close after. Mexico's ability to wage war continued to climb after Villahermosa was successfully defended and German arms flowed in en masse. A stalemate had miraculously been achieved, and now an event would shake the world enough for the tide to turn the other way.
The conclusion of the Russian Civil War and the formation and economic success of the USSR changed everything. Soviet aid began pouring into socialist Mexico. Guns, planes, oil, steel, and armored cars were shipped to the Americas via Norway and Ireland, and a foothold in Alaska was established for the same purpose to circumvent the Japanese in the Pacific. Lenin spoke to Sovnarkom and the Soviet people that Mexico was the critical first foothold of socialism in the New World, and that great effort must be made to prevent it from being crushed under the boot of the United States. The Germans, realizing what was going on, switched sides and began to aid the US, while the UK, after signing the Anglo-Soviet Alliance, began to support Mexico as a means to foil German plans.
Not only did the Soviets funnel aid to the Mexican cause, but also the USSR sent funding to Communist and leftist groups across American cities and in the south. This paid off in November 1920, when the US economy collapsed. Trade with Europe had gone down significantly since the start of the war, confidence in the war was beginning to erode, and the war itself (along with the commitment of the US Navy from other tasks in the region) was strangling the country's own lifeblood in Latin America, doubly so as central and South America also began to fall into conflicts. The economic devastation was catastrophic, and soon workers were setting up barricades in major cities as police were ordered to fire on crowds only for the protesting, hungry crowds to grow.
President Woodrow Wilson sent in reserve elements of the army to put down these insurrections, but this only weakened America's leaguer of Mexico and resulted in many soldiers deserting to join their fellow citizens in rebellion. Soon, the movements grew even more powerful, and became united in their anger under the banner of the American Communist Party. Red militias were formed and organized under the ACP into the American Workers' and Farmers' Red Army which took control of the city of Pittsburg in 1921. As cities across the north rose up or were taken, a group of representatives of the ACP, other leftist political parties and the trade unions negotiated the formation of the United Socialist Party of America, drafting a new constitution which provided for an Economic Bill of Rights to which the state was subject and dictated a program of worker collective control over the means of production, with smaller firms operated solely at workers' discretion under the wider aegis of the party and larger industries operated directly under state control. Farmers were guaranteed a living according to quantity of food produced, while planting quotas for necessary foods were put into place, food prices were fixed, and an equal-field system was instituted under state rent. Housing was collectivized and expanded while industry repurposed for war was used instead to create arms to fight the US government. The American Federated Socialist Republic was born.
Meanwhile in the south, events in the north and in Mexico inspired a movement of African liberation from the racialist and economic slavery of the post-reconstruction order. Blacks armed themselves illegally, protecting their plots of land by force when the masters would send stooges to collect their crushing debts, organizing their own red militias, and, with the protection of numbers, began to kill white landowners and divide their estates among them. Soon cities with large black populations began to come under liberationist control, and the entirety of white southern society was drawn into total war against an existential threat. Unhappy with the shaky response of the US government, and blaming the lack of troops sent in to quell the uprisings on unwillingness rather than inability, the radical right, led by the Second Ku Klux Klan, organized counter-rebellions and formed their own armies and militias to put down the insurrections, wantonly take out their anger on black citizens through torture, rape, and murder, and attempt to maintain the order of white supremacy. Now, having loosed the dogs of war with their uprising and fighting for their very survival, the black liberationists began to form their own new socialist governments. The three most prominent being the Socialist Republic of New Africa, the Shiloh Soviet Republic, and the Soviet Republic of the Mississippi.
After this things went downhill for the US quickly. Native Americans in Oklahoma rose up and established the Union of American Indian Soviets, a state created out of the tribal organization of the former Indian Territory and led by the Choctaw and Chickasaw, giving it the widespread nickname "Chocktaw Soviet", while local white settlers attempted to put down the rising. Workers in California rose up and established the California Soviet while reactionaries declared the Second California Republic. Workers of the iron mining and copper country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula rose in revolt and took the mines from their owners, declaring the Escanaba Soviet and joining with the AFSR. After largely non-Mormon workers in Ogden barricaded the city and declared the Ogden Soviet, the Mormons of Utah formed a reactionary ultra-religious militia which has established a poorly organized ephemeral state called the Holy Republic of Deseret. Led by an LDS religious leader preaching the end times against the Communist antichrist, life under the absolute theocracy dedicated to enforcing virtuous religious life at the point of a shotgun is nothing short of hell. The story of the plight of the workers of Ogden, besieged by the ruthless theocrats, has captured the sympathy of the world and is a focus of propaganda in the Communist sphere.
While all this was going on in the US, Canada also experienced labor uprisings. A procession from Calgary to Thunder Bay took the Canadian West by storm as miners, prairie farmers, urban laborers and dockworkers began to wave red banners and in 1921 the Canadian Workers' Soviet was declared and established with its capital at Thunder Bay. The Canadian communists operate on their own brand of peasant oriented folk communism tied to the farmers and the proletariat of the mineral and shipping industries. Daniel Harmon, Chairman of the All-Canada Supreme Revolutionary Council, the farmer-turned-revolutionary leader of the CWS, is a brutally effective political force. His particularly violent retributions against counter-revolutionaries and bloody seizures of land and resources from the wealthy owners to smallholders under state rent and state collective firms have earned him the fear of many throughout the continent, while his and his associates' rhetoric of power to the workers and the farmers has driven many more to fight. So, while the Dominion of Canada fought the revolutionaries in Alaska after the US no longer could, the most fertile and industrial areas of the country rose in revolt and civil war ensued.
Violence from the Canadian Civil War spilled over the border on numerous occasions as the chaos in the US grew, but Montana, a state within Federal control, looked with indignation on the lack of response to Communist raiding parties trespassing on Montanan land and in many cases robbing and stealing to supply the CWSR and its American communist allies. The state had at first prospered from the war with Mexico through its contribution of over 40,000 men and 10,000 cavalry horses to the front. The boon to industry made support for the war high in Montana, and it seemed to the people that the Federal government they had trusted with their sons to the war effort had wasted them and the enemies of the republic were clipping the heels of Montana itself. In October of 1923, the worst raid of all occurred from the north, as a force of 2,000 Red Canadian soldiers and their Indian allies raided the bank of the town of Fort Benton where the fortunes of many miners and businessmen lay, killing 78 civilians during a three day occupation of the town and looting everything of value. When the occupation and subsequent sack and abandonment of the town went unopposed by the federal army, state governor Sam V. Stewart called for the raising of an Army of the State of Montana to defend the northern border. This act was pushed through opposition via judicial fraud and greeted enthusiastically by the population, who clamored for blood in retribution for the massacre.
The federal government took notice of this development but at first did nothing. However, soon after the creation of the ASM, governor Stewart declared his intention to invade Canada if neither faction of the Canadian Civil War extradited those responsible. The federal government's response to this was condemnation and a threat to invade the state if the army were not disbanded immediately. Stewart made an impassioned speech before the legislature and representatives from the ASM that the US had failed its obligations to Montana and Montana's relationship to the US government was void. This was met with cheers and a session a week later to draft a constitution for the creation of the Republic of Montana. On November 23rd, 1923 the new nation was declared and on the same day the US Army invaded Montana to put down the secessionist uprising and roll back the ongoing invasion of Canada. The US could barely afford to send any force, tied down in that theatre alone by the rapidly escalating Dakota Front, and the forces arrayed against the Republic were only enough the contain the state and not enough to stop the Canadian invasion, which had begun immediately right while the whole conflict began to spiral out of control on both sides of the border. A flag of three bands white, blue, and gold with the words MONTANA REPUBLIC in white in the middle bar, sewed by a local working woman and used by soldiers of the ASM during the Battle of Billings was chosen as the national flag in early 1924.
Still the US army did not give up as the corpses piled higher on the northern plains of Mexico and in the forests of Veracruz and the Yucatan. Several victories against the rebellions and a policy of total war executed with ruthlessness and terror resulted in the rebellions being contained and even rolled back in various regions. The AFSR's hold over the west was challenged seriously with the revolt of the Michigan Division after word of the Howell Massacre, the destruction and near depopulation of a Michigan town by a Red cavalry regiment for suspected KKK agitation. The rebels took numerous transportation veins and severely crippled the Red war effort. Secondly came the Walsh Rebellions, which occurred after a Kansas farmer named Virgil Walsh organized a farmer's rebellion in response to instances of corrupt Communist military governors applying War Communism too liberally. Seeing the AFSR as having regressed from true socialism in the name of expediency (notwithstanding that war communism was only applied during active combat and occupation during the civil war and in areas of intense fighting and ephemeral control administration could be rather ad hoc) the farmers began to wave a banner of black and blue in a horizontal bicolor. The rebellion was put down with ruthless force but nonetheless caused the temporary loss of vast swathes of the fertile and vital western prairie.
In the south, the anti-Communist rebellions were contained an vital transport links, ports, and cities of the south were reestablished under federal control and the black revolts besieged, and some semblance of capability was maintained for the US war effort.
With total war, stabilizing frontiers and millions of men on the fronts, the Americans launched the October Offensive in Mexico aimed at quickly ending the war. Monterrey was successfully captured twice by the Americans and the northern and southern armies successfully linked with the Battle of Tampico. However, the Mexican army, making deft use of railroads, cavalry, and mobile tactics, resisted the advance successfully, drawing blood for every inch. The offensive was then halted when US army communications leaked that the offensive's aim was to capture San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas and cut Mexico in half with a naval invasion of Tepic from the other side. With this information, General Amador Salazar set up defensive positions along the routes southward and 300,000 Mexicans dealt nearly 500,000 soldiers of the US Army a crushing defeat at the Battle of Tolentino over a period of 5 days and 150,000 casualties. The third prong of the plan, an offensive from the Veracruz front inland towards Tlaxcala and Mexico City, was defeated with great loss at the Battle of Jalapa, in which Mexican commander Otilio Montaño Sánchez made use of heavy artillery, entrenched infantry and aircraft to stop the US Army under Charles M. Clement from retracing the route of Cortes and Scott into the heart of the country.
At the same time, the US naval force in the Pacific under Admiral Carl Vogelsegang, sent to occupy the city of Chacala, from where would disembark 10,000 men to march inland toward Zacatecas, was defeated when the Mexican Pacific Fleet, consisting of the recently purchased dreadnought battleship Ignacio Zaragoza and few gunboats under the command of Hilario Malpica launched an incredibly daring attack on the old and second-rate ships that the US could spare for the landing. The ensuing Battle of Jaltemba was fierce, but when the powder cache on the decrepit pre-dreadnought ship the Connecticut exploded, sinking the ship and killing the admiral, the Mexican battleship gained the upper hand and the rest of the American squadron surrendered after the landing forces were defeated and captured at the Battle of Altavista and shore batteries brought in and used in Jaltemba Bay.
These defeats greatly demoralized the US forces, growing increasingly low on food and supplies as the war dragged on at home and abroad, and was the immediate spark that caused the Pensacola Naval Mutiny, when sailors of the US Gulf Fleet on numerous ships launched a simultaneous revolt in port, refusing to be sent to die starving and in rags on an under-maintained ship. The mutiny spread to the front itself soon enough, and when ships began to desert the blockade and the
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Faeelin
Banned
I understand we all played Kaiserreich, but aren't well organized socialist revolutionary movements springing into existence in America getting a little old by now?
There's a lot I like about this map, but revolutionary movements lurking behind every POD is becoming really common.
There's a lot I like about this map, but revolutionary movements lurking behind every POD is becoming really common.
Dorozhand
Banned
The USSR's victory and its taking advantage of the collapse of imperialism has had a powerful effect on Latin America in particular, and the US war with Mexico ignited social tensions in the US, which slowly grew and organized until they boiled over. The US response to the insurrection was poorly conceived and the loss of the Mexican War made things even worse. Canada underwent revolution for the same reasons Germany did IOTL, namely disillusioned soldiers returning from a lost war and desperately poor farmers ad workers wondering why the economy has now collapsed.
This is another really awesome one. I'm looking forward to L- I'm predicting every bit of the globe is isolated (except of course Latvia and Lithuania finding Lichtenstein's ruins).
Here's another continent in 'The Years of Rice and Salt' by Kim Stanley Robinson. This time it's Yingzhou, or North America.
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The near extinction of humanity in Firanja (Europe) lead to minor butterflies throughout the Eastern hemisphere. Direct conflicts between China and various Japanese Shoguns attempting to invade Korea lead to a more naval-prone China, which, rather accidentally, discovered the Americas in 1610/1611 A.D..
Said discovery was not to play out in the manner of our world's meeting of hemispheres however. Recurrent conflicts with Japan, the Manchu Qing conquering China and creating their own dynasty (not butterflied), and a China still somewhat distrustful of long ocean-going voyages across the Pacific all helped to slow down China settlement across the seas.
This did not mean that the Eastern hemisphere totally ignored the Western one. Firanjis, the mixed peoples of Arab, Berber, Turkish, Tatar, and Native European descent that were beginning to slowly resettle the vast unpopulated forests of Europe founded some trading posts in the new continents. But larger streams of migrations to Yingzhou came after 1735 A.D. when China at last successfully conquered Japan. Japanese settlers came in large number, settling beyond the coastal ports of Chinese *California, mixing with the natives as the Chinese pushed them further and further inland. Viets, Laos, Koreans, and other fleeing Chinese domination fled as well, and the already rising state-building activities of the inland portions of Yingzhou increased.
Over the next century, as Mesoamerica and the Andes were turned from Chinese vassals into territories directly held by the Qing Emperors, Chinese colonial expansions meant the end of many of the Japanese 'Boer-like' states. In the East however, one Native state in particular was growing. The Hodenosaunee (our world's Iroquois) had created a genuinely indigenous democracy, constitution, and had adopted both writing and religion from the Japanese- zealously so in the later case, and as the Hodenosaunee came to see themselves as the protectors of Zen Buddhism from both a worldly Chinese Emperor and from Muslim settlers who now were increasing. Other tribes, such as the people who in our world would be called the Cherokee, joined. More Native states in the Great Plains, as well as the Dine and Ute, had better relations with the Chinese, but enjoyed pitting the Hodenosaunee and Chinese against one another to retain their independence. Later, as Hindu traders began to bring industrialization and early mechanization in the first few decades of the Long War (1914-1980) the Hodenosaunee rapidly caught up.
The Long War (between a Chinese-lead Grand Coalition and an Islamic Alliance), the Japanese Independence of War, and two Chinese Civil wars all let the various Chinese territories in the New World leave peacefully.
Today, the Yingzhou League stands as a pre-eminent power, but for all its size it is not the power that the OTL U.S. is. Rather than leading the Grand Coalition to victory in a Normandy-equivalent Battle, the Chinese and Native States of the continent were forced to beg for Chinese support in the midst of the conflict as much of the land east of the *Rockies was overrun by Jihadist Armies. Despite being larger than the OTL U.S., the Yingzhou League, which was formed during the War out of necessity, has fewer people, and more of it is poor. Disagreements between the constituent states still cause problems- a federal-type government is minimal at best. And for all the military bases and Buddhist missionaries around the world, the Yingzhou League still has strong Isolationist tendencies. And while the Native states may look at the Chinese states in much the same that Red states look at Blue states in OTL, the Muslim states (which have their own passports and enforce sharia law, though they may not leave the Yingzhou League) are different entirely. Nonetheless, the Yingzhou League is solidly democratic and proud of its own unique heritage. Between Fangzheng (OTL San Francisco) and Golcolda (OTL New York City) new waves of research and technology are pushing the world forward.
Well Libya and Lebanon are in an okay place to trade. Liberia could probably exist on the edge of the 'civilized' world. Laos and Lesotho will be pretty lonely though.
I think that is just Kiribati settling the Pacific after their baby boom.
EDIT: Misread it.
The Kuwait monarchy was the only pre-event monarchy to go along, so from this world's perspective they're the only surviving pre-event monarchy. They view the other dynasties as upstarts.
Alex Richards
Donor
Of course, the one good thing for Liechtenstein is that, if needs be, they can probably be in radio contact with Latvia/Lithuania (why do people always seem to forget about Long Range radio with these sort of things?) and the population is small enough, rich enough and with enough skilled and educated people that at least a partial evacuation could be organised.
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