Chapter 26 - The United Provinces and the Great War
When news of the outbreak of war first reached La Plata, the government paid it little mind: tensions had been running high for years now, and some even suspected that the declaration may yet remain a formality while the great powers negotiated. They had heard of the ultimatums of course, and there had even been rumors of mass mobilizations soon after, but the general consensus was that war was too expensive and too risky for any of the involved powers to really accept it.
But soon the ultimatums escalated, the demands became too unreasonable, and soon war was the only option: what had started as a petty argument over a minor squabble in a peripheral theater suddenly activated the criss-crossing web of alliances in Europe, and by the end of 1914, tens of thousands lied dead on the freezing mud of northern France and the Russian plains. As the new year began, the realization that this was a new kind of conflict was beginning to set in.
As the optimism of the pre-war period recedes, so too do many of the things that prop up the Platine boom: easy credit from London dries up, along with orders for Platine industrial goods as the British reorient their imports from consumer goods to the raw materials it needs to feed its population and war machine. To make matters worse, there is also a sharp drop off in British, French and German industrial exports, severely disrupting Platine supply chains and sending prices soaring.
The recession that follows is as biting as it is sudden, with hundreds of thousands of jobs destroyed in a matter of days and thousands of factories going silent for the first time in years. But as the machinery of war kicked into overdrive in Europe and the war expanded to the Alps and the Caucasus, it breathed new life into the Platine economy, fueled by the old world’s insatiable appetite for Platine grain, meat, oil and steel. The cities of Collao and the Paraná basin are soon booming again, with whole ramshackle neighborhoods springing up overnight.
Although those involved have little inkling of its significance, this would represent a sea change in the Platine economy, as the British share of the Platine market would never recover its pre-war heights. While some of that share is occupied by an influx of American capitals and products starting in 1915, the war proves to be a golden opportunity for the industrialists and financiers of Chuquisaca and Buenos Aires. Some of the country’s largest corporations, like BAC and Compañia Uruguay, trace their origins to the spree of mergers and acquisitions sparked by the Great War.
But just as the great corporate titans of the United Provinces trace their origins to the upheaval of the Great War, the same is true for the Platine labor and student movements, both of which expanded at breakneck speed during the war and would take on a whole new dimension at the war’s end. Union membership exploded with the influx into the industrial cities of the littoral and Collao, and as the 1914-15 recession gave way to a 4 year boom that would swell the ranks of the Platine middle class, the subsequent influx of new students to the university system kicked off a wave of new student unions.
But as Platine society convulses in the Great War’s shadow, the Platine military is reacting with horror at the reports trickling back from its volunteers serving in Europe. Those volunteers came in two varieties in 1916: pilots from the recently-founded Naval Air Wing serving in the French front, and Italian descendents serving in the Alpine meat grinder against Austro-Hungarian forces. Both described campaigns that sent shockwaves up the line of command as the realization that long standing military doctrine has been rendered obsolete in the short time since the war began.
The tales of horrendous casualties for meagre gains send the military leadership reeling, but the news that trickles down to the general population is far more sanitized: the Platine press treats the war as a distant and epic tale of hardship and struggle, with pulpy accounts of individual acts of heroism become instant best sellers across the country. As inconsequential as those acts of heroism are in the grand scheme of the war, readers can’t get enough of them.
It would take formal Platine entry into the war for the reality of the carnage at the front to penetrate into the public consciousness, followed soon after by an uptick in popularity of memoirs written by returning Platine volunteers as the sense of general malaise and disillusion caused by the Great War spread to across the United Provinces. Ironically, it was the very popularity of the war stories that started the United Provinces down the path towards a war against Germany, as those tales tended to accompany news of U-Boat attacks against ships plying Platine wares, leading to a formal declaration of war by mid-1917 alongside other New World allies of the Entente like the United States, Colombia and Brazil for similar grievances over unrestricted submarine warfare.
Arriving too late to slow the collapse of the Russian war effort, which would buckle in the face of a concerted German offensive in the summer and fall of 1917, the impact of New World soldiers on the Western Front would only be slightly more pronounced. The soldiers arriving at the French front would be little more than fresh stock for the meat grinder, more valuable for their supplies than their enthusiasm, but the Platine mountain regiments from the Collao would find themselves thrown into the thickest of the fighting as Italy’s Isonzo campaign reached a crescendo.
When the first Platine troops arrived in Genoa and made their way to the front, they were forced to adapt quickly to an indecisive high command and a fraught supply line. But they brought with them two valuable advantages that would prove decisive in short order: traditionally stationed in the Andes, their traditional use of coca leaves to stave off altitude sickness made them valuable scouts and lookouts in the Austrian Alps, while Platine emphasis on autonomy at the squadron level meant that the isolated units were able to respond quickly to changing circumstances.
A daring German raid attempting to infiltrate behind Italian lines was turned back on the brink of success as Platine units sounded the alarm and fought back, and with the German attack repulsed, the Austrian lines would soon collapse when faced with a similar push the next day. Although unable and unwilling to press their advantage further into the Tyrolean Alps, the defeat would be a harbinger of even more problems for the Central Powers: troops liberated by the collapse of the Russian war effort suddenly had to rush south to shore up Habsburg defenses, while German plans for a spring offensive in the West had to be adapted due to the sudden need to send troops south.
By the spring of 1918, the position of the Central Powers was quickly growing untenable: German efforts were spread too thin by their need to sustain not just their own defenses in Northern France, but the wholesale assumption of the leadership of the Alpine front as well. With the certainty that the scales would only tip further in favor of the Entente as time wore on, Germany was forced to act despite finding their advantage in troops on the Western Front far smaller than they had originally envisioned, and thus began the Kaiserschlacht.
But by June of 1918, the offensive had not just ground to a halt, it had been repulsed, and soon the Entente’s counteroffensive was pushing past German trenches nearly 2 years old. Even the formidable Hindenburg Line would be breached before the summer was out, and as the Italian front threatened to collapse just as spectacularly, the Central Powers capitulated before the Entente’s armies could storm across the borders of Germany or capture Vienna.
On November 1st, 1918, the war officially comes to an end with an armistice signed at Versailles. As celebrations break out across the globe, including a tremendous parade in the streets of La Plata, the Entente gets to work on designing the post-war world.