TL-191: Filling the Gaps
- Thread starter Craigo
- Start date
JoeMulk
Banned
Adlai Stevenson was elected president of the United States in 1956. Following the second great war voters had gone through a period of hesitancy in terms of trusting the Socialist Party which was largely blamed for having gotten the US into the war by negotiating a deal with Jake Fetherston. The epoch of near Socialist collapse was in 1948 when James Curley came in a distant third to Harold Strassen who preformed well in the traditionally Socialist stronghold of the midwest and Thomas Dewey who was re-elected in a near landslide. Both the Democrats and Republicans ran as hardliners in terms of putting down the repeated instances of violence in the Confederacy and Utah. However, the Socialists slowly rebounded following an economic slowdown and general workers strikes in 1951 which led to the passage of several unfriendly strike laws. In 1952, when many had suspected the Socialist Party of possibly fading the way the Whigs and Republicans had in the past W Averall Harriman very nearly defeated Harry Truman.
In 1956, Stevenson defeated Truman in his bid for re-election with the Stevenson/Humphery ticket. The Socialists had finally come around to being foreign policy hawks, and had even managed to outflank the Democrats on the issue of German incursion into Mexico which they attacked Truman's complicity for violating the Monroe Doctrine. Stevenson became one of the most progressive presidents in American, passing nationwide rent control laws, Universal Health Care, finally implementing the national insurance plan which previous Socialist Presidents had failed to achieve and universal college funding. Perhaps the biggest restructuring of society came in 1958 when President Stevenson pushed through a plan to end universal conscription and switch the draft to a random system, which had been a hallmark of US society since the Remembrance years. In 1961, also for the first time in eighty years the US capital was relocated to Washington DC. President Humphery was elected in 1964 and attempted to continue the Stevenson legacy, but was tragically overshadowed by the continuing violence in Mexico, explosion of the students movement and increasing jingoism on the right following the 1968 German moon landing of Gunther Rail. In 1968 he was defeated by Barry Goldwater in a narrow election who was himself defeated by Ralph Nader (leader of the new gaurd of the Socialist Party) in 1972.
In 1956, Stevenson defeated Truman in his bid for re-election with the Stevenson/Humphery ticket. The Socialists had finally come around to being foreign policy hawks, and had even managed to outflank the Democrats on the issue of German incursion into Mexico which they attacked Truman's complicity for violating the Monroe Doctrine. Stevenson became one of the most progressive presidents in American, passing nationwide rent control laws, Universal Health Care, finally implementing the national insurance plan which previous Socialist Presidents had failed to achieve and universal college funding. Perhaps the biggest restructuring of society came in 1958 when President Stevenson pushed through a plan to end universal conscription and switch the draft to a random system, which had been a hallmark of US society since the Remembrance years. In 1961, also for the first time in eighty years the US capital was relocated to Washington DC. President Humphery was elected in 1964 and attempted to continue the Stevenson legacy, but was tragically overshadowed by the continuing violence in Mexico, explosion of the students movement and increasing jingoism on the right following the 1968 German moon landing of Gunther Rail. In 1968 he was defeated by Barry Goldwater in a narrow election who was himself defeated by Ralph Nader (leader of the new gaurd of the Socialist Party) in 1972.
George C. Marshall, 1880-1953
Born on the eve of the Second Mexican War, George Cathcart Marshall, squire of an old Virginia family, lost his father to that conflict when George Sr. was killed in a meaningless cavalry skirmish in the final weeks of the war. Determined to see her son follow in his father’s footsteps, his mother pushed Marshall to attend Virginia Military Institute, where he was a disinterested student. He graduated in the middle of the pack in 1901, and was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Confederate Army the same year.
Postings in Sequoyah, Cuba, and Texas followed, and in 1907 Marshall was promoted to first lieutenant and assigned to the War Department’s Militia Office, which oversaw the readiness of the various state guards. In 1913 he was promoted to Captain and given an infantry company in the Army of Northern Virginia’s Stonewall Brigade. When the war came the next year, he participated in the wild ride of the Confederate left wing, which swept out of the Shenandoah Valley and executed a great wheel through Maryland and Pennsylvania to the Susquehanna River. He was twice mentioned in dispatches in 1914, and in January 191515 he was promoted to major and assigned to brigade headquarters.
Marshall remained with the brigade throughout the slow retreat of 1915, in September of that year he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and assigned as the brigade’s executive officer. This billet was short-lived, however; following the outbreak of the Red Rebellion in October, he was detached to the Mississippi State Guard to direct the militia’s activities against the rebels in that state. Though he performed effectively in that role, Mississippi was a backwater even in good times, and his success went unnoticed in Richmond. His career languished, and when he was finally returned to the Army in 1916, it was in the War Department’s logistics bureau.
He lobbied for and eventually received a return to the Stonewall Brigade in early 1917, but by this time his old unit was unrecognizable, having suffered over 200% casualties in two and a half years of war. Marshall was one of the officers responsible for conducting the defense in depth of Northern Virginia during the final US offensives; the Confederates mitigated the Union advantage in troops and firepower by leaving their forward lines nearly empty and ambushing the Yankees in open country. The resulting slog cost the Northern armies dearly, but could not reverse the tide. When the order to seek an armistice came down in July 1917, Marshall volunteered to signal the cease-fire in his division’s sector. The Stonewall Brigade stacked arms and was deactivated in August.
The Confederate Army shrank drastically after the war, but Marshall was one of the fortunate few to remain in service, at his old post in the Militia Office. But promotion came even harder in the new army than it had in old, as Chief of Staff General Jeb Stuart Jr. lavished favors on men with more distinguished family names, like Forrest, Breckinridge, Pickett, and Taylor. Marshall was not promoted to full Colonel until 1927, and didn’t receive a star until 1933, the same year that Jake Featherston was elected.
Marshall had always been rigidly apolitical, seeing it as no part of a soldier’s business. When pressed, he would answer that his mother was a Whig, his father a Radical Liberal, and he was an Episcopalian. This may have cost him in the Army, whose Whig hierarchy had stood foursquare against the Freedom Party. But with Featherston’s ascent, Marshall’s star ironically began to rise also: as one of the few senior officers that did not openly oppose the new President, the War Department under Secretary James Byrnes came to regard him as a favorite. He was promoted to Major General in 1935 and assigned to oversee the expansion granted by US President Herbert Hoover, in response to the black uprisings. And when Jeb Stuart Jr., Featherston’s old nemesis, was finally pushed out in 1936, the President reached down the seniority list and chose Marshall as his replacement.
As Chief of Staff, Marshall’s genius for planning and organization proved invaluable to the Confederate military buildup - without his efforts, it’s unlikely that Featherston could have unleashed his war machine as early as 1941. But bloodshed and destruction that he had witnessed in Virginia had removed the shine from war in Marshall’s eyes. After four years in office, with the prospect of war now almost certain, he presented a plan for a series of defensive fortifications in Northern Virginia; to build this Marshall Line, he proposed to slash the barrel production budget in half. Marshall was unceremoniously dropped in favor of Nathan Bedford Forrest III, a forty year old son and grandson of cavalry officers who had become the interwar period’s leading authority on armored warfare.
Forrest, while unsuited to administration, was more than capable of fighting a war with the army that Marshall had built - it was his plan that led the Army of Kentucky on a surprise offensive into Ohio and to the banks of Lake Erie. But when President Al Smith shocked the Cofnederate high command by defying a demand to surrender, Featherston and Forrest needed a new plan. Marshall, who had retired to the family farm in Virginia while “awaiting orders,” requested a field command, and Forrest persuaded Featherston (who had grown to dislike and distrust Marshall) to grant it.
While Operation Coalscuttle was Featherston’s idea and Patton’s command, it was Forrest and Marshall, working in harmony, who planned it. Marshall volunteered to be placed in command of the fictitious “Army of the Valley,” fifteen divisions on paper which in reality consisted of the general, his headquarters, engineers to create a fake buildup, and a few radio operators to create communications traffic. The US took the bait and expected a Confederate thrust into Maryland and Pennsylvania a la 1914, and were unprepared when George Patton re-appeared in Ohio at the head of a reinforced Army of Kentucky. Featherston was heard to chortle that “The damnyankees are so stupid they fell for the same trick twice.”
With Patton driving to the east, Marshall was rewarded for his successful deception with command of the Army of Kentucky’s Command B (Confederate field armies were anomalously large, equivalent in size to army groups in the US - another wrinkle which tended to confuse Yankee intelligence). His troops were responsible for checking a Union counterattack out of the Appalachian Mountains at the Battle of Steubenville. When the Army of Kentucky descended into Pittsburgh, Marshall, like all Confederate commanders in that city, became intimately familiar with the horrors of urban warfare. Commanding the right, southern wing of Confederate forces, his troops penetrated further east than any other unit before the winter ended the advance.
Marshall, like most of his peers, soon recognized the futility of continuing the offensive (strategically, the US had suffered devastating losses, and Pittsburgh itself had been virtually destroyed). Unlike his peers, Marshall had the courage to say so to President Featherston. He was promptly relieved of Command B and assigned to command of the three Mexican divisions borrowed from Emperor Francisco Jose II. (Alvaro Obregon, the Mexican-Confederate Freedom Party chieftain who had been placed at the head of these troops out of respect to the Mexicans’ dignity, received Command B.) Marshall suddenly found himself in desperate need of the rudimentary Spanish he had picked up in Cuba and Texas so many decades before. Linguistic difficulties bedeviled Mexican operations in North America to the very end, here to no greater disaster: A misunderstanding between a local Mexican commander and the sullen locals in Connellsville, south of Pittsburgh, sparked a short-lived uprising which nevertheless forced Marshall to transfer several units out of the front line to that vicinity. He had unfortunate timing, as US General Irving Morrell had planned his counter-offensive to coincide with the blizzard that hit the next day. The confusion in the Mexican lines ended any hope of effective resistance, and the three divisions were virtually destroyed. Marshall himself was captured at Uniontown, the highest-ranking Confederate officer to suffer such an indignity in that country’s history.
The disgraced general ended the war in a US prison camp, and in 1944 he was put before the war-crimes tribunals. He was acquitted of all charges, as there was no evidence that the troops under his command had broken the laws of war as a matter of policy, or that he was aware of any crimes against humanity. He was released and returned to Virginia, where his home was now American soil for the first time in nearly a century.
Marshall broke with many of his colleagues by advocating a full and peaceful reunion of the North and South. He directed many reconstruction projects in Virginia, encouraged the formation of local advisory councils, appeared before the US Congress in 1947 to speak in favor of greater aid to the defeated South. He was appointed head of the Civilian Bureau in his native state in 1947, endorsed President Dewey’s re-election campaign in 1948, and joined the Democratic party himself.
In 1953 George Cathcart Marshall was shot and killed in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, during a keynote speech at the opening of a local war memorial. The gunman, a former Freedom Party Guard, was immediately shot and killed by a former American officer who had brought his service pistol to the event. Marshall was buried with full military honors near the grounds of the Virginia Military Institute. His grave was vandalized later that year, and the perpetrator was drummed out of the school. It is now a duty of all cadets to periodically serve guard duty on the cemetery grounds.
Born on the eve of the Second Mexican War, George Cathcart Marshall, squire of an old Virginia family, lost his father to that conflict when George Sr. was killed in a meaningless cavalry skirmish in the final weeks of the war. Determined to see her son follow in his father’s footsteps, his mother pushed Marshall to attend Virginia Military Institute, where he was a disinterested student. He graduated in the middle of the pack in 1901, and was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Confederate Army the same year.
Postings in Sequoyah, Cuba, and Texas followed, and in 1907 Marshall was promoted to first lieutenant and assigned to the War Department’s Militia Office, which oversaw the readiness of the various state guards. In 1913 he was promoted to Captain and given an infantry company in the Army of Northern Virginia’s Stonewall Brigade. When the war came the next year, he participated in the wild ride of the Confederate left wing, which swept out of the Shenandoah Valley and executed a great wheel through Maryland and Pennsylvania to the Susquehanna River. He was twice mentioned in dispatches in 1914, and in January 191515 he was promoted to major and assigned to brigade headquarters.
Marshall remained with the brigade throughout the slow retreat of 1915, in September of that year he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and assigned as the brigade’s executive officer. This billet was short-lived, however; following the outbreak of the Red Rebellion in October, he was detached to the Mississippi State Guard to direct the militia’s activities against the rebels in that state. Though he performed effectively in that role, Mississippi was a backwater even in good times, and his success went unnoticed in Richmond. His career languished, and when he was finally returned to the Army in 1916, it was in the War Department’s logistics bureau.
He lobbied for and eventually received a return to the Stonewall Brigade in early 1917, but by this time his old unit was unrecognizable, having suffered over 200% casualties in two and a half years of war. Marshall was one of the officers responsible for conducting the defense in depth of Northern Virginia during the final US offensives; the Confederates mitigated the Union advantage in troops and firepower by leaving their forward lines nearly empty and ambushing the Yankees in open country. The resulting slog cost the Northern armies dearly, but could not reverse the tide. When the order to seek an armistice came down in July 1917, Marshall volunteered to signal the cease-fire in his division’s sector. The Stonewall Brigade stacked arms and was deactivated in August.
The Confederate Army shrank drastically after the war, but Marshall was one of the fortunate few to remain in service, at his old post in the Militia Office. But promotion came even harder in the new army than it had in old, as Chief of Staff General Jeb Stuart Jr. lavished favors on men with more distinguished family names, like Forrest, Breckinridge, Pickett, and Taylor. Marshall was not promoted to full Colonel until 1927, and didn’t receive a star until 1933, the same year that Jake Featherston was elected.
Marshall had always been rigidly apolitical, seeing it as no part of a soldier’s business. When pressed, he would answer that his mother was a Whig, his father a Radical Liberal, and he was an Episcopalian. This may have cost him in the Army, whose Whig hierarchy had stood foursquare against the Freedom Party. But with Featherston’s ascent, Marshall’s star ironically began to rise also: as one of the few senior officers that did not openly oppose the new President, the War Department under Secretary James Byrnes came to regard him as a favorite. He was promoted to Major General in 1935 and assigned to oversee the expansion granted by US President Herbert Hoover, in response to the black uprisings. And when Jeb Stuart Jr., Featherston’s old nemesis, was finally pushed out in 1936, the President reached down the seniority list and chose Marshall as his replacement.
As Chief of Staff, Marshall’s genius for planning and organization proved invaluable to the Confederate military buildup - without his efforts, it’s unlikely that Featherston could have unleashed his war machine as early as 1941. But bloodshed and destruction that he had witnessed in Virginia had removed the shine from war in Marshall’s eyes. After four years in office, with the prospect of war now almost certain, he presented a plan for a series of defensive fortifications in Northern Virginia; to build this Marshall Line, he proposed to slash the barrel production budget in half. Marshall was unceremoniously dropped in favor of Nathan Bedford Forrest III, a forty year old son and grandson of cavalry officers who had become the interwar period’s leading authority on armored warfare.
Forrest, while unsuited to administration, was more than capable of fighting a war with the army that Marshall had built - it was his plan that led the Army of Kentucky on a surprise offensive into Ohio and to the banks of Lake Erie. But when President Al Smith shocked the Cofnederate high command by defying a demand to surrender, Featherston and Forrest needed a new plan. Marshall, who had retired to the family farm in Virginia while “awaiting orders,” requested a field command, and Forrest persuaded Featherston (who had grown to dislike and distrust Marshall) to grant it.
While Operation Coalscuttle was Featherston’s idea and Patton’s command, it was Forrest and Marshall, working in harmony, who planned it. Marshall volunteered to be placed in command of the fictitious “Army of the Valley,” fifteen divisions on paper which in reality consisted of the general, his headquarters, engineers to create a fake buildup, and a few radio operators to create communications traffic. The US took the bait and expected a Confederate thrust into Maryland and Pennsylvania a la 1914, and were unprepared when George Patton re-appeared in Ohio at the head of a reinforced Army of Kentucky. Featherston was heard to chortle that “The damnyankees are so stupid they fell for the same trick twice.”
With Patton driving to the east, Marshall was rewarded for his successful deception with command of the Army of Kentucky’s Command B (Confederate field armies were anomalously large, equivalent in size to army groups in the US - another wrinkle which tended to confuse Yankee intelligence). His troops were responsible for checking a Union counterattack out of the Appalachian Mountains at the Battle of Steubenville. When the Army of Kentucky descended into Pittsburgh, Marshall, like all Confederate commanders in that city, became intimately familiar with the horrors of urban warfare. Commanding the right, southern wing of Confederate forces, his troops penetrated further east than any other unit before the winter ended the advance.
Marshall, like most of his peers, soon recognized the futility of continuing the offensive (strategically, the US had suffered devastating losses, and Pittsburgh itself had been virtually destroyed). Unlike his peers, Marshall had the courage to say so to President Featherston. He was promptly relieved of Command B and assigned to command of the three Mexican divisions borrowed from Emperor Francisco Jose II. (Alvaro Obregon, the Mexican-Confederate Freedom Party chieftain who had been placed at the head of these troops out of respect to the Mexicans’ dignity, received Command B.) Marshall suddenly found himself in desperate need of the rudimentary Spanish he had picked up in Cuba and Texas so many decades before. Linguistic difficulties bedeviled Mexican operations in North America to the very end, here to no greater disaster: A misunderstanding between a local Mexican commander and the sullen locals in Connellsville, south of Pittsburgh, sparked a short-lived uprising which nevertheless forced Marshall to transfer several units out of the front line to that vicinity. He had unfortunate timing, as US General Irving Morrell had planned his counter-offensive to coincide with the blizzard that hit the next day. The confusion in the Mexican lines ended any hope of effective resistance, and the three divisions were virtually destroyed. Marshall himself was captured at Uniontown, the highest-ranking Confederate officer to suffer such an indignity in that country’s history.
The disgraced general ended the war in a US prison camp, and in 1944 he was put before the war-crimes tribunals. He was acquitted of all charges, as there was no evidence that the troops under his command had broken the laws of war as a matter of policy, or that he was aware of any crimes against humanity. He was released and returned to Virginia, where his home was now American soil for the first time in nearly a century.
Marshall broke with many of his colleagues by advocating a full and peaceful reunion of the North and South. He directed many reconstruction projects in Virginia, encouraged the formation of local advisory councils, appeared before the US Congress in 1947 to speak in favor of greater aid to the defeated South. He was appointed head of the Civilian Bureau in his native state in 1947, endorsed President Dewey’s re-election campaign in 1948, and joined the Democratic party himself.
In 1953 George Cathcart Marshall was shot and killed in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, during a keynote speech at the opening of a local war memorial. The gunman, a former Freedom Party Guard, was immediately shot and killed by a former American officer who had brought his service pistol to the event. Marshall was buried with full military honors near the grounds of the Virginia Military Institute. His grave was vandalized later that year, and the perpetrator was drummed out of the school. It is now a duty of all cadets to periodically serve guard duty on the cemetery grounds.
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Yay! It's back!
Great work as always, Craigo
Thanks.
I'm not sure how I turned that digit upside down in my head. Ironically, as I was writing I was thinking that an earlier date would have made more sense. I'll edit.
US Army Commanding Generals/Chiefs of Staff
1841-1861 Winfield Scott
1861-1862 George McClellan
1862-1865 Henry Halleck
1865-1868 John Dix
1868-1870 George Stoneman
1870-1873 Montgomery Meigs
1873-1881 Rufus Ingalls
1881-1883 William Rosecrans
1883-1889 Henry Hunt
1889-1900 Emory Upton
1900-1915 Charles Francis Adams Jr.
1915-1921 Leonard Wood
1921-1927 Hunter Liggett
1927-1930 Tasker Bliss
1930-1933 Preston Blair
1933-1940 Samuel Sturgis Jr.
1940-1945 James McNair
1945-19?? William Mitchell
The modern history of the United States Army has seen it led by nearly twenty men - fighters, bureaucrats, geniuses, and mediocrities. At the time of the Civil War the old war horse Winfield Scott, hero of 1812 and Mexico, was still in his post as Commanding General despite his age and severe weight problem. He was soon eased out in favor of the dashing young engineer George McClellan, whose meticulous administration and boundless self-regard could not save him from disaster at Robert E. Lee's hands on the banks of the Susquehanna in October 1862.
McClellan, who was in a state of near shock for several days after his defeat at Camp Hill, resigned that same week and was replaced by Henry Halleck, an "intellectual" soldier with few martial qualities. As it turned out, a fighting spirit would be unneeded, as combat ended everywhere before the year was out. Halleck remained as Commanding General until Lincoln's defeat by Horatio Seymour, at which point it became politically necessary for him to retire. He was replaced by the elderly John Dix, who, as a War Democrat with no combat record, was well-received by the Seymour Administration.
Dix left after a few short years due to ill-health, and Seymour, facing problems with Confederate raiders, Indian bandits, and Irish filibsuters, appointed the cavalry general George Stoneman, one of the few high-ranking officers to escape the battles of the War of Secession with his reputation intact. (Hooker, Burnside, and Porter, as McClellan's chief lieutenants at Camp Hill, had been destroyed alongside their chief and had all left the Army; Pope was still in exile in the West, and Grant had resigned, for a second time, under a cloud of drunkenness.) Stoneman aggressively prosecuted the Indian Wars in the West, unleashing Pope, Ord, and Rosecrans against the Sioux, Kiowas, and Lakota. But Thomas Bayard of Delaware, who was virtually a Southerner himself, became President in 1869, and suddenly an aggressive general was not to the White House's liking. Stoneman was forced to resign, and he was replaced by Quartermaster-General Montgomery Meigs, who was also of Southern birth.
When Bayard was replaced by the more assertive George Woodward, a southern-born Commanding General was no longer palatable, and Meigs was replaced by Rufus Ingalls (who had earlier succeeded Meigs as Quartermaster-General). Ingalls served for nearly a decade, before the Republican victory of 1881 brought sweeping changes to the American government. Administrators and bureaucrats were out, and fighting soldiers were in again. James Blaine appointed William Rosecrans, fresh off his victory at Wounded Knee, to the post soon after his inauguration, and the two of them blundered through the Second Mexican War together.
While Rosecrans was tough and determined, he lacked other qualities necessary to lead a large army, like organizational ability and strategic vision. Unlike many such men, he was acutely aware of his flaws, and following the US's defeat he accepted the advice of German officer Alfred von Schlieffen and began implementing a general staff system for the US Army.
Rosecrans did not survive long enough to complete his work - Blaine threw him to the wolves in 1883. He was replaced by Henry Hunt, chief of the US artillery. While Hunt had proven himself exceptional in this role in both wars, he was deeply conservative and proved resistant to the changes that the reformers in the Army were pushing. It was not until Thomas Reed's re-election in 1889 that the reformers gained enough political capital to force Hunt into retirement and elevate Emory Upton. A wunderkind who had served ably in the infantry, cavalry, and artillery, Upton more than made up in imagination what he lacked in social skills. Shortly after his appointment he became the first official Chief of Staff when President Reed signed the General Staff Act into law.
Upton served for over a decade, years that saw the US Army come to resemble the Imperial German Army more and more. But the reform spirit slowly died, and when Upton retired in 1900, his seat was taken by Charles Francis Adams Jr., another hidebound traditionalist. Thanks to inertia and the protection of his brother Henry, the Speaker of the House, Adams remained Chief of Staff for nearly fifteen years. He might have broken Winfield Scott's record, were it not for the untimely intervention of the Great War.
When the US's plans went awry in 1914, Adams, who was nearly eighty years old, proved unable to adapt. President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of War Elihu Root (himself seventy years old) took steps to bypass him by issuing orders directly to field army commanders and the deputy chief of staff. Adams finally bowed to the enormous political pressure and retired on January 1, 1915, having been virtually absent from US decision-making for three months.
To the consternation of many and the surprise of few, TR installed his protege, Leonard Wood, as Chief of Staff. This proved to be a brilliant choice, as Wood, a progressive medical doctor who had come of age outside the Regular Army hierarchy, was an innovative and adroit commander. One of the few blemishes on Wood's record was his insistence on using barrels as infantry-support, rather as offensive weapons themselves.
Wood led the US to its first vicory in a war in over seventy years, and was rewarded with a promotion to four-star General, only the second in American history. Ever loyal, he retired when Roosevelt left office in 1921. Upton Sinclair, the first Socialist President, reached out to the suspicious Army by promoting one of its ablest combat leaders, Hunter Liggett, to its highest post. Liggett played the good soldier and implemented Sinclair's budget cuts, though he was deeply suspicious of the Administration's military sense.
Liggett planned to retire after Sinclair's re-election in 1925, but the Canadian uprising interrupted his plans. He saw the rebellion through to the end and left the Army in 1926 (ironically, the first year since 1917 that saw an increase in the military budget). Sinclair originally wished to promote Benjamin Cardozo, who had been field commander during the Canadian rebellion. But Cardozo's Jewish heritage and Socialist politics proved to be at least one obstacle too many, and Cardozo chose to retire civilian life. Tasker Bliss, the next senior major general, was chosen almost by default.
But Bliss, who had himself planned to retire, was well into his seventies at the time of his appointment, and Scott and Adams had set a poor precedent for top commanders of such advancing years. His tenure was meant to be a stopgap until the new President of 19129 could choose his own Chief of Staff, but the Collapse struck early that year, and Hosea Blackford found Tasker Bliss to be among the least of his problems. Bliss solved the problem of his own accord by dropping dead in 1930, forcing Blackford to choose a replacement. The President appointed Gist Blair, of the bellicose Missouri clan, the final commander of Tenth Army before its deactivation in 1918.
But Blair was also seventy in 1930, a problem that was magnified when President-elect Calvin Coolidge passed away in 1933. New President Herbert Hoover, deeply aware of his own age and the perception that the country was being run by a cadre of half-dead old men, asked Blair to retire upon his inauguration, and he reached down into the ranks to appoint Samuel Sturgis - at a youthful 40, already Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers. (Hoover had become acquainted with then Colonel Sturgis when the latter was seconded to the United States Construction Corps during Hoover's reconstruction of Washington, D.C. Hoover had later requested that Brigadier General Sturgis oversee the building of the massive Roosevelt Dam on the border between New Mexico and Nevada.)
Sturgis capably handled the slow military buildup begun Blackford and continued under Hoover and Al Smith (though it was nothing on the scale that George Marshall was building south of the border). But when war began to loom again in 1940, Al Smith, seeking to protect his flanks from Democratic attacks, decided that a combat soldier was needed at the top. James McNair, who had begun the Great War commanding an artillery battery and ended it at the head of a division, was chosen. McNair, as an artilleryman, appreciated the value of firepower, and supported the efforts to rebuild the US's barrel forces. But like many contemporaries, he still saw barrels primarily as infantry-support, and he frustrated attempts to form armored divisions such as those in the Confederate Army.
The events of the Second Great War were to prove McNair wrong, as the Confederates made devastating use of massed barrel attacks to punch holes in the US's defensive lines early in the war. Generals got the ax by the handful in 1941, and McNair would have logically been expected to join his subordinates on the chopping block. But Smith's death in early 1942 changed the political calculus, as new President Charlie LaFollette didn't want to further shake the nation's confidence by firing its top soldier. McNair continued in his post despite diminished influence, watching impotently as his rival Irving Morrell eclipsed him with brilliant victories in the field.
McNair retired with the administration in early 1945, and was replaced by Billy Mitchell. Though an able soldier and senior general who had proved his worth as commander of the Northern Front (comprising the American and Quebecois occupation troops in Canada), he was likely picked to spare Tom Dewey the dilemma of choosing between Irving Morrell and Daniel MacArthur.
1841-1861 Winfield Scott
1861-1862 George McClellan
1862-1865 Henry Halleck
1865-1868 John Dix
1868-1870 George Stoneman
1870-1873 Montgomery Meigs
1873-1881 Rufus Ingalls
1881-1883 William Rosecrans
1883-1889 Henry Hunt
1889-1900 Emory Upton
1900-1915 Charles Francis Adams Jr.
1915-1921 Leonard Wood
1921-1927 Hunter Liggett
1927-1930 Tasker Bliss
1930-1933 Preston Blair
1933-1940 Samuel Sturgis Jr.
1940-1945 James McNair
1945-19?? William Mitchell
The modern history of the United States Army has seen it led by nearly twenty men - fighters, bureaucrats, geniuses, and mediocrities. At the time of the Civil War the old war horse Winfield Scott, hero of 1812 and Mexico, was still in his post as Commanding General despite his age and severe weight problem. He was soon eased out in favor of the dashing young engineer George McClellan, whose meticulous administration and boundless self-regard could not save him from disaster at Robert E. Lee's hands on the banks of the Susquehanna in October 1862.
McClellan, who was in a state of near shock for several days after his defeat at Camp Hill, resigned that same week and was replaced by Henry Halleck, an "intellectual" soldier with few martial qualities. As it turned out, a fighting spirit would be unneeded, as combat ended everywhere before the year was out. Halleck remained as Commanding General until Lincoln's defeat by Horatio Seymour, at which point it became politically necessary for him to retire. He was replaced by the elderly John Dix, who, as a War Democrat with no combat record, was well-received by the Seymour Administration.
Dix left after a few short years due to ill-health, and Seymour, facing problems with Confederate raiders, Indian bandits, and Irish filibsuters, appointed the cavalry general George Stoneman, one of the few high-ranking officers to escape the battles of the War of Secession with his reputation intact. (Hooker, Burnside, and Porter, as McClellan's chief lieutenants at Camp Hill, had been destroyed alongside their chief and had all left the Army; Pope was still in exile in the West, and Grant had resigned, for a second time, under a cloud of drunkenness.) Stoneman aggressively prosecuted the Indian Wars in the West, unleashing Pope, Ord, and Rosecrans against the Sioux, Kiowas, and Lakota. But Thomas Bayard of Delaware, who was virtually a Southerner himself, became President in 1869, and suddenly an aggressive general was not to the White House's liking. Stoneman was forced to resign, and he was replaced by Quartermaster-General Montgomery Meigs, who was also of Southern birth.
When Bayard was replaced by the more assertive George Woodward, a southern-born Commanding General was no longer palatable, and Meigs was replaced by Rufus Ingalls (who had earlier succeeded Meigs as Quartermaster-General). Ingalls served for nearly a decade, before the Republican victory of 1881 brought sweeping changes to the American government. Administrators and bureaucrats were out, and fighting soldiers were in again. James Blaine appointed William Rosecrans, fresh off his victory at Wounded Knee, to the post soon after his inauguration, and the two of them blundered through the Second Mexican War together.
While Rosecrans was tough and determined, he lacked other qualities necessary to lead a large army, like organizational ability and strategic vision. Unlike many such men, he was acutely aware of his flaws, and following the US's defeat he accepted the advice of German officer Alfred von Schlieffen and began implementing a general staff system for the US Army.
Rosecrans did not survive long enough to complete his work - Blaine threw him to the wolves in 1883. He was replaced by Henry Hunt, chief of the US artillery. While Hunt had proven himself exceptional in this role in both wars, he was deeply conservative and proved resistant to the changes that the reformers in the Army were pushing. It was not until Thomas Reed's re-election in 1889 that the reformers gained enough political capital to force Hunt into retirement and elevate Emory Upton. A wunderkind who had served ably in the infantry, cavalry, and artillery, Upton more than made up in imagination what he lacked in social skills. Shortly after his appointment he became the first official Chief of Staff when President Reed signed the General Staff Act into law.
Upton served for over a decade, years that saw the US Army come to resemble the Imperial German Army more and more. But the reform spirit slowly died, and when Upton retired in 1900, his seat was taken by Charles Francis Adams Jr., another hidebound traditionalist. Thanks to inertia and the protection of his brother Henry, the Speaker of the House, Adams remained Chief of Staff for nearly fifteen years. He might have broken Winfield Scott's record, were it not for the untimely intervention of the Great War.
When the US's plans went awry in 1914, Adams, who was nearly eighty years old, proved unable to adapt. President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of War Elihu Root (himself seventy years old) took steps to bypass him by issuing orders directly to field army commanders and the deputy chief of staff. Adams finally bowed to the enormous political pressure and retired on January 1, 1915, having been virtually absent from US decision-making for three months.
To the consternation of many and the surprise of few, TR installed his protege, Leonard Wood, as Chief of Staff. This proved to be a brilliant choice, as Wood, a progressive medical doctor who had come of age outside the Regular Army hierarchy, was an innovative and adroit commander. One of the few blemishes on Wood's record was his insistence on using barrels as infantry-support, rather as offensive weapons themselves.
Wood led the US to its first vicory in a war in over seventy years, and was rewarded with a promotion to four-star General, only the second in American history. Ever loyal, he retired when Roosevelt left office in 1921. Upton Sinclair, the first Socialist President, reached out to the suspicious Army by promoting one of its ablest combat leaders, Hunter Liggett, to its highest post. Liggett played the good soldier and implemented Sinclair's budget cuts, though he was deeply suspicious of the Administration's military sense.
Liggett planned to retire after Sinclair's re-election in 1925, but the Canadian uprising interrupted his plans. He saw the rebellion through to the end and left the Army in 1926 (ironically, the first year since 1917 that saw an increase in the military budget). Sinclair originally wished to promote Benjamin Cardozo, who had been field commander during the Canadian rebellion. But Cardozo's Jewish heritage and Socialist politics proved to be at least one obstacle too many, and Cardozo chose to retire civilian life. Tasker Bliss, the next senior major general, was chosen almost by default.
But Bliss, who had himself planned to retire, was well into his seventies at the time of his appointment, and Scott and Adams had set a poor precedent for top commanders of such advancing years. His tenure was meant to be a stopgap until the new President of 19129 could choose his own Chief of Staff, but the Collapse struck early that year, and Hosea Blackford found Tasker Bliss to be among the least of his problems. Bliss solved the problem of his own accord by dropping dead in 1930, forcing Blackford to choose a replacement. The President appointed Gist Blair, of the bellicose Missouri clan, the final commander of Tenth Army before its deactivation in 1918.
But Blair was also seventy in 1930, a problem that was magnified when President-elect Calvin Coolidge passed away in 1933. New President Herbert Hoover, deeply aware of his own age and the perception that the country was being run by a cadre of half-dead old men, asked Blair to retire upon his inauguration, and he reached down into the ranks to appoint Samuel Sturgis - at a youthful 40, already Chief of the Army Corps of Engineers. (Hoover had become acquainted with then Colonel Sturgis when the latter was seconded to the United States Construction Corps during Hoover's reconstruction of Washington, D.C. Hoover had later requested that Brigadier General Sturgis oversee the building of the massive Roosevelt Dam on the border between New Mexico and Nevada.)
Sturgis capably handled the slow military buildup begun Blackford and continued under Hoover and Al Smith (though it was nothing on the scale that George Marshall was building south of the border). But when war began to loom again in 1940, Al Smith, seeking to protect his flanks from Democratic attacks, decided that a combat soldier was needed at the top. James McNair, who had begun the Great War commanding an artillery battery and ended it at the head of a division, was chosen. McNair, as an artilleryman, appreciated the value of firepower, and supported the efforts to rebuild the US's barrel forces. But like many contemporaries, he still saw barrels primarily as infantry-support, and he frustrated attempts to form armored divisions such as those in the Confederate Army.
The events of the Second Great War were to prove McNair wrong, as the Confederates made devastating use of massed barrel attacks to punch holes in the US's defensive lines early in the war. Generals got the ax by the handful in 1941, and McNair would have logically been expected to join his subordinates on the chopping block. But Smith's death in early 1942 changed the political calculus, as new President Charlie LaFollette didn't want to further shake the nation's confidence by firing its top soldier. McNair continued in his post despite diminished influence, watching impotently as his rival Irving Morrell eclipsed him with brilliant victories in the field.
McNair retired with the administration in early 1945, and was replaced by Billy Mitchell. Though an able soldier and senior general who had proved his worth as commander of the Northern Front (comprising the American and Quebecois occupation troops in Canada), he was likely picked to spare Tom Dewey the dilemma of choosing between Irving Morrell and Daniel MacArthur.
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I wouldn't mind seeing the evoluton of Imperial German Panzerkorps. As well Guderian would be great.
I also agree on seeing the rise of Churchill, the zealous nationalist he is.
I simply have a greater fascination with the European end of the Great War and Second Great War, simply because we only getting fleeting glances at it.
Oh heres an American I would like to see: Eisenhower, I don't remember him popping up once, and although I admit he was more of a staff officer then combat officer, I'm surprised he didn't end up on the Confederate General Staff or something
I also agree on seeing the rise of Churchill, the zealous nationalist he is.
I simply have a greater fascination with the European end of the Great War and Second Great War, simply because we only getting fleeting glances at it.
Oh heres an American I would like to see: Eisenhower, I don't remember him popping up once, and although I admit he was more of a staff officer then combat officer, I'm surprised he didn't end up on the Confederate General Staff or something
I'm still working out the European theater in my head.
Eisenhower is apparently Ironhewer from In At The Death, or an analog. (Eisenhauer means "iron tooth" in German.) OTL he was born in Texas, but the family was from Kansas and Pennsylvania before that. The name change is a head-scratcher, though - it's not like a German name is a handicap for TL-191 Americans.
Eisenhower is apparently Ironhewer from In At The Death, or an analog. (Eisenhauer means "iron tooth" in German.) OTL he was born in Texas, but the family was from Kansas and Pennsylvania before that. The name change is a head-scratcher, though - it's not like a German name is a handicap for TL-191 Americans.
Well I suppose, I mean we all know by fact Irving Morrel is Erwin Rommel, just surprised we didn't see more of the big names from WWII, like Nimitiz, though you said you had an idea for him 
nah for the most part I'd be happy just seeing the evolution of the German barrel program, since in the Great War they don't seem to need any what so ever. And what Guderian was up to, aside from obviously having Hitler as his hapless adjudant, running around and seeing how far during the Second World War he got
oh and since you did it for the US, the CS Chiefs of the General Staff
nah for the most part I'd be happy just seeing the evolution of the German barrel program, since in the Great War they don't seem to need any what so ever. And what Guderian was up to, aside from obviously having Hitler as his hapless adjudant, running around
and seeing how far during the Second World War he gotoh and since you did it for the US, the CS Chiefs of the General Staff
The Confederate superbomb project
In some quarters, the Great War became known as the "War to End All Wars." With nearly forty million people killed, wounded or missing in three years, it was difficult to imagine in 1918 that the world could descend into such destruction twice.
Of course, it took a little over twenty years for this to come to past. The Second Great War was, in fact, far more destructive - the number of deaths from 1941-1944 surpassed the Great War's total casualties. What made this war particularly horrific was the violence visited upon civilian populations, from collateral damage in bombing campaigns, to the organized slaughter of the Confederacy's Negro population, which is believed to have taken over eight million lives alone.
The Population Destruction set the standard for destruction in the Second Great War, but the superbomb is a close second. Over a million people died at Petrograd and Paris each, while the United Kingdom suffered as much as both of these nations put together. A large portion of Belgium was unintentionally rendered uninhabitable by the British, who had gone to war ostensibly to free their former ally. The North American nations were "lucky," as the three bombs dropped in the Western Hemisphere killed only about a million people. Of all the major powers in the Second Great War, only Japan was never attacked with superbombs.
Three nations, Germany, the US, and Britain, are currently known to possess these weapons, while Russia, Japan, and Italy are known to be pursuing them. As the Habsburg Empire contributed heavily to the German project, it is thought that they may possess superbombs as well.) It is also known that Germany has stationed superbomb-armed squadrons on Austrian soil, and perhaps Ukraine and Poland as well. That this empire, rich as it has always been in scientific talent, was the first to build such a weapon is no surprise. But as late as the Second Great War, it was not fully appreciated that the second foremost nation in nuclear physics was not the mighty United States or proud British Empire, but the supposed backwards Confederate States of America.
How this country of landowners and serfs became a scientific powerhouse is something of a historical mystery. But by the Great War, significant research was being carried out at Washington University in Virginia, Duke in North Carolina, and Tulane in Louisiana. (The reader will note that these three schools, along with Muscle Shoals, Alabama, were the primary sites of the Confederate nuclear program thirty years later.) Several historians have pointed out that Jewish scientists were highly prominent in nuclear research in general and the German Mittelwerk project in particular. The Confederate project also had a surprising number of Jews in its ranks, such as the young Russian emigres Julius Khariton and Jacob Zeldovich, and the uranium ("jovium") expert Benjamin Martin, who was killed along with a number of colleagues in a bombing raid in 1943.
But the driving force was undoubtedly Henderson Venable FitzBelmont (1895-1945), grandson of Robert E. Lee's aide-de-camp, a professor of mathematics. Had the Entente won the war, his name would have been bandied about in the same way that "Einstein" and "Oppenheimer" are today. He followed in the footsteps of his grandfather and father (who succeeded Woodrow Wilson as the President of the University of Virginia) and went into academia. A 1913 graduate of the University of Virginia, he was studying at Harvard University when the Great War began in 1914. FitzBelmont, along with a number of his countrymen, was exchanged in early 1915. He spent the rest of the year in a lab on the War Department payroll, researching optics and then radio communications. When the war ended he returned to his studies in nuclear physics, receiving his doctorate from Washington University at Lexington, Virginia.
FitzBelmont spent the 1920s studying and teaching in Charlottesville, Chapel Hill, and Heidelberg before returning to Lexington. He shared the Gorgas Medal, the highest Confederate scientific prize, in 1927 for his work on alpha decay. But 1930 saw an even greater achievement: the discovery of a previously-unknown particle in the nucleus of the atom, which he dubbed the "neutron," due to its lack of charge. This revelation set off what could be described as an arms race in nuclear physics, as FitzBelmont and his peers immediately recognized that a neutron could easily penetrate the electrical barrier of a nucleus. Soon teams of scientists on both sides of the Atlantic were bombarding hapless nuclei with neutrons. In early 1938, the German scientist Otto Hahn and his assistants, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassman at the University of Berlin succeeded in splitting an atom of uranium-238.
The experiment was soon repeated in the universities of the world powers, using uranium from the German Congo, Russia, and Canada. (Such was the sparse understanding of nuclear physics outside a cloistered community that uranium remained unrestricted by the US State Department until 1941, allowing it to be sold in the Confederate States and United Kingdom.) The Hungarian Leo Szilard, working at the University of Munich, was the first to posit that a nuclear chain reaction could be induced, but the theoretical and practical barriers seemed enormous. Research continued, but the pace slowed as it became clear that uranium-238, the most common isotope of that element, could not sustain a chain reaction.
Even at this late stage, despite the increasing tension on the world stage, national and military leaders had yet to grasp the significance of what had occurred. Nuclear research was still conducted almost entirely by universities, with little to no government support. The first government known to have officially approved a superbomb project was that of Winston Churchill, who had an affinity for innovative schemes (what his detractors would call "gimmicks"). But even this did not occur until 1939, and then it was still a rather minor research project under James Chadwick at Liverpool.
Following the plebiscites in former Confederate territories held under the Richmond Agreement, the possibility of war rose sharply when Kentucky was re-militarized twenty-five years ahead of schedule. President Alfred Smith authorized nuclear research following his second inauguration in March 1941, handing the project off to Franklin Roosevelt, brought back into the War Department expressly due to the likelihood of war. When Roosevelt began negotiating with the German Empire to purchase large quantities of uranium from the German Congo, Wilhelm’s ambassador to the United States informed Smith that Germany was working on its own superbomb. Germany permitted the sale, and even allowed some note-sharing between scientists, but no official cooperation between the two nations ensued.
FitzBelmont approached Jake Featherston in 1941 as well, but was turned down when he could not promise that he could actually produce a bomb if given the men and money he needed. (Presumably, Featherston was being besieged with claims of new wonder-weapons everyday.) It was not until early 1942, after FitzBelmont and Clarence Potter presented him with evidence of the Hanford project, that Featherston gave the green light. Ordinarily, those lost months would have doomed the effort. The Confederacy had a smaller industrial base, a smaller scientific talent pool, and like the US, no uranium within its borders. Throughout the war, the Confederate effort relied on those stockpiles purchased by universities before 1941, largely from Canada and the German Congo, and from supplies smuggled via submarine from French North Africa, and from Russia via the United Kingdom. And the United States’ greater economic clout took a huge blow when the Confederate Army blasted a hole through the middle of the North’s industrial heartland in 1941-1942 and cut the country in two.
But the Confederacy’s greatest advantage lay, surprisingly, in its scientists. FitzBelmont himself proved to be an excellent administrator, especially with Clarence Potter there to run interference. But his scientific acumen was second to none, and the team he assembled proved, pound for pound, to be more brilliant than any outside Germany. The American team, run by the capable Robert J. Oppenheimer, tended to proceed slowly and cautiously, and often deferred to previous work in the field, especially German-produced research. The Confederates, with fewer resources and on a tighter schedule often threw caution to the winds and proceeded on guesswork. The Confederates chose fairly early on to concentrate their enrichment efforts on gas centrifuges, while the US relied on the more expensive gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation, which had fewer scientific hurdles to clear. Gas centrifuges were far more efficient and required smaller facilities, but were much more difficult to design.
The Confederates had another stroke of luck in that no other nation other than Germany had an easier time handling uranium hexafluoride, a highly corrosive substance utilized in both the diffusion and centrifuge methods. Germany’s large and highly-advanced chemical industry soon found that coating components with fluorocarbons reduced damage. FitzBelmont's team hit upon the same idea shortly afterwards, and by chance one of its chemists had in 1939 accidentally invented polytetrafluoroethylene, which proved perfectly suited to the task. (Rains Chemicals’ patent was appropriated by the US government after the war and auctioned off to DuPont, which now markets it as a nonstick coating for kitchen utensils under the name Teflet.)
While most research and production was carried out at Washington University, Tulane and Duke also hosted satellites of the project, though these lost their importance as the war continued. (Duke had been the primary site for electromagnetic separation research, which was abandoned in 1942. Most of Tulane’s personnel were transferred to Lexington in 1943.) A large production facility was constructed near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but it had to be abandoned after the power plants were destroyed in 1943 during Irving Morrell’s drive through Kentucky and Tennessee. The US Army actually captured the facility later that year, but nobody who examined it had the specialized knowledge required to identify its purpose until after the war had ended.
Despite increasingly savage bombing raids on Lexington during 1943 and 1944, which resulted in the deaths of several invaluable scientists and forced the entire project deep underground, the Confederacy succeeded in producing a jovium (plutonium) implosion-type weapon in the spring of 1944. (The original plan had been to produce a gun-type weapon, which was considered easier to produce. But British research passed to the Confederates by ambassador Lord Halifax revealed that a plutonium gun-type weapon was too unstable to be safely built. The British abandoned “churchillium” weapons and instead produced gun-type uranium weapons exclusively, while the Confederates went ahead with the difficult process of machining a hollow jovium sphere). The United States actually detonated the first superbomb used on North American soil, shortly after the Germans destroyed Petrograd, testing it in the deserts of Utah. The Confederates, faced with marauding armies in every corner of their country, had no time for such niceties, and when Clarence Potter left the superbomb sitting in a truck in West Philadelphia in May 1944, he had no idea whether it would actually explode.
The weapon worked, of course, and though it destroyed a large chunk of the densely-populated city and killed hundreds of thousands, it failed to knock the US out of the war. The US responded with two superbombings in June, destroying Newport News (narrowly missing Featherston) and Charleston, birthplace of the War of Secession. By the time Featherston was finally killed while on the run outside Madison, Georgia, the Confederacy was still weeks away from building another viable weapon, while the US still had one round chambered.
Every single human being in Lexington and Rockbridge County was arrested by the US Army and thoroughly debriefed, and the entire area was sealed off. It was not until 1946 that Rockbridge County was re-opened and the locals were allowed to return. A sweep of universities across the South resulted in every academic with a knowledge of nuclear physics being rounded up and at least briefly detained, with many remaining in permanent Army custody. Pursuant to the Dewey Doctrine, by which the US and German Empire agreed to police global superbomb programs, anyone who worked for any sector of the Confederate project, in any capacity, was forbidden to leave the country.
Nevertheless, Confederate jovium expert Thurston Delaney, who had been badly maimed by a US bomb in 1943 and invalided out, is believed to have been living in an apartment near the University of Rome as of late 1945, and a container of gas centrifuges seized on a merchant ship out of Guaymas bound for Yokohama, Japan were eventually traced to long-defunct Muscle Shoals facility. Henderson Venable Fitzbelmont, for one, will never trouble the US again, as he died of a heart attack in October 1945, at the age of fifty, while in Army custody.
In some quarters, the Great War became known as the "War to End All Wars." With nearly forty million people killed, wounded or missing in three years, it was difficult to imagine in 1918 that the world could descend into such destruction twice.
Of course, it took a little over twenty years for this to come to past. The Second Great War was, in fact, far more destructive - the number of deaths from 1941-1944 surpassed the Great War's total casualties. What made this war particularly horrific was the violence visited upon civilian populations, from collateral damage in bombing campaigns, to the organized slaughter of the Confederacy's Negro population, which is believed to have taken over eight million lives alone.
The Population Destruction set the standard for destruction in the Second Great War, but the superbomb is a close second. Over a million people died at Petrograd and Paris each, while the United Kingdom suffered as much as both of these nations put together. A large portion of Belgium was unintentionally rendered uninhabitable by the British, who had gone to war ostensibly to free their former ally. The North American nations were "lucky," as the three bombs dropped in the Western Hemisphere killed only about a million people. Of all the major powers in the Second Great War, only Japan was never attacked with superbombs.
Three nations, Germany, the US, and Britain, are currently known to possess these weapons, while Russia, Japan, and Italy are known to be pursuing them. As the Habsburg Empire contributed heavily to the German project, it is thought that they may possess superbombs as well.) It is also known that Germany has stationed superbomb-armed squadrons on Austrian soil, and perhaps Ukraine and Poland as well. That this empire, rich as it has always been in scientific talent, was the first to build such a weapon is no surprise. But as late as the Second Great War, it was not fully appreciated that the second foremost nation in nuclear physics was not the mighty United States or proud British Empire, but the supposed backwards Confederate States of America.
How this country of landowners and serfs became a scientific powerhouse is something of a historical mystery. But by the Great War, significant research was being carried out at Washington University in Virginia, Duke in North Carolina, and Tulane in Louisiana. (The reader will note that these three schools, along with Muscle Shoals, Alabama, were the primary sites of the Confederate nuclear program thirty years later.) Several historians have pointed out that Jewish scientists were highly prominent in nuclear research in general and the German Mittelwerk project in particular. The Confederate project also had a surprising number of Jews in its ranks, such as the young Russian emigres Julius Khariton and Jacob Zeldovich, and the uranium ("jovium") expert Benjamin Martin, who was killed along with a number of colleagues in a bombing raid in 1943.
But the driving force was undoubtedly Henderson Venable FitzBelmont (1895-1945), grandson of Robert E. Lee's aide-de-camp, a professor of mathematics. Had the Entente won the war, his name would have been bandied about in the same way that "Einstein" and "Oppenheimer" are today. He followed in the footsteps of his grandfather and father (who succeeded Woodrow Wilson as the President of the University of Virginia) and went into academia. A 1913 graduate of the University of Virginia, he was studying at Harvard University when the Great War began in 1914. FitzBelmont, along with a number of his countrymen, was exchanged in early 1915. He spent the rest of the year in a lab on the War Department payroll, researching optics and then radio communications. When the war ended he returned to his studies in nuclear physics, receiving his doctorate from Washington University at Lexington, Virginia.
FitzBelmont spent the 1920s studying and teaching in Charlottesville, Chapel Hill, and Heidelberg before returning to Lexington. He shared the Gorgas Medal, the highest Confederate scientific prize, in 1927 for his work on alpha decay. But 1930 saw an even greater achievement: the discovery of a previously-unknown particle in the nucleus of the atom, which he dubbed the "neutron," due to its lack of charge. This revelation set off what could be described as an arms race in nuclear physics, as FitzBelmont and his peers immediately recognized that a neutron could easily penetrate the electrical barrier of a nucleus. Soon teams of scientists on both sides of the Atlantic were bombarding hapless nuclei with neutrons. In early 1938, the German scientist Otto Hahn and his assistants, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassman at the University of Berlin succeeded in splitting an atom of uranium-238.
The experiment was soon repeated in the universities of the world powers, using uranium from the German Congo, Russia, and Canada. (Such was the sparse understanding of nuclear physics outside a cloistered community that uranium remained unrestricted by the US State Department until 1941, allowing it to be sold in the Confederate States and United Kingdom.) The Hungarian Leo Szilard, working at the University of Munich, was the first to posit that a nuclear chain reaction could be induced, but the theoretical and practical barriers seemed enormous. Research continued, but the pace slowed as it became clear that uranium-238, the most common isotope of that element, could not sustain a chain reaction.
Even at this late stage, despite the increasing tension on the world stage, national and military leaders had yet to grasp the significance of what had occurred. Nuclear research was still conducted almost entirely by universities, with little to no government support. The first government known to have officially approved a superbomb project was that of Winston Churchill, who had an affinity for innovative schemes (what his detractors would call "gimmicks"). But even this did not occur until 1939, and then it was still a rather minor research project under James Chadwick at Liverpool.
Following the plebiscites in former Confederate territories held under the Richmond Agreement, the possibility of war rose sharply when Kentucky was re-militarized twenty-five years ahead of schedule. President Alfred Smith authorized nuclear research following his second inauguration in March 1941, handing the project off to Franklin Roosevelt, brought back into the War Department expressly due to the likelihood of war. When Roosevelt began negotiating with the German Empire to purchase large quantities of uranium from the German Congo, Wilhelm’s ambassador to the United States informed Smith that Germany was working on its own superbomb. Germany permitted the sale, and even allowed some note-sharing between scientists, but no official cooperation between the two nations ensued.
FitzBelmont approached Jake Featherston in 1941 as well, but was turned down when he could not promise that he could actually produce a bomb if given the men and money he needed. (Presumably, Featherston was being besieged with claims of new wonder-weapons everyday.) It was not until early 1942, after FitzBelmont and Clarence Potter presented him with evidence of the Hanford project, that Featherston gave the green light. Ordinarily, those lost months would have doomed the effort. The Confederacy had a smaller industrial base, a smaller scientific talent pool, and like the US, no uranium within its borders. Throughout the war, the Confederate effort relied on those stockpiles purchased by universities before 1941, largely from Canada and the German Congo, and from supplies smuggled via submarine from French North Africa, and from Russia via the United Kingdom. And the United States’ greater economic clout took a huge blow when the Confederate Army blasted a hole through the middle of the North’s industrial heartland in 1941-1942 and cut the country in two.
But the Confederacy’s greatest advantage lay, surprisingly, in its scientists. FitzBelmont himself proved to be an excellent administrator, especially with Clarence Potter there to run interference. But his scientific acumen was second to none, and the team he assembled proved, pound for pound, to be more brilliant than any outside Germany. The American team, run by the capable Robert J. Oppenheimer, tended to proceed slowly and cautiously, and often deferred to previous work in the field, especially German-produced research. The Confederates, with fewer resources and on a tighter schedule often threw caution to the winds and proceeded on guesswork. The Confederates chose fairly early on to concentrate their enrichment efforts on gas centrifuges, while the US relied on the more expensive gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation, which had fewer scientific hurdles to clear. Gas centrifuges were far more efficient and required smaller facilities, but were much more difficult to design.
The Confederates had another stroke of luck in that no other nation other than Germany had an easier time handling uranium hexafluoride, a highly corrosive substance utilized in both the diffusion and centrifuge methods. Germany’s large and highly-advanced chemical industry soon found that coating components with fluorocarbons reduced damage. FitzBelmont's team hit upon the same idea shortly afterwards, and by chance one of its chemists had in 1939 accidentally invented polytetrafluoroethylene, which proved perfectly suited to the task. (Rains Chemicals’ patent was appropriated by the US government after the war and auctioned off to DuPont, which now markets it as a nonstick coating for kitchen utensils under the name Teflet.)
While most research and production was carried out at Washington University, Tulane and Duke also hosted satellites of the project, though these lost their importance as the war continued. (Duke had been the primary site for electromagnetic separation research, which was abandoned in 1942. Most of Tulane’s personnel were transferred to Lexington in 1943.) A large production facility was constructed near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but it had to be abandoned after the power plants were destroyed in 1943 during Irving Morrell’s drive through Kentucky and Tennessee. The US Army actually captured the facility later that year, but nobody who examined it had the specialized knowledge required to identify its purpose until after the war had ended.
Despite increasingly savage bombing raids on Lexington during 1943 and 1944, which resulted in the deaths of several invaluable scientists and forced the entire project deep underground, the Confederacy succeeded in producing a jovium (plutonium) implosion-type weapon in the spring of 1944. (The original plan had been to produce a gun-type weapon, which was considered easier to produce. But British research passed to the Confederates by ambassador Lord Halifax revealed that a plutonium gun-type weapon was too unstable to be safely built. The British abandoned “churchillium” weapons and instead produced gun-type uranium weapons exclusively, while the Confederates went ahead with the difficult process of machining a hollow jovium sphere). The United States actually detonated the first superbomb used on North American soil, shortly after the Germans destroyed Petrograd, testing it in the deserts of Utah. The Confederates, faced with marauding armies in every corner of their country, had no time for such niceties, and when Clarence Potter left the superbomb sitting in a truck in West Philadelphia in May 1944, he had no idea whether it would actually explode.
The weapon worked, of course, and though it destroyed a large chunk of the densely-populated city and killed hundreds of thousands, it failed to knock the US out of the war. The US responded with two superbombings in June, destroying Newport News (narrowly missing Featherston) and Charleston, birthplace of the War of Secession. By the time Featherston was finally killed while on the run outside Madison, Georgia, the Confederacy was still weeks away from building another viable weapon, while the US still had one round chambered.
Every single human being in Lexington and Rockbridge County was arrested by the US Army and thoroughly debriefed, and the entire area was sealed off. It was not until 1946 that Rockbridge County was re-opened and the locals were allowed to return. A sweep of universities across the South resulted in every academic with a knowledge of nuclear physics being rounded up and at least briefly detained, with many remaining in permanent Army custody. Pursuant to the Dewey Doctrine, by which the US and German Empire agreed to police global superbomb programs, anyone who worked for any sector of the Confederate project, in any capacity, was forbidden to leave the country.
Nevertheless, Confederate jovium expert Thurston Delaney, who had been badly maimed by a US bomb in 1943 and invalided out, is believed to have been living in an apartment near the University of Rome as of late 1945, and a container of gas centrifuges seized on a merchant ship out of Guaymas bound for Yokohama, Japan were eventually traced to long-defunct Muscle Shoals facility. Henderson Venable Fitzbelmont, for one, will never trouble the US again, as he died of a heart attack in October 1945, at the age of fifty, while in Army custody.
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