REDUX: Place In The Sun: What If Italy Joined The Central Powers?
- Thread starter Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth
- Start date
This mutiny sounds bad, hopefully French High Command doesn't try to shell or gas the traitors. That just make things worse since the Artillery men might turn their coats as well.
Damn France is in trouble and the British probably won't help in crushing the mutiny.
Damn France is in trouble and the British probably won't help in crushing the mutiny.
NoMommsen
Kicked
... british soldiers 'shooting' at Poilus ... even if mutineers ... they're still The french heros of the time
The Number One recipe to crush franco-british relations completly for at least the next 2 generations regardless whatever outcome this war will have.
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The bottom is out of the tub. The Freach Army is literally tearing itself apart and the French High Command are going to do something very stupid in trying to crush the mutiny as more and more soldiers turn on their superiors and leaders.
London and what's left of the Allied Powers are going to be horrified and even furious at Paris and even the British will start to see the war is over for them if both their mainland allies start shooting at each other.
London and what's left of the Allied Powers are going to be horrified and even furious at Paris and even the British will start to see the war is over for them if both their mainland allies start shooting at each other.
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Yeah, but openly shelling your own men is not going to go down well, worse, it's gonna carry over to their own troops.
Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth
Banned
I don't see the British Army mutinying here- certainly not British troops fighting one another. French mutineers clashing with the British is another story.
In OTL WW2 the Brits blew up a French fleet and invaded (with the Americans) French North Africa. And while the French grumpiness about the 'Anglos' certainly wasn't irrelevant, it also wasn't that bad.
the difference there is that the French mainland was already fully occupied by the Germans/Collaborators at that point, and the two countries had fought a victorious war together. In this scenario the French still have a functioning (if barely) army in the field, together with the Brits. If the Brittish troops start firing on French troops, no matter what the government wants, French troops are going to start making trouble about it. And so will French citizens probably. Which means the government doesn't really get much of a choice in their actions...if they don't strongly condemn the event, the French might remember their favourite pastime is overthrowing their own government
Three years later, the 11th French Empire is declared....
Followed by, simultaneously, the 4th Paris Commune and the 14th Republic
The biggest strength which France has is that there isn't much to Balkanize. Brittany, French Flanders, and the Basque and Catalan regions, but that leaves France like 85% fine. (No, Occitania becoming independent wouldn't happen without massive intervention and even still it would be difficult)
Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth
Banned
This is 100% correct. It would take a defeat far worse than this one- as in, on the scale of OTL 1940, with the whole country under enemy occupation- for Brittany, the most separatist region, to break away and even that would be a stretch. That's one of the advantages of France's high degree of cultural and political centralisation: there just aren't that many fault lines on which to break the country up.
Chapter XXXI- Another Change In Command
Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth
Banned
Chapter XXXI
Another Change In Command
June 25th, 1916 saw the French Army in its moment of greatest crisis. The mutiny of Regiment d'infantrie 127 and the other regiment sent to subdue them had shut down the Nivelle Offensive, and no one seemed to have any idea of how to stop it. Lucien Chanaris' illegal surrender during the siege of Verdun had handed the great city over to the enemy, and shown the men in the trenches that there was another way out besides dying, while the mutiny at L'empire-aux-Bois a few days before had inspired this. Everyone, from the high command to the mutineers themselves, knew things could only get worse from here. What, Nivelle asked himself, would he do if the next unit he sent against the mutineers rebelled? How long before an entire division was up in arms against him? How could he dream of survival- much less victory- when he could not even trust half of his men? If he did not put down the mutinies within the next few days, they would spread- doubtless with German encouragement- and it would all be over for France.
Nivelle never got the chance to decide. On June 27th, once more desperate to save his position, Joseph Joffre fired the commander of the broken Second Army, promoting the hitherto unknown Auguste Hirschauer to take his place. Hirschauer's last name hadn't stopped him from rising through the first year and a half of war. He went from a brigade of balloons supervised by the Combat Engineers to an Army Corps within months of war breaking out and had served on the Second Army's staff during the Battle of Verdun- only a lucky order from Joffre sending him to Bar-le-Duc had kept him from being trapped during the siege. Hirschauer's name had come up as a contender to replace Petain, and he had spent the last month chafing under Nivelle's command. As the "maniac behind the mutiny" fled out the command post door, towards a long and dismal future fighting insurgents in southern Algeria, Hirschauer seemed as good a choice as any to repair the damage.
Nivelle's superior now, at last, faced defeat. Joseph Joffre had promised War Minister Pierre Roques that if Nivelle failed to liberate Verdun, Roques could "have his head". This was nothing if not honourable, but it doomed the French commander-in-chief. One day after Hirschauer assumed his position, Joffre received a telegram summoning him to Paris. Standing in the War Minister's office that night, with Prime Minister Briand shifting his feet in the corner, Joseph Joffre was relieved of command and transferred to Madagascar, where he had served as a young man. The War Minister expressed his "deep sorrow that measures such as this have become necessary", to which Joffre replied, "and I am sure the Kaiser will say the same thing to you six months hence!"
France needed a new commander-in-chief, and Briand's Cabinet convened the next day to discuss the matter. Someone suggested Philippe Petain, but Roques shot that proposal down: Petain, he said, had let Verdun slip through his fingers. What suggested he would be able to hold all of France? Left unspoken was Roques' telephone call with Joffre at the end of May, where the War Minister had agreed to let Joffre remove Petain from Verdun to preserve his own position. If Petain was made commander-in-chief, he would surely tell the world that, no less than Joffre, Roques had endorsed Nivelle and deserved blame for losing Verdun- while had he, Petain, remained in command, the city would still be French. Petain retained command of Army Group Centre until the Germans unleashed their Spring 1917 Offensive, at which point "the rabbit of Verdun" was given a key assignment supervising troop movements and training camps in Bordeaux. Joffre's successor eventually merged the position of commander-in-chief with control over Army Group Centre, and it was he who oversaw the final collapse of France.
Maurice Sarrail referred to himself after the war as "the man who held Verdun", as during the Battle of the Marne, he had kept German forces out of the city (and helped form the bulge around which Falkenhayn staged his great battle). Such insensitivity won him few friends, and eventually not even Nivelle- certainly not Petain- would associate with him. This was quite a fall for a man who had once been the darling of France's political leadership. His Socialist politics and Freemasonry alienated him from the rest of the officer corps but endeared him to liberal civilians. Sarrail had fought well during the war's opening months, commanding the Third Army to good effect, and became Joffre's successor-designate as commander-in-chief, something which, as he never tired of pointing out after the war, should have entitled him to the position without even considering others. His politics were not the only thing which came between him and his fellow officers. It was an open secret that he coveted Joffre's job, and many resented him for trying to advance his career when his fellow officers were engaged in a struggle for survival. Worse, he enjoyed proposing schemes which, however glorious, would have served no purpose in keeping la patrie safe. Sending an expeditionary force across the enemy Adriatic and through hostile Albania to rescue the Serbian Royal Family, or mounting an amphibious assault on the Turkish Mediterranean Coast would have done wonders for his ego but little for France. Nonetheless, Sarrail had the nominal right to, and correct politics for, the position, and that was enough.
Whether or not it was fast enough to suit his "honour", and no matter what his fellow soldiers thought, the civilian Cabinet voted to appoint him commander-in-chief on the night of June 29th, with Roques as the only abstention.
Just as Nivelle and Petain take all of the blame for the calamities of 1916, so is Sarrail the traditional scapegoat for the defeat of 1917. Yet unlike Nivelle, he was not incompetent. One military historian described Sarrail as "the best man for the task at hand, and simultaneously the worst man for the tasks which were to come." It is doubtful whether the men behind his appointment considered this, but his left-wing politics made Sarrail the perfect choice to quell the Mutinies. His failure to do so stems more from the actions of field commanders who viewed him, as one put it, "as appeasing the rabble", and who took matters into their own hands, often with disastrous effects. Had Sarrail enjoyed a free hand from the beginning, he could have contained the damage far better than he was actually able to, which in turn could have saved France from defeat in 1917. Conversely, had a conservative such as Petain assumed the supreme command, the consensus goes, the mutinies could have crippled France a year earlier.
Yet when Falkenhayn launched his Letzeschlacht in the coming year, Sarrail showed his weaknesses. His performance in the open battles of 1914 notwithstanding, Sarrail had spent most of his war launching small offensives from fixed positions. He knew nothing of open battles in which the enemy held the initiative, while his insistence on running every detail of the defence, to say nothing of his inability to coordinate with the British, all helped cede the battle to Falkenhayn. Yet all that lay in the future. For the moment, Maurice Sarrail had a free hand to stop the cancer of mutiny before it killed France.
The situation had grown worse in the few days since Joffre's fall. General Hirschauer decided that it was no use throwing more men at the mutineers, and that trying to hold the line anywhere near Verdun was hopeless. He thus pulled his loyal forces back to Souilly and waited for the enemy, French or German, to make the next move. While this may have kept more units from flaring into open revolt, it was too late to stop the spirit of mutiny. Shooting every officer in sight and parleying with the enemy was an extreme reaction born of fear and a conviction that one's own leaders were a bigger threat than the enemy. "Incidents of indiscipline" were far harder to root out. On the march to Souilly, soldiers chanted "Souilly, Verdun, finalement Nice, qu'est-ce le guerre etait finis?" and laughed at officers who wrote them up for "defeatism". They also sent a delegation to Hirschauer's headquarters, making clear that they were only obeying him because he was replacing Nivelle; if he ordered them over the top in any suicide attacks, they would refuse. In addition, this delegation forced Hirschauer to pledge not to court-martial anyone involved in the L'empire-aux-Bois mutiny; he signed, but intended to break his word as soon as possible.
Hirschauer was at least reasonable, both by virtue of being new and to beat his predecessor's odious example. Other commanders up and down the front took a far harder line. Much of this stemmed from a basic disagreement with Sarrail. The new commander-in-chief saw the mutinies as symptoms of something much larger: proof that France needed to change direction if it was going to keep its soldiers' loyalty. He called for a complete shift to the defensive and promised reforms to improve conditions for the fighting men. "Patriotism", he told Roques, "can only carry a broken man so far." Sarrail knew what the French soldier was capable of under the right circumstances, and more than anything else, it was his job to help bring those circumstances about. Most of the field commanders, by contrast, saw the mutinies as the work of cowards at best, and enemy agents at worst. When Sarrail sent instructions to treat the mutineers with "caution, and inform them that the High Command will address their needs in due course", many began to wonder whose side he was on. Just as the men in the trenches felt no compulsion to listen when the officers ordered them over the top, the field army commanders felt free to ignore a man who told them to compromise with people they hated.
General Georges Humbert of the Third Army issued an Order of the Day on July 1st, that any man found disobeying any order given by his lawful superiors was subject to arrest and court-martial, with death as the punishment for inciting others to do the same. The Third Army's military judges court-martialled forty-nine men that month, and sentenced twenty to death. Several regiments of General Emile Fayolle's Sixth Army nearly deserted after their commanding officer sent military police to arrest perceived troublemakers. Just like at L'empire-aux-Bois, front-line soldiers forced the MPs back and reserves refused to attack their brothers-in-arms. Like those two regiments, these men sat between the two armies, unwilling to give themselves up to les Boches but equally unwilling to take orders from a man who, if he could not send them to die against the Germans, would send military police to kill them. Down in the Alps, the men of Antoine de Mitry's Ninth Army protested that Italy was not even a real enemy, and demanded that the Government make a separate peace with Rome so they could focus on fighting the German invaders. To the south, General Cordonnier's Eighth Army held firm- no one needed to tell the defenders of Nice how hostile Italy was.
The real effects were not the handful of regiments which needed to be put down by their countrymen, nor even the losses from desertion- nearly two out of every hundred poilus went absent without leave during July and August 1916, barely half of whom were caught- but the damage to national morale. The soldiers had made their total lack of faith in the war, their commanders, and Briand's Government clear. While they were willing to hold the line for the sake of France, they had no intention of going over the top again until their commanders found a way to win that wouldn't get them killed in lots. Despite the best efforts of censors, this attitude infected the civilian population. Not reporting on the mutinies by the middle of July would have required not printing newspapers, and despite the Government's efforts to portray this in the best light possible, the truth soon leaked out. Nor could censors stop soldiers from slipping coded references into their letters- those censors still doing their jobs, who hadn't walked away in solidarity with the fighting men.
French civilians ceased to care during the summer of 1916. Until now, unless they or their loved ones lived in immediate proximity to the front line, the war was a distant affair. Men who had never left Paris or Brest had no reason to fear that German or Italian soldiers would ever march past their homes, while rationing was more of an annoyance than a true privation. But for the danger their sons and brothers went through every day, the war might have been something from an adventure novel- every day, the newspapers brought the latest struggle against the hated invaders and expressed confidence that the country would be free in mere weeks, with heroic Belgium liberated not long after. This attitude had sustained the French through two years of war fought almost entirely on their home soil, but now it began to crack.
Once it became evident that, far from winning, their country was losing day by day, the French people ran out of energy. For the first time, people asked the fatal question: why? Russia was a long way away, and the Germans seemed more than capable of fighting both at once- so why had the Government gone to war in defence of the Tsar? Far from having liberated Alsace-Lorraine in the first weeks of fighting, as four decades of propaganda had promised, French soldiers had been pushed back almost to their own capital. Britain had expanded her colonial empire and demonstrated her naval strength, but had not saved Belgium from the enemy, nor made much of a difference in the West, while driving Italy into the enemy camp. It had faced no consequences for doing so while forcing France to fight on two fronts. Was London the valuable ally everyone had assumed? Above all, if countless offensives and three months at Verdun had brought victory no closer, what was the point? If the men were throwing down their arms and going over to the enemy to save themselves, if the men who knew best said the war was unwinnable, and the Government did its utmost to hide that knowledge, it proved that the war was unwinnable. The sooner it ended, no matter the cost, the greater the chances of anyone's son coming home.
With no end to the crisis at the front in sight, whispers began crossing Paris in August 1916. These were first confined to the leadership of far-left parties, which had cooperated with the Government thus far, but soon spread. If the military would not do what it needed to, the civilians would take matters into their own hands. If that helped the enemy, if it made prosecuting the war effort more difficult, then so be it. Perhaps then the Government would listen.
Paris Commune 3.0?
Meanwhile, von Falkenhayn's lamenting he doesn't have a cigar to smoke while watching France burn.
Meanwhile, von Falkenhayn's lamenting he doesn't have a cigar to smoke while watching France burn.
Honestly plausible enough to consider. Paris always has been a bit... out of step with a lot of France.
Is Albania hostile in this timeline? That could set up an interesting situation where Italy supports Albanian claims on Kosovo from Serbia to enlarge their protectorate. I can't see Bulgaria opposing this either, since it weakens Serbia and creates a buffer before Macedonia