Cinco de Mayo

[KingSweden24]

"...conditions in Baltimore forced the train to stop in Gwynns Falls and everybody piled off onto the tight platform as an automobile to circumvent the city was procured. Though the Maryland National Guard would hold at the Monocacy for the entirety of the first two days of fighting, nobody could have known that at the time, and the fear that a Confederate advance force could threaten to attack the B&P line and cut fleeing persons entirely off from escape routes north. Hughes and Root stood side-by-side in the commotion, looking about at the panicked civilians around them, and Hughes would later record in his diary, "I was left stunned by the humanity before me; the fear, the confusion, the shock. This small train station near Baltimore was close enough to the exchange of fire in the Harbor that we could hear the report of gunfire, a battle so close to the city that we could not continue on to Pennsylvania Station. It was the most humbling hour of my life." It was noted by Hughes, Root and countless historians for decades thereafter that the moment was perhaps the nadir of the American Presidency, having fled the capital under bombardment and now waiting to escape to safety while genuinely worried about the risk of capture. Had events in the weeks that followed transpired differently, Hughes' Presidency may well have been remembered as a hapless, humiliating episode. But it was on that platform at Gwynns Falls that the long process to win the war, and salvage his own reputation, began with a short, impromptu address oft overshadowed by that given some weeks later before Independence Hall but perhaps no less important.

A bystander pointed and exclaimed that the President was on the platform. The crowd turned and backed away, somewhat surprised and in awe. Rural Maryland was not exactly Liberal territory, but there was cachet for a man of his stature standing there yet. Hughes, nobody's idea at that time of a stirring orator at the level of his former rival Hearst, looked out over the nervous eyes of his fellow Americans and raised his hat above his head. "Yes, it is indeed I," he called out. "Yesterday, I was the President. Tomorrow, I suspect I will be as well. But today, here, I am just a man standing here with my fellow Americans, stunned and confused and in shock. Today, I am just another man, standing here with his crumpled hat. We can all hear the rolling thunder of cannon fire here in Baltimore, and I suspect most of you heard it this morning in Washington as well. I shall not insult you with empty reassurances; rather, I ask only for your prayers." [1]

The Gwynns Falls Address, also known as "the Crumpled Hat Speech," was short and off the cuff but it did its job. The words were jotted down by a reporter on the platform and reprinted late in the week across the country. It spoke to Hughes' strengths, of moderation and modesty, and captured the shocked mood of Americans very well. The car, as it were, did show up before long, and Hughes and Root were in it and driving the long way on perilous country roads around Baltimore to a depot north of the city where they could take a train to Philadelphia; the harrowing journey out of Washington was, by nightfall, at its end, and Hughes noted in his diary simply, "This is only the beginning. God help us all."..."

- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes

[1] I hate writing speeches

 

[KingSweden24]

"...solemn choice. It is a small wrinkle of history that had the United States held up better on that fateful day of September 9th, Mexico may well have not entered the war, and the Argentine-Brazilian conflict may have been settled otherwise. But the rapid collapse of American defenses in the state of Maryland suggested that the great Yankee hegemon was perhaps rather a paper tiger, and if properly supported with supplies and manpower, the efforts of the Bloc Sud to defang it could bear fruit.

Nonetheless, the legend of the "reluctant Mexican" was born out of the deep divisions in the Mexican government over how, exactly, to respond. The Emperor made plain that he would stand back from the "momentous" decision; he had made a civilian constitution a decade earlier, and he would abide by it. This immediately sidelined possibly the most important voice in the room, particularly for the faction of skeptics who may have carried the day had he spoken up. Unlike the sister republics at war, a declaration of war in Mexico required not a full vote of the Assembly but rather just a vote of the Cabinet, and the Emperor's countersignature. Swaying enough men in the Cabinet, then, became the task of the hawks led by Creel, Molina and, increasingly, Prime Minister Leon de la Barra. The skeptics had no single figure to coalesce around; Lascurain, the ostensibly dovish Foreign Minister, had negotiated the agreement with the Confederacy that the Creel-Molina faction now argued compelled Mexico to act, and he was of course a timid figure in his own right. A war beside the Confederacy was sold as potentially healing the deep rifts in Mexican society exposed by the shocking civil conflicts of the spring; though the militant strike wave had subsided over the course of the summer, there was fear that another autumn of labor militancy might be ahead and that concentrating all that energy northwards could help cool passions in Mexico itself. There was some reason to believe that - one of the few things men like Enrique Creel and Abraham Gonzalez agreed upon was that the United States was the source of much of what ailed Mexico economically, and focusing on that point of agreement was a uniting factor.

The most important voices for the skeptics thus came from outside the government, once again the tandem of Crown Prince Louis Maximilian and General Bernardo Reyes. Margarita herself was firmly opposed to the war, crying long into the night when she heard of the sacking of Washington, but this did not influence her husband; the Crown Prince was not an objector out of compassion but rather out of cold, pragmatic logic. Still, the Emperor instructed members of the royal family not to speak publicly on their thoughts on the war (this of course also muzzled arch-hawks like the Iturbide brothers and Margarita's eldest son, Francisco Jose), and the heir was forced to use Reyes as his mouthpiece as the Cabinet vote on September 13th came closer and closer. The general, having already received orders to mobilize the troops two days earlier out of "caution," came before the Cabinet the morning of their vote and presciently remarked, "In two years time, mark my words, we will be wondering why exactly we followed the Confederacy into the abyss, and we will be negotiating our exit from this senseless war with a decision on whether we buy peace from the yanqui via treasure or land."

Whether Reyes swayed any votes is unclear; the motion to declare war on the United States passed by two votes, one of them Lascurain. At first, the news excited the Mexican street; men who had been striking or rioting were now enlisting to train to fight, and the harshly critical press (soon to be under severe wartime censorship) came to a fairly uniform opinion that the war presented an opportunity for Mexico to drive the United States from its economy forever, using the Confederate war effort as a vehicle. The declaration of war was followed by an even more popular measure - the seizure of American assets, including ranchland such as that belonging to former US President William Hearst, in Mexico and their use to finance the war. Reyes, despite his reluctance, mobilized the standing army and prepared it for a journey north to Los Pasos and Nogales in order to provide cover to the Confederacy on its vast, open Western flank, and prepared to march the 1st Reserve to Centro, from where it would lunge for the real prize and Mexico's other strategic goal in the war - Nicaragua..."

- The Matriarch: Empress Margarita Clementina and the Emergence of a Modern Mexico

 

[KingSweden24]

"...new development. Despite their remarkably dissimilar personalities, Poincare found Maurice Paleologue an outstanding fit for the role of Foreign Minister. They were of an age, born about a year apart and having both grown up during the post-Unification Wars economic boom, come of age in the Decade d'Or of the 1880s, and having been forged ideologically and intellectually in a Quai d'Orsay that was practicing reasserting itself globally during the time of Courbet and Faure, making them the perfect civil servants for implementing the Boulangist project as the century turned. Poincare trusted Paleologue even though they were not personally close, and to a man who was often deeply unsure of who was his friend in the cutthroat political culture of late-Empire Paris, that was all that mattered.

The new Foreign Minister's appointment in October of 1913 drew surprised reactions around Europe. Paleologue was a colorful figure; as a career civil servant rather than a political in the austere and conservative Empire, his peculiarities had never drawn scrutiny until now. He was a novelist by hobby, alternating between light (and oft sultry) romances and heavier fare; he was of Romanian extraction, his father an exiled revolutionary from an illegitimate line of boyars that claimed direct descent from the Paleologos imperial family of Byzantium. Well educated and personable, he impressed his counterparts, even if they found him somewhat fanciful and eccentric.

It was this that made Paleologue, despite his complete confidence from Poincare, such a dangerous man in the office he found himself in. His novelist's mind let his imagination run adrift, often over-interpreting events as they arose; this was a problem in the reports he gave back to Poincare, but particularly was an issue in dealing with ambassadors or ministers from other states. As his power over the Quai d'Orsay increased and the French government increasingly began to resemble a new Le Trois between Poincare, Paleologue and Castelnau, his flights of fancy and exaggerations became the stuff crises are made of..."

- Path of Darkness: Europe's Illiberal Hour

 

[KingSweden24]

"...advantage; firstly, the infrastructure in southern Mexico was infamously subpar east of the Tehuantepec railways, and the rail transport system of Centro was designed to ship cash crops from the interior to company-run port facilities on the coast. There was thus no particularly easy way for the mobilized Reserva Primera Mexicana to advance by land to Nicaragua other than by foot, and the Mexican forces under General Victoriano Huerta [1] began their long trudge after rail lines sufficient to transport them at mass scale ended at Comitan in Chiapas.

The hope for the nascent Bloc Sud, then, was for Centroamerican forces led personally by their controversial president Manuel Estrada Cabrera to march rapidly across the infamously poor roads of eastern Honduras, link up with Conservative Nicaraguan rebels who had been scattered throughout the forests of the border country for years, and then punch south towards Managua and ideally break Zelaya's government while it enjoyed the initiative, and then wait for Mexican reinforcements to pin Americans against the Canal. The second piece of this strategy would be for Mexican naval vessels to harass and interdict American vessels in both the Caribbean and Pacific to prevent them from ably reinforcing their positions in Nicaragua and eventually starve out the US Marines there until the Canal, at the very least the seizable Pacific end of it, was theirs.

Smedley Butler had other ideas. The Nicaragua Squadron in the Gulf of Fonseca was activated effectively immediately on September 9th; when word of Mexico's declaration of war against the United States arrived on the 14th, the USS Indiana and her escorts opened sealed orders from the Naval Department to immediately, in case of hostilities, treat Centro as an enemy. Within hours, all port facilities on Fonseca were shelled and destroyed and nearly every non-Nicaraguan vessel that could float even fifty yards from a dock was sunk. "If they come," Butler coyly transmitted via his final telegram to the Presidio in San Francisco before oceanic cables were cut, "they will at the very least not come by sea."

The Nicaraguan Squadron shifted southwards to guard the Pacific mouth of the Canal, and on the other side of the Isthmus the same was done with the Caribbean Squadron; both of its "divisions" were activated on the 10th and diverted from St. Thomas and Haiti to Bluefields. Naval officers suspected - again, correctly - that Brazilian vessels would not have time to intercept them and that the priority would be to defend Nicaragua rather than be isolated and defeated in detail in the Windward Passage or its immediate vicinity. Three of Mexico's four dreadnoughts were in the Gulf of Mexico, and none of the Confederate or Brazilian naval vessels would be in the area early enough to prevent their defensive posture at Nicaragua - this effectively made the key strategic position of the United States a naval fortress within a week of the war starting, and made the logistical and strategic position of the Bloc Sud considerably more difficult if their goal was to seize the Canal, rather than merely make it inconvenient for the United States to use..." [2]

- The Forgotten Front: The Isthmian Campaigns of the Great American War

[1] You want this fucker nowhere near the capital, which I'm sure Reyes knows, hence why he's being sent off to the Isthmus (which I'm honestly debating just making the name of the region/country at this point, a la License to Kill where Bond goes to Not-Panama to take on Totally-Not-Noriega)
[2] Bet the Chileans are wishing they hadn't gone on that weird late July joyride and then sent their ships home from Panama's coast now, eh?

 

[KingSweden24]

"...splitting the difference and sending troops across the Rio Negro toward Montevideo first, and gradually crossing the Uruguay into Argentina thereafter. The infighting between Army and Navy in Brazil is of course infamous for its role in limiting Brazil's achievable objectives in the Great American War, but the infighting within the Army, between the ideologue Hermes da Fonseca and his similarly partisan, positivist officer cadre and the more professional staff-level planners, kneecapped Rio de Janeiro's ambitions early on, too.

The slow mobilization of Brazilian forces of course did not go unnoticed in Argentina and gave Buenos Aires time to plan lines of defense at key fording points of both the Uruguay and the Parana to its west; Ricchetti developed what became known as Plan M, for "Mesopotamia," which described Argentina's options to defend behind the broad and wide rivers of the river to keep Brazil away from its more developed provinces. Brazil's first attempted crossing, upstream of Salto, was a grueling, gruesome battle; though their forces were able to cross after three days of heavy fighting and bombardment, they suffered disproportionate losses and the Argentine forces were able to withdraw and regroup on the dirt road towards the city of Parana.

The developments in Uruguay proper were not as promising. The Blanco rebels had already pushed the Colorado forces well south of the Rio Negro and the support of the most professional corps of the Brazilian Army dramatically leveraged their advantages. The last government positions on the Rio Yi completely collapsed in the last week of September and the Fuerza Cisplatina found that its main role was screening defenses for retreating Uruguayan forces moving backwards to the capital. A defensive line was established between San Jose del Mayo, Florida and Cerro Colorado, effectively ceding the port of Colonia del Sacramento to Brazil. The question of how easily Argentina could evacuate its expeditionary force if need be was now a live one, and the Naval Office's reports to President Drago and his war cabinet were not optimistic. As the defense of Montevideo began, no good options remained in Uruguay..."

- War in the Cone

 

[KingSweden24]

"...and establishing his headquarters and reserve arsenal at Indio, where the California National Guard had been consolidated at makeshift barracks along the rail route to the Colorado. Pershing appointed Charles Menoher, a former West Point classmate, as his chief subordinate, and was asked by California Governor Hiram Johnson to wait to press on offensively until the commander of the National Guard was dispatched. Upon hearing that said commander would be a political appointment - Congressman Joseph Knowland, who represented a district centered upon Alameda County on the San Francisco Bay - Pershing elected to press ahead. As American defenses in Maryland seemed to evaporate at the slightest contact from Confederate forces, a victory needed to be secured on some front, somewhere.

Yuma was the natural target, both for Pershing's gathering battalions in Indio and from a broader strategic standpoint. Word that Mexico had declared war on the United States arrived at Indio and it did not take too many glances at a map of North America's strategic rail network to figure out where they could make an impact. From railheads at Nogales and Los Pasos, Mexican forces could fortify the Confederate West and, potentially, harass or even attack New Mexico or, less likely, California. One priority for Mexico would almost certainly getting some of their troops to the isolated northern outposts of Baja California and the carnival town of Tijuana on the border [1], which Marines from San Diego had rapidly moved to seize within days of the declaration of war with minimal resistance. The immediate, if minor, threat to America's position in the West thus came from access to the Colorado and its delta, control that flowed through Yuma.

The Confederacy had done considerable work over the past decade in making Yuma into a thriving commercial town; though the frontier of both countries was definitively closed, the West was an area of growth and opportunity. Until the trade wars of the early 1910s, Yuma had been the main conduit for Confederate wares and goods to the Pacific, either down steamboats on the Colorado into the Gulf of California or, eventually, by rail to Los Angeles or San Diego. It sat at the confluence of the Gila with the larger Colorado and the tripoint border of the Confederacy, United States and Mexico. The logistical value of the city was thus considerable, and it would be a target that would certainly grab Richmond's attention. On September 20th, at the same time that the Army was forming its official theater commands from the wartime capital in Philadelphia [2], Pershing had his railcars collected and gave the command to move forward to attack the following day.

Yuma was defended by a namesake fort on the banks of the Colorado itself, where the railroad crossed the river, garrisoned by approximately two thousand men. Early on the morning of the 21st, Pershing's mobile artillery opened fire across the Colorado, the first pitched battle of the Southwestern Front. One of the advantages the Confederacy did have, compared to their attackers, was a robust fixed artillery position and machine gun nests at Fort Yuma that allowed them to screen the rail crossing at the river. Pershing pressed ahead anyways, hoping that his suppressing fire would be sufficient; Menoher expressed skepticism at this maneuver but gave the orders anyways.

The Battle of Yuma was thus typical of a Pershing battle; aggressive and with willingness to take casualties in order to overwhelm the enemy with relentless force. [3] Two thousand American casualties were sustained in the crossing of the Colorado, with the typical 25% killed-in-action ratio. However, Yuma fell before nightfall as the artillery support eventually destroyed two of the de Bange 90mm guns, diminishing Confederate defensive capabilities, and most of surviving Confederate delegation surrendered rather than fight on once the bridgehead was established. Pershing ordered the California Guardsmen transport the prisoners back to Indio, which would be the site of "Camp Pershing," a major Confederate prisoner-of-war camp later converted to a fort in the aftermath of the war.

The first major victory for the US of the war had been won - the Colorado was now entirely under the control of the United States, and the threat to California or western New Mexico effectively negated within the opening weeks of the conflict..."

- Pershing

[1] Even in the early 1910s, Tijuana basically existed for Americans to come to engage in various forms of debauchery
[2] "Wartime"
[3] This is something Black Jack was kind of infamous for in WW1; it wasn't quite the human waves of the Soviets in WW2 but he was a huge fan of frontal attacks. Pershing was a mediocre tactician but a very good political general in terms of his role as head of the AEF, IMO, but the conditions in the Southwest are very different from the Western Front of 1918 so his more aggressive offensive style would work better here.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...as a border state, Missouri had one of the largest and best-developed National Guards in the country, an investment begun under successive administrations but closely nurtured by its former Governor Hadley - now the Vice President of the United States. It was Hadley who, upon President Hughes' arrival in Philadelphia, urged the War Committee of Cabinet officers and senior military planners to route the Missouri Guard away from Cape Girardeau, where it had been positioned to help screen against raids from northeast Arkansas, to instead be moved to Joplin and partner with Guardsmen from Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska and the US Army's local cavalry units to thrust into the Indian Territory.

Hadley did not need to do much to convince the War Committee of the prudence of this strategic choice. The Osage Hills housed some of the richest oil wells on the North American continent, centered upon the boomtown of Tulasah on the Arkansas River. While the Confederacy had emerged in the last decade as a major oil producer in its own right, the Osage fields were more mature and better integrated with the rail network of both republics. The United States could not afford to not have access to Osage oil, and cutting it off from the Confederates was just an added boon.

The massed forces moved rapidly down the rail line from Joplin, Missouri to strike the Osage Hills from the west, as cavalry support and the Kansas Guardsmen moved south from Wichita along the Arkansas River to strike at defenders from the northwest. The Tulasah Campaign was an early, violent, and eventually successful targeted offensive by the United States; like other engagements that were not occurring east of the Appalachians, the strategic goals and objectives of it were accomplished by early October. The reality is that the "Territorial Guard" assembled by the Five Nations were easily overwhelmed in open battle and forced to quickly withdraw west of the Arkansas River and resort to guerilla tactics throughout the hill country. The US, upon seizing Tulasah itself in violent house-to-house combat, secured the rail yards and major oil wells and garrisoned them with thousands of men to keep the oil supply going; the wells and rail infrastructure would be major targets of Indian hit-and-run teams for the remainder of the war, and by late 1914 the Army resolved to pursue their opponents deeper into the Indian Territory down to the Canadian River to drive them further south from the oilfields. For the purposes of an early, achievable win, however, the capture of Tulasah had served its purposes..."

- The Guns of September

 

[KingSweden24]

"...necessity. The assault on Baltimore would not be the last time that President Smith and General Scott butted heads, but it was the last time that Scott allowed himself to be directly overruled on preferred strategy, choosing in the future not to broach operational matters with Heritage House unless plans were already in motion, or he was avoiding specifics.

For good reason, Smith's Presidency in the years since the war ended has been analyzed at depth both by our own countrymen here in Dixie and abroad, and scholars decades from now will enjoy even more hindsight and historical resources with which to absolve or condemn him. The consensus that has formed in our present time with the biases of recency is that he was a man out of his depth who often worsened matters; in the case of the Battle of Baltimore, however, he may have inadvertently staved off a disaster and helped continue the remarkable hot hand the Confederate States enjoyed in the opening weeks of the war.

Baltimore's harbor facilities had of course been severely damaged in the opening assault and the vessels scuttled at dock were in the end salvageable, even if they saw little use in the war due to needed repairs. The city was uncaptured, however, and was no small metropolis; it was the sixth-largest city in the United States and still twice as big as any city in the Confederacy, a major port and thriving industrial center, home to over six hundred thousand souls in the city proper with thousands more in her suburbs and hinterland. The plans for HHH called for isolating it from north, south and east - with the harbor taken by Confederate vessels, forces would march on it from the south while escape routes were cut to the north, ideally to cause a surrender.

Scott pushed for an escalation of this plan, telegraphing for General Dade's men on the Patapsco to cut northeast and head for the Susquehanna immediately, aiming for the rail bridges at Havre de Grace, rather than the closer-in scythe movement that HHH called for. Scott had no way of knowing this, but had this maneuver been executed by Dade, it would have left him completely exposed from the rear by the Pennsylvania National Guard, which had been assembled just south of York ready to be moved into Maryland by rail, supported by a full corps of Army reservists based out of the Army War College in nearby Carlisle and commanded by General George M. Cameron. York was a mere fifty miles from Baltimore and had Dade overshot Baltimore he would have been badly isolated, easily taken from behind and defeated in detail away from reinforcements.

Smith was of course not aware of this circumstance either, but he considered the plan foolish when, at forward headquarters at Mount Vernon to meet with Scott and to congratulate General Patrick in the field, he was informed of Scott's tentative order. Smith instead ordered a pincer assault on Baltimore, as planned, to "secure the city" - not out of strategic necessity, but as an unredeemed Southern metropolis. Whether or not Smith believed that the Confederates would be welcomed as liberators is unclear - Scott and Patrick certainly had no illusions about Maryland's sympathies after fifty years apart from the rest of the Old South - but Baltimore was the prize to be had, and if that meant allowing refugees to flee from the city ahead of Confederate armies, that only made a future occupation easier.

The move saved Dade's army, surely, but ironically and crucially also gave the Pennsylvanians time to retreat back across the Susquehanna north of York as the westernmost scythe approached Carlisle and Harrisburg beyond it - the lynchpin of the front..."

- Mississippi Rubicon: How the Confederacy Went to War in 1913

 

[KingSweden24]

"...defining moment of the state's 20th century.

Failure had many fathers in Maryland in September of 1913. The state was still quite Southern in outlook and culture despite having largely shed its Confederate sympathies since 1863; to wit, the Commandant of the Maryland National Guard was the cousin of a powerful Calvert County state senator, who was of course promptly captured in the opening days of the war. But failure was also a bipartisan affair - Governor Phillips Goldsborough [1], one of only two non-Democratic governors of the state since the War of Secession, took much of the blame for the slow response of the Guard and though he stayed behind until the last train out of Baltimore before Pennsylvania Station was cut off by Confederate soldiers, he was pilloried for years and Maryland would not elect a Liberal as Governor again until 2002, among the longest such stretches of single-party control in American history as the state came to be dominated by a handful of families with names such as Lee, Tydings, and in time D'Alesandro.

For all the constant jokes about "Maryland's state flag is a white banner," the defense of Baltimore was a fine hour. On September 16th, having regrouped for a few days, consolidated their logistics and been reinforced with tens of thousands of additional men from down south, the Confederate Army thrust across the Patapsco again directly towards the city, while the forces that had sacked Washington swung north first along Rock Creek and then marching straight for the harbor. A third smaller screening force set out from recently-captured Westminster and thrust eastwards, towards the York-Baltimore rail connection, having garrisoned Taneytown on their rear. Behind them was a fourth force that was aimed directly at Gettysburg, a small market town west of York, which would serve as a key point on the drive to the Susquehanna. In total, close to seventy thousand men in addition to the forces nearing Carlisle in Pennsylvania were on the march in Maryland, the majority of them bearing down on Baltimore specifically.

The hero of the battle was Robert Alexander, a native Marylander who had requested the command of the Baltimore Garrison of the United States Army to be near to ailing family. From the moment the bombardment had begun and news of the collapse of Washington's defenses had arrived, Alexander had leapt into action, stationing his small but able forces throughout key western neighborhoods of the city and drawing the Maryland Guardsmen who had not melted in battle back into the city with them. Relief arrived with the arrival on the 13th of the entirety of the Delaware Guard and two companies of New Jerseyans, along with an additional company of Army men from Philadelphia. The whole of the Northeast mobilization tree was coming active and Alexander knew the hour at hand; the longer he could hold the Confederate advance at Baltimore, the better prepared the rest of the scattered, surprised American forces would be at the inevitable battle upon the Susquehanna.

Alexander placed himself in charge of evacuations, and in all as many as sixty thousand Baltimoreans were able to flee by train north to Delaware and beyond, and an additional fifty thousand escaped on foot. Fears of a Confederate cut to the north prevented more from fleeing, and the evacuations were chaotic; many of the souls in Baltimore were not residents but those who had fled to the perceived safety of the city ahead of advancing columns of the enemy. In a dark repeat of events in Washington, Black and immigrant travelers were often denied a place on trains, even turned away with paid tickets; with about a fifth of Baltimore's pre-war population being of African descent, some fifty or sixty thousand American citizens of that city were captured and sold into slavery by Confederate soldiers.

The battle began in the early afternoon of the 16th as the Confederate soldiers marched into Baltimore, led by a pounding artillery fire that destroyed much of the northwest of the city mere years after the rebuilding from the fire of 1904 was finally complete. Armed citizens and soldiers took up positions in buildings from where they had excellent lines of fire on Confederate troops and five-man "fire gangs" could rapidly run throughout the near-empty and oft-barricaded streets to strike where needed. Baltimore saw amongst the most brutal urban warfare of the war, which would be repeated the next year as the Confederacy retreated back to the Potomac, devastating the city for years to come. It was the Sack of Washington on an even greater scale; summary executions, mass rapes, and thousands of prisoners of color taken. Fights were not street-by-street or house-to-house but often room-to-room. The hand grenade, a novel invention of modern war at that time, was used to devastating effect by the attackers to clear out civilian homes, and artillery and dynamite was used indiscriminately to clear obstacles or buildings. After six horrifying, fiery days, the Confederacy had secured most of the city, including the crucial rail yards on its north, and sent much of what remained of the defense scattered northeast towards the Chesapeake shores. Alexander himself was captured in the fighting; he would die of pneumonia in a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp, the most prominent captive other than the seventeen Congressmen taken in Washington, in late 1915, and was posthumously honored by both Congress and President Hughes.

The battle had come at a great cost, no matter its psychological impact on the Americans. The Confederacy suffered a jaw-dropping twenty-five thousand casualties over the course of six days, with seven thousand dead and eighteen thousand wounded, with hundreds succumbing to their wounds in the weeks and months thereafter. It had greatly slowed the Confederacy's advance to the Susquehanna, thus threatening their strategic initiative, and more importantly ended any pretense that the weak, effete Americans would wilt at the first sign of violence - the enemy could and would defend their home to the knife. Baltimore, even moreso than the depravities in Washington, was the first crucible that showed both sides exactly what kind of war this would be..."

- The Guns of September

[1] What a fucking wild old-school Yankee Republican/Liberal name, amirite?I

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the War Council was a sort of inner Cabinet, starting out with Root, Herrick, Ballinger, and the most senior officers of the Army and Navy. It was here where Hadley's experience as a Governor came in handy, as by January of 1914 he had taken over essentially most civilian-related aspects of the executive branch while Hughes turned his focus largely to coordinating the running of the war. Like the rest of the executive branch, the War Council met every day at the unused Merchants' Exchange Building, which Hughes facetiously called "the field White House," and the dominant personalities of the remainder of the conflict can see their influences traced to the very earliest meetings there in late September.

Hughes had mulled sacking Herrick as early as the train ride into Philadelphia but did not want to start a panic throughout the armed forces at a time of such fragile morale and instead began to slowly box his Secretary of War out, dealing directly with Wotherspoon and his chief aide, Bliss. It was the junior general who impressed Hughes, and Root for that matter, and they resolved that sometime soon, they would quietly ask Wotherspoon to retire to allow his more capable lieutenant to take the job of Chief of Staff. To his credit, Wotherspoon did perform capably and contrary to his reputation as "William Worthless-spoon" in the early weeks of the war, aggressively coordinating with regional garrison commanders, the infamously lead-footed Ordnance Bureau, and National Guards to bring as much mobilized force to the frontlines as possible by the end of the month, and a potential disaster at Harrisburg was averted thanks to his routing nearly the entire strength of the Northeast to central Pennsylvania even as Baltimore was falling into enemy hands.

Nonetheless, Bliss showed his mind for organization and strategy in those early meetings. It was Bliss' idea to look back to the War of Secession and not repeat the mistakes made then; first and foremost, he encouraged the civilian leadership to think in terms of strategic theaters, defined loosely by river systems, and three Army field commands were formed accordingly that would work independently under individual commanding generals but as part of a coordinated, grander strategy. In the east, the Army Command Susquehanna was created to prevent the Confederates from advancing any further north, placed under one of the most senior serving generals in the Army and a native Pennsylvanian, Hunter Liggett. Army Command Ohio was formed to attack the Confederate Midlands, placed under the purview of Charles Farnsworth, and finally Army Command Colorado, to coordiante all actions in the Southwest along the Texan and Mexican frontiers, under Charles Treat, though Hughes suspected that the forces under John J. Pershing in the western Arizona Territory would largely operate as they saw fit with little input from Treat's command post in Santa Fe.

Bliss' thinking in organizing the Army commands this way was that it aligned with the strategic realities of the various theaters of war and allowed various commanders to think on their feet accordingly in terms of pursuing their objectives. Further, he made a compelling case to the War Council that the Midlands were the true objective of the war and if the Confederates could be held off in southern Pennsylvania through winter, then a massive offensive into Kentucky the following spring could rapidly break Confederate morale and warmaking capabilities. "The key to defeating the enemy," Bliss wrote in a memorandum, "is to thrust through the heartland of their industry, a belt from Louisville on the Ohio through the central Cumberland Valley all the way to the transportation key at Chattanooga and on to grand Atlanta herself."

Similar actions were taken navally, where the various squadrons of the Navy were organized into two commands, Atlantic under William Sims and Pacific under Henry Mayo. Both would report directly to Austin Knight, who was designated as Chief of Naval Operations not long thereafter..."

- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Great American War, thus, was the largest mobilization of forces since not just the Unification Wars but the Napoleonic coalitions a century earlier. European general staffs were eager to study its every aspect and military attaches who were not already out in the field were immediately ordered to do so, and a veritable flood of military observers were sailing across the Atlantic before long.

The impact of the war on the complex European political developments of the 1910s is an oft-underdiscussed aspect of the period, but it is not an irrelevant one. Even before considering the economic fallout - the United States was increasingly not just an industrial competitor to the European Big Three of Britain, France and Germany but also in many ways an engine of their economies in its own right - the ideological dynamic of the war polarized European public opinion and those of its movers and shakers, often in ways that were unexpected.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the "Catholic Powers" of France, Austria-Hungary and Belgium empathized almost wholly with the "Bloc Sud" of the Confederacy, Brazil, Mexico and Chile. These were all conservative revisionist powers, two of them Catholic monarchies; that two of them were two of the last countries to preserve legally the institution of slavery in the world was an inconvenience. For Austria-Hungary, the affinity was also familial, for Mexico's Emperor was Franz Josef's younger brother, her Empress the aunt of the Belgian King (indeed, a Belgian prince served as a military observer on the Mexican lines), [1] and even Brazil's House of Braganza was distantly related to the Viennese royals.

France, though, had the most direct and determined interests in the New World of possibly any European state sans Britain. France had, in many ways, created the Bloc Sud, if inadvertently. It was French intervention that had originally shaped and saved the Mexican Empire, French recognition that brought the Confederacy to full independence at the Conference of Havana, French investments across northern Latin America that had shaped policy choices for a generation. French desire for a Panamanian Canal that had influenced Paris' bloody but brief intervention in Colombia's civil war only to see their dreams dashed by the successful engineering of an American alternative in Nicaragua. For fifty years, the strategic situation in the Caribbean Basin was driven in large part by French influence, and now those decisions were at last paying off or coming home to roost, depending on who precisely in Paris one spoke to.

As the crisis unfolded over the summer and then erupted into a massive war in the autumn of 1913, the consensus in French government circles was overt public neutrality. Amerophilia was in very short supply at both the Tuileries and Quai d'Orsay but policymakers from Prime Minister Poincare on down saw little benefit to directly provoking the United States. As American blockade policy slowly developed over the next months into the spring of 1914, France elected to take the Anglo-German stance of declaring that flagged vessels were expected to be honored as they passed into Hemispheric waters and that attacks on merchant vessels would be considered an act of aggression. Beyond that, opinions widely varied. Though sympathetic to the Mexicans and Brazilians, Poincare thought the whole affair largely a nuisance brought on by the Confederacy and predicted that even with "trade normalization" as an explicit policy of the Big Three European naval powers, the war would be more trouble than it was worth and early on ordered his Foreign Minister Paleologue to attempt to lead delegations to negotiate a conclusion to the war. Others in France were more explicitly favorable to the Bloc Sud, led largely by the defense establishment (War Minister Castelnau in particular) and members of the Action Francaise, who supported large weapons orders be farmed out to the Confederacy and viewed a Mexican-Brazilian custodianship over the Nicaragua Canal as a huge boon, perhaps one to be followed by the completion of the Panama project and the eventual isolation of the United States entirely from Latin affairs over the next generation.

Most European states, however, did not ponder their own strategic advantages in the war. The British, with major investments in essentially all parties of the conflict (and particularly reliant on Argentine food imports), declared a strict neutrality and took the lead in formulating the policy of normalized trade that Europe would shield behind. The Liberal government of Richard Haldane was very much sympathetic to the United States, but after its replacement in the spring of 1914 by the right-wing Cecil cabinet, policy was little changed. The British public, even its more conservative voters, had little sympathy for slaveholding, and even though the National Party of Hugh Cecil was naturally empathetic towards large landowners, the dominance of conservative Catholicism amongst the other Bloc Sud powers made their reactionary but fiercely Protestant base resolute in demanding strict neutrality be adhered to. Germans and Italians were split largely along ideological and confessional lines but also flummoxed by large ethnic communities from both countries split amongst the combatants; better to be neutral and not invite a reaction against their countrymen, and their valuable remittances, abroad.

The strangest European reaction remained Russia, however. Since the 1830s, the autocratic Tsardom and liberal United States had enjoyed good relations largely out of having no natural disputes; though the treatment of Jews in the Russian Empire had triggered a minor diplomatic crisis in 1910, American elite Russophilia had reemerged
with the passage of the Constitution of 1912 and the friendship shown by Russia fifty years earlier at Havana became an important institutional memory once again. Russia, uniquely amongst European powers, explicitly declared its view that the Bloc Sud was acting as an aggressor towards the United States and Argentina rather than mealy-mouthed statements of neutrality, and though Russian imports were negligible save some trade through wartime Seattle, the declaration of sympathy by Tsar Michael II and his government was not soon forgotten by American leaders..."

- Path of Darkness: Europe's Illiberal Hour

[1] Don't think I've forgotten to give you all the depraved Steffie content you could want and hope for!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Confederate push towards Harrisburg and the Susquehanna was slowed considerably by a series of logistical challenges that kneecapped offensive operations and, when the United States had grouped its armies in Ohio and Illinois for the push into Kentucky the following spring out of the small bridgeheads near Cairo and Cincinnati, limited their coordination across theaters until the issue was fixed aggressively by order of the Confederate War Department in June that year.

Three problems bedeviled Confederate transport and communications capabilities and limited the advantages imparted by Richmond's strategic initiative in catching the enemy on the back foot and well-developed armaments and ordnance divisions. The first was the most easily fixable, that being the monopoly held by Consolidated National Telephone on all telegraphy and telephony infrastructure in the Confederacy save parts of Texas and Arkansas. The former Bell Telephone subsidiary came under considerable pressure both from its limited infrastructure and corporate parentage in New York; the War Department claimed in late October that it had unearthed a conspiracy by CNT officials to "delimit" Confederate communications on their lines and therefore seized all CNT equipment and transfer stations, sending thousands of soldiers to work as telegraph agents and switchboard operators when they could have been used elsewhere. This problem was compounded by the limited electrification that existed in most of the Confederacy, even its cities. The Confederacy had indulged for a good decade later than elsewhere Thomas Edison's insistence on the superiority of the direct current, and the migration to the now-universal alternating current had been slow and gradual as even Edison abandoned the idea and, with it, the large electric utilities he had set up in the Confederacy. This meant that, per capita, the Confederacy had fewer electrified buildings than any other participant in the war and was considerably less electrified than any of its peer economies. While not a critical point, it limited the amount of electricity available for a variety of industrial warfare purposes, and required a major buildup in electric infrastructure that, once again, diverted critical manpower both free and enslaved from frontline efforts.

The third and most critical problem, however, was the three prevailing rail gauges of the Confederate States railroad network. For years, military planners and businessmen alike had complained about the northeast of the Confederacy largely using standard gauge and the Midlands using a 5' broad gauge, to say nothing of the ultra-broad 5'6" "Texas gauge" used west of the Mississippi. While bizarre incompatibilities like a lonely stretch of standard gauge rail between Montgomery and the Georgia state line had been fixed on a one-off basis, competition between rival firms, make-work desires in interchange localities and the refusal of the Confederate Congress to mandate a national network had left the three largely separate networks in place, coming in contact only at Petersburg and Richmond, where Midlands railroads passed to connect to the capital and the harbor and Norfolk, and at Charlotte, where the standard gauge "eastern system" that interlined with the United States' network met the broad gauge network of the rest of the country. This made Charlotte in particular a logistical snarl, nicknamed the "Charlotte Chokepoint," in that men and materiel heading northeast from the states of the Deep South could not flow straight through Charlotte but rather had to disembark and be transported to the correct railyard to continue on, a circumstance that enraged war planners who found their promised reinforcements badly delayed but which suited the railyard owners of Charlotte just fine..."

- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War

 

[KingSweden24]

"...it was said the Confederacy would never need conscription [1] because the Confederacy would never lack willing men to go fight for it. Certainly it was the case that there was a deep expectation that men, particularly young men, would go fight if they were of age (the requirement at the onset of the war was simply that a man be between seventeen and sixty-two years old and in "fighting health," both stipulations which would be made considerably more flexible in time), lest they suffer social ostracism. Men had been honor-bound to serve in the state militias in peacetime - only a coward would refuse the call in times of war. But even beyond that, the groundswell of enthusiasm that met the declaration of war and the shocking early victories such as sacking Washington within a week of hostilities being declared created a storm of enlistments across the Confederacy as men rushed to don the gray, with many hoping to see the field before the war was over, which was expected to occur before weeks. This more than anything explains the frenzy of the autumn of 1913 - there were jokes made about dining in Philadelphia or perhaps even New York for Christmas dinner, and everyone wanted to see to it that they could have the chance to experience such a victory firsthand.

Unlike the War of Secession, much of the Confederate elite made their way to enlistment stations as well. Friends at universities and boarding schools formed "Pals' Battalions" to go and fight the war together, and towns sent off their proud young men in makeshift parades as lifelong neighbors and comrades marched to the nearest train stations to go off to war together. By late November, much of the CSA was nearly emptied out of its youth, and indeed so many men volunteered that the Army had to turn many of them away for lack of equipment as the Ordnance Bureau ramped up into full gear. The war was still at its nascent phase, one of excitement and ebullience, without the savagery that was to come yet revealed..."

- Mississippi Rubicon: How the Confederacy Went to War in 1913

[1] Lol, sure

 

[KingSweden24]

"...situation. The United States had long realized the value of good relations with Peru, not only for the mineral wealth both there and in neighboring Bolivia, to which Tacna and Arica served as a gateway, but also the longstanding small naval station at Chimbote that the countries shared on a lease arrangement and the considerable investments American businessmen had in Peruvian enterprises. One irony of the Great American War was that Peruvian-American relations were actually approaching a nadir at the time hostilities broke out; the "Aristocratic Republic," as that era of Peruvian history had become known, had delivered political stability unseen in the nation's history with a defanged military and a flourishing export-oriented economy at the expense of a number of political liberties and strong inequalities under the ruling Civilista Party. The current President, Guillermo Billinghurst, was a progressive, elected on the backs of workers both in urban and rural areas despite strict property and literacy qualifications against more conservative members of his own party, and he had battled the Peruvian Congress nearly every month of his Presidency to the point that he had been prepared to dissolve the body and rule by decree, threatening the limited democracy the Civilistas had managed to construct and nurture out of the wake of the Saltpeter War.

Billinghurst was not particularly popular with a key constituency - the United States government, and not just because of his economic program [1]. As a man Billinghurst was passionate, hot-tempered and often spoke without thinking. Though styling himself as a populist man of the people, Billinghurst was a millionaire who had threatened to overthrow the government with a paramilitary of armed workers if he were not elected [2] and was now suggesting such a course of action once again if Congress opened impeachment proceedings against him. As the situation in Peru had deteriorated in the spring and summer of 1913, before Billinghurst had even been in office a year, the United States had dispatched a new ambassador to Peru, Adelbert "Del" Hay, son of a former Secretary of State and President [3] who had worked in various ministerial roles in the State Department under Presidents of both parties and was respected in the diplomatic corps as an honest broker of American interests who conducted himself as a no-nonsense professional, despite the partisan nature of his pedigree. Hay had thus found much of his time in Lima spent trying to defuse tensions and when that failed, begin to try to help conservative Civilistas find a potential successor from within the civilian, rather than military, hierarchy should Billinghurst for whatever reason no longer be President. The extent of Hay's involvement in the October 1913 coup d'etat in Peru is thus a subject of great academic debate in both countries, and though consensus is hard to find, it is generally accepted that even if the American embassy did not orchestrate the event, it was at least fairly aware of it. At any rate, Hay was not in Lima during those crucial days anyways, for he had gone on a mission to Bolivia to attempt to persuade the newly-elected government of Ismael Montes to join an alliance with the United States and Peru to fight Chile.

The Hay Mission, as the journey into the Andean mountains to the Bolivian capital at La Paz came to be called, was not without controversy. It conveniently removed Hay from Lima when soldiers affiliated with the Peruvian Army kidnapped Billinghurst and demanded his resignation in favor of his First Vice President, Roberto Leguia (whose brother, Augusto, was Billinghurst's predecessor) and then imprisoned him and declared martial law upon his refusal, triggering rioting in the capital and elsewhere. It was also pursued without sanction by Philadelphia, which had authorized prior to telegraph cables being cut the pursuit of an alliance with Peru but not Bolivia, which was regarded as unreliable, unstable and which had just begun a long rapprochement with Chile under Montes in his first of two non-consecutive terms. Hay, who had dreamed of an illustrious career in the diplomatic corps in honor of his father, was rewarded for his successful but unauthorized freelancing in South America during the war (missions to Ecuador, Paraguay and Colombia would not be as fruitful) not with a high-ranking position within the State Department but instead quietly exiled with sinecure positions at minor diplomatic postings around the world until his sudden death of a heart attack in 1930.

Part of the reason why Hay's mission caused controversy in the halls of State back home was because there was debate internally about what exactly the treaty with Argentina required of the United States, which suddenly found itself at war with the Confederate States, Mexico and Brazil - but maybe not Chile, which had not formally declared war and had, as of early October, mobilized her fleet but sent it to Chiloe Island rather than north, to the Navy's surprise. Several vessels were drawn out of Chimbote and sent north to Nicaragua - a prescient move, it turned out - but the Chilean fleet had returned to Valparaiso rather than attack Argentina through the Straits of Magellan just as Hay was arriving in La Paz and Billinghurst was being locked away where his most passionate supporters couldn't find him. Since Chile had neither attacked Argentina nor declared war upon the United States, more optimistic minds in Philadelphia, including Secretary of State Root, hoped that Chile was dithering on whether to actually go to war beyond readying for defensive combat, a state of affairs that also left the Navy loathe to totally empty Chimbote in case Chile did declare war, in which case having vessels in proximity would be valuable and not leaving the Peruvian Navy also moored there exposed.

Of course, it was true that Chile was dithering, both on to what extent they should move land forces across the Andes and how best to deploy their navy, and as Hay debated with a skeptical but open-minded Montes the merits of an anti-Chilean coalition (there was little to be gained in Bolivian politics, cabined to participation by elites as they were, in being pro-Chilean in outlook) the Chilean Congress finally made a decision and committed to it..." [5]

- A Game in the Shadows: Diplomacy, Espionage and Subterfuge in the Great American War

[1] As I'm sure you all have deduced, outside of the US-CS theater of the war, the United States' status a protagonist of this conflict is... ambiguous.
[2] And, of course, on the other side the people the US is fighting against or fighting alongside are often some fairly shady characters themselves
[3] Every now and then, we'll check in with prominent kids of various major figures if the narrative warrants (we'll get some Hearst brood action later on, fear not!) and this vignette is basically the extent of Del Hay's reappearance in the TL
[4] Inspired by OTL's Mexican Revolution engineered by Henry Lane Wilson and
[5] Originally, the attempts to form a counter-Chilean coalition with Peru and Bolivia as well as the Chilean attack on Chimbote Bay was going to be one update, but I wanted to capture the shenanigans of trying to piece that alliance together with the space it deserved. Next up - Chile decides to poke the bear again and party like its 1885

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the dithering for which Chile became famous reared its head once again. It was to the enormous frustration of both Brazil and Mexico, having stuck out their necks, that now the Chilean government seemed to be getting cold feet; diplomats in Santiago meeting with counterparts and contacts expressed bafflement at how the same Chile that had staged provocative naval exercises off the coast of Panama and Costa Rica a mere two months ago now hid their navy in the bays around Isla Chiloe, seemingly terrified of their own shadow. Chile had mobilized its ground forces in the Andes but not attacked Argentine positions, confusing the enemy but also giving them time to reinforce their defensive positions on both emerging fronts, and they seemed to exist in a stage of semi-war with the United States where the American navy was making preparations by withdrawing their dreadnought and several escort vessels from Chimbote, but guns had not started firing yet.

President Juan Luis Sanfuentes was a hawk and strongly in favor of rapid naval action (that Mexico's ambassador was shouting from the rooftops that it was time to coordinate actions around Nicaragua was perhaps part of the equation), and had Chile acted more decisively they could have severely complicated matters for the United States in the Pacific. However, the Congress of the Republica Oligarcico was less persuaded. Sure, there were still a number of Deputies and Senators in particular who remembered the bad taste left by the "mutilated victory" of 1885 and resented the large presence of American corporations in the Chilean economy, but saltpeter sales were still strong as was the copper trade, and war was bad for business. The street was nationalistic and enthusiastic about battle with el Yanqui and to a lesser extent Argentina, but when had Chile's masters ever listened to the street? This was a minority position, to be sure, but in the consensus-based and lethargic political system of Chile, minority views got a long and thorough hearing-out before being politely voted against, and the debate over whether to assault Chimbote before sailing around the Horn to pin down Argentina became one not just for Sanfuentes' war cabinet but indeed the whole of Congress to get in on. Destroying the chief American Pacific naval station guarding the southern approach to Nicaragua was a strategic necessity, but it would also drag Peru into the war; Sanfuentes ordered the fleet return from Chiloe as news from North America was increasingly positive to give himself the option.

Two things tipped Chile's hand. The first was an impassioned speech given by former President and war hero Arturo Prat on the floor of the Senate. Officially retired but the unofficial backroom Chief of the Navy (to the great chagrin of the real holder of said office, Admiral Luis Uribe), Prat declared that "honor demands that we support our friends and take the fight to the enemy!" Chile had won decisive victories in 1879 and a forced peace after a favorable effective draw in 1885 - their navy was regarded highly, despite its small size. Prat had been an architect of both those wars and even as he advanced in age he was no less a forceful speaker, with many Senators openly weeping as he spoke to their sense of duty and patriotism. When he volunteered to command the task force himself, a standing ovation erupted. The most popular man in Chile had drawn a line in the sand, and the unpopular, corrupt and controversial Sanfuentes had no choice but to respond now.

The other piece, with Prat triumphantly heading to the docks in Valparaiso to take command of the dreadnought Almirante Latorre, was that news arrived from the British ambassador in Lima to his colleague at Britain's embassy in Santiago that, as riots engulfed the streets of Peru with the imprisonment of President Guillermo Billinghurst in an apparent coup, the American ambassador, Adelbert Hay, had seemingly vanished from the capital but was vaguely confirmed to have traveled to Bolivia. It did not take much effort to piece the puzzle together of what exactly was happening, with a secret mission to La Paz at the same time that an equivocating Peruvian leader was overthrown - the United States did not seem, to Chilean leaders, to be taking its time in waiting to make a move to its advantage. Sanfuentes telegraphed the order to Prat to set off as soon as possible from Valparaiso, and Prat followed the order to the letter.

The Chilean strike force that attacked Chimbote Bay and the joint American-Peruvian fleet within it was essentially the full force of the country's substantive navy. The Latorre and its sister-ship, Almirante Cochrane, sailed alongside six brand-new escort destroyers that were among the fastest in the world and five armored cruisers and three protected cruisers. This was considerably more than the tonnage kept at Chimbote, where three Peruvian protected cruisers and two American armored cruisers - Sante Fe and Cheyenne - and two protected cruisers - the San Francisco and the Newark - were at dock. The Chileans attacked shortly after dawn on October 6th, 1913, coming up straight from the west with the sun ahead of them behind the mountains on shore. Four American vessels were no match for Chilean dreadnoughts and most of the ships barely made it out of dock; the Peruvian ships were scuttled before even trying to set off, and within hours Chilean marines had raised their flag over Chimbote.

The decision, while sensible perhaps from a tactical standpoint, was in the end a disaster for Chile. If Peru had been slouching towards war, now it was sprinting - the declaration of support for the United States was made later that afternoon in a stunned Lima. With Ambassador Hay already in La Paz, the decision to go to war in Bolivia was made equally quickly, with a declaration made on the 8th by President Ismael Montes, after receiving assurances that the United States would support a revision to pre-1879 borders in the Atacama. In the course of a week, Chile had gone from a peripheral partial participant in the Great American War to having dragged in Peru and Bolivia in a coalition aimed exclusively at defeating them..."

- Alliance Against America: Inside the Bloc Sud

 

[KingSweden24]

"...coordination with Army Command Colorado, currently based out of Colorado Springs, remarkably far from any front lines. It was no secret even then, and certainly not now with decades of scholarship to shed light, that Pershing and General Charles Treat did not like each other or even work particularly well as a team. Treat viewed Pershing as stubborn, brash and prone to walking up to the line of outright insubordination; Pershing, for his part, regarded Treat as a mediocre tactician and was quick to remind others that his superior officer came from a political family (Treat's father had been a Wisconsin legislator, and his grandfather one in Maine), with considerable implications that Treat's appointment to head up ACC had to do with his deep ties to the Liberal establishment rather than talent. Neither man was entirely wrong in their assessments, but also not being perfectly fair; the strategic developments of October 1913 in the Far West are an excellent illustration of the tensions between them that would define Pershing's war until his dispatch to eastern Tennessee two years later. [1]

One immediate consequence of the Mexican declaration of war upon the United States was that tens of thousands of fresh, professional soldiers were now available to reinforce Confederate lines from coast to coast. Despite the hassle of having to switch trains frequently between the Confederacy's incompatible rail gauges, Mexican troops once mobilized were slotted into position in the Far West and on the defensive in the Midlands to allow for full Confederate concentration in the Susquehanna Valley. In the immediate aftermath of the victory at Yuma, national guard forces from the various mountain states had moved south out of Colorado and New Mexico only to be stopped at what came to be known as the Socorro Line, a rough defensive position across the Rio Bravo just south of the Arizona Territory's northern border anchored by the substantial Fort Craig complex. Reinforcements from Dakota, Oregon and the Utah garrison had, through the end of December, done little to dislodge this concentration of Confederate troops, and a particularly bloody attempted assault head-on at Fort Craig had been repulsed with staggering American casualties, including most of the Idaho National Guard being wiped out in the span of a day. Fresh recruits and Army regulars were on the way, but Treat's attempt at a feint towards Placito through the desert to the east of the line, near the Texas border, had been abandoned due to the logistical nightmare of marching soldiers through empty arid land, though aerial reconnaissance had given ACC a glimpse of what exactly they were up against - behind the Texas State Militia and Arizona Territorial Guard was a full corps of Mexican soldiers fortifying and securing a secondary line of defense.

Pershing thought the solution was straightforward - hammer the Socorro Line into oblivion with artillery, and most importantly have Treat stop hiding in Colorado Springs. Treat had proposed a different solution, which was to tack east and seize undefended Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle, which crucially was one of the few places for hundreds of miles that had a direct rail connection to New Mexico and from where the United States could credibly threaten the less populated western half of the Indian Territory and end the potential threat to the captured oil reserves in the Osage Hills near Missouri. Pershing was aghast at this suggestion - the Mexicans were only going to mobilize more men and route them up through Los Pasos, and extended trench warfare in the rugged mountains around the Rio Bravo on the New Mexico-Arizona border was preferable to leaving Albuquerque and Santa Fe exposed on a quixotic attempt to claim empty land in northern Texas. [2]

Treat's plans were, mercifully for him, a secret communique and not revealed publicly by himself or anyone else until after the war; Treat, when ridiculed, would later claim that it was a merely a suggestion and he was taking the temperature of his officers on the matter. To whatever extent that is accurate, he certainly got a hot read from Pershing and Menoher, who rapidly drafted their own plan - a march through the Sonoran Desert along the South-Western Railroad to strike directly at Tucson and, south of it, Nogales. The broader strategic objectives of Army Command Colorado required this to happen eventually anyways, but Treat's preference had been to wait until early spring to attack. Pershing, not a man prone to waiting, gathered his reinforced men in Yuma, left Knowland and the California Guard behind as a garrison on his rear to hold Yuma and several small Mexican villages to its south, and set off to break one of the two logistical points through which Mexican forces could penetrate the Southwest..."

- Pershing

[1] Some of you probably can see where this is headed, but for now just enjoy the insinuations
[2] Charles Treat, I'm sure, was not in real life actually this stupid (he has a Distinguished Service Medal after all), but some light character assassination of people with a short Wikipedia page in favor of one of our TL's budding protagonists is an indulgence I hope you will all allow me

 

[KingSweden24]

"...inflection point in the history of the American socialist movement. The two wings were completely and utterly at loggerheads, and something was going to have to give.

Morris Hillquit was not the protagonist the right wing of the Socialists expected to emerge, but he was the one they got. Debs was, as always, far too focused on trying to be all things to all factions, while the Bergerites seemed more and more destined to rest fat on their Milwaukeean laurels. Hillquit had, briefly, joined Meyer London in Congress from New York, defeated after a single term by a progressive Democrat, and the Russian-born Jew was at a crossroads in his own life, both personally and professionally. The quandary the Great American War posed socialism seemed perfectly suited to his pragmatic talents, and as the Socialist Party gathered for its emergency meeting in Buffalo in October of 1913, the hour was at hand for the party's fate and trajectory to be sealed.

That month may be more famous in the annals of American history for the "Axis of Liberty" speech delivered in Philadelphia by President Hughes, but Hillquit's oratory in Buffalo was impactful in its own right. Socialism was genuinely split on the question of the war; before hostilities had broken out, the movement had been unilaterally pacifist, viewing war as a mechanism of capitalistic oppression in its newsletters and ideological journals. The sudden attack by the Confederacy complicated the picture, not least because the southern opponent was possibly the least sympathetic enemy imaginable. Hillquit agreed with Haywood that the United States could certainly have dealt with Richmond more delicately, but they disagreed sharply on the response afterwards. Haywood, speaking first on behalf of the then-ascendant IWW, proclaimed before the Emergency Congress of American Socialism: "We must have peace, no matter the price!" A marker had been laid down - anti-war, inflexibly, and that was the line the IWW would be expected to take.

Debs was privately horrified; his precious American Railroad Union had recovered from the Pullman Strike to become the country's largest union and successfully penetrated multiple railroad professions, and how the ARU navigated the war would determine its survival. His theory of "all means available" to deliver a socialist society depended upon tactical cleverness rather than ideological purity, but Debs' position as the most prominent Socialist figure in the country alongside Haywood required him to be more diplomatic than that view. Hillquit spoke for the center and right of the Socialist Party moments later, however, without consulting Debs.

"Setting aside for a moment the matter of the war - have we forgotten, Mr. Haywood, that no man is born a socialist? There is no man emerged from the womb knowledgeable of exploitation, of iniquity, of the corruption of the capitalist! A man must learn. A man must be persuaded of facts that the most powerful figures of society have an interest in convincing him are not facts but uncertainties. Have you elected, in the face of this, to throw aside all means of persuasion? Are you so convinced of your righteousness that you forget we must bring people over to our cause?"

Haywood sat in stunned, angry silence, unable to respond as Hillquit continued: "If we are to win the trust of the people of this Republic to steward it to a just and socialist future, we cannot abandon its defense in this hour of terror. The course ahead must be one of principled opposition when we witness grievous wrongs, in return for qualified support when prudent. This is the fulcrum of history upon this continent. We cannot reject the defense of the people out of our opposition to wage slavery when we face the most evil regime of our time which propagates chattel slavery." [1]

In those ten minutes, Hillquit went from obscure to one of the most famed names of the American left. Newspapers reprinted his remarks in surprisingly approving terms, possibly the most positive coverage socialists had ever received in American media, contrasting his support for men at war to Haywood's defeatist, stubborn opposition. It proved a crucial hour for the party as a whole, too; the resurgence the revolutionaries had seen after the Lawrence strike and WFM-affiliated candidates winning across the West was halted by Hillquit's principled pragmatism, and in the end the Central Committee of the Socialist Party voted narrowly to support a resolution calling for the ejection of Confederate soldiers from American territory and reparations for the assault on Maryland before considering peace terms, a position that would put them to the left of the Democrats and Liberals but certainly a far cry from the "total pacifism" of Haywood and the syndicalist minority..."

- The American Socialists

[1] To say the least, this is a very different reaction of American socialism vs. OTL's WW1...

 

[KingSweden24]

"...General Charles Summerall's advance from Hagerstown to Harrisburg has been criticized to no end in Confederate scholarship for decades now, but his choice to regroup in the Cumberland Valley, grow his army with tens of thousands of additional recruits, and then forge forward once he knew he no longer had to act as a screen for forces in Washington and Baltimore was likely the correct one. Summerall was more innovative than other Confederate officers in using hot air balloons and small biplanes for scouting out enemy positions; he could clearly witness the Pennsylvania National Guard's swing position at York which could rapidly deploy in a multitude of directions, and the massing forces behind the Susquehanna awaiting him. His single corps that had taken Hagerstown was isolated, across a substantive and forested low ridge of mountains from the rest of south-central Pennsylvania and Maryland, and one of the few Confederate columns that was likely outnumbered. Better to establish defensive pickets west of his position to guard the mountain roads through the Appalachians and have a large fighting force than be caught flat-footed and open the gateway to Harpers Ferry and beyond.

Summerall's choice to slow-walk his approach to the Susquehanna, while understandable, did throw a wrench in the timetables of the Confederate march along with the decision to take Baltimore rather than race to the river. Though claims that Summerall could have "marched into an empty Harrisburg" are likely untrue, it is not incorrect that the pause gave time for the Pennsylvania National Guard to withdraw in good order north of York and establish a firm line ahead of the river along with effectively every Guardsman, soldier and reservist east of Ohio in the last weeks of September ahead of the coming Confederate assault. Summerall's attack on Carlisle on September 28th, nineteen days after hostilities broke out, was likely a full week, maybe more, later than Scott had hoped it would be, and was a bloody three-day affair that gave the Americans time to pull tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, thousands of shells, and several hundred tons of other supplies out of the Carlisle Barracks to nearby Harrisburg before burning the barracks and remaining ordnance depots to the ground and retreating across the Harrisburg bridges.

Summerall pressed ahead, receiving word both by telegram and by aerial reconnaissance that General Dade's men had hooked north towards York while Patrick was on the march towards Havre de Grace, and on October 1st pressed forth at Harrisburg. The city was as much an important psychological target as it was a strategic one. It had been the high point of Robert E. Lee's Cumberland Campaign in September of 1862 that broke the Union's will to fight when Harrisburg was burned, and as the capital of Pennsylvania it was yet another symbolic domino to fall if it should be captured. More importantly, though, Harrisburg was where several key railroads both east and west met, many of them running north and north-west of the city into mountainous terrain the Confederacy would be unlikely to easily capture. Taking Harrisburg would essentially cut American logistics in Pennsylvania in half and force transport between the eastern and midwestern theaters to run through Upstate New York and Scranton, far to the north. A bridgehead east of the Susquehanna opened up further possibilities, too, namely being credibly able to pincer southwards at Lancaster and perhaps even Reading and Philadelphia beyond. The American Congress and government fleeing to Philadelphia was one massive blow and nearly a fatal one; having to abandon yet another capital, this one a critical industrial and port city, could end the war.

The American defenders at Harrisburg understood this vividly, of course, and thus began one of the major early battles of the war. Two bridges over the Susquehanna at Harrisburg were dynamited on October 1st after all personnel had been evacuated east of it, and General Hunter Liggett and his chief deputy, General George H. Cameron, arrived at a camp immediately east of the city to personally direct the defense of the city and its environs. Summerall was perplexed by the decision to leave two of Harrisburg's four bridges standing but elected to forge ahead. He made his headquarters at the high grounds of Camp Hill [1], where the majority of his artillery was set up as well and began raining fire down on Harrisburg for the next two days, before he ordered the river crossings be seized.

It did not take Summerall long on the bloody morning of October 4th to realize that Liggett had set a trap for him. At the other end of the two rail bridges left standing were machine gun nests and snipers, who opened unholy fire upon the Confederate attackers from straight on as well as the sides. American positions on City Island, in the heart of the river, were also able to attack in both directions, turning each bridge into a veritable shooting gallery that Confederate men squeezed into only to be cut down in hails of rapid-fire bullets. A stampede to turn back was blocked by additional platoons trying to push their way forward, turning the bridges into a slaughter. In the course of three hours that morning, close to a thousand men were killed and four thousand wounded, many of whom would perish from their wounds in the following days. Summerall's deputy, "Dixie" Dick Taylor, ordered an end to the madness without his superior's knowledge to regroup that afternoon.

The next morning, the Confederates tried something else. After half a day of artillery barrages on City Island and central Harrisburg beyond, they forged ahead onto the island itself, attempting to dislodge the defensive position that had created so many issues for them. This attack was even worse, with concentrated fire tearing into supine men as they waded into the cold water of the Susquehanna only to be met with bullets and the blood of their comrades. The 8th South Carolina Company was able to make it fully onto the island and engaged in brutal hand-to-hand combat in close quarters with the beleaguered Pennsylvanians for the rest of the day, late into the night; they were killed to a man, the defenders of City Island under strict orders to take no prisoners, having been volunteers who understood they would be forbidden to retreat.

Both attacks on Harrisburg having been abject failures, Summerall elected to pull his troops back behind Camp Hill to lick to their wounds for a few days, rest and recover and then try to attack to the city's south, expected to be less defended. On October 8th, the Confederate forces - bolstered by the reinforcement of a division from Florida, and encouraged by news that Dade's men had pacified York after several days of fighting straggling defenders and its citizens and were now approaching the Susquehanna themselves - attacked across the so-called "Forest Islands" of Sheesly, Redbuds, Hess and Stucker in the middle of the river about a mile and a half southeast of City Island. The Battle for the Forest Islands thus began with Confederates pressing into the frigid waters of the river once again, here wider than upstream, to take the islands by midday. Liggett had anticipated this but left the positions relatively lightly defended - instead, mobile artillery had been routed to the grounds of the Pennsylvania Steel Company mill and it opened unholy fire upon the islands once Cameron was relatively certain that a substantial number of Confederate soldiers were among the trees and soggy underbrush there. The islands were effectively flattened by the concentrated fire over the course of the next two days, and in the end of the three thousand Confederates who attempted to ford the river via the Forest Islands, only seventy-three returned across the river, shivering and wide-eyed. All three attempts to cross at Harrisburg had been an abject failure, and though Summerall was now pondering a plan to throw thousands more men across the Susquehanna at all points he had individually probed over the last few days, Taylor and another adjutant, Henry Pinckney McCain, persuaded him otherwise. Better to wait, regroup, resupply, and then push across the river - the entire river - as a theater-wide operation, overwhelming the Yankees from Harrisburg to Havre de Grace all at once. Summerall begrudgingly accepted that he had been stymied for now at Harrisburg, and traveled to Frederick and from there General Hugh Scott's headquarters at Mount Vernon, Virginia to confer with the ASO chief as well as his counterparts Dade and Patrick on planning such an operation, what would soon come to be known as the Battle of the Susquehanna.

The importance of Harrisburg, however, lies in that it was the first distinct defeat for the Confederacy after a month in which they had sliced through Union defenders like hot butter, albeit in considerably more favorable territory. The stiff defense of Harrisburg, with relatively light casualties, was a thunderous victory for the United States and the publicity-shy Liggett, a theater-level rather than tactical commander, was celebrated as the "Hero of Harrisburg" for his achievement. Stories of Philadelphia taxicabs shuttling men and supplies to the front lines via bumpy, potholed farm roads became famous, as were tales of ordinary citizens rushing to Harrisburg to repair damaged structures, care for the wounded, and in some cases grab rifles themselves and open fire on the first "damned Dixieman" they saw. The arrest of the Confederate advance at Harrisburg, while a fairly minor tactical engagement compared to the apocalyptic bloodshed in a number of battles later in the war, was one of the most psychologically important events of the war, stiffening American resolve at a critical hour when all had previously felt hopeless, and in tandem with Pershing's triumphs in the West in Confederate Arizona began to give the average American the distinct feeling that perhaps they were not staring at a total collapse of their homeland and a humiliation at the hands of their "little sister," but that this was a war that could be won with some patience and determination..."

- The Guns of September

[1] TL-191 fans will recognize this name

 

[KingSweden24]

"...gaping hole. Lunalilo had been what American merchants jokingly called "the Goldilocks king" - not completely supine to Anglo-Canadian and American commercial interests, but not totally hostile either. The Hawaiian Legislature had come to be dominated by the haoles (non-Natives) from North America but, increasingly, middle-class Japanese, who stemmed from an ethnic group that was a plurality of the islands' population - nearly fifty percent.

The death of the canny Lunalilo was in that sense a crossroads not just for the Hawaiian monarchy and a heated, hostile debate internally amongst the movers and shakers of the aristocracy but also occurred at a demographic, economic and cultural inflection point for Hawaii as a whole. The British Resident Commissioner was no longer the most effectively powerful foreigner in Hawaii with the looming rise of Lili'oukalani, Lunalilo's likeliest heir, and her American-born husband; Presbyterian ministers from Scotland and Canada (and to a lesser extent the Northeastern United States) had largely replaced tribal chieftains as the most authoritative figures in Hawaiian communities. Japanese was spoken on the streets of Honolulu and on the sugar and pineapple plantations as much or more as English and Japan's budding conglomerates had begun making noise about investments in the Pineapple Kingdom alongside the Anglo-Canadian "Big Five." As the great powers began to jockey over influence in the Asia-Pacific region and the Great American War caused disruptions to trade patterns in the eastern half of that ocean, Hawaii's place in the puzzle began to be an open question and a crucial one at that as the long, forty-year reign of Lunalilo closed and a strange new era began..."

- Ring of Fire: The Great Power Competition for the Pacific, 1901-1958

 

[KingSweden24]

"...importance of Nicaragua to Germany's ambitions to be able to project economic power in Asia without having to rely upon the sea routes through Suez or around Africa, and its dual function as a key base to project influence in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, Mexico and Spanish Cuba, where German businessmen had recently earned a tremendous foothold thanks to trade treaties signed between Spain and Germany.

The Kaiser was personally sympathetic with this point of view. The Samoa War was ancient history and the United States had been a reliable partner on the Canal project and other matters since then, even if neither party was interested in formal alliance. While the Bloc Sud powers all had large German expatriate communities, nothing compared to the "Germania Americanum" which had formed in a belt from New York's harbor to the edge of the Rocky Mountains, full of land farmed by German families and cities where newspapers, schools, churches and social clubs all communicated in German as their preferred language. Save culturally and ethnically similar England, probably no European country held as much esteem in the eye of the average American as Germany, and Waldemar's tour of the country in 1898 had only enhanced that prestige. An Amerophile position was not only strategically sound, considering the intertwined Teuto-American interests in the Caribbean, but an emotionally appealing one, too.

Furstenburg, in a rare split with Heinrich, quietly disagreed, and he influenced a large block of Prussian noblemen and Bavarian conservatives to feel likewise, perfectly placed at the junction of those two camps as he was. Furstenburg was a reformer but no liberal and mistrusted the United States, and to a lesser extent Argentina, as the epicenter of global revolutionary activity and of social degeneracy. Unlike many European Catholics who viewed the struggle in the Americas as a holy war for the Church and for monarchy itself, especially with the election of an ultra-conservative Pope in the 1913 "Christmas Conclave" who held such views himself, Furstenburg did not see the distant war in such apocalyptic and civilizational terms but he was a committed Amerophobe and felt that Germany had more to offer the Americas than the other way around.

This split within the high echelons of German thought leadership - within the Chancellery, within the Reichstag, within the bureaucracy, within the military - cascaded down through to the lower ranks and informed the peculiarly German attitude towards neutrality that emerged in the conflict. Where appropriate they could help the Americans - communications to Nicaragua via the German Caribbean, for instance - but otherwise they would stand apart. Thankfully, the extent of anti-Americanism in German halls of power was not revealed until both Heinrich and Furstenburg was dead, and the United States earned its prestige in Berlin back through trade in the Central European War to come, but the seeds of tensions between the two rising Neuermachten were there to be seen as early as 1913..."

- Heinrich: The Life and Legacy of Germany's Goldkaiser