I don't know why, but he actually did it in 1908. He also apparently spread rumours that the Tsar was a hermaphrodite...Wait, what? He actually did that? WHY?
Place In the Sun: What If Italy Joined the Central Powers? (1.0)
- Thread starter Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth
- Start date
...Not wanting to take this into modern politics but...does that mean Kaiser Willy is basically the Donald Trump of the Early 20th century?
Perhaps there could be something resembling the 12 Knights of Charlemagne?
Mittelafrika makes sense... and probably charming the pants off of von Lettow-Vorbeck in the process!
That's actually a very good point. It will level with time, I'm sure.
Quite. It's a shame but there you go.
I like that.
We do- perhaps they could be the in-universe version of Cossacks?
What? What did the Tsarina do to him (Wilhelm) afterwards?
Good God, Wilhelm.
Stupid remarks about India pale in comparison to that nonsense.
One might say so-- and now he's the most powerful man in Europe, arguably the world. As the OP, I can reveal that my Butterfly Detector™ enables me to say that Place In the Sun will be a world sans Trump.
Thanks for the comments everybody!
Pretty sure you'd be hard pressed to find an uncomplicated love for the British in some of their other colonies. As for the Herrero genocide, that, while bad, isn't actually any worse than how French, british and Italian colonial governments behaved. It only stands out today because people want to trot it out to prove Germany was somehow always genocidal because that way people can go back to calmly telling themselves "it can't happen here"
The real question to me is what sort of aesthetic the bad guys who overthrew the just Empire are gonna be derived from. it would be interesting if like, Sorelian France gets a certain aesthetic Look™ associated with them and that becomes the equivalent of the 'Putting on the Reich' trope.
Or maybe just british top hats and monocles. or something Russian.
the question is if the british did learn the lesson that their battleships tend to explode with the old design.
and in the long run both are at a disadvantage, because the battleship will soon obsolescence due to the aircraft carrier.
so i won't level as much as sidelined, and here the question is who will realise first
Pretty sure no colonial power in Africa actually purposefully killed 70 percent of the colonial population to the level that they actively aided your enemies.
Eventually someone will figure out that if the armour is quite thin, perhaps placing bags of highly explosive gunpowder right where it's liable to take a hit isn't actually such a great idea!
You're right about the carriers...
The Herroro Genocide wasn't a deliberate policy of murder either. The deaths were largely the result of the concentration camps and associated costs to human life. And that sort of thing, dear friend, absolutely was mimicked across Africa by every colonial power.
Also, the 70 percent number was one ethnic group, not the entire colony, AND that number is in some dispute.
and to add what Kylia said, the real worst colonial bad guys are the belgians, the horror show that was the Congo.
Yes, it was his personal property not the country's. It really is the strongest early example of the kind of widespread atrocities that would be committed over the course of the 20th century.
The same people responsible for despoiling half the world twisted Belgium's wrist to annex it from Leopold because he was such a notorious, cruel, and rapacious tyrant.
Leopold very much earned his place among the likes of Hitler, Mao and Stalin. If anything he worked harder at it than they did and simply had far less to carry out his atrocities.
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The Belgian government was better when they gave Leo the boot, but they still weren't that grand.
Chapter 33.2: Britannia Contests the Waves
Chapter 33.2: Britannia Contests the Waves
"We are not defeated yet, by God. With the Channel at our backs and our Navy afloat I dare the Kaiser to enforce his will on us!"
-David Lloyd George boasting defiantly of Britain's military survival, 1917
"Imagine a man being torn apart by three horses in the manner of the old executions. That, my friends, is our Empire. Germany and the backstabbing Italians are one horse, the Japanese another, and the bloody Dominions telling us what to do are another. But we have survived worse storms and we shall pull through."
-Sir John Jellicoe commenting on the geo-political strain on Britain, 1917
For a defeated military, the British had done quite well.
Starting off with a hundred thousand soldiers deployed in August 1914, the British Expeditionary Force had doubled by the spring of 1916- and that was after casualties had been replaced. Despite the courage of its men, the Army had failed to ease the pressure on France and had faced the full might of the German Army at Third Ypres. Operation DYNAMO was when the British Army can be said to have lost the war; five thousand casualties and 20,000 prisoners taken was enough to move Whitehall towards peace. In just under two years of fighting from August 1914 to June 1916, Great Britain suffered approximately half a million deaths. The social aspect of this back home was considerable, and many women spent 1917 sleeping in an oddly empty bed.
Despite proud claims to the contrary, the British Army had lost the Great War.
Losing the war and many lives didn’t affect Britain’s ability to project power around the globe. Plenty of men in Singapore, Kenya, and Belize never heard the rumble of guns and remained doing what they’d done pre war: keeping the Union Jack up around the globe. The main losses were concentrated in the Territorial Army, Britain’s prewar reservoir of trained men for home defence. Most of these were now pushing up daisies, and the conscripts who’d replaced them didn’t always want to stay under the colours. The TA would be formally disbanded in 1918 and replaced with the Army Reserve- men who worked as librarians in Reading (1) and put in a few weeks of training every year. Many of the 75,000 volunteers in the Army of India were ex-TA men who hadn’t enjoyed civilian life; India veterans would subsequently make up a disproportionately high number of Army Reserve men. Like all former servicemen, veterans of the Great War and the India campaign bonded together with their shared memories, good and bad. 1917 saw the emergence of veteran’s groups all across Britain, often centred in somebody’s house or the local church hall or pub and providing valuable emotional and financial support for former servicemen. Such groups would play a valuable role in tossing out the Liberals in 1918 as they blamed the Asquith government for losing the war and the Lloyd George government for the hard times which came after. These organisations were typically quite “well-behaved”, although there were instances of drunken ex-soldiers setting out in unruly gangs to pounce on known conscientious objectors or pacifists. Cases also arose of veterans essentially thinking that they were above the law and treating civilian police with contempt. Tensions arose between soldiers who’d fought throughout the whole war and those who’d been captured. The former viewed the latter (some 95,000 of them) as cowards for having “opted out”. Ex-prisoners of war usually proved their manhood by giving their accusers a fist in the teeth. That said, the vast majority of veterans were extremely well-behaved and as usual with such things, the media prominently reported the rare cases of bad behaviour while ignoring the many patriotic, law-abiding veterans.
While most veterans reintegrated back into society, often conquering depression or alcoholism, and a small group ended up rather anti-social, another handful were never the same, becoming bitter recluses furious over having lost the war. This would lead to a tragic incident which would put many ex-soldier’s associations in a poor light.
Rupert Kendall had had quite an ordinary life before the Great War doing odd-jobs in London. He’d spent every free moment in the pub with his mates, choosing his hobby of skirt-chasing over marriage. Rupert had gone off to the Great War expecting adventure… and had gotten something else entirely. Fighting in Artois in spring 1915 and being gassed at Second Ypres had changed him. His Cockney humour had vanished beneath the grimly set jawline of a soldier who’d seen it all. Kendall had been wounded in the arm during the Third Battle of Ypres and fought in Dunkirk, where he was wounded again. He’d been taken off during Operation DYNAMO, but a U-Boat had sunk his Little Ship and he’d had to tread water for two hours before being picked up. When he arrived in Folkestone, Kendall was diagnosed with hypothermia from the cold water and gangrene from the two wounds in his arm. Nightmares haunted him every night of his mates screaming in a shell-hole, of his Little Ship exploding and his nearly drowning, of the gnawing pain in his arm that never went away. It was a miracle that he didn’t have any amputations performed; an even greater one that he escaped morphine addiction. Like many in his shoes, Rupert Kendall suffered from shell-shock and spent his twenty-seventh birthday in a psychiatric hospital. He got out in June 1917, mentally stable but with his dark memories bubbling below the surface. Rupert found solace in the Malden Legion, a veteran’s association based out of his local pub, the Gypsy Queen. He was always a bit of a loner there, irritated by people who hadn’t been through what he had, but he never once missed a meeting. Rupert began railing about the Irish “stabbing us in the back”, claiming that the St. George’s Day Riots in Belfast were part of an Irish-German conspiracy. It was all nonsense, but some of his colleagues believed it, and a very dangerous plan was hatched. In his war-torn mind, Rupert Kendall imagined himself the man who would show the world that Britain would never give in to “those nasty foreigners”. He was going to strike a blow for King and Country.
Together with a few friends from the Malden Legion, all men equally damaged inside by the war, Rupert travelled to London’s Belgrave Square where the freshly opened German embassy stood. The embassy grounds were a public place where anybody could come and go as they pleased, although the building itself was under armed guard. On a warm, wet August day, Rupert and his mates chucked homemade grenades through an open window. They were immediately tackled and arrested by armed men, but the damage was done. Fortunately, the ambassador was out to lunch, but forty embassy staff and ten innocent bystanders were killed or wounded. Kendall and his colleagues were hanged in January 1919, and the Gypsy Queen was raided. No one else was implicated, but the Malden Legion’s reputation was ruined and it disbanded soon after.
As with the Army, so too with the Royal Navy. Since it is much easier to stick a rifle in a man’s hands and teach him how to fight in the trenches than it is to teach him the inner workings of a military vessel, and since building destroyers is a longer and more time-consuming process than building battalions, the Royal Navy had not grown nearly as much as the Army during the war. This meant that there were far fewer ex-Navy men “on the beach” than there were with the Army, and correspondingly fewer ex-Navy organisations.
It also meant that the Royal Navy had a better chance of reverting to its pre-war role than the Army.
Prior to the Great War, the Royal Navy had been Britain’s pride and joy, fulfilling two essential strategic goals: keeping the lifelines to the Empire open and deterring a German attack on the home island. It had succeeded in both during the Great War; Britain had imported Argentine beef and American materiel while facing no invasion of its home country. Despite having lost sixty-nine surface vessels and thousands of lives, it had fought the U-Boat menace to a stalemate while leaving much of the High Seas Fleet in the bottom of the drink. With plenty of help from France, distant Japan and South Africa, it had kept the shipping lane from Gibraltar to the Suez Canal open. Unlike the Army, the Royal Navy could claim to have performed well in the Great War, and many British naval enthusiasts claimed that the war had been “lost on land but won at sea”. This did little to strengthen Army-Navy relations, but held more than a little truth about it.
The one area where the Royal Navy had unquestionably failed, and the one which harmed relations between the services the most, was in Operation DYNAMO. Failure to take the U-Boat menace seriously enough had led to the submarines ambushing the Little Ships and killing five thousand soldiers. The debacle had cost Winston Churchill his post as First Lord of the Admiralty; Sir John Jellicoe, whose victory at Jutland had made him a public darling, replaced him.
The new man had ideas to reform the Royal Navy.
Jellicoe was an imperfect commander, but he recognised that Britain’s strategic situation differed greatly from three years before. The good news was that the drubbing the Germans had received at Jutland, plus the 12:12 battleship ratio now in effect, meant that the surface naval threat from across the North Sea was ironically less than in 1914. That was the only silver lining he could see in the storm cloud. Japan’s seizure of Indochina showed their ability to do as they pleased in the Pacific, meaning that more naval resources would have to be allocated there. Britain viewed Italy and the Ottoman Empire as permanently hostile, while much of the Marine Nationale flew a Central Powers flag; this left Britain solely responsible for the Mediterranean. Lastly, while the British had done well enough in the Battle of the Atlantic, they had taken heavy losses from Germany’s submarines- and that was with French support. There was no need for a major allocation to the Atlantic in peacetime, but Jellicoe believed he had to keep a number of ships earmarked for such a thing in the future… not to mention the need to defend the North Sea. All this to say, the Royal Navy was stretched in four directions and would have a tremendous balancing act in the years to come.
Historians often credit Jellicoe exclusively with reorganising the British fleet post war. In fact, this was not solely his doing: dozens of people collaborated on the project throughout 1917. Nonetheless, as First Lord of the Admiralty, his was the ‘face on the poster’ at the time and so we shall credit him here.
The Home Fleet was based at Rosyth, and its hypothetical wartime job would be to do what its predecessor had in 1914-1916: to blockade Germany from afar and deter an invasion. He created a new formation, the Atlantic Fleet. The smallest of the new divisions, it contained a disproportionately high number of destroyers and was designed to fight off the U-Boats and keep supply lines to America, Argentina, and the Empire open. Jellicoe based the Atlantic Fleet at Pembroke in Wales and expanded existing facilities to accommodate them. Canada’s small but efficient navy was tasked with cooperating with the Atlantic Fleet in future times of war- surely neither Canada nor Newfoundland would refuse to stand by the mother country in an hour of need?
With Italy and the Ottomans now foes at the same moment as France was taken off the naval table, Jellicoe was forced to commit precious resources to the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean Fleet’s goals were rather limited. Jellicoe had decided that with its resources stretched, Britain could not single-handedly keep the route from Gibraltar to Cairo open, especially with Malta under Italian rule. Thus, the Mediterranean Fleet’s goals were limited to defending the approaches to its namesake sea, both of which flew the Union Jack. As long as those two points held, Britain would be able to contest the Mediterranean in the face of superior opposition. The fleet was divided into two sub-fleets, Western and Eastern, but the acronyms WestMedFleet and EastMedFleet were soon adopted and so we shall use them here. Full admirals commanded both and enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from the other. As part of the Mediterranean division, the harbour at Alexandria was massively expanded, providing much-needed revenue to the British regime in Egypt.
The Orient was no longer a British playground. In the years before the Great War, the Anglo-Japanese alliance had allowed all parties concerned to relax, confident that there would be no war in the region. Said security was now a thing of the past. Japan had been allowed to keep the German Pacific territories, providing it with naval bases hundreds of miles afield and extending its reach like never before, while its seizure of French Indochina spoke of how ruthless it was. Faced with what they perceived as a very real threat, Australia and New Zealand clamoured for increased British defences, while London was forced to consider its own interests in the area. Hong Kong was a valuable port in peacetime, but it would not be defensible from a Japanese attack. A small China Squadron remained moored there to ward off trouble, but it was anticipated that the fleet would close all the hatches fleeing south in the event of war. With North Borneo similarly isolated and lacking an adequate port, this left Singapore as the obvious choice. The Malacca Fleet was stationed in the city, and in time of war its task would be to defend its base and close the straits for which it was named, thus denying Japan a path to India.
This left much of the world’s oceans without a regular, substantial Royal Navy presence. The Bay of Bengal was covered only by a handful of units from the Malacca Fleet, and it was an open question how much naval support could be provided in the event of another Indian revolt. A small squadron not designated as a formal fleet was anchored in the Falklands, but that was more to show off to Argentina than anything else. For all intents and purposes, until a major war broke out the South Atlantic would be the purview of the South African Navy. The new Fleet system stripped the Persian Gulf of much of its British presence. A small squadron- again, not formally designated a Fleet- was stationed at Muscat, but they were there for anti-piracy duties and to remind Constantinople, Tehran, and the smaller Arab states that Britain was still a player in the region. However, neither force was ever going to dominate its respective region. Placing ships in Sierra Leone enabled the British to keep an eye on Mittelafrika and the German concession in Dakar, while the flotilla at Bermuda would prove invaluable if a conflict arose with America. Other minor refuelling and patrol stations were scattered about the globe, but none amounted to much force. For their part, Canada and Newfoundland refused to send a single sailor to British fleets abroad.
In sum, Britain had suffered the least of the Entente powers. Their homeland had not been invaded, their Navy remained mostly afloat, armed rebellion had not come to their streets, and their finances were tolerable. Yet it was painfully clear that the glory days were past. London’s allies were weak and untrustworthy, and the German colossus was her equal if not superior. No longer was the empire the undisputed master of all it surveyed- now Britannia contested the waves.
Comments?
(1) Dreadful to be sure; my apologies.
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The above update is not perfect. Specifically, I'm not sure about the feasibility of a massive fleet reorganisation or Jellicoe at the helm. If anybody has constructive criticism or ideas-- fire away!
Additionally, I apologise for the lack of graphics-- I tried making a map and it ended very badly.
Additionally, I apologise for the lack of graphics-- I tried making a map and it ended very badly.
Does this include plans to expand the drydocks at Alexandria? OTL the limited size of the drydocks there proved a major impediment to the Royal Navy. The Queen Elizabeths were the largest ships that could be accommodated, keeping the more modern and powerful Nelson and King George V classes out, as well as forcing any damaged carriers not named Eagle to limp to Malta, an often hazardous exercise. This is especially important with Malta's dockyard facilities now in Italian hands.
My main objections are in the Far East. Singapore as the base for an Eastern Fleet is sound, but the Royal Navy isn't abandoning the China Station in Hong Kong short of an actual war with Japan. It's too valuable as a peacetime station. The same is even more true of the African and American stations; they're too valuable as peacetime flag stations and with the expanded German presence on the African continent their value in providing basing to help track down commerce raiders is more valuable, not less.
In fact, that's probably the biggest problem with this proposed fleet reorganization: it seems to be overly battle-focused without regard for what the Germans might do with commerce raiding, something the Royal Navy had to tackle throughout 1914 despite the focus on the North Sea. Freetown, or Bermuda, or Hong Kong or Durban will never be able to host large battle fleets, no. But their value as cruiser stations even in wartime cannot be discounted.
Then there's that Coral-Timor fleet. Why does it exist? What is there to defend that isn't best handled by the Royal Australian Navy with some reinforcements? The main axis of decision in any clash between the Brits and Japanese is going to be in the East Indies between the main IJN and the Eastern Fleet in Singapore, not way out to the east around Australia.
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I kinda love how the English call the Italians lazy, treacherous and backstabbers for doing what Britain always do:
"Those bloody spaghettis! Waiting for the last possible moment to support the winning side and getting what they wanted whit minimal losses!"
"Yes, that's plagiarism, we invented that move!"
"Those bloody spaghettis! Waiting for the last possible moment to support the winning side and getting what they wanted whit minimal losses!"
"Yes, that's plagiarism, we invented that move!"
Opportunism is immensely satisfying to pull off, and immensely dissatisfying to have pulled against you.