Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Oh don't worry, plenty of time for Pole-on-Ukrainian actionOn a related note - kinda surprised that the outbreak of tensions was between the Poles and Magyars and not the Poles and Ruthenians who really, really, didn't get along at this point
Thank you!
Whoops
The Iranian misadventure will definitely have some knock-on effects for the Russians
Haha
Anywho
Not yet, but thank you for reminding me I need to bring that to a conclusion (likely in Firm Hand of Freedom)
Day of Infamy (Part II)
"...Operation Z, so named after the famous "Z order" given by Admiral Togo at the Battle of Yaeyama, was not exclusively aimed at Formosa and the Pescadores, even if the Mako Harbor attack is the most well-known episode of the events of September 14. Indeed, what makes Japan's planned coup de main against the French on that day so impressive was that it was executed across a variety of theaters, all within hours of each other, and that French spies and codebreakers had not detected anything amiss that suggested it might be in the offing.
Indeed, the first engagement was not on the 14th itself but, rather, shortly before midnight, when Japanese vessels originating at Kure Naval Base surreptitiously moved from where they had been moored just east of Tsushima Island through the Manzeki-Seto canal into the West Channel of the Korea Strait, where they steamed towards Busan and cut underwater telegraph cables near the harbor's approaches, managing by some miracle to avoid detection by the USS Hunter, a destroyer on a routine movement towards nearby Port Hamilton. Four hundred Japanese marines, or rikusentai, came ashore around three in the morning six kilometers east of the city and moved quickly through the hilly terrain adjacent to the city, and at dawn the cannon fire of the small squadron of Japanese destroyers docked off the shore of Pusan opened fire. The rikusentai, with Korean translators in tow, quickly moved on the town as French soldiers scrambled out of bed, stunned by the attack, and shouted as loud as they could to Korean mercenaries guarding the town that they would not shoot anybody who laid down their weapons and that the French "occupation" of Busan was, officially, at an end. The Battle of Busan took no more than three hours, and was over before ten o' clock. Twenty-seven Frenchmen and Foreign Legionnaires died, along with roughly forty civilians; only two Japanese lost their lives, and sixty-two Korean mercenaries were killed. The French who surrendered were taken to Japan, where they would be imprisoned for the remainder of the conflict in comfortable conditions near Kure. [1]
The Japanese seizure of Busan would kickstart Japan's participation in the war for primacy in the Orient between France and Germany, but also badly scramble the internal dynamics of Korean politics. For those with long memories, it reminded of the Japanese interventions in Korean affairs in the 1880s, which the Gojong military reforms and coziness with both the United States and Russia had been intended to foreclose upon in the future. It also meant that two of Korea's key ports, first Wonsan and now Busan, were in the hands of Japan, which raised alarms as much in St. Petersburg and Philadelphia due to their economic and political interests in the Korean Peninsula as it did in Paris and London; if Busan were to become a Japanese concession long term, it would allow them to close the Korean Strait at will.
It also proved a contentious point at a time that Gojong's health was beginning to fade; this bold provocation by Japan left open the question of how the various personalities of Young Korea would handle an ascendant Japan at a time when the sovereign going back close to forty years was near death..." [2]
- Land of the Morning Calm: Korea's 20th Century
"...the flagship Bretagne, a relatively new dreadnought deployed to serve as the lead vessel of the Far East Fleet. Joining her in what was then known as Makeng Harbor on the namesake island were two pre-dreadnought battleships in Patrie and Gaulois, as well as the cruisers Jeanne d'Arc and Champagne and an escort of four destroyers, seven torpedo boats and eight defensive submarines. As a quirk of history, Francois Darlan - the French State's future strongman - was an officer aboard the Gaulois, and his daring on that day and many to come helped build the legend around him that would eventually form the core of his cult of personality.
The first wave of Japanese planes launched from Pingtan shortly before dawn; with an effective range of a little over four hundred and fifty kilometers, they were expected to strike their target and, rather than turn around and head back, instead head west to Amoy, which sat under blockade of submarines and destroyers and which the Northern Squadron of the Far East Fleet was assisting in a "distant" blockade to which they could respond to threats against in less than three hours out of Makeng, an effective fleet-in-being. Several of the planes, due to the darkness and fault compass equipment, accidentally flew too far east or west, with several missing the Pescadores entirely before turning around to Amoy in a panic and others flying over Formosa instead, with some pilots landing in rice paddies on the island rather than risk running out of fuel over the Straits. The development of air-launched torpedoes in 1919 was primitive, with the most successful experimental variants having been built by the Italians and French (with the other country's navy in mind as a likely target), and Japan lacked the same scientific base and military design bureaus as the more advanced Western navies. Nonetheless, the prototype torpedoes dropped from the Japanese planes would do some damage to the French vessels, and the real target was bombing shore facilities in preparation for harassing an attempted sortie out of the harbor.
Admiral Maurice Grasset, commander of the whole Far East Fleet, gave out the call to general quarters just as many ships were completing their Sunday Mass atop decks. The first wave of planes roared overhead, scattering bombs across the docks, barracks and depots lining the southern and eastern shores of Makeng Harbor, with many of the bombs hitting their targets and one in particular setting up a gunpowder magazine that made the entire harbor shake and even damaged the Patrie. The cannons on several ships roared to life, taking out a few of the Japanese planes, but most of the intact squadron was able to make it out after their run, even if they had done less damage than planned, and veered off towards the mainland.
This course initially persuaded Grasset and his commanders as the boilers roared to life and the Bretagne slid out of its anchorage that the bombers, which were largely unmarked, were German, and had launched from Amoy as part of a sneak attack ahead of fleet action to break the blockade; for a moment, Grasset pondered whether a German squadron had perhaps passed through the Nicaragua Canal or around Cape Horn, steamed across the Pacific with a stopover in Samoa or the Solomons to refuel and regroup, and then found some way to evade French patrols near Mindanao and the Sulus to slip around the southern coast of Formosa. As the Bretagne and her escorts passed out into the central sound of the Pescadores, however, this thought was quickly dashed as vessels appeared over the western horizon, visible around the promontory of the Fisher Island Lighthouse - the 2nd Fleet, heavy on cruisers and destroyers, attempting to block the French in from the southwest.
The problem for Grasset, at this point, was that the battleship-component 1st Fleet was to the Pescadores' north, blocking his potential escape, and both fleets in positioning themselves as such had effectively crossed the T and formed a cauldron around the north, west, and south of the horseshoe-shaped island chain [3], leaving only a narrow passage out to the east past Chuton Island. Grasset, desperate, ordered two destroyers to head out via the Chuton passage and potentially clear an opening if necessary, only to moments later receive their distress signal as Japanese submarines lying in wait struck them with torpedoes. The 1st and 2nd Fleets then began their probing salvos, testing the distance between their positions outside of the islands only eight to ten kilometers away. [4][5]
The second bomber squadron arrived at this point, now in the full light of morning, and there were no waylaid planes this time. Most bombs landed in the water, but one struck home on the damaged Patrie and detonated the whole ship, killing hundreds of French sailors. As this bomber wave cruised through, Grasset made the decision that his ships would simply have to fight their way out to the south, avoiding the battleships to their north and if they had to would blast a path through what he considered inferior (and now clearly Japanese) vessels. He signaled to Formosa his plans and pressed forward into the gauntlet.
The Northern Squadron of the Marine Imperiale's Far East Fleet made a gallant show on September 14, 1919. They had been caught in a brilliantly devised attempted coup de main that combined Japan's efforts at both Manila Bay and Yaeyama from the 1903-04 Spanish-Japanese War and also now included aerial bombardment from above; the attack had been sprung early on a Sunday morning when most of the sailors and officers had been asleep or in Mass. It happened at a French naval outpost isolated in the middle of the Formosa Strait and on the other side of the world from the Metropole and over a thousand kilometers from the Far East Fleet's other major base at Cam Ranh. The Japanese enjoyed air superiority (the rudimentary airfield on Makeng had been the first obvious target of the bombers), the element of complete surprise, and considerably more firepower, especially after the annihilation of the Patrie. But the French fought on, even as the Bretagne suffered several direct hits and began to take on water and eventually had to be abandoned off the coast of Swatow, where Grasset and the majority of the crew were able to escape and come ashore. The Jeanne d'Arc took on water and flames closer to the Pescadores, burning into the early afternoon like a beacon on the deep blue waters of the Orient, but her crew still fired volley after volley even as the fires crept close to the their magazine and finally detonated the vessel like a great brazier with all hands. Champagne and Gaulois, despite losing the vast majority of their destroyer escorts, were able to blast their way through and steamed immediately southwards as fast as possible towards Hong Kong, where they would harbor for two nights before redeploying to Hainan, heavily damaged but seaworthy. The three capital ships lost by the French, along with the losses of almost all destroyers and defensive torpedo boats, was the worst loss by the French Navy since Trafalgar, but the bravery exhibited in breaking through the Japanese gauntlet would earn them a place in the hearts of their countrymen forever from then on.
Of course, the Japanese were not going to complain. Despite losing several cruisers and pre-dreadnought battleships, they had achieved their chief strategic goal, which was the elimination of the French presence in the Formosa Strait and gave them total command of the waters between Pingtan and the Pescadores. With that coup de main, the blockade of Amoy was effectively broken - the French vessels off the coast of Fukien immediately evacuated southwards or to Takau upon hearing that Makeng Harbor had fallen - and vessels could now resupply German positions there. It also meant that Formosa was, quite critically, suddenly isolated on her own, supine to any future Japanese attacks, unless the French committed a great deal of resources to her rescue, and quickly..."
- The French Orient
"...with their declaration of war in hand.
The speed at which Japan enforced their will was what shocked French policymakers. The very next day - Monday, September 15 - Japanese soldiers came ashore at Liukung Island, site of the main coastal battery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's concession at Weihaiwei, and seized it with barely a shot fired, rapidly overruning the small Austrian garrison there after sinking the two coastal defense ships in harbor from nearly ten kilometers away. By the following weekend, another surprise had been sprung - a detachment of Japanese troops that had left Tsingtao and rapidly moved across the Shandong hinterland before attacking Chefou from the south, thus evading the makeshift defenses French forces had established in the high hills immediately to the city's west in anticipation of an expedition from Chinese forces. Chefou would hold out for a week despite aggressive attacks from remarkably capable Japanese infantrymen as well as bombardment from the sea, but it too eventually fell. The outposts of the French Orient were falling, one by one.
The reaction in Europe was one of panic. The Austrians had depended on the French security umbrella provided by the triangle of Busan, the Pescadores, and Chefou to maintain their sole overseas possession in Shandong and were despondent; those feelings were multiplied by many factors in Paris. Raymond Poincare, the right-wing and highly nationalistic Prime Minister, angrily denounced the Japanese surprise attack upon Makeng as a "day of infamy" and promised "we shall make the oceans run red with the blood of the Japans" and further suggested, "La Patrie shall not rest until we have ended for good this yellow menace that blights the world." Protests erupted across Europe against Japan, even in neutral countries; the previously Germanophile Spaniards, themselves having suffered a similar humiliation at Japan's hands sixteen years earlier, suddenly expressed sympathy for France and several of their retired admirals traveled over the heavily-fortified border of the Pyrenees to offer their services as advisors to the French Admiralty in dealing with the "savage" Japanese. Even in the United States, about as far from the violence of East Asia as was possible, anti-Japanese riots occurred in cities on it West Coast, with fears of Japanese intervention against possessions like Port Hamilton or Chusan now live.
The war had only really begun now with Japan's audacious attack, but it was already a new, strange kind of war, termed in civilizational struggles, and more of a coming-out party for Japan than even her skirmish with Spain had been. Whatever happened after, Asia could not and would not ever be the same..."
- Steel Typhoon: The Oriental Theater of the Central European War
[1] The Japanese in WW1 treated their prisoners of war as well as any other power did; the whole "compete over who can be as barbaric towards POWs as possible" energy of the Japanese military was very much a WW2 phenomenon.
[2] So me being dumb forgot to cover Gojong's OTL death in January 1919. Chalk it up in-universe to him living a less-stressful life without the Japanese occupation and his frequent imprisonment, but let's also ignore the rumors that he was poisoned by the Japanese and assume he really was going to die sometime around the late 1910s/early 1920s
[3] I hope you're all referring to a map for this update in particular, but it's funny that the Pescadores/Penghus look kind of like the alien script from "Arrival" (one of my all-time favorite films)
[4] Deck guns on a dreadnoughts typically had a range of 25,000 meters or twenty-five kilometers, much better than land artillery
[5] Is this a similar trap to Hilton Head? Yes, yes it is. That wasn't my initial plan until I started really looking at a map of the Pescadores. Also, I'm allowed to plagiarize myself, so.
Indeed, the first engagement was not on the 14th itself but, rather, shortly before midnight, when Japanese vessels originating at Kure Naval Base surreptitiously moved from where they had been moored just east of Tsushima Island through the Manzeki-Seto canal into the West Channel of the Korea Strait, where they steamed towards Busan and cut underwater telegraph cables near the harbor's approaches, managing by some miracle to avoid detection by the USS Hunter, a destroyer on a routine movement towards nearby Port Hamilton. Four hundred Japanese marines, or rikusentai, came ashore around three in the morning six kilometers east of the city and moved quickly through the hilly terrain adjacent to the city, and at dawn the cannon fire of the small squadron of Japanese destroyers docked off the shore of Pusan opened fire. The rikusentai, with Korean translators in tow, quickly moved on the town as French soldiers scrambled out of bed, stunned by the attack, and shouted as loud as they could to Korean mercenaries guarding the town that they would not shoot anybody who laid down their weapons and that the French "occupation" of Busan was, officially, at an end. The Battle of Busan took no more than three hours, and was over before ten o' clock. Twenty-seven Frenchmen and Foreign Legionnaires died, along with roughly forty civilians; only two Japanese lost their lives, and sixty-two Korean mercenaries were killed. The French who surrendered were taken to Japan, where they would be imprisoned for the remainder of the conflict in comfortable conditions near Kure. [1]
The Japanese seizure of Busan would kickstart Japan's participation in the war for primacy in the Orient between France and Germany, but also badly scramble the internal dynamics of Korean politics. For those with long memories, it reminded of the Japanese interventions in Korean affairs in the 1880s, which the Gojong military reforms and coziness with both the United States and Russia had been intended to foreclose upon in the future. It also meant that two of Korea's key ports, first Wonsan and now Busan, were in the hands of Japan, which raised alarms as much in St. Petersburg and Philadelphia due to their economic and political interests in the Korean Peninsula as it did in Paris and London; if Busan were to become a Japanese concession long term, it would allow them to close the Korean Strait at will.
It also proved a contentious point at a time that Gojong's health was beginning to fade; this bold provocation by Japan left open the question of how the various personalities of Young Korea would handle an ascendant Japan at a time when the sovereign going back close to forty years was near death..." [2]
- Land of the Morning Calm: Korea's 20th Century
"...the flagship Bretagne, a relatively new dreadnought deployed to serve as the lead vessel of the Far East Fleet. Joining her in what was then known as Makeng Harbor on the namesake island were two pre-dreadnought battleships in Patrie and Gaulois, as well as the cruisers Jeanne d'Arc and Champagne and an escort of four destroyers, seven torpedo boats and eight defensive submarines. As a quirk of history, Francois Darlan - the French State's future strongman - was an officer aboard the Gaulois, and his daring on that day and many to come helped build the legend around him that would eventually form the core of his cult of personality.
The first wave of Japanese planes launched from Pingtan shortly before dawn; with an effective range of a little over four hundred and fifty kilometers, they were expected to strike their target and, rather than turn around and head back, instead head west to Amoy, which sat under blockade of submarines and destroyers and which the Northern Squadron of the Far East Fleet was assisting in a "distant" blockade to which they could respond to threats against in less than three hours out of Makeng, an effective fleet-in-being. Several of the planes, due to the darkness and fault compass equipment, accidentally flew too far east or west, with several missing the Pescadores entirely before turning around to Amoy in a panic and others flying over Formosa instead, with some pilots landing in rice paddies on the island rather than risk running out of fuel over the Straits. The development of air-launched torpedoes in 1919 was primitive, with the most successful experimental variants having been built by the Italians and French (with the other country's navy in mind as a likely target), and Japan lacked the same scientific base and military design bureaus as the more advanced Western navies. Nonetheless, the prototype torpedoes dropped from the Japanese planes would do some damage to the French vessels, and the real target was bombing shore facilities in preparation for harassing an attempted sortie out of the harbor.
Admiral Maurice Grasset, commander of the whole Far East Fleet, gave out the call to general quarters just as many ships were completing their Sunday Mass atop decks. The first wave of planes roared overhead, scattering bombs across the docks, barracks and depots lining the southern and eastern shores of Makeng Harbor, with many of the bombs hitting their targets and one in particular setting up a gunpowder magazine that made the entire harbor shake and even damaged the Patrie. The cannons on several ships roared to life, taking out a few of the Japanese planes, but most of the intact squadron was able to make it out after their run, even if they had done less damage than planned, and veered off towards the mainland.
This course initially persuaded Grasset and his commanders as the boilers roared to life and the Bretagne slid out of its anchorage that the bombers, which were largely unmarked, were German, and had launched from Amoy as part of a sneak attack ahead of fleet action to break the blockade; for a moment, Grasset pondered whether a German squadron had perhaps passed through the Nicaragua Canal or around Cape Horn, steamed across the Pacific with a stopover in Samoa or the Solomons to refuel and regroup, and then found some way to evade French patrols near Mindanao and the Sulus to slip around the southern coast of Formosa. As the Bretagne and her escorts passed out into the central sound of the Pescadores, however, this thought was quickly dashed as vessels appeared over the western horizon, visible around the promontory of the Fisher Island Lighthouse - the 2nd Fleet, heavy on cruisers and destroyers, attempting to block the French in from the southwest.
The problem for Grasset, at this point, was that the battleship-component 1st Fleet was to the Pescadores' north, blocking his potential escape, and both fleets in positioning themselves as such had effectively crossed the T and formed a cauldron around the north, west, and south of the horseshoe-shaped island chain [3], leaving only a narrow passage out to the east past Chuton Island. Grasset, desperate, ordered two destroyers to head out via the Chuton passage and potentially clear an opening if necessary, only to moments later receive their distress signal as Japanese submarines lying in wait struck them with torpedoes. The 1st and 2nd Fleets then began their probing salvos, testing the distance between their positions outside of the islands only eight to ten kilometers away. [4][5]
The second bomber squadron arrived at this point, now in the full light of morning, and there were no waylaid planes this time. Most bombs landed in the water, but one struck home on the damaged Patrie and detonated the whole ship, killing hundreds of French sailors. As this bomber wave cruised through, Grasset made the decision that his ships would simply have to fight their way out to the south, avoiding the battleships to their north and if they had to would blast a path through what he considered inferior (and now clearly Japanese) vessels. He signaled to Formosa his plans and pressed forward into the gauntlet.
The Northern Squadron of the Marine Imperiale's Far East Fleet made a gallant show on September 14, 1919. They had been caught in a brilliantly devised attempted coup de main that combined Japan's efforts at both Manila Bay and Yaeyama from the 1903-04 Spanish-Japanese War and also now included aerial bombardment from above; the attack had been sprung early on a Sunday morning when most of the sailors and officers had been asleep or in Mass. It happened at a French naval outpost isolated in the middle of the Formosa Strait and on the other side of the world from the Metropole and over a thousand kilometers from the Far East Fleet's other major base at Cam Ranh. The Japanese enjoyed air superiority (the rudimentary airfield on Makeng had been the first obvious target of the bombers), the element of complete surprise, and considerably more firepower, especially after the annihilation of the Patrie. But the French fought on, even as the Bretagne suffered several direct hits and began to take on water and eventually had to be abandoned off the coast of Swatow, where Grasset and the majority of the crew were able to escape and come ashore. The Jeanne d'Arc took on water and flames closer to the Pescadores, burning into the early afternoon like a beacon on the deep blue waters of the Orient, but her crew still fired volley after volley even as the fires crept close to the their magazine and finally detonated the vessel like a great brazier with all hands. Champagne and Gaulois, despite losing the vast majority of their destroyer escorts, were able to blast their way through and steamed immediately southwards as fast as possible towards Hong Kong, where they would harbor for two nights before redeploying to Hainan, heavily damaged but seaworthy. The three capital ships lost by the French, along with the losses of almost all destroyers and defensive torpedo boats, was the worst loss by the French Navy since Trafalgar, but the bravery exhibited in breaking through the Japanese gauntlet would earn them a place in the hearts of their countrymen forever from then on.
Of course, the Japanese were not going to complain. Despite losing several cruisers and pre-dreadnought battleships, they had achieved their chief strategic goal, which was the elimination of the French presence in the Formosa Strait and gave them total command of the waters between Pingtan and the Pescadores. With that coup de main, the blockade of Amoy was effectively broken - the French vessels off the coast of Fukien immediately evacuated southwards or to Takau upon hearing that Makeng Harbor had fallen - and vessels could now resupply German positions there. It also meant that Formosa was, quite critically, suddenly isolated on her own, supine to any future Japanese attacks, unless the French committed a great deal of resources to her rescue, and quickly..."
- The French Orient
"...with their declaration of war in hand.
The speed at which Japan enforced their will was what shocked French policymakers. The very next day - Monday, September 15 - Japanese soldiers came ashore at Liukung Island, site of the main coastal battery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's concession at Weihaiwei, and seized it with barely a shot fired, rapidly overruning the small Austrian garrison there after sinking the two coastal defense ships in harbor from nearly ten kilometers away. By the following weekend, another surprise had been sprung - a detachment of Japanese troops that had left Tsingtao and rapidly moved across the Shandong hinterland before attacking Chefou from the south, thus evading the makeshift defenses French forces had established in the high hills immediately to the city's west in anticipation of an expedition from Chinese forces. Chefou would hold out for a week despite aggressive attacks from remarkably capable Japanese infantrymen as well as bombardment from the sea, but it too eventually fell. The outposts of the French Orient were falling, one by one.
The reaction in Europe was one of panic. The Austrians had depended on the French security umbrella provided by the triangle of Busan, the Pescadores, and Chefou to maintain their sole overseas possession in Shandong and were despondent; those feelings were multiplied by many factors in Paris. Raymond Poincare, the right-wing and highly nationalistic Prime Minister, angrily denounced the Japanese surprise attack upon Makeng as a "day of infamy" and promised "we shall make the oceans run red with the blood of the Japans" and further suggested, "La Patrie shall not rest until we have ended for good this yellow menace that blights the world." Protests erupted across Europe against Japan, even in neutral countries; the previously Germanophile Spaniards, themselves having suffered a similar humiliation at Japan's hands sixteen years earlier, suddenly expressed sympathy for France and several of their retired admirals traveled over the heavily-fortified border of the Pyrenees to offer their services as advisors to the French Admiralty in dealing with the "savage" Japanese. Even in the United States, about as far from the violence of East Asia as was possible, anti-Japanese riots occurred in cities on it West Coast, with fears of Japanese intervention against possessions like Port Hamilton or Chusan now live.
The war had only really begun now with Japan's audacious attack, but it was already a new, strange kind of war, termed in civilizational struggles, and more of a coming-out party for Japan than even her skirmish with Spain had been. Whatever happened after, Asia could not and would not ever be the same..."
- Steel Typhoon: The Oriental Theater of the Central European War
[1] The Japanese in WW1 treated their prisoners of war as well as any other power did; the whole "compete over who can be as barbaric towards POWs as possible" energy of the Japanese military was very much a WW2 phenomenon.
[2] So me being dumb forgot to cover Gojong's OTL death in January 1919. Chalk it up in-universe to him living a less-stressful life without the Japanese occupation and his frequent imprisonment, but let's also ignore the rumors that he was poisoned by the Japanese and assume he really was going to die sometime around the late 1910s/early 1920s
[3] I hope you're all referring to a map for this update in particular, but it's funny that the Pescadores/Penghus look kind of like the alien script from "Arrival" (one of my all-time favorite films)
[4] Deck guns on a dreadnoughts typically had a range of 25,000 meters or twenty-five kilometers, much better than land artillery
[5] Is this a similar trap to Hilton Head? Yes, yes it is. That wasn't my initial plan until I started really looking at a map of the Pescadores. Also, I'm allowed to plagiarize myself, so.
Huh. We now know two of their leaders..
So a suggestion, unless you have entirely jumped ahead, you dont have to change the lore. I have also forgot to cover events in my tl and I didnt change the lore for it.
Also I think, Western Powers will snatch Busan like they did with Porth Arthur post 1st Sino-Japanese War iotl.
So when will Gojong die ittl?
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On paper when fired at a high elevation. When put in a casemate, or secondary turret? Not so much.
For whatever reason Darlan is the WW2 French military guy I've always been curious about living longer, and thus...
Probably sometime early 1920, it doesn't really matter for the TL either way. I just want to make sure I take the time to explore its ramifications, since I've spent a decent amount of time on Korea.
Fiancee has her WSET 3 Level (wine course) test this weekend so I've had some extra free time lol
In practice it's more like 15000m or thereabouts, no?
The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
"...genuine alarm at Martin's condition. The President's health had deteriorated, rapidly, over the previous six months; his face was gaunt but his gut looked perpetually inflamed, his knees wobbled noticeably when he stood, and he could not walk far without a cane. He very seldom left his lavish townhome at 16th and Harrill, with a small army of Negro domestic servants doting upon him at all times. Swanson and Murphy both muttered about nudging the dying President to resign for the good of the Confederacy, but once rumors of such got back to "the House on Harrill Street," they were quickly denied future audiences with him.
It was not clear what good it would have done to launch a putsch against Martin, either; much of the toothless Confederate Senate was personally loyal to him, having been recruited into the elite body through his efforts as regular party politics had evaporated across Dixie. The type of tight control that Martin had exercised over Confederate politics in the waning days of the war now was nowhere to be seen, of course, as local chieftains exercised their own control in far-off corners and real decisions, as everybody knew, were made by the Military Administration, typically the authoritarian General James Harbord.
It was against that backdrop that the 1919 elections were held, or were as close to held as they could be. If 1917 had been difficult to consider free and fair due to the chaos of the Red Summer and the collapse of public order, 1919 was an echo with local bosses simply adding up how many votes their favored candidates needed to win, and the Congress that would convene in February 1920 would be a bizarre collection, with as many genuine political figures as there were simply illiterate cousins, brothers-in-law or sons of prominent chieftains back west. In urban areas where the Military Administration exercised control, the elections were not much more fair; Yankee commanders placed their own thumbs on the scale to tip result to make sure they had a voice in Charlotte, not that it would have much effect. The occupation was not over yet formally, but across much of Dixie it had been for over a year, while in other places the Yankees were as ensconced as ever. Forrest and his core circle of the NRO were still at large in the Appalachians, appearing occasionally to carry out raids and massacres, but the hillboys had been more or less crushed and many of those desperate to join them in the grim spring of 1917 were now back on their farms or officially deputized by county bosses. Dixie was stable, but not due to any effort made by the powers that be in Charlotte; in that sense, it was governed only in the loosest sense of the phrase.
1919 thus was not much of a national election, even though Oscar Underwood once more did what he could to make it one, touring the countryside in an open-top German automobile with a small army of bodyguards. His platform, still under the title of "Democratic Opposition," was one of optimistic renewal, of an end to the Yankee occupation, and of the disarmament of the still-roving gangs of paramilitaries outside of state authority, in particular the NRO, which he described as a "menace to the peace of the Confederate States." Underwood, who had been considered a staunch progressive well to the left of his late ally Tillman, had shifted notably to the right since the end of the war; while his 1919 "National Tour" condemned the NRO and preached an inclusive healing process for the broken land, he denounced any suggestion of passing the Fourth and Fifth Amendments even while maintaining that slavery had, quite clearly, ended. Hoping to lean into the simple facts on the ground in the Confederacy, he also preached a return to pre-secession state's rights, of a weak central authority, as much out of genuine conviction as an acceptance that the Confederacy had been irretrievably changed and that the Old Dixie of August 1913 was never coming back.
Candidates aligned with or endorsed by Democratic Opposition performed better than they had in 1917 in House elections, where many sheriffs and other localist cliques liked Underwood's message of resisting Martin's on-paper authority in Charlotte, but Martinite candidates nonetheless dominated, and Underwood returned to Alabama as results across Dixie were openly questioned wondering if it was worth his efforts to continue fighting for a more hopeful Confederacy. Whatever he would eventually decide, it would be in a wholly new context; a few days after the elections, on November 12, 1919, Thomas Staples Martin died, aged 72, in Charlotte.
Initially, very little changed. Duncan Upshaw Fletcher, a reactionary Floridian who had been Martin's key lieutenant in the Senate, became the 15th President of the Confederate States, and the fourth since Vardaman's inauguration in February 1916. He would also be the longest-serving of those four, completing the unfinished term in 1922 and thus providing at least some modicum of stability to the badly-tarnished institutional clout of the Confederate Presidency, which since 1910 had resembled a revolving door of rapidly-fading power. As a sign of this, Fletcher returned to the Senate in 1924, this time as the Senator for her Class 1 seat, because that body provided him more opportunity for continued influence than his brief Presidency ever had. It also underlined, as the 1920s dawned, the power wielded by the "Three Unburned" - North Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, states that had escaped the devastation of the war relatively unscathed and whose internal politics, and the downstream effects of them in Dixie, would come to define the next two decades, in sharp contrast to the dominance of Alabama, Virginia and South Carolina on high-level Confederate politics since the early 1890s..."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
It was not clear what good it would have done to launch a putsch against Martin, either; much of the toothless Confederate Senate was personally loyal to him, having been recruited into the elite body through his efforts as regular party politics had evaporated across Dixie. The type of tight control that Martin had exercised over Confederate politics in the waning days of the war now was nowhere to be seen, of course, as local chieftains exercised their own control in far-off corners and real decisions, as everybody knew, were made by the Military Administration, typically the authoritarian General James Harbord.
It was against that backdrop that the 1919 elections were held, or were as close to held as they could be. If 1917 had been difficult to consider free and fair due to the chaos of the Red Summer and the collapse of public order, 1919 was an echo with local bosses simply adding up how many votes their favored candidates needed to win, and the Congress that would convene in February 1920 would be a bizarre collection, with as many genuine political figures as there were simply illiterate cousins, brothers-in-law or sons of prominent chieftains back west. In urban areas where the Military Administration exercised control, the elections were not much more fair; Yankee commanders placed their own thumbs on the scale to tip result to make sure they had a voice in Charlotte, not that it would have much effect. The occupation was not over yet formally, but across much of Dixie it had been for over a year, while in other places the Yankees were as ensconced as ever. Forrest and his core circle of the NRO were still at large in the Appalachians, appearing occasionally to carry out raids and massacres, but the hillboys had been more or less crushed and many of those desperate to join them in the grim spring of 1917 were now back on their farms or officially deputized by county bosses. Dixie was stable, but not due to any effort made by the powers that be in Charlotte; in that sense, it was governed only in the loosest sense of the phrase.
1919 thus was not much of a national election, even though Oscar Underwood once more did what he could to make it one, touring the countryside in an open-top German automobile with a small army of bodyguards. His platform, still under the title of "Democratic Opposition," was one of optimistic renewal, of an end to the Yankee occupation, and of the disarmament of the still-roving gangs of paramilitaries outside of state authority, in particular the NRO, which he described as a "menace to the peace of the Confederate States." Underwood, who had been considered a staunch progressive well to the left of his late ally Tillman, had shifted notably to the right since the end of the war; while his 1919 "National Tour" condemned the NRO and preached an inclusive healing process for the broken land, he denounced any suggestion of passing the Fourth and Fifth Amendments even while maintaining that slavery had, quite clearly, ended. Hoping to lean into the simple facts on the ground in the Confederacy, he also preached a return to pre-secession state's rights, of a weak central authority, as much out of genuine conviction as an acceptance that the Confederacy had been irretrievably changed and that the Old Dixie of August 1913 was never coming back.
Candidates aligned with or endorsed by Democratic Opposition performed better than they had in 1917 in House elections, where many sheriffs and other localist cliques liked Underwood's message of resisting Martin's on-paper authority in Charlotte, but Martinite candidates nonetheless dominated, and Underwood returned to Alabama as results across Dixie were openly questioned wondering if it was worth his efforts to continue fighting for a more hopeful Confederacy. Whatever he would eventually decide, it would be in a wholly new context; a few days after the elections, on November 12, 1919, Thomas Staples Martin died, aged 72, in Charlotte.
Initially, very little changed. Duncan Upshaw Fletcher, a reactionary Floridian who had been Martin's key lieutenant in the Senate, became the 15th President of the Confederate States, and the fourth since Vardaman's inauguration in February 1916. He would also be the longest-serving of those four, completing the unfinished term in 1922 and thus providing at least some modicum of stability to the badly-tarnished institutional clout of the Confederate Presidency, which since 1910 had resembled a revolving door of rapidly-fading power. As a sign of this, Fletcher returned to the Senate in 1924, this time as the Senator for her Class 1 seat, because that body provided him more opportunity for continued influence than his brief Presidency ever had. It also underlined, as the 1920s dawned, the power wielded by the "Three Unburned" - North Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, states that had escaped the devastation of the war relatively unscathed and whose internal politics, and the downstream effects of them in Dixie, would come to define the next two decades, in sharp contrast to the dominance of Alabama, Virginia and South Carolina on high-level Confederate politics since the early 1890s..."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
Don’t feel too bad, I originally went back and forth on killing him off
Ireland Unleashed
"...villages where the Royal Irish Constabulary seldom if ever made its presence felt; nonetheless, the perception that Ireland immediately post-Convention was lawless and still scarred by the civil war had some merit, especially in the west and south.
Devlin was tremendously aided by the ability to more or less "turn-key" many of the institutions of Irish government in the summer and early autumn of 1919, even as he pressed ahead with his own agenda of genuine state-building. The court and penal system were left largely untouched, as were land registries; births and marriages would continue to be recorded by the Church of Ireland and Catholic Church, with civil marriages unavailable to the chagrin of a growing anti-clerical element in the labor movement and Ireland's small Jewish community. Seeking to avoid an ugly battle over schooling, Devlin made little effort to confront the power of the Catholic and Anglican parish school systems nor the sharply segregated universities; knowing the tensions in Ulster well from personal experience, he understood there was little to be gained and much to be lost on such an emotive question so early in young, free Ireland's journey.
It was perhaps just as well that such livewires were avoided, because Ireland as the 1920s beckoned was a broken country, much poorer in late 1919 than it had been in early 1914 when the Curragh Mutiny had tipped the whole of the island into open conflict. Tens of thousands had fled the violence and fewer than half returned; many of those who did were men like Michael Collins, radicals associated with republicanism who had fought in the trenches of the Great American War and built up strong support networks in the United States who still held to republican ideals and had been as responsible as anyone for the massive spike in guns floating around Ireland since the beginning of 1917. The ban on whiskey imports to the United States since early 1914 had not only not been repealed but codified, damaging the distilleries which formed the industrial base in Dublin, and only the explosion of the Central European War had redirected some of Ireland's slack productive capacity, though it would not be until well into 1920 that this began to trickle down to the masses. As such, Devlin ruled not over ashes, but stood atop a mistrustful, anxious and hardened polity that had experienced a grievous self-inflicted wound for the past half-decade and now was scrambling to discover what came next as the joyous glow of the Convention and the transition to the Dominion of Ireland faded and hard realities emerged.
It was appropriately Irish that the seemingly easiest of debates would elicit the strongest responses, and the Flag Question was part and parcel to that. The St. Patrick's Cross had been considered the formal flag of the Kingdom of Ireland since the 1770s - indeed, it remained a component of the Union Jack even after the Irish Convention to symbolize Ireland's importance to London - but many Irish nationalists, to say nothing of the powerful republican lobby, wanted it changed, viewing it as an English imposition upon the country and symbolic of British suzerainty. The question came to a head when on September 10, 1919, a riot occurred before the Four Courts and labor leader Big Jim Larkin himself climbed up the front of the building and tore down the St. Patrick's Cross while leaving the Union Jack in place, throwing the putative Irish flag down to the steps below. He later admitted that he had debated hanging the Republican green-white-orange tricolor in its place, but worried that either that or the red banner of socialism would provoke a more violent response from the RIC already trying to clear the crowd, and so he simply scampered back down and for his troubles was handed down a three-year prison sentence inside that very same building a month later.
The episode was demonstrative of the sentiment roiling Ireland, however. Nationalists were of the view that they had, truly, created a new nation and were eager for symbols of their own; Ulstermen scoffed that Ireland already had its own symbol in St. Patrick's Cross. The matter was escalated days later when Arthur Griffith, whose Sinn Fein was now in total collapse, rose in the Assembly and demanded that the Cross be taken down from inside the hall, for "it is no flag of Ireland I shall ever salute." The problem for Devlin in this matter, of course, was that the Irish tricolor was totally associated with the republican and labor movements, which thought the Convention had not gone far enough and sought a project of Irish nationalism well beyond what he and Redmond had fought for. As such, he proposed a grand debate - of selecting a new flag for Ireland that "could belong to all Irishmen," unassociated with republicanism or Ulsterism.
This discussion through the autumn of 1919 was highly toxic, with accusations of disloyalty to the Crown as common as accusations of wanting to renege on the Convention and return Ireland to Westminster's direct control. The St. Patrick's Cross and the tricolor were both burned in demonstrations in Belfast that ended in shootings, bombings and riots; the young Irish Army was forced to quell a number of these battles and did so under a blank blue banner with no insignia to avoid offending any soldier's own sensibilities. For a moment it seemed as if Ireland was about to tip into open war again over its flag.
The compromise Devlin cooked up, however, eventually satisfied everyone and nobody. The Green Harp Flag was associated with more moderate nationalism since the early 19th century as opposed to the tricolor, but was not seen as an overtly Anglican symbol like the St. Patrick's Cross; it was a flag that already existed and represented all of Ireland, both of its communions, and had even been flown by Redmond a few times around the hour of the Convention. Ulstermen were aghast but they were a vote short of being able to fully flex their provincial veto; the Irish Republican Party abstained from the vote held on December 11 to approve the Green Harp Flag, while Labour split in two, with roughly half in favor and half against. Devlin, proudly, slung the flag over the Speaker's well before the vote and stated, "This is a flag that was designed by an Anglican, to be flown in pride for a country that is majority Catholic; it is a flag for an Ireland that nonetheless looks approvingly to Britain. It is a flag that represents everyone, and turns aside no-one. It is the flag of Ireland!" The flag was passed, though with more IPP defections than Devlin would have liked, and it was officially flown as the flag of Ireland permanently, to this day, starting on January 2, 1920.
The affair nonetheless exposed how divided the Emerald Isle remained. Republicans made a great show of flying the tricolor at their demonstrations, and that flag became irretrievably associated with their political movement; Protestant schools, churches and of course Orange Lodges continued flying the St. Patrick's Cross and the Union Jack side-by-side for decades, and there was a resurgence in doing so during the resurgence of communal tensions in the late 1970s in Ulster. Even for many nationalists, they were dismayed that a flag used since the 17th century was bandied out as what they considered a slapdash compromise to punt the question of what Ireland was now that it was free, and that an opportunity to create a flag that genuinely represented every community on the island as one had been missed. More than anything, it revealed that Devlin's increasingly top-down nation-building project had a long ways to go, and that feelings would be bruised and feuds reopened many a time along the way..."
- Ireland Unleashed
Devlin was tremendously aided by the ability to more or less "turn-key" many of the institutions of Irish government in the summer and early autumn of 1919, even as he pressed ahead with his own agenda of genuine state-building. The court and penal system were left largely untouched, as were land registries; births and marriages would continue to be recorded by the Church of Ireland and Catholic Church, with civil marriages unavailable to the chagrin of a growing anti-clerical element in the labor movement and Ireland's small Jewish community. Seeking to avoid an ugly battle over schooling, Devlin made little effort to confront the power of the Catholic and Anglican parish school systems nor the sharply segregated universities; knowing the tensions in Ulster well from personal experience, he understood there was little to be gained and much to be lost on such an emotive question so early in young, free Ireland's journey.
It was perhaps just as well that such livewires were avoided, because Ireland as the 1920s beckoned was a broken country, much poorer in late 1919 than it had been in early 1914 when the Curragh Mutiny had tipped the whole of the island into open conflict. Tens of thousands had fled the violence and fewer than half returned; many of those who did were men like Michael Collins, radicals associated with republicanism who had fought in the trenches of the Great American War and built up strong support networks in the United States who still held to republican ideals and had been as responsible as anyone for the massive spike in guns floating around Ireland since the beginning of 1917. The ban on whiskey imports to the United States since early 1914 had not only not been repealed but codified, damaging the distilleries which formed the industrial base in Dublin, and only the explosion of the Central European War had redirected some of Ireland's slack productive capacity, though it would not be until well into 1920 that this began to trickle down to the masses. As such, Devlin ruled not over ashes, but stood atop a mistrustful, anxious and hardened polity that had experienced a grievous self-inflicted wound for the past half-decade and now was scrambling to discover what came next as the joyous glow of the Convention and the transition to the Dominion of Ireland faded and hard realities emerged.
It was appropriately Irish that the seemingly easiest of debates would elicit the strongest responses, and the Flag Question was part and parcel to that. The St. Patrick's Cross had been considered the formal flag of the Kingdom of Ireland since the 1770s - indeed, it remained a component of the Union Jack even after the Irish Convention to symbolize Ireland's importance to London - but many Irish nationalists, to say nothing of the powerful republican lobby, wanted it changed, viewing it as an English imposition upon the country and symbolic of British suzerainty. The question came to a head when on September 10, 1919, a riot occurred before the Four Courts and labor leader Big Jim Larkin himself climbed up the front of the building and tore down the St. Patrick's Cross while leaving the Union Jack in place, throwing the putative Irish flag down to the steps below. He later admitted that he had debated hanging the Republican green-white-orange tricolor in its place, but worried that either that or the red banner of socialism would provoke a more violent response from the RIC already trying to clear the crowd, and so he simply scampered back down and for his troubles was handed down a three-year prison sentence inside that very same building a month later.
The episode was demonstrative of the sentiment roiling Ireland, however. Nationalists were of the view that they had, truly, created a new nation and were eager for symbols of their own; Ulstermen scoffed that Ireland already had its own symbol in St. Patrick's Cross. The matter was escalated days later when Arthur Griffith, whose Sinn Fein was now in total collapse, rose in the Assembly and demanded that the Cross be taken down from inside the hall, for "it is no flag of Ireland I shall ever salute." The problem for Devlin in this matter, of course, was that the Irish tricolor was totally associated with the republican and labor movements, which thought the Convention had not gone far enough and sought a project of Irish nationalism well beyond what he and Redmond had fought for. As such, he proposed a grand debate - of selecting a new flag for Ireland that "could belong to all Irishmen," unassociated with republicanism or Ulsterism.
This discussion through the autumn of 1919 was highly toxic, with accusations of disloyalty to the Crown as common as accusations of wanting to renege on the Convention and return Ireland to Westminster's direct control. The St. Patrick's Cross and the tricolor were both burned in demonstrations in Belfast that ended in shootings, bombings and riots; the young Irish Army was forced to quell a number of these battles and did so under a blank blue banner with no insignia to avoid offending any soldier's own sensibilities. For a moment it seemed as if Ireland was about to tip into open war again over its flag.
The compromise Devlin cooked up, however, eventually satisfied everyone and nobody. The Green Harp Flag was associated with more moderate nationalism since the early 19th century as opposed to the tricolor, but was not seen as an overtly Anglican symbol like the St. Patrick's Cross; it was a flag that already existed and represented all of Ireland, both of its communions, and had even been flown by Redmond a few times around the hour of the Convention. Ulstermen were aghast but they were a vote short of being able to fully flex their provincial veto; the Irish Republican Party abstained from the vote held on December 11 to approve the Green Harp Flag, while Labour split in two, with roughly half in favor and half against. Devlin, proudly, slung the flag over the Speaker's well before the vote and stated, "This is a flag that was designed by an Anglican, to be flown in pride for a country that is majority Catholic; it is a flag for an Ireland that nonetheless looks approvingly to Britain. It is a flag that represents everyone, and turns aside no-one. It is the flag of Ireland!" The flag was passed, though with more IPP defections than Devlin would have liked, and it was officially flown as the flag of Ireland permanently, to this day, starting on January 2, 1920.
The affair nonetheless exposed how divided the Emerald Isle remained. Republicans made a great show of flying the tricolor at their demonstrations, and that flag became irretrievably associated with their political movement; Protestant schools, churches and of course Orange Lodges continued flying the St. Patrick's Cross and the Union Jack side-by-side for decades, and there was a resurgence in doing so during the resurgence of communal tensions in the late 1970s in Ulster. Even for many nationalists, they were dismayed that a flag used since the 17th century was bandied out as what they considered a slapdash compromise to punt the question of what Ireland was now that it was free, and that an opportunity to create a flag that genuinely represented every community on the island as one had been missed. More than anything, it revealed that Devlin's increasingly top-down nation-building project had a long ways to go, and that feelings would be bruised and feuds reopened many a time along the way..."
- Ireland Unleashed
Between 1910 and the president elected in the 1922 election there could have been two people each with a 6 year term, in actuality there were 6 (or was it 7)?
Irealnd's path is going to be painful but expected, the competition between Irish elite who basically want the old system with them in control, sectarians, republicans and leftists is going to be intense.
It does not help Devlin appears to be kicking cans down the road, one day those cans will be tripped upon. My guess is that overtime his system perhaps ironically succeeds in winning over most of the parties causing radical splinters to erupt and hit the Irish fault lines in the 70s. Say for example a leftist group emerges perhaps ironically among the deprived Unionist parts them clashing with authorities can turn rapidly sectarian very fast.
It does not help Devlin appears to be kicking cans down the road, one day those cans will be tripped upon. My guess is that overtime his system perhaps ironically succeeds in winning over most of the parties causing radical splinters to erupt and hit the Irish fault lines in the 70s. Say for example a leftist group emerges perhaps ironically among the deprived Unionist parts them clashing with authorities can turn rapidly sectarian very fast.
It's six. Four alone in the 1916-1922 six year term.
Joseph F. Johnston 1909-1913 (elected, died)
Cotton Ed Smith 1913-1916
James K. Vardaman 1916-1916 (elected, died)
George S. Patton 1916-1918 (resigned)
Thomas S. Martin 1918-1919 (died)
Duncan Fletcher 1919-1922
It's no wonder the Confederate presidency is turning into even more of a toothless figurehead office than it was pre-war. Can't imagine them having such a crippled and illegitimate government during the post-war crisis years is going to end well. I suppose that's how we're going to end up with Long.