Place In the Sun: What If Italy Joined the Central Powers? (1.0)

[Migrant_Coconut]

Would you mind saying what the cartoon says? I'd like to know and I can't read German.

Top: Germany
Middle: Britain
Bottom Left: France
Bottom Right: Belgium

Are you sure about that?

As evil as that one was, Germany's kill count doesn't exceed seven digits like Belgium's does - nor did they regularly chop off hands for missing the quota. It's like comparing Joker to Thanos.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth]

Top: Germany
Middle: Britain
Bottom Left: France
Bottom Right: Belgium

As evil as that one was, Trotha's kill count doesn't exceed seven digits. Nor did Germans regularly chop off hands for missing the quota.

Ah, cheers for that!
Trotha? Oh dear. Well, we won't be seeing anything like that in this TL- Berlin doesn't want that kind of publicity and besides, I'd feel dreadful just writing such a thing!

 

[Prince Daemon Targaryen]

Top: Germany
Middle: Britain
Bottom Left: France
Bottom Right: Belgium

As evil as that one was, Germany's kill count doesn't exceed seven digits like Belgium's does - nor did they regularly chop off hands for missing the quota. It's like comparing Joker to Thanos.

I'm not sure I get what the French one is about, besides mocking them for their rather... love of passion and pleasure.

I sorta get the others:
Germany basically mining Africa for troops (the alligator stumps me)
Britain doesn't care except for making money
Belgians are barbaric

 

[Migrant_Coconut]

I'm not sure I get what the French one is about, besides mocking them for their rather... love of passion and pleasure.

I sorta get the others:
Germany basically mining Africa for troops (the alligator stumps me)
Britain doesn't care except for making money
Belgians are barbaric

Far as I can tell, it's about how the French "civilized" a token few and left the rest to rot.

I don't get the crocodile either.

Don't forget the preacher. "The ignorant savages will always be inferior, but surely they can be saved?"

 

[Jürgen]

Would you mind saying what the cartoon says? I'd like to know and I can't read German.


I suppose you're both right- but surely we'd see more stuff like the Herero Genocide? And I can't really imagine the Germans would be too benevolent towards, for example, copper miners in Katanga. They might not go full-on King Leopold but they wouldn't be anywhere close to humane.

The Herero Genocide is mostly something which people have spoken about after WWII, the interest was in finding a specific German cultural genocide-ness and as the biggest German colonial atrocity, it became the center of a lot of research. But the estimates for the number of people killed lies from below to above the number of civilians killed in the 2nd Boer War, and far below even the lowest estimate for Leopold II‘s atrocities in Congo, which range in between 2-13 million people.

Before WWII no one knew or cared about the Herero except for a few researchers in Berlin, who were very interesting in studying their skulls.

 

[Jürgen]

I sorta get the others:
Germany basically mining Africa for troops (the alligator stumps me)

It’s a joke about German Africa being a empty wasteland and the Prussian obsession with order and structure, which they here enforce on the animals.

 

[Jürgen]

Belgians are barbaric

I forgot this one, no it’s not about the Belgians being barbaric, look at the fine dining when he eat the African. It’s about the pure depravity of the Congo Free State, remember the official reason for the Free State was to civilized the “savages” (the fine dining), while the cannibalism show the practical aspect of Belgian colonialism.

 

[Jaenera Targaryen]

That, and one of the men in charge in Mittelafrika right now is von Lettow-Vorbeck. Sure, he made use of scorched earth tactics in East Africa, but that was military necessity, and not something driven by racial ideology, the way Nazi Germany's crimes were. And compared to most Europeans of his day and age, von Lettow-Vorbeck had much more respect for the natives, a respect reciprocated by the men under his command. If nothing else, he'd be a voice of reason, and considering the reputation of the Lion of Africa, not someone the German viceroy could easily brush aside. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised that if the viceroy was someone like von Trotha, von Lettow-Vorbeck would have him arrested before he could cause too much damage, and complaining to Berlin, be the one the folks back home would side with, and not the viceroy.

 

[Migrant_Coconut]

Lettow-Vorbeck literally told Hitler to go f**k himself. He knew firsthand that the Nazis' master race ideology was garbage.

Side note:

In the year of Lettow-Vorbeck's death, 1964, the West German Bundestag voted to give back-dated pay to all surviving Askaris from the German forces of the First World War. A temporary cashier's office was set up in Mwanza on Lake Victoria. Of the 350 former soldiers who gathered, only a handful could produce the certificates that Lettow-Vorbeck had given them in 1918. Others presented pieces of their old uniforms as proof of service. The German banker who had brought the money then had an idea: each claimant was asked to step forward, was handed a broom, and was ordered in German to perform the manual of arms. Not one man failed the test.
Wikipedia

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth]

Lettow-Vorbeck literally told Hitler to go f**k himself. He knew firsthand that the Nazis' master race ideology was garbage.

Side note:

Then he's our man! We'll see more from Von Lettow-Vorbeck.
Side note of interest: How on earth do you get Hermann Goering running Mittelafrika? That makes absolutely no sense.

 

[Gen.Jurten]

Side note of interest: How on earth do you get Hermann Goering running Mittelafrika? That makes absolutely no sense.

KR lore have him sent there as some form of informal exile to snuffed the influence of Goering from Germany proper, who was at the time basically the figurehead of the entire far right in the country

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth]

I'm not sure I get what the French one is about, besides mocking them for their rather... love of passion and pleasure.

I sorta get the others:
Germany basically mining Africa for troops (the alligator stumps me)
Britain doesn't care except for making money
Belgians are barbaric

That looks it. The French one looks almost like the cartoonist is accusing them of homosexuality... it does rather look like the two blokes in the back are kissing. I could be wrong of course.

Far as I can tell, it's about how the French "civilized" a token few and left the rest to rot.

I don't get the crocodile either.

Don't forget the preacher. "The ignorant savages will always be inferior, but surely they can be saved?"

Perhaps the crocodile symbolises martial force and strength?

It’s a joke about German Africa being a empty wasteland and the Prussian obsession with order and structure, which they here enforce on the animals.

Reminds me of the scene in The Lion King where all the jackals march in formation on their way to kill King Mustafa... blimey that takes me back a few!

That, and one of the men in charge in Mittelafrika right now is von Lettow-Vorbeck. Sure, he made use of scorched earth tactics in East Africa, but that was military necessity, and not something driven by racial ideology, the way Nazi Germany's crimes were. And compared to most Europeans of his day and age, von Lettow-Vorbeck had much more respect for the natives, a respect reciprocated by the men under his command. If nothing else, he'd be a voice and reason, and considering the reputation of the Lion of Africa, not someone the German viceroy could easily brush aside. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised that if the viceroy was someone like von Trotha, von Lettow-Vorbeck would have him arrested before he could cause too much damage, and complaining to Berlin, be the one the folks back home would side with, and not the viceroy.

He'd be the best choice possible and also one of the most plausible. If the Germans could have a better relationship with their colonies than the British and French in OTL, that would be fun to write!

KR lore have him sent there as some form of informal exile to snuffed the influence of Goering from Germany proper, who was at the time basically the figurehead of the entire far right in the country

I stand corrected. Thank you!



Hopefully we can have another update tomorrow, or if not then on Monday.

 

[Migrant_Coconut]

Then he's our man! We'll see more from Von Lettow-Vorbeck.
Side note of interest: How on earth do you get Hermann Goering running Mittelafrika? That makes absolutely no sense.

You'll have to ask Joriz Castillo, not me.

I don't get it either - Goering only got as far as he did because he was Hitler's friend. The Luftstreitkrafte is retiring Neidermeyers like him as soon as the war's over.

Reminds me of the scene in The Lion King where all the jackals march in formation on their way to kill King Mustafa... blimey that takes me back a few!

IIRC the hyena marching scene is taken straight from Triumph of the Will.

 

[Alternator]

I suppose you're both right- but surely we'd see more stuff like the Herero Genocide? And I can't really imagine the Germans would be too benevolent towards, for example, copper miners in Katanga. They might not go full-on King Leopold but they wouldn't be anywhere close to humane.

The Herero Genocide isn't well known because it was special, it's well known because Germany lost and it made a good example of German atrocities.

Briefly: the Herero were abused and often enslaved, they rebelled, the rebellion failed, and they were driven into the desert to die. Both "enslave the locals" (informally, of course) and "kill the rebels" were standard policy for colonial powers in Africa.

The Belgians took this to another level. Fail to meet your rubber quota? Mutilation (sometimes of children or wives - don't want to damage the workers), execution, and possibly cannibalism followed. Comparisons in this thread to the Nazis are reasonable. Massive death tolls due to mistreatment, reaching up to a half-million deaths per year? Eh, who cares, there's more where they came from.

African colonization was brutal by nature, but Leopold's Congo Free State was the only one who made that brutality into intentional, widespread policy.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth]

The Herero Genocide isn't well known because it was special, it's well known because Germany lost and it made a good example of German atrocities.

Briefly: the Herero were abused and often enslaved, they rebelled, the rebellion failed, and they were driven into the desert to die. Both "enslave the locals" (informally, of course) and "kill the rebels" were standard policy for colonial powers in Africa.

The Belgians took this to another level. Fail to meet your rubber quota? Mutilation (sometimes of children or wives - don't want to damage the workers), execution, and possibly cannibalism followed. Comparisons in this thread to the Nazis are reasonable. Massive death tolls due to mistreatment, reaching up to a half-million deaths per year? Eh, who cares, there's more where they came from.

African colonization was brutal by nature, but Leopold's Congo Free State was the only one who made that brutality into intentional, widespread policy.

Ugh. Well, we won't have that. Clearly, my understanding of just how evil the Belgians were vis-a-vis the other Europeans were was... lacking.
Mittelafrika won't be anywhere near a racially equal place to live, but Nazi-esque treatment certainly won't be the norm. All of this will come in handy when I get round to writing about Africa.

In this world, the Congo Free State's atrocities will be much better known, as the Germans will yell about it to the four winds as an example of Entente "degradation"

 

[Rivercat893]

Ugh. Well, we won't have that. Clearly, my understanding of just how evil the Belgians were vis-a-vis the other Europeans were was... lacking.
Mittelafrika won't be anywhere near a racially equal place to live, but Nazi-esque treatment certainly won't be the norm. All of this will come in handy when I get round to writing about Africa.

In this world, the Congo Free State's atrocities will be much better known, as the Germans will yell about it to the four winds as an example of Entente "degradation"

We already know that India will be free from British rule, just from a quote from one of your chapters. Ireland is pretty much next to win through armed struggle, which will cause quite a bit of instability for Britain, especially with radical groups seeking to capitalize on the success of these anti-colonial revolutions.

As for Russia, can you give us a status report about what the Reds and Whites are up to right now?

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth]

We already know that India is going to be free from British rule just from a quote from one of your chapters. Ireland is pretty much next to win through armed struggle and this will cause quite a bit of instability for Britain especially with radical groups seeking to capitalize on the success of these anti-colonial revolutions.

You're right on both counts. Ireland has its own problems, or rather troubles, which will be covered in due course.

 

[Jürgen]

Ugh. Well, we won't have that. Clearly, my understanding of just how evil the Belgians were vis-a-vis the other Europeans were was... lacking.
Mittelafrika won't be anywhere near a racially equal place to live, but Nazi-esque treatment certainly won't be the norm. All of this will come in handy when I get round to writing about Africa.

In this world, the Congo Free State's atrocities will be much better known, as the Germans will yell about it to the four winds as an example of Entente "degradation"

The Belgian atrocities are in fact very well known in OTL, it may be the single most well known colonial atrocity in large part thanks to the novella 1899 Heart of Darkness. It have just fallen somewhat out of popular conscious over time as the Age of Colonialism grow less relevant and as the Belgians have stayed out of Africa afterward.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm the Tenth]

Chapter Twenty-Nine: A Tiger By the Tail​

"We are holding a tiger by the tail, my friends, and we must not let the thing turn round and claw at us!"
- Winston Churchill commenting on the situation in India, summer 1917

"India? Yes my friends, there is no doubt that India is tremendously valuable. But what Mr Lloyd George, the Liberals, and the Conservatives fail to understand is that what is more valuable are the lives of British men! How can one support a measure that will condemn good British troops to death after having escaped the cauldron of the Great War?"
-Prominent Labour Party figure William Adamson criticising Lloyd George's decision to ship British troops to India.

"Go forward, valiant soldiers, and do your duty for that Empire on which the sun never sets! England expects every man shall do his duty!"
-David Lloyd George addressing troops about to depart from Plymouth harbour for India

The British Empire was the product of three centuries’ worth of construction. It had started off as a few trading outposts on the road to China in the mid-sixteenth century, and by the summer of 1917 it spanned a quarter of the globe. India and China, lands courted for their wealth since Roman times, were now under direct control and indirect influence, respectively. The sun never set on the British Empire, as the Union Jack fluttered from the furthest northern reaches of Canada to the Egyptian desert to the jungles of Brunei.

And now it was all in danger of coming undone.

The Indian revolt of July 1917 was not inevitable. London could have taken steps in the wake of defeat to give the people of the subcontinent more autonomy as a reward for their wartime contributions. Yet the British repeatedly turned a tin ear to their subjects. After a fanatic murdered Bonar Law, Viceroy George Lloyd saw a conspiracy afoot and clamped down hard. The Raj simmered for months until two inept soldiers touched off a revolt by killing a sacred cow.

That revolt had now spread across Hyderabad like wildfire. The local nizam controlled only a small chunk of his realm, while the British were facing mass unrest in the rest of India. Lloyd’s stern martial law had only raised tensions without making Britain’s task any easier. 10 July saw the rebels seize the city of Gulbarga to the west; the British garrison had been fighting the inhabitants for days and finally gave up. The countryside was no longer safe for white men as “freedom fighters” prowled about; they may have had high-minded goals, but they behaved an awful lot like common bandits. No one at the front seemed to know what to do: the rebels were able to dodge conventional assaults by melting into the jungle, yet whenever the British sent infantry patrols to beat the rebels in said jungle, those men seldom returned. That it was monsoon season only made things worse; while the Indians were used to the torrential rain, the British had a nightmare keeping troops supplied in the muck. The weather made it impossible for the British to use chemical weapons to flush out their foes; gas was useless in thick rain. Servants couldn’t be trusted, as it was all too common for cooks to slip a little snake venom into the stew or for guides to send British troops into a waiting ambush.

Rebel Indian cavalry charge a British army camp in the countryside, July 1917

Only in the cities did the British have a secure presence. Viceroy Lloyd’s martial law meant that troops were heavily concentrated there, and they ruled urban areas with an iron fist to the detriment of controlling the countryside. Rural villages took on a very nasty character, as they were a major source of food production; often the farmers were put to work at bayonet point, the colonisers making off with the goods. All this infuriated the locals and cost the British manpower, but it ensured that no one starved. One may compare British rule in summer 1917 to a net; wherever men in khaki were present, the British controlled, but there were vast swathes of territory (and more than a few sizable cities) where rebels ruled. The regime in the cities may have been iron-fisted but was a long way from peaceful- 10 July alone saw riots in twenty cities leave a hundred Englishmen dead and whole city blocks levelled. The disruption of trade with the countryside left rationing tight for everybody, and hunger motivated people to vicious ends. Indians turned on one another for a bowl of rice, while the British were certainly not above forcibly requisitioning food. Armed soldiers with a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later guarded grain warehouses. Looters and “subversives” (a very loosely defined term ranging from grumblers to rioters), if they were lucky, found themselves in detention camps. These were not known for their sanitary conditions or bountiful rations, and once again they tied down many British troops who could’ve been put to good use against the rebels. Many died from dysentery, malnutrition, or simple execution in these prisons.

If things went on like this, the British Raj would collapse, and that would be the beginning of the end for the Empire.

British troops guarding a warehouse repel rioters with gas, summer 1917 (2)

The men in grey suits in Whitehall had finally had enough. David Lloyd George refused to be remembered as the man who lost India and was prepared to move heaven and earth to crush the revolt. He’d initially supported martial law to quell the trouble, but had soured on it after ten days of chaos. He realised Calcutta was out of its depth, and that London needed to step in. On 10 July 1917, he telephoned Lloyd and the two men had a terse conversation. The PM made no bones about his displeasure. He was sending some encoded instructions to Lloyd, which were to be followed to the letter. The prideful governor was none too pleased about this, but sensed that he was already on thin ice and didn’t protest too loudly. He spent the afternoon pacing his office, waiting for the missive to arrive. When it did, his comments were enough to make a schoolteacher faint. Lloyd George was appointing a man named Francis Maxwell as “special emergency commanding officer with all due jurisdiction over military forces of the British Indian Army.” In short, a new man would run military operations- and it was a good bet that Maxwell would thumb his nose at Lloyd. This was a snub to the governor, but what came next was worse. He was ordered to make a public speech praising the princely regimes and the people of Burma- both groups had remained steadfastly loyal and the latter was one of the few peaceful spots in India at the moment. Lloyd’s ego bristled at the thought of praising a nonwhite, and he feared- not without justification- that doing so might send a message of weakness. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister had made it clear that he expected Lloyd to obey, and the man didn’t want to lose his job.

Thus, at midday on the twelfth, Lloyd invited a number of reporters into his Calcutta office. The windows were locked and the curtains drawn. Only reporters and government officials were let in and they were all subject to intense scrutiny. His desk was surrounded by muscle-bound white troops and no servants were allowed in the room, just in case.

Surely nothing could go wrong… surely.

“Good afternoon to you all. I, Viceroy George Lloyd, Baron Lloyd, speak to all the peoples of India today. The time since the war has, regrettably, not brought the peace we have all craved. Mistrust, violence, and deception have caused flawed decisions to be made. Can my august predecessor, Mr Freeman-Thomas (1), be absolved of all error? Perhaps not. It may be argued, not without reason, that previous governments made miscalculations. Yet there can be no denying that the past sixty years have brought peace and stability to the Indian people. Under the rule of His Majesty King George V, the Indian people have flourished. Therefore, this government is all the more appalled by the senseless acts of violence which have wracked our beloved realm. The assassination of Mr Freeman-Thomas and Mr Law was an inexcusable crime, the work of radicals who will not listen to reason! The past weeks have been a time of tremendous national stress for all of us. A senseless tide of violence has washed over our beautiful land- and this is an even greater crime. Truly, the history of India is reaching a bitter ebb.

“Yet, we must not permit ourselves to slide into despondency! For let us never forget that you, the Indian people, are overwhelmingly loyal! The good princes of this realm, especially Azam Jah of Hyderabad, driven from his capital by insurgency and chaos, remain steadfastly loyal to the stable order. I must also congratulate the people of Burma on their fealty- Rangoon remains one of the few places in this land where peace is still the order of the day, where it is the birds and not the guns which chirp at nights. Yet above all, I must thank you, the people of India. I know from the bottom of my heart that these dangerous radicals do not represent who you are and what you stand for. The Raj Government is and will always stand for peace and prosperity, and has always rested on the backs of a great silent majority. Now, I must call upon that silent majority once more, to carry the torch and hold firm in their fealty. Thank you.”

He blew up five minutes later.

The security in the office was immense, yes. However, the Viceroy's palace was still bustling with servants and ministers moving back and forth. As such, one gardener whose name has not survived was able to exploit a security lapse in the small hours of 12 July. Governor Lloyd had always had a green thumb and rather liked to glance out the window at his plants. The garden, though separated from the office by a sizable fence, was only fifty metres away from the window. Thus, the Hindu gardener was able to plant a time bomb in the garden scheduled to detonate at noon. Ironically, he hadn’t known about the speech and was simply hoping that Lloyd would be in his office at the appropriate time. The upshot of it all was that not only was the governor-general killed, so were three newspapermen and a soldier. The blast tore through the fence at precisely twelve noon, sending shards of metal and cabbage flying every which way. Debris crashed through the wall, collapsing the structure of the building and reducing Lloyd’s office to rubble. The governor-general survived the initial blast but had his trunk blown off; he was pulled, howling, from the ruins within minutes, his suit drenched a sickly red, and died a lingering death.

The British retaliated predictably. The new governor-general, a man named Rufus Isaacs, quickly showed that he was his predecessor’s equal in ruthlessness and superior in thinking. Viceroy Isaacs was sworn into his new post forty-five minutes after doctors pronounced Lloyd dead. His first move was to declare a policy of hostage-taking, infamously saying that “for every one of our men they kill, we’ll put twenty up against a wall- and we’ll give ‘em a bit of shepherd’s pie first!” (3) His policy was never fully enacted- although hundreds of hostages were taken, the kitchens of the Raj were never put to work producing shepherd’s pie en masse. Nonetheless, the British randomly pulled twenty people off the street and shot them that very day. The executions took place at sundown in a military prison, but word naturally got out and hundreds of people turned up to prevent it. Soldiers were forced to fix bayonets and form a sharp square around the execution yard to prevent the mob from having its way; eighteen Indians were killed by these jittery men. The policy of hostage-taking was extended all throughout the Raj, and before too long the volley of firing squads became part of daily life. They snatched innocent people off the streets, took parents from their children, husbands from their wives. Some, having lost a loved one to the firing squad, decided to literally go out with a bang by going to a public place with a homemade or stolen explosive beneath their clothing. Of course, for every white man killed by said bombs, twenty more innocents were executed… and so it went. (4) Anybody who could flee did, and no one entered freely.

The British public wasn’t told the full story of what was happening in India. Rumours of the violence racking the subcontinent and a reasonable desire not to be caught up in it kept the press away. That image was in keeping with the British tradition of viewing the colonies as slightly untamed, backwards places, and it played into London’s hands. For a start, having those pesky reporters too afraid to come near the fighting effectively meant that the press was censoring itself, since the Ministry for the Colonies could drip-feed information to them. Second, it promoted the notion of India as a wild and barbaric land, which meant that London could portray the war as a clash between “civilisation” and “barbarity”. That image was totally inaccurate- the British were even less scrupulous than their foes- to say nothing of racist. Nonetheless, it was in keeping with a decades-long imperial mindset, and so it appeared on the front page of the Daily Herald and the Daily Mail. (5) This stream of propaganda convinced many veterans to re-enlist. Many of these men had not had a good time since coming back from the Great War- the jobs they’d previously held were gone, their mates from before the war dead, etc. Unemployment remained stubbornly high. As such, all it took to convince many was one or two concocted stories about Indian “savagery”, and they were off to re-enlist.

A new army was being established, one that might just save the British Raj.

Aside from a few eighteen-year-old kids who’d been too young to join in 1916, and who eagerly followed their older brothers to India, this fresh army consisted almost universally of Great War veterans. These men had been out of service for less than a year and retraining them would be a matter of course. Royal Army training camps, some built during the war, were scattered all across Britain; for the sake of convenience, most men went to the massive complex at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire. The Army of India, as it quickly became dubbed, had a most peculiar experience in training, for the men, being largely seasoned veterans, were able to impress their drill sergeants by actually knowing what they were doing! Of course, there were plenty of fresh-faced green recruits who needed toughening up, but the refresher course in late July 1917 proceeded remarkably smoothly.

However, there were limits to what Britain could do. The British economy in summer 1917 was stable but shaken. They’d defaulted on their debt to the Americans and the sale of Malta and Somaliland had helped pay for the war, but the Exchequer was still in no mood to finance a million-man army halfway across the globe. The Great War veterans returning to the colours had just begun to re-integrate themselves back into civilian society and the economy; this was a recipe for labour shortages. Additionally, with the war having just been lost, many civilians drew comfort from the fact that “Jack and Tommy” were back from the Army, as that was surely a harbinger of more peaceful times. Even though those men were returning to service voluntarily, their disappearance caused some panic that Britain was about to be hurled back into a great war, and contradicted the official line that everything was fine in India. Many in Parliament were unhappy about this- having just lost the Great War, they said, wasn’t it time Britain rested and thought of a peaceful way forward? How could David Lloyd George sleep, knowing that he was condemning to death men who’d fought in the trenches and survived the debacles of 1916? Labour kicked up a fuss about conscription; the Conservatives lamented the return of wartime taxes.

Lloyd George would have none of it. He had to walk a fine political tightrope and generally tried to appease both sides of the spectrum, but this was too much. In a much-publicised interview with the Daily Express, he claimed that “this nation’s pride was harmed by losing the Great War, but our status as a premiere empire was not! If, however, we should lose India to chaos, it would be the end of the British Empire on which the sun never sets, a greater defeat than we have suffered since the Hundred Years War.” Despite its political intent, the Prime Minister’s message was not wrong. India was essential to Britain’s status as a world power and they had to make sacrifices to retain it. Such an approach was unquestionably the right thing for Britain, but it did Lloyd George’s political career no favours. The Liberal Party was divided and dying, and Lloyd George was forced to draw support from the Conservatives, who like everyone else were tired of war. The electorate would reject him and the Liberals in the 1918 general election, and one consistent charge against him was that “He killed my boy after the war was done!”

David Lloyd George threw his political career under the bus in an attempt to preserve the British Raj.

Top: David Lloyd George, bottom: Governor-General Rufus Isaacs

By the start of September, the Army of India- as it came to be known- was ready to go. The men had been retrained and equipment dug out of warehouses for them; officers were ready to lead. David Lloyd George gave a farewell speech for one brigade at Plymouth harbour on the first, calling on them to “bravely go where our grandfathers went, to restore prosperity and safety to our beloved empire.” To the tune of “Rule Britannia”, played by a secondary-school marching band, the brigade boarded HMS Cardiganshire and HMS Andania, the two ships steaming off on their long journey to India. This scene was repeated in all of Britain’s harbour throughout the first week of September 1917, as men packed up and moved to fight. This timing was ideal as it meant that the troops would be landing just as the monsoon abated.

While the Army of India- some forty thousand men- landed at various ports across the subcontinent, the British enlisted aid of a different sort. Nepal and Bhutan were nominally independent states which could so easily have been swallowed up by the colonisers. However, being remote Himalayan lands without much in the way of natural resources, London decided it was cheaper and better to keep them as protectorates. Neither was especially wealthy and with Chinese Tibet a mountain range away, their economic livelihoods were linked to the Raj. London had paid the regimes subsidies for decades and that money was what had kept Nepal and Bhutan afloat.

It was time for Britain to cash in on its investment.

The two kingdoms had remained neutral thus far, and had become even more cut off from the outside world than usual. There were no telephone or telegraph lines reaching into the rugged mountains and so communication with Nepal and Bhutan had to be done in the ancient way- give a courier a slip of paper and pray he doesn’t fall off a Himalayan cliff. With India not exactly a safe place for foot journeys right now, communication between the mountain kingdoms and their patron in London had gone dark. Nonetheless, envoys managed to reach the two kingdoms in early September. Owing to the immense costs of the war in India, they said, London was forced to trim its budget, and they would be unable to give Nepal and Bhutan their annual subsidies in 1918. The two courts responded with horrified gasps, as to turn off the money tap from London would be to drive the two kingdoms into bankruptcy. However the envoys said with a wry smile, if Nepal and Bhutan were to send their armies into battle against the rebels, that would reduce the strain on London just enough for the subsidies to find a place in the budget after all.

It didn’t take long for the courts to decide.

Nepalese troops on parade shortly before leaving for India

Being small mountain nations under the thumb of a foreign power meant that neither state needed a large military. Equipment was out-of-date and training minimal. Had the Nepalese and Bhutanese armies been shipped over to Europe, the result would’ve been a bloodbath. Yet… there wasn’t a modern army to be faced in India. The fighting there was one of urban unrest and guerilla warfare, and that was the sort of fighting which even a backwards force was capable of. While backwards, the Nepalese and Bhutanese armies were disproportionately big for such small countries, and combined the two states contributed eighty thousand men to the British cause. These troops would play a key role in ensuring that northern India remained relatively calm compared to the chaos elsewhere.

In sum, the British Empire had been dealt a very nasty blow in July 1917. They were desperately trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered crown jewel. Yet, Britain was still a Great Power and they’d ridden out the first blows. A counteroffensive was coming… but more trials still lay ahead…

Comments?

1. Freeman Freeman-Thomas was Lloyd’s predecessor; he was assassinated alongside Bonar Law in chapter 27
2. Yes, this is a still from Threads
3. Shepherd’s pie, being made of beef, would be offensive to the rebels
4. Inspired by the latter scenes of hostage-taking in TL-191, where Mormons and Confederates were executed en masse as reprisals for the murder of Union troops.
5. Before they became the tabloid rags they are today.

 

[Rivercat893]

Chapter Twenty-Nine: A Tiger By the Tail​

"We are holding a tiger by the tail, my friends, and we must not let the thing turn round and claw at us!"
- Winston Churchill commenting on the situation in India, summer 1917

"India? Yes my friends, there is no doubt that India is tremendously valuable. But what Mr Lloyd George, the Liberals, and the Conservatives fail to understand is that what is more valuable are the lives of British men! How can one support a measure that will condemn good British troops to death after having escaped the cauldron of the Great War?"
-Prominent Labour Party figure William Adamson criticising Lloyd George's decision to ship British troops to India.

"Go forward, valiant soldiers, and do your duty for that Empire on which the sun never sets! England expects every man shall do his duty!"
-David Lloyd George addressing troops about to depart from Plymouth harbour for India

The British Empire was the product of three centuries’ worth of construction. It had started off as a few trading outposts on the road to China in the mid-sixteenth century, and by the summer of 1917 it spanned a quarter of the globe. India and China, lands courted for their wealth since Roman times, were now under direct control and indirect influence, respectively. The sun never set on the British Empire, as the Union Jack fluttered from the furthest northern reaches of Canada to the Egyptian desert to the jungles of Brunei.

And now it was all in danger of coming undone.

The Indian revolt of July 1917 was not inevitable. London could have taken steps in the wake of defeat to give the people of the subcontinent more autonomy as a reward for their wartime contributions. Yet the British repeatedly turned a tin ear to their subjects. After a fanatic murdered Bonar Law, Governor George Lloyd saw a conspiracy afoot and clamped down hard. The Raj simmered for months until two inept soldiers touched off a revolt by killing a sacred cow.

That revolt had now spread across Hyderabad like wildfire. The local nizam controlled only a small chunk of his realm, while the British were facing mass unrest in the rest of India. Lloyd’s stern martial law had only raised tensions without making Britain’s task any easier. 10 July saw the rebels seize the city of Gulbarga to the west; the British garrison had been fighting the inhabitants for days and finally gave up. The countryside was no longer safe for white men as “freedom fighters” prowled about; they may have had high-minded goals, but they behaved an awful lot like common bandits. No one at the front seemed to know what to do: the rebels were able to dodge conventional assaults by melting into the jungle, yet whenever the British sent infantry patrols to beat the rebels in said jungle, those men seldom returned. That it was monsoon season only made things worse; while the Indians were used to the torrential rain, the British had a nightmare keeping troops supplied in the muck. The weather made it impossible for the British to use chemical weapons to flush out their foes; gas was useless in thick rain. Servants couldn’t be trusted, as it was all too common for cooks to slip a little snake venom into the stew or for guides to send British troops into a waiting ambush.

Rebel Indian cavalry charge a British army camp in the countryside, July 1917
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Only in the cities did the British have a secure presence. Governor Lloyd’s martial law meant that troops were heavily concentrated there, and they ruled urban areas with an iron fist to the detriment of controlling the countryside. Rural villages took on a very nasty character, as they were a major source of food production; often the farmers were put to work at bayonet point, the colonisers making off with the goods. All this infuriated the locals and cost the British manpower, but it ensured that no one starved. One may compare British rule in summer 1917 to a net; wherever men in khaki were present, the British controlled, but there were vast swathes of territory (and more than a few sizable cities) where rebels ruled. The regime in the cities may have been iron-fisted but was a long way from peaceful- 10 July alone saw riots in twenty cities leave a hundred Englishmen dead and whole city blocks levelled. The disruption of trade with the countryside left rationing tight for everybody, and hunger motivated people to vicious ends. Indians turned on one another for a bowl of rice, while the British were certainly not above forcibly requisitioning food. Armed soldiers with a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later guarded grain warehouses. Looters and “subversives” (a very loosely defined term ranging from grumblers to rioters), if they were lucky, found themselves in detention camps. These were not known for their sanitary conditions or bountiful rations, and once again they tied down many British troops who could’ve been put to good use against the rebels. Many died from dysentery, malnutrition, or simple execution in these prisons.

If things went on like this, the British Raj would collapse, and that would be the beginning of the end for the Empire.

British troops guarding a warehouse repel rioters with gas, summer 1917 (2)
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The men in grey suits in Whitehall had finally had enough. David Lloyd George refused to be remembered as the man who lost India and was prepared to move heaven and earth to crush the revolt. He’d initially supported martial law to quell the trouble, but had soured on it after ten days of chaos. He realised Calcutta was out of its depth, and that London needed to step in. On 10 July 1917, he telephoned Lloyd and the two men had a terse conversation. The PM made no bones about his displeasure. He was sending some encoded instructions to Lloyd, which were to be followed to the letter. The prideful governor was none too pleased about this, but sensed that he was already on thin ice and didn’t protest too loudly. He spent the afternoon pacing his office, waiting for the missive to arrive. When it did, his comments were enough to make a schoolteacher faint. Lloyd George was appointing a man named Francis Maxwell as “special emergency commanding officer with all due jurisdiction over military forces of the British Indian Army.” In short, a new man would run military operations- and it was a good bet that Maxwell would thumb his nose at Lloyd. This was a snub to the governor, but what came next was worse. He was ordered to make a public speech praising the princely regimes and the people of Burma- both groups had remained steadfastly loyal and the latter was one of the few peaceful spots in India at the moment. Lloyd’s ego bristled at the thought of praising a nonwhite, and he feared- not without justification- that doing so might send a message of weakness. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister had made it clear that he expected Lloyd to obey, and the man didn’t want to lose his job.

Thus, at midday on the twelfth, Lloyd invited a number of reporters into his Calcutta office. The windows were locked and the curtains drawn. Only reporters and government officials were let in and they were all subject to intense scrutiny. His desk was surrounded by muscle-bound white troops and no servants were allowed in the room, just in case.

Surely nothing could go wrong… surely.

“Good afternoon to you all. I, Governor-General George Lloyd, Baron Lloyd, speak to all the peoples of India today. The time since the war has, regrettably, not brought the peace we have all craved. Mistrust, violence, and deception have caused flawed decisions to be made. Can my august predecessor, Mr Freeman-Thomas (1), be absolved of all error? Perhaps not. It may be argued, not without reason, that previous governments made miscalculations. Yet there can be no denying that the past sixty years have brought peace and stability to the Indian people. Under the rule of His Majesty King George V, the Indian people have flourished. Therefore, this government is all the more appalled by the senseless acts of violence which have wracked our beloved realm. The assassination of Mr Freeman-Thomas and Mr Law was an inexcusable crime, the work of radicals who will not listen to reason! The past weeks have been a time of tremendous national stress for all of us. A senseless tide of violence has washed over our beautiful land- and this is an even greater crime. Truly, the history of India is reaching a bitter ebb.

“Yet, we must not permit ourselves to slide into despondency! For let us never forget that you, the Indian people, are overwhelmingly loyal! The good princes of this realm, especially Azam Jah of Hyderabad, driven from his capital by insurgency and chaos, remain steadfastly loyal to the stable order. I must also congratulate the people of Burma on their fealty- Rangoon remains one of the few places in this land where peace is still the order of the day, where it is the birds and not the guns which chirp at nights. Yet above all, I must thank you, the people of India. I know from the bottom of my heart that these dangerous radicals do not represent who you are and what you stand for. The Raj Government is and will always stand for peace and prosperity, and has always rested on the backs of a great silent majority. Now, I must call upon that silent majority once more, to carry the torch and hold firm in their fealty. Thank you.”

He blew up five minutes later.

The security in the office was immense, yes. However, the Governor-General’s palace was still bustling with servants and ministers moving back and forth. As such, one gardener whose name has not survived was able to exploit a security lapse in the small hours of 12 July. Governor Lloyd had always had a green thumb and rather liked to glance out the window at his plants. The garden, though separated from the office by a sizable fence, was only fifty metres away from the window. Thus, the Hindu gardener was able to plant a time bomb in the garden scheduled to detonate at noon. Ironically, he hadn’t known about the speech and was simply hoping that Lloyd would be in his office at the appropriate time. The upshot of it all was that not only was the governor-general killed, so were three newspapermen and a soldier. The blast tore through the fence at precisely twelve noon, sending shards of metal and cabbage flying every which way. Debris crashed through the wall, collapsing the structure of the building and reducing Lloyd’s office to rubble. The governor-general survived the initial blast but had his trunk blown off; he was pulled, howling, from the ruins within minutes, his suit drenched a sickly red, and died a lingering death.

The British retaliated predictably. The new governor-general, a man named Rufus Isaacs, quickly showed that he was his predecessor’s equal in ruthlessness and superior in thinking. Governor-General Isaacs was sworn into his new post forty-five minutes after doctors pronounced Lloyd dead. His first move was to declare a policy of hostage-taking, infamously saying that “for every one of our men they kill, we’ll put twenty up against a wall- and we’ll give ‘em a bit of shepherd’s pie first!” (3) His policy was never fully enacted- although hundreds of hostages were taken, the kitchens of the Raj were never put to work producing shepherd’s pie en masse. Nonetheless, the British randomly pulled twenty people off the street and shot them that very day. The executions took place at sundown in a military prison, but word naturally got out and hundreds of people turned up to prevent it. Soldiers were forced to fix bayonets and form a sharp square around the execution yard to prevent the mob from having its way; eighteen Indians were killed by these jittery men. The policy of hostage-taking was extended all throughout the Raj, and before too long the volley of firing squads became part of daily life. They snatched innocent people off the streets, took parents from their children, husbands from their wives. Some, having lost a loved one to the firing squad, decided to literally go out with a bang by going to a public place with a homemade or stolen explosive beneath their clothing. Of course, for every white man killed by said bombs, twenty more innocents were executed… and so it went. (4) Anybody who could flee did, and no one entered freely.

The British public wasn’t told the full story of what was happening in India. Rumours of the violence racking the subcontinent and a reasonable desire not to be caught up in it kept the press away. That image was in keeping with the British tradition of viewing the colonies as slightly untamed, backwards places, and it played into London’s hands. For a start, having those pesky reporters too afraid to come near the fighting effectively meant that the press was censoring itself, since the Ministry for the Colonies could drip-feed information to them. Second, it promoted the notion of India as a wild and barbaric land, which meant that London could portray the war as a clash between “civilisation” and “barbarity”. That image was totally inaccurate- the British were even less scrupulous than their foes- to say nothing of racist. Nonetheless, it was in keeping with a decades-long imperial mindset, and so it appeared on the front page of the Daily Herald and the Daily Mail. (5) This stream of propaganda convinced many veterans to re-enlist. Many of these men had not had a good time since coming back from the Great War- the jobs they’d previously held were gone, their mates from before the war dead, etc. Unemployment remained stubbornly high. As such, all it took to convince many was one or two concocted stories about Indian “savagery”, and they were off to re-enlist.

A new army was being established, one that might just save the British Raj.

Aside from a few eighteen-year-old kids who’d been too young to join in 1916, and who eagerly followed their older brothers to India, this fresh army consisted almost universally of Great War veterans. These men had been out of service for less than a year and retraining them would be a matter of course. Royal Army training camps, some built during the war, were scattered all across Britain; for the sake of convenience, most men went to the massive complex at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire. The Army of India, as it quickly became dubbed, had a most peculiar experience in training, for the men, being largely seasoned veterans, were able to impress their drill sergeants by actually knowing what they were doing! Of course, there were plenty of fresh-faced green recruits who needed toughening up, but the refresher course in late July 1917 proceeded remarkably smoothly.

However, there were limits to what Britain could do. The British economy in summer 1917 was stable but shaken. They’d defaulted on their debt to the Americans and the sale of Malta and Somaliland had helped pay for the war, but the Exchequer was still in no mood to finance a million-man army halfway across the globe. The Great War veterans returning to the colours had just begun to re-integrate themselves back into civilian society and the economy; this was a recipe for labour shortages. Additionally, with the war having just been lost, many civilians drew comfort from the fact that “Jack and Tommy” were back from the Army, as that was surely a harbinger of more peaceful times. Even though those men were returning to service voluntarily, their disappearance caused some panic that Britain was about to be hurled back into a great war, and contradicted the official line that everything was fine in India. Many in Parliament were unhappy about this- having just lost the Great War, they said, wasn’t it time Britain rested and thought of a peaceful way forward? How could David Lloyd George sleep, knowing that he was condemning to death men who’d fought in the trenches and survived the debacles of 1916? Labour kicked up a fuss about conscription; the Conservatives lamented the return of wartime taxes.

Lloyd George would have none of it. He had to walk a fine political tightrope and generally tried to appease both sides of the spectrum, but this was too much. In a much-publicised interview with the Daily Express, he claimed that “this nation’s pride was harmed by losing the Great War, but our status as a premiere empire was not! If, however, we should lose India to chaos, it would be the end of the British Empire on which the sun never sets, a greater defeat than we have suffered since the Hundred Years War.” Despite its political intent, the Prime Minister’s message was not wrong. India was essential to Britain’s status as a world power and they had to make sacrifices to retain it. Such an approach was unquestionably the right thing for Britain, but it did Lloyd George’s political career no favours. The Liberal Party was divided and dying, and Lloyd George was forced to draw support from the Conservatives, who like everyone else were tired of war. The electorate would reject him and the Liberals in the 1918 general election, and one consistent charge against him was that “He killed my boy after the war was done!”

David Lloyd George threw his political career under the bus in an attempt to preserve the British Raj.

Top: David Lloyd George, bottom: Governor-General Rufus Isaacs
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By the start of September, the Army of India- as it came to be known- was ready to go. The men had been retrained and equipment dug out of warehouses for them; officers were ready to lead. David Lloyd George gave a farewell speech for one brigade at Plymouth harbour on the first, calling on them to “bravely go where our grandfathers went, to restore prosperity and safety to our beloved empire.” To the tune of “Rule Britannia”, played by a secondary-school marching band, the brigade boarded HMS Cardiganshire and HMS Andania, the two ships steaming off on their long journey to India. This scene was repeated in all of Britain’s harbour throughout the first week of September 1917, as men packed up and moved to fight. This timing was ideal as it meant that the troops would be landing just as the monsoon abated.

While the Army of India- some forty thousand men- landed at various ports across the subcontinent, the British enlisted aid of a different sort. Nepal and Bhutan were nominally independent states which could so easily have been swallowed up by the colonisers. However, being remote Himalayan lands without much in the way of natural resources, London decided it was cheaper and better to keep them as protectorates. Neither was especially wealthy and with Chinese Tibet a mountain range away, their economic livelihoods were linked to the Raj. London had paid the regimes subsidies for decades and that money was what had kept Nepal and Bhutan afloat.

It was time for Britain to cash in on its investment.

The two kingdoms had remained neutral thus far, and had become even more cut off from the outside world than usual. There were no telephone or telegraph lines reaching into the rugged mountains and so communication with Nepal and Bhutan had to be done in the ancient way- give a courier a slip of paper and pray he doesn’t fall off a Himalayan cliff. With India not exactly a safe place for foot journeys right now, communication between the mountain kingdoms and their patron in London had gone dark. Nonetheless, envoys managed to reach the two kingdoms in early September. Owing to the immense costs of the war in India, they said, London was forced to trim its budget, and they would be unable to give Nepal and Bhutan their annual subsidies in 1918. The two courts responded with horrified gasps, as to turn off the money tap from London would be to drive the two kingdoms into bankruptcy. However the envoys said with a wry smile, if Nepal and Bhutan were to send their armies into battle against the rebels, that would reduce the strain on London just enough for the subsidies to find a place in the budget after all.

It didn’t take long for the courts to decide.

Nepalese troops on parade shortly before leaving for India
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Being small mountain nations under the thumb of a foreign power meant that neither state needed a large military. Equipment was out-of-date and training minimal. Had the Nepalese and Bhutanese armies been shipped over to Europe, the result would’ve been a bloodbath. Yet… there wasn’t a modern army to be faced in India. The fighting there was one of urban unrest and guerilla warfare, and that was the sort of fighting which even a backwards force was capable of. While backwards, the Nepalese and Bhutanese armies were disproportionately big for such small countries, and combined the two states contributed eighty thousand men to the British cause. These troops would play a key role in ensuring that northern India remained relatively calm compared to the chaos elsewhere.

In sum, the British Empire had been dealt a very nasty blow in July 1917. They were desperately trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered crown jewel. Yet, Britain was still a Great Power and they’d ridden out the first blows. A counteroffensive was coming… but more trials still lay ahead…

Comments?

1. Freeman Freeman-Thomas was Lloyd’s predecessor; he was assassinated alongside Bonar Law in chapter 27
2. Yes, this is a still from Threads
3. Shepherd’s pie, being made of beef, would be offensive to the rebels
4. Inspired by the latter scenes of hostage-taking in TL-191, where Mormons and Confederates were executed en masse as reprisals for the murder of Union troops.
5. Before they became the tabloid rags they are today.

The Indian War (or whatever you want to call it) will be very much Britain's Vietnam where they are fighting an enemy thousand of miles away from home with an advantage in geography and morale. Ireland is going to be a lot worse and I wonder what will you do with Russia next.