“
The advantage of geographical nearness to an enemy, or to the object of attack, is nowhere more apparent than in that form of warfare which has lately received the name of commerce-destroying, which the French call guerre de course
. This operation of war, being directed against peaceful merchant vessels which are usually defenceless, calls for ships of small military force. Such ships, having little power to defend themselves, need a refuge or point of support near at hand; which will be found either in certain parts of the sea controlled by the fighting ships of their country, or in friendly harbors. The latter give the strongest support, because they are always in the same place, and the approaches to them are more familiar to the commerce-destroyer than to his enemy.”
-- A. T. Mahan,
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783
The spheres of influence in the Pacific. Not included in the map are Wamp’una Island [a], Rapa Nui, and the Topa Islands [0], which are all under Inca rule.
The Pacific Theater (1948 - 1951)
The War of the Danube was waged atop the landmasses of Central and Southern Europe, but the fate of Europe’s waters was also at stake. If the Confederation of Unitarian States managed to replace Visegrad on the European stage while taking cues from the Turks behind the screen, the Unitarian Commonwealth would have secured control of the Eastern Mediterranean, the great commercial artery of the Danube, and distant outposts on the southern Baltic shore. However, the German hammer soon fell savagely upon the CUS and eventually the Union itself, making the Mediterranean a lake of democratic (or at least, not entirely absolutist) nations. India, the last remaining Blue state, appeared unlikely to mimic the aggression of Constantinople and Kyoto. The expulsion of the doomed Japanese state from the Commonwealth and the abandonment of the Unitarian government in Baghdad showed that if the likely rewards of a military adventure couldn’t justify the possible dangers and costs, Lucknow would not pursue it. After the end of the Second Turkish Civil War in the 1945 and the “Hajj of Victory” later that year, the leaders of Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia considered it likely that India, now without allies to raise its chances of success in war, no longer posed a threat to the rest of the world. Proponents of this
“Caged Tiger” theory believed that India, pragmatic as it was, was ultimately incapable of audacity. Its influence had been contained within the northern Indian Ocean, and could steadily be chipped away from the peripheries.
The Oceanian Revolution proved that the real cages didn’t enclose the Indian “tiger,” but the limited imaginations of the world’s statesmen. Lucknow had independently, unilaterally, and forcefully placed a massive continent under a Blue banner. Worse, Unitarianism’s new Pacific shore bordered several targets for the increasingly real threat of Indian aggression.
A Lusangese poster encouraging settlement in the Dongnanhai Islands. Such initiatives were generally very successful.
The first sign of trouble, in
Lusang’s view, was that fishermen could no longer go looking for sea cucumbers without getting shot at. Since the 1700s, Lusangese and Malay fishermen had plied the waters off northern Oceania and conducted trade with the local natives to gain sea cucumbers, which the Chinese and Japanese believed to have strong and valuable medicinal powers. The Britannians allowed this trade to happen freely at first— they didn’t control northern Oceania as strongly as the north and east, and felt that abolishing the lucrative trade would turn the native Oceanians against their colonial rulers— but placed increasing restrictions on it over the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Oceanian Unitarians, however, were far more paranoid about the level of control they had over the lands they claimed, and enforced the maritime border between Oceania and Lusang quite strictly. The Lusangese government didn’t wish to start a war over this— after all, the Oceanians had restricted themselves to firing warning shots and ultimately killed no Lusangese fishermen— and restricted its own considerable merchant and fishing fleets from traveling too far south. Expecting that the Oceanians would someday attempt to expand their territory— just like every other Unitarian state that reached a certain level of stability and maturity— the Lusangese also upgraded the fortifications on their southern islands (including Aozhou [1]) and on the islands of
Dongnanhai [2] in the east.
The peoples of the islands under the Emperor’s rule had possessed naval traditions for centuries, and Lusangese fishermen and had charted the waters of western Dongnanhai for almost two decades by the time the Wanzhe Emperor acceded to the throne. Wanzhe’s transformation of Lusang into a naval power did, however, bring these charted regions and unknown ones further to the east under the state’s control during the first two decades of the 1900s. The Lusangese Navy was originally responsible for governing the islands of Dongnanhai, and the headquarters of the military government was established in
Koror, on the island of Zhudao [3]. Sailors stationed in smaller centers on the outlying islands reported back to Koror through periodic trips by boat. The native islanders were, to an extent, integrated into this new system— anticipating the eventual transfer of power to civilian authorities, the Navy created schools for the native population and training programs for future bureaucrats. However, the pace of demographic, economic, and social change in Dongnanhai eventually grew so fast that, by the 1930s and 1940s, the natives had become strange minorities in their own lands.
The Dongnanhai sugar industry appeared fated for failure. Lusangese investors knew little about sugar production and made bad investments in companies that folded soon after their establishment. By 1915, however, Li Siyang partnered with Gumbay Pendatun, a Muslim from Mindanao, to establish the
Dongnanhai Sugar Company (東南海糖公行,
Dongnanhai Tang Gonghang). Dongtang established sugar plantations quickly by importing willing and skilled tenant farmers from the Visayas and Mindanao instead of recruiting local islanders unfamiliar with sugar production or plantation monoculture. Other companies developed in Dongnanhai around particular specialities, usually to serve the needs of the increasingly numerous Lusangese settler population. After sugar,
copra (dried coconut meat) was the second-most lucrative cash crop in the islands. Copra could be used as feed for livestock, or grated and boiled to extract coconut oil. Meanwhile, fishing fleets plied the waters every day, and sold their wares directly to sprawling fish markets or to the fish processing plants that were set up on the larger islands. Zhudao earned its name through enormous harvests of pearls and mother-of-pearl. The Navy handled the shipping of mail and cargo to and from Dongnanhai and the Lusangese heartland. As such industries grew, the need for improvements to port and harbor facilities did as well. These improvements, once implemented, facilitated further shipping and colonization.
By 1937, air travel had been established between most of Lusang’s major regions, with airports built on Dongnanhai’s larger islands. Development had reached international standards, with a network of elected and appointed civilian officials taking over the Navy’s efforts to promote public works, health and sanitation, agriculture, infrastructure, industry, safety, and justice. However, the natives’ opinions on these seemingly positive changes ranged from ambivalence to strong disapproval. Airplanes that landed in Koror found a thoroughly Lusangese city, in which Chinese and Tagalog were the main languages of public life. The population of Saipan, the economic and administrative center of northern Dongnanhai, was almost 90% Lusangese. Settlers and immigrants made up a significant part of Pohnpei Island’s population as well. The natives were free to participate in this system, and to be as educated and wealthy as any subject of the Emperor, but the system didn’t necessarily depend on their participation. The transformation of Dongnanhai did not depend on the assimilation of the natives— if sufficient native labor could not be found for a venture, then workers, managers, and investors could simply be imported from elsewhere. The system established itself, swelled until it filled the whole world of Dongnanhai, and then presented the natives with the choice of joining it wholeheartedly or imposing a cultural and economic exile upon themselves.
The fortification of Dongnanhai required the importation of soldiers. While the local civil and military defense forces generally regarded native customs with respect and sought not to anger them, the imported soldiers saw the natives as potential fifth columns for Oceanian invasion. The insults of the military garrisons soon gave the native chiefs and commoners alike plenty of reasons to complain to Koror.
When asked about the situation in the South Pacific in 1951, Admiral Cheng Tianyu of the Lusangese Navy replied that “it has become commonplace in Tongduo [4] to joke about how the Ocean of Great Peace was named prematurely.” A contemporary observer could easily believe that Lucknow and its allies intended to prove the Admiral right.
The flag of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
As the Britannian empire collapsed on all the Pacific’s shores, the volume of naval traffic in the Pacific decreased. Unable to gain as much funding from port taxes as it used to, the Britannian protectorate of
Hawaii faced severe financial troubles. Angered by their commanders’ inability to guarantee the payment of their salaries and the Britannian Resident in Honolulu’s imposition of
“Troubles Taxes” to pay for London’s efforts at recovery, a wide coalition of sailors began a mutiny in Honolulu Harbor. Though “English” sailors who identified as such were unsupportive of the mutineers’ demands, they were outnumbered by native Hawaiians,
haole (locally-born whites, usually the descendants of Celts) islanders, and crewmen of mixed race. The spirit of revolt soon spread to the dockworkers and the wider city, each of whom had their own grievances against the Britannians. The Honolulu civil police force, which was not integrated into the Britannian chain of command, did nothing to prevent this fire from spreading, and even helped to detain the Resident in Honolulu. The Hawaiian Revolution of 1950 ended with a new government of Hawaiian Marines, sailors, businessmen, and traditional chiefs (who still commanded the native populace’s deep respect) in custody of Honolulu and most of the Royal Navy’s Hawaiian fleet. After receiving notes of surrender from the tiny and isolated Britannian garrisons in Oahu, the ruling coalition declared
John Kana’ina— a descendant of the old Hawaiian kings who had accrued much popularity as the Chief Surgeon of Honolulu General Hospital— as King
Kamehameha VI of the restored
Kingdom of Hawaii. The newly-constituted Hawaiian Navy ensured that the figurehead sovereign’s writ ran to all the islands of Hawaii’s traditional territory and the new acquisitions of Midway Island and Johnston Atoll. All who were dissatisfied with the new state of affairs were allowed to repossess most of their movable property and given a one-way ticket to Jamestown, the capital of New England.
The French-trained troops of a Samoan ali’i.
The Hawaiian kingdom, eager to build good relations with local powers and avoid the financial troubles of its predecessor, scrapped the old provisions against allowing the ships of Britannia’s rivals to use the islands’ ports. The French, who has previously considered conquering those same ports for their own exclusive use, took Honolulu’s olive branch for what it was and redoubled on their undeclared war against the Oceanian republic— or, more accurately, the Turkish-led pirates operating under the Oceanian flag.
In the early months of 1949, when the Oceanian Civil War began to turn especially deadly, French scouts noted an anomalous development. The Oceanian Unitarians were still struggling to break out of eastern Oceania Major [5], and Benedict Scrooge’s forces held them off from the democratic-nationalist strongholds in the south of the great continent. Despite the stalemate on land, however, the Unitarians enjoyed uninterrupted success at sea. Britannian New Guinea, the Baronial Islands [6], and New Ireland [7] all fell to the Oceanian navy, which appeared to have a strength beyond any possessed by the remaining Oceanian fleet of the Royal Navy, which was beaten back to Wallace [8] and the Aardman Islands [9]. Sustained surveillance revealed that most of the vessels in the “Oceanian navy” were of Turkish make. Questioning of the refugees who sailed from the Oceanian-ruled islands and were rescued by French vessels confirmed the wider Unitarian movement’s involvement in the Oceanian revolution. The
Reynaud Report, compiled in March 1949, detailed the almost wholesale transfer of the defunct Union’s naval units— which had defected to India as the War of the Danube wound down— to Oceanian service. Turkish submarine crews, who had become infamous as unfeeling hunters of the Visegradian refugees from Tripolitania, now applied their not-insignificant experience in a new theater. The
Résident-Général in
Apia, who served as the head of government and commander-in-chief in the French Pacific, ordered the establishment of French control over Fiji before the Oceanians could arrive, and the regular delivery of aid to the Britannian ships that still held out in the Aardman Islands. The Unitarians naturally objected to this foreign intrusion on “rightfully Oceanian” territory, but were under strict orders to avoid attacking any non-Britannian vessels. The Indians didn’t want their incursion into the Britannian Pacific to spiral out of hand, and in this respect they were quite similar to the French. The Britannian Royal Navy did most of the actual fighting, and the French relegated themselves to keeping the Britannians in the game through steadfast support from and cooperation with the French.
It is possible to argue that France’s intervention in the Oceanian conflict was the latest in a long series of similar ventures upon which the French empire in Oceanesia [10] had been built. Rival rulers and peoples in the islands had long waged wars with spears and war clubs (but, notably, not with bows and arrows). The arrival of European sailors, and the experience with modern weapons and warfare that they brought, intensified these struggles. Stalemates were shot to bits by white mercenaries in the employ of traditional chiefs with ambitions of paramount kingship. Sometimes, different factions of Europeans faced off against each other— British and French traders and soldiers were often equally assimilated into the fabric of Oceanesian society, but their traditional sectarianism animated many battles between warring chiefs. In the late 1800s, the French government, which sought friendly waystations on the Pacific route between New France and Indochina, used many of these conflicts as pretexts to annex or impose protectorates over local societies. Samoa was the first to fall, and from the European settlement near Apia the French ranged forward to conquer Tonga to the south and a range of islands and atolls in the north.
Despite the French establishment of strong political and economic structures over most of their Pacific possessions, Native Oceanesians constituted the majority of the population on every island. In
Samoa and
Tonga, the traditional
ali’i chiefs still possessed the
mana, or divine inspiration, which they inherited from their godly ancestors. The Samoan and Tongan kingdoms had been adversaries in the past (the Samoan king’s title of
Malietoa was a reference to a great fight against Tongan invaders), and both peoples identified as separate nations. However, the militarization and taxes imposed by the French to carry on their war against the Oceanians fell equally heavily upon both. The French fleet contained crew members of Samoan and Tongan descent, and the death of these native sons at sea fostered a sense of common destiny among both peoples. In Fiji, the Bau chieftains had once ruled as kings, and still held much power during the period of Britannian rule. Their cooperation was essential for the speedy establishment of French control over Fiji, but was only gained through Apia’s granting of economic and political concessions. This strengthened the Bau position in the short term, but in time they would be viewed as self-interested collaborators by Fijian commoners unable to emulate the chiefs’ success. Profits from the whaling industry near Tonga, in which crews of natives and Europeans hunted sperm whales and humpbacks for their oil and spermaceti, had once been doled out by the French to ensure political quietism. The age of electricity, however, had decimated this industry, and nothing of similar profit-making capacity had arisen in French Oceanesia in the decades since.
Demands for outright independence were uncommon among the Oceanesians, and heavily discouraged by the French. They would, however, become more significant in in later years.
A ship of the Royal Navy’s Oceanic fleet. It is one of the last remnants of the once-extensive Britannian empire in the Pacific.
Britannia was no stranger to the Pacific. While the Dutch and the Portuguese had charted the Pacific quite extensively, assembling trade empires with the strength of gold and cannon, the Britannians had been the first to extensively chart the islands of the South Pacific. They established the first long-term colonial empire of the Pacific
in the 1700s and early 1800s, at a time when the French barely even thought about conquering the Khmer kingdom with troops from New France. The war against the Unitarians was, for the more dedicated Britannian nationalists and even some of the less dedicated ones, a war to keep intact in an age of sin that which had been built by the heroic figures of a more noble time. With the fall of Bedford [11], the last holdout of the Oceanian democratic-nationalist forces, the remnants of Benedict Scrooge’s military forces commandeered the remaining warships and stolen civilian vessels at their disposal and set out for Prester’s Port [12], the chief settlement of the Aardman Islands. Bolstered further by forcefully-recruited refugees of all races from Oceania, the resultant force, which identified as the
Royal Navy of the Kingdom of Britannia in all communications with outsiders, tenaciously drove the Unitarians back from the last remnants of Britannian Oceania. Admiral
Nigel Griffin presided over an "navy with a state", in which the traditional resource-extraction tools of the colonial government were reconfigured to finance Griffin’s war for survival. The French offered to sell warships to Griffin, but the Admiral had grown to prefer ships on the model of the Oceanesians’ traditional canoes. These small boats— sleek, fast, and filled with 20 or 30 raiders each— had brought down many a Dutch, Portuguese, or even Britannian treasure ship through tenacity and force of numbers. When enough Unitarian ships had been raided, stolen, or sabotaged, he planned to bring out the warships and carry out traditional pitched battles against the remaining Unitarian naval forces.
Not all the islanders, though, were happy about being ruled by warlords waging a marine guerilla campaign. The forced impressment of refugees as crewmen in Griffin’s ships was especially insulting because the Britannians in Oceania, disregarding the orders of London, had long practiced a king of indentured servitude known as blackbirding. Merchants in New Guinea, the Baronials, and the Aardmans oversaw the illegal but pervasive transfer of thousands of men to Oceania Major, where they worked on farms and plantations. If they survived their ordeals, they could go home. However, the experience never truly left these men behind. Worse still, the lighter-skinned Oceanesians were never recruited for such tasks; it fell upon the darker-skinned Gorgonesians [13] to fill the Britannians’ labor quotas.
In Oceania’s and the Royal Navy’s portions of
Gorgonesia, a new identity had steadily developed. Important to this development was the standardization of Gorgonesian Pidgin, a stable and remarkably uniform creole language that encapsulated the common heritage of the Gorgonesians, and their more recent shared history of violence and subjection. The Britannians had long sought to co-opt this identity: the Catholic priests of the islands first standardized the language and its Latin-based writing system as a means of translating the Bible and commentaries on Puritan theology. Admiral Griffin authorized the creation of a “Gorgonesian Battalion” near the end of 1950. Much like the Legion of Archangel Michael, however, this force strained to escape the narrow ambitions of its creators. “Onward to
Honiara,” the motto of the Battalion, invoked Honiara’s name to mean something other than the economic center of the Baronial Islands. The motto invoked the geographical centrality that placed Honiara in easy reach of every island of Gorgonesia, and the Pidgin literature that its writers had produced before the Oceanian Civil War— in other words, the qualities that made it suitable as a future national capital.
The city hall of Patamarca, Tahiti’s most prominent settlement. Designed in the Vespucian Modernist style, this behemoth of concrete and glass is a potent reminder of Inca presence.
France’s dominions walled the Oceanian Unitarians off from the Sapa Inka’s islands, and so Cusco did not seriously think that the Oceanians could disrupt its control of eastern Oceanesia. The Inca had leveraged the traditional system of chiefs in Oceanesia in a manner which recalled the statecraft of Pachacuti and Tupac Yupanqui. The Tahitian chiefs were required to send their heirs to Cusco to study in Inca schools and learn Inca ways, and were sent back home upon reaching adulthood. Many, however, stayed in the service of their adoptive fatherland by serving in the Inca navy or coast guard. Co-opting the traditional power structures in Oceanesia gave the Inca enormous influence over the population as a whole, and this was especially effective in Tahiti, whose sophisticated political and religious systems were underpinned by the
mana of the king— who ruled as a vassal of the Sapa Inka— and his power to impose
tapu, or prohibitions on particular activities. The Incas eagerly built on this control by erecting visible reminders of their rule. The naval base on Wamp’una Island was both massive and modern. A similar structure on Niue, built by the French on land leased to them by Cusco, was nonetheless an impressive structure that demonstrated the Inca ability to dispense with the land as they saw fit.
In the event that the control was seriously challenged, the Inca retained a justified confidence in the ability of their navy to defeat the Oceanians in a one-on-one fight, and to beat a fighting retreat if the Indians chose to intervene directly.
The flag of the Unitarian Republic of Oceania.
A notable feature of
Harold Stassen’s new government, ensconced in the colonial-era capital of
Saint Anselm [14] since 1949, was that it billed itself as a “Unitarian Republic of Oceania,” not a “Union.” Stassen, meanwhile, abandoned the title of “Chairman” for “Democrat.” These developments indicate a shift in Revolutionary Unitarianism, a self-confident ideology that had been dealt a decimating blow by the War of the Danube. The Republican rhetoric of Stassen’s Oceania, which also cropped up in speeches and internal memoranda, can be read as an effort by authoritarians to associate themselves with the Democratic Unitarian movement, which enjoyed greater success and popularity in Europe at a lower cost in blood and resources. In the short term, however, pretensions to Republicanism had little effect on the internal administration of Oceania, which largely adopted the Indian model.
For Oceania, consolidation meant reconquering the seas as well as the land. After ejecting the last of Scrooge’s democratic nationalist forces from the city of Bedford on New Anglesey [15], Democrat Harold Stassen pledged that all of Britannia’s old Pacific territories would be painted as rightfully Oceanian on domestically-produced maps. The French conquest of Fiji initiated a period of anti-French sentiment in Oceania, which the Turkish, Indian, and Khmer advisors to the government generally encouraged. At their suggestion, Democrat Stassen proclaimed “solidarity with the oppressed peoples under French rule” in an incendiary speech on New Years’ Eve, 1950. Whether this meant only Fiji or all the Pacific Islands under French rule was purposely left unclear.
Harold Stassen, First Democrat of Oceania. He is not yet an infamous man, but who knows what the future holds?
[a] Pitcairn Island.
[0]
Galapagos Islands.
[1] The name for the Lusangese parts of northwestern New Guinea. The name “New Guinea” is generally reserved for the Britannian part.
[2] The zone of the Pacific under Lusangese control; generally coterminous with the region of
Micronesia. Dongnanhai (東南海) means “Southeast Sea” in Chinese.
[3] Palau. Zhudao (珠島) means “pearl island” in Chinese.
[4]
Manila.
[5] The Australian continent.
[6] The Solomon Islands.
[7] New Caledonia.
[8] Nauru.
[9] Vanuatu.
[10] TTL’s term for
Polynesia, but not Micronesia or Melanesia.
[11] Auckland.
[12] Port-Vila, the OTL capital of Vanuatu.
[13] “Gorgonesia” is OTL
Melanesia. The name, based on the
taxonomic name for a family of corals, is a reference to the nearby Coral Sea.
[14] Brisbane. Located on Australia’s eastern side and within easy reach of New Zealand and other Pacific Islands, it’s a good place to put the capital of Oceania.
[15] New Zealand’s North Island.