“Marchin’ Through New York”
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From Albany west, across various places in New York whose names I do not know but whose places I have removed, the trail of this army is marked by countless white crosses.” - George S. Patton
Infantry in Patton's Fourth Army
As the winter snows melted in western New York, General Patton was the only notable Republican commander to enjoy major successes in the field. Groundwork was being laid in Philadelphia and the Midwest for the tide to eventually be turned, but Patton’s dramatic and stunning victory over Leland Hobbs and the Natcorps immediately turned heads in both Washington and Albany. The General’s own colorful, profanity-laden outbursts to the press quickly made him a figure that was known as well among the general public as in military circles. The government press, desperate for something to tout as a success, quickly turned him into their cause’s champion. “And this peculiar knight’s favorite dragon to slay,” wrote an editorial in Republican-controlled Delaware, “is Douglas MacArthur, who his joust is leveled against and at whom he will presumably continue to charge until he has reached the steps of the White House.” The Natcorps more or less refrained from mentioning him at all in the beginning of 1935, and as his exploits became impossible to ignore they viciously defamed him. But whatever the case, George S. Patton quickly emerged as one of the most dynamic and notable figures in the entire saga of the war. Just as important as his pioneering of the armored warfare doctrine was his intense charisma, which whipped the haphazardly assembled Fourth Army into one of the most serious fighting forces in the world. Following Patton’s aggressive strikes against Hobbs in the Finger Lakes campaign, by the middle of April the headwinds in that theater were obviously at the Republicans’ backs.
The only issue was that Patton was still facing one of the U.S. Army’s more talented commanders, and now he was no longer in the open field where he excelled, but going up against a fortified city backed by superior air forces. Patton certainly had the equipment to prosecute a siege, but he lacked many of the elements that traditionally produce successful ones: while he certainly was not “ass-naked and neck-deep in Pennsylvania shit with no gun and no bullets” like he constantly told his superiors in Albany, the Republicans as a whole enjoyed less armor and less artillery and less airpower than the Natcorps did. Patton did not have the overwhelming numerical superiority usually necessary to win a siege. Between these two factors, and his own somewhat unreliable supply lines, Patton’s odds of successfully cutting off Ithaca from Natcorp controlled territory in Pennsylvania were low. Doing so, of course, would have been a long and arduous endeavor without any guarantees of success. Patton would’ve been out of his element, surrounding and starving a city rather than fighting a slower and more cautious commander in the open field. There remained the possibility that the Natcorps could have a breakthrough in Philadelphia that would free up forces that could relieve it— throwing Patton back to square one, trying to defend the Erie Canal from the Natcorps. Furthermore, the General appeared to have been genuinely loath to inflict such suffering on a city filled with civilians. Especially “dyed in the wool rumpublicans that could be better used manning tanks for us.”
Natcorp tank outside of Ithaca
Nonetheless, Ithaca needed to be taken from Hobbs. Failure to do so would have allowed the Natcorps to “keep a dagger in the heart of New York,” like President Smith was fond of saying. Philadelphia had become a meat grinder that was rapidly reducing one of America’s largest cities into utter rubble, but the Natcorps had failed to shatter Republican resolve there. Despite their best efforts, they’d also failed to break the web of Republican supply lines keeping the city’s defense afloat, which mostly went through New York and could never be used to the fullest as long as the Natcorps had a serious chance of invading the state. There was also the question of the Midwest. The War Department had simply been in no position to make serious troop transfers to the temporary command Butler and Olsen had set up in Minneapolis. This was through no fault of its own, but the Republic eventually needed to link up with its other half. Doing so would require, eventually, serious offensives through the Great Lakes, and that wouldn’t be possible as long as Hobbs was holding on in the belly of western New York. Hobbs understood his duty quite well. He also knew that all of Patton’s talent in the field was of little use in a siege, and believed the fiery general could be taken advantage of in a stalemate. Hobbs, who had received the “silent treatment” from MacArthur due to his failures in the field, had no choice but to go his own way. He cut down on the raw amount of troops he had on hand and expelled many of the city’s inhabitants. He was fully prepared for a siege, and was probably correct that this was the best way to preserve his position. How Patton would have fared under these circumstances remains unknown, because the General had made the same calculation as Hobbs— and did something extraordinary to avoid getting caught in one.
Patton made his move on April fifteenth, knowing Hobbs’s forces were contracting and dealing with the wave of refugees from Ithaca. He enjoyed the overwhelming support of the local people. While intelligence was never Patton’s strong suit and the Secret Service was not yet able to match the DOJ’s capabilities, the Fourth Army made do with a sprawling network of local informants that quickly gave the Republicans more knowledge about the Natcorps than the Natcorps had about them. This was the deciding factor in enabling the last stretch of Patton’s Finger Lakes campaign, a rapid pincer designed to catch Hobbs in the awkward transition between commanding an army in the field and hunkering down for a siege. This was no small feat, as hitting Hobbs from the northeast required doubling back and circling around Lake Cayuga. It would have taken speed, audacity, and high morale among the Fourth Army, as well as a commander clever enough to keep Hobbs on his toes for however long it would take to complete the march. George Patton, thankfully for the Republicans, could provide all of these. He divided his army into two parts, sending the contingent with more armor and weaponry north to begin the long hike to Ithaca. Here he gambled that his forces could pick up adequate recruits on the way to bolster their numbers. Patton took the remainder under his command. To ensure that their activities stayed mostly unnoticed and to keep Hobbs from continuing to build his defenses, Patton launched a full frontal offensive against Hobbs so ferocious that even after months of facing Patton the Natcorp commander was caught off guard, and certainly did not know the true number of Republicans he was facing. Hobbs, like most of his colleagues, had heard of Patton and understood something of his military theories. He fully believed that this was the General’s last play, a blowhard’s desperate attempt to keep the battle in the open. Hobbs’s plan was to slowly retreat and inflict maximum casualties on Patton, putting him in a weak spot for the inevitable siege.
“Patton you magnificent bastard,” chuckled Hobbs to a lieutenant, “I read your book.”
A victorious Patton in Ithaca
Hobbs was taken by complete surprise on April twentieth, when Omar Bradley swept in from the north with as little warning as an army with thousands and thousands of troops and vehicles could feasibly give. The Republicans quickly turned the Natcorp flank, making Hobbs’s strategic withdrawal degenerate into a panicked rout. By night, the Natcorps were still trickling into Ithaca, and Patton now had enough of an edge to take the city by storm in the near future. Hobbs (likely correctly) estimated that he would lose that match up, possibly handily, and that the units he had dispatched south were too far and not in the state to return and relieve him. With MacArthur unresponsive and Hobbs himself unsure exactly who to answer to, he judged that it was better to lose the city and save his army than lose both. He slipped out as quickly as possible, managing to mostly evade the Fourth Army. Patton, for his part, viewed every wasted second as more American blood shed. He fully intended to pursue Hobbs the next morning, but the administrative concerns alone in absorbing Ithaca and restoring order to the city covered the Natcorps’ retreat to Binghamton. Patton delivering a third, consecutive victory made him cause celebre in Government America even more than he’d been before. Of course, it is worth noting that after months of tireless work, by the time Patton attacked Ithaca the War Department was competing with the Natcorps for air superiority, which probably made his brutal frontal offensives possible to begin with. Leland Hobbs, meanwhile, had failed MacArthur for the final time. Without any elaboration whatsoever from Natcorp high command, he was immediately transferred to West Virginia. His army was dismantled and sent to Philadelphia. Hobbs himself wouldn’t see combat for the rest of the war. This provoked the first of MacArthur’s infamous command shake ups, which have long been studied for their lack of strategic merit and whose rationale remains mostly inscrutable. MacArthur rapidly put Brigadier General Lloyd Fredendall in Hobbs’s place, overseeing most operations in Pennsylvania and New York— of course, the issue being that Fredendall was no more likely to conquer New York than Hobbs was. And indeed, as spring gave way to summer, Fredendall had little choice but to delay Patton as the Fourth Army finally secured a mostly unoccupied Buffalo and ended any serious threat to the Erie Canal. Patton and his soldiers were welcomed as liberators by cheering crowds of Republicans. The Natcorp administrators and collaborators that they could mop up were court martialed and hanged.
Meanwhile, the Battle of Philadelphia continued to rage on a scale completely unheard of in U.S. history. By April of 1935, it was already the most utterly destructive single engagement in United States history, claiming as many lives as the Battle of Antietam when factoring in civilian casualties. For the Republic, the Ninth and Sixth Armies were lodged in the city’s eastern limits, knowing full well that losing control of the Delaware River likely meant the collapse of their whole cause. The Natcorps, meanwhile, were pushing from two sides. Of course, MacArthur had been frustrated at Pottstown, but the Natcorps’ superior organization, training, weaponry, and numbers due to mass recruitment in the Upper South had forced the Republicans into a steady retreat. The destruction inflicted on the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed during this is almost impossible to fathom, as the Natcorps were aided by a huge bombing campaign of unprecedented scale. Masterminded by a young officer named Curtis LeMay, known as “Bombs Away LeMay”, the Natcorps razed much of the Republic’s fledgling industry in addition to hitting military formations. LeMay heavily targeted Philadelphia in particular, and while the Republicans were slowly catching up in terms of air technology they did not have the resources to stop him from wreaking havoc on their exhausted recruits. “Philadelphia is a hell on earth,” said George C. Marshall, leading the Republican resistance there. “It is a city of monsters. There is no humanity in Philadelphia.” It was also, however, a “city of courage— every man and woman in Philadelphia knows the stakes of losing and fights manfully to keep the Jackboot from crossing the Delaware.” Even so, by May of 1935, the Natcorps’ spring offensive (code named Operation Vespasian) had driven the frontlines to King of Prussia and Springfield. The Natcorps were particularly determined to cut Wilmington and Philadelphia off from one another, and in the spring of 1935 they had good reason to believe this was possible. The casualties they were suffering, however, were highly unsustainable and both armies were at the point of mutiny during multiple junctions in the war. But Marshall proved a wily defender and a highly competent organizer, which was why he kept Smith and Stimson’s confidence. Philadelphia’s units he did his best to rotate, ensuring that no single soldier was kept in “the Philly bloodletting” for too long. He kept enough bodies and equipment in Chester to prevent the Natcorps from severing the spine of his defenses, and masterminded several complex operations to keep the Republican forces there intact despite savage Natcorp bombing. At particularly desperate points in the fighting, Marshall famously had transports intentionally beached by Natcorp artillery in the Delaware so infantry could reach the other side.
Natcorps in Philadelphia preparing for a Republican counterattack
From the southeast was Eisenhower, whose progress was much more alarming because it threatened to capture or destroy the apparatus east of the Delaware that Marshall was depending on to keep his troops west of it afloat. And Eisenhower of course was in a similar position to Marshall in that the Republicans’ naval forces had made it very complicated to resupply his army. This forced him to live off of the local land, which was to both the detriment of the civilian population there and his own troops. This limited his movements more than anything, and is what ultimately prevented Operation Vespasian from snowballing into capturing the city center at first. Marshall and Eisenhower were similar commanders in many ways. As opposed to the flamboyant personalities of men like Douglas MacArthur, Smedler Butler, and George S. Patton, the Generals that faced one another in southern New Jersey saw the war through the lens of long term strategy and logistics. And both understood that they occupied very perilous positions and were at the mercy of many factors they could not control. Eisenhower understood the war through a curve. The longer that the Republic fought on, the closer it would come to bridging most of the Natcorps’ advantages. However, a prolonged war would demand unfathomable resource commitments from both sides— and in 1935, if the Natcorps could hold America’s heartland and continue to extract resources from it, they would be in a much better position to weather the storm.
Eisenhower, however, needed relief, and this is what triggered MacArthur’s authorization of the Battle of Cape May in June. The strategy was simple enough. To give Eisenhower relief that could probably turn the tide, MacArthur wanted the Natcorps’ navy to concentrate on southern New Jersey with overwhelming force. Up to this point, the war’s naval theater had been a stalemate. Both sides had seized shipyards that left them with limited but notable sea presences. The Natcorp air bombing campaign had left no major population center in the northeast unmolested. On top of this, MacArthur’s allies harried Republican ports from sea. New York City and Boston were the most obvious, but Hartford, Providence, Portland, and Plymouth were also easy targets that the Natcorps could pound and keep the Republican Navy constantly scrambling to cover its bases. But this went two ways, and as 1935 proceeded Republican raids on Natcorp ports and operations to bring in resources from southern ones escalated. The Chesapeake remained almost completely secure, but that required a considerable capital commitment with ships that would better serve the cause in the northeast’s chilly waters. MacArthur hungered for a knockout blow. Under Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz, the Natcorps assembled what ships they had on hand and barreled towards the Delaware. It was the killing blow in the Philadelphia campaign, at least it would’ve been had it succeeded. This, of course, was something Republican high command grasped as well as Washington did— and why they prepared just as well, in a field of warfare where they and the Natcorps were considerably more evenly matched. The Republicans had an armada of their own prowling near Eisenhower’s Atlantic City Headquarters. It was modern, equipped with the most recent sonar technology and armed with the U.S.N.’s finest weaponry, plus supplements from the United Kingdom and France. When the two fleets engaged near Cape May, Nimitz realized very quickly that shattering the Republican Navy was not an attainable goal at that moment. He broke off after both sides suffered moderate losses, which allowed the Natcorp press to spin the engagement as a draw. In reality, it was a strategic Republican victory, as it certainly staved off death in Philadelphia.
The Second American Civil War at this point was a total war. While the fighting in Philadelphia was particularly destructive, the Marshall Line snaked north through Pennsylvania’s eastern enclaves and New York’s southwest. Everywhere there was fighting, there were two massive armies occupying land that didn’t have the capacity to support them. The Natcorps’ air campaign destroyed much of the Republic, but as the Republicans’ air capacity increased they too inflicted chaos and havoc across the American heartland. The reality is that nearly everyone in America was living in a state of war of some kind or another. And while not everyone fought, everyone felt the ripples from the March on Washington. Most commonly, this was through rations. The Republic in particular suffered horribly when 1935 opened. Nearly everyone that wasn’t actively fighting MacArthur on the front was serving the Republican war machine by helping the northeast’s industry get off its feet, even as LeMay intentionally targeted factories and other civilian installments that could bolster the Republican war effort. President Smith had initially believed that staking the war effort on these measures would “make us like the foolish man who built his house on the sand”, but when he was forced to adopt them they were overwhelmingly followed in government territory.
“It’s the least we can do,” one woman said at a town hall, “when freedom in America is being trampled on by the Jackboot. Eating less is an easy thing when you think about all this destruction happening in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.” She went on for some length, but concluded by saying, “you hear people complain about hard biscuits washed down with warm water. Like a lot of people have said— Americansare going to fight through, like we always have. We’ll make do. I think we ought to while our children are dying in the field for us, as long as it takes until Al Smith is back in the White House and every single Natcorp’s in the gallows.” And indeed, while the armies of the American Republic came close to, and at some points did completely break during 1935 the war’s second year, they didn’t bend. Unlike in 1934, it was rare for Republican recruits to scatter when they were hit with hellfire from above or from fresh German panzers. “There’s iron in their blood,” said one black Sergeant from Connecticut. “You can depend on them now. Nobody’s running.” The same thing was true of the other side. While Americans living under fascist control were much less miserable from the direct consequences of the war (with the exception of those in prison camps), nearly all of their labors too came to be consumed by it. There was a temporary illusion of stability and unity the Natcorp takeover created. And through this, MacArthur commanded the genuine devotion of most of their new subjects. The Natcorps’ propaganda arm, arguably the most efficient piece of the whole regime, had millions of Americans utterly convicted that their nation needed a strong leader to protect itself from the twin evils of communism and international capitalism, an all-American supergenius that could “reorder a collapsing society under the principle of class harmony,” as Nicholas Murray Butler said in one of his addresses, “and who has the steely will to face our country’s enemies down and do what needs to be done.”
A woman making munitions in a northeastern factory
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