Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)

[KingSweden24]

Very bad enemy rail infrastructure (LeT's UsE dIfFeReNt RaIl GaUgEs BeTwEeN sTaTeS, tHaT's A gReAt IdEa!)

Indeed. Definitely doesn’t help

 

[5000 Cows]

"...agreement that had not been acted upon by either side; it was for that reason that on February 29, 1916, Marines crossed back into Guatemala from El Salvador to punch their way to the capital as Mexican forces seized two major crossings of the border from unstable Chiapas to prevent a Huertista evacuation. In theory, under the stipulations of the Treaty of San Diego, Mexico was meant to have left Guatemala entirely alone, but the ink had been dry on that document for only four months before the United States was already acquiescing to Mexican intervention in the region, as forces under Aureliano Blanquet, at one time a good friend and ally of Huerta, moved off of their border positions in a scramble for the capital, with Mexicans embarrassed by Huerta having received the signal from Mexico City that it would be preferable if his scalp was taken by his own, rather than the Yankee.

Simple geography largely dictated the events to come. Mexico overran northern Guatemala's Peten Department and captured Quetzaltenango, but Guatemala City's collapse was carried out by American Marines who refused surrenders from many of the Huertistas there, simply shooting them in the head and leaving them in a mass grave on the edge of the city while declaring that the "official" Army of Guatemala was welcome to be in charge of the country again. The problem, of course, was that there wasn't much of an official army left, after two years of brutal war in Nicaragua, Estrada Cabrera's various purges of his officer class, and finally Huerta massacring his enemies to keep hold of power in the country. There wasn't much official of anything in Guatemala, and Butler's missives back to Philadelphia suggested that a long campaign of nation-building would be required to restore the country to any semblance of governability.

Huerta, of course, escaped into the jungles of northeastern Guatemala with many of his men, where a few months later he would die of some unspecified tropical disease believed to be yellow fever, thus dissolving his strange army of pseudo-mercenaries into the guerilla groups increasingly in control of Honduras and parts of rural Guatemala, paramilitary cliques that essentially came to hold their own fiefdoms with the support of fruit mercenaries and making a joke of any kind of idea of central government and structure in two of the three member-states of the now-dead Centroamerica..."

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

Oh boy this is going to be a mess. It could literally be decades before former Centro gets back on its feet.

 

[Dragonboy]

@KingSweden24 amazing chapters, things continue to fall apart for the south, good.

 

[naraht]

Very bad enemy rail infrastructure (LeT's UsE dIfFeReNt RaIl GaUgEs BeTwEeN sTaTeS, tHaT's A gReAt IdEa!)

I'm not sure if the Author has said *which* if any of the Confederate Rail Gauges are the same as what the United States has standardized on. (I presume that is the same gauge as iOTL.) With the (lack of) speed that the US has advanced in Northern Virginia, I expect that they have *completely* regauged (sp?) all of Virginia behind the line to the US gauge. The other question is whether the US and Mexico are using the same gauge. I'm presuming the Canada is using the same gauge as the since the US and the UK use the same. iOTL the non-standard gauge users are Ireland, Iberia and Russia (former part of the Russian Empire vary and standardizing to Europe is a political question)
I expect at least some lines in Kentucky to have been converted to Standard as well. If the United States and Mexico are on the same Gauge, then I expect that the 2RoT wil regauge within a generation.

 

[naraht]

Oh boy this is going to be a mess. It could literally be decades before former Centro gets back on its feet.

We'll see whether in a decade or two if the US and Mexico simply divide the country based on Facts on the ground. I'm not sure whether the Author as done anything indicating whether Guatemala exists in 1940 or later.

 

[dcharles]

I'm not sure if the Author has said *which* if any of the Confederate Rail Gauges are the same as what the United States has standardized on. (I presume that is the same gauge as iOTL.) With the (lack of) speed that the US has advanced in Northern Virginia, I expect that they have *completely* regauged (sp?) all of Virginia behind the line to the US gauge. The other question is whether the US and Mexico are using the same gauge. I'm presuming the Canada is using the same gauge as the since the US and the UK use the same. iOTL the non-standard gauge users are Ireland, Iberia and Russia (former part of the Russian Empire vary and standardizing to Europe is a political question)
I expect at least some lines in Kentucky to have been converted to Standard as well. If the United States and Mexico are on the same Gauge, then I expect that the 2RoT wil regauge within a generation.

Not to be the "well actually" guy, and I can't speak to what @KingSweden24 has written subsequent to OTL, (not that I haven't been reading, but CdM had gotten pretty big over the years) but it seems that the idea of Southern railroads being unusually non standardized before the war is largely a myth. See: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/railroads-after-a-confederate-victory.537466/page-3
Posts # 50 and 52 for some research @Geekhis Khan and I did on the subject.

 

[naraht]

Not to be the "well actually" guy, and I can't speak to what @KingSweden24 has written subsequent to OTL, (not that I haven't been reading, but CdM had gotten pretty big over the years) but it seems that the idea of Southern railroads being unusually non standardized before the war is largely a myth. See: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/railroads-after-a-confederate-victory.537466/page-3
Posts # 50 and 52 for some research @Geekhis Khan and I did on the subject.

I'm using http://www.virginiaplaces.org/rail/ as a source.
That does match what the author has said (other than a Texas Gauge )with *one* (Major) change, the absence of the Knoxville Lynchburg connector. Having that road will allow for the CSA to get troops into Virginia (if not to Richmond) without having to go through a gauge break at what the author called the "Charlotte Clusterf***". I could see North Carolina trying to focus rail traffic through Charlotte at the expense of Wilmington/Ft. Fisher, but North Carolina doesn't have any control of the Norfolk & Western (which goes to Bristol), the only thing that makes sense as a Retcon is to add Guerilla Strikes during the war out of West Virginia into Virginia to cut that line. I know the OP has said that the border between WV and VA is different, I'm not sure in the south, but as far as I can tell, it is about 30 miles from OTL Bastian, WV to Wytheville, VA which as far as I can tell is on that line.
There were raids in OTL Civil War and protecting a Railroad like that would be *very* difficult.
Also, the image over in the other thread (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...61.jpg/781px-Railroad_of_Confederacy-1861.jpg) does answer a question that I've had for a while. Most of Virginia and North Carolina were on the standard gauge, while most of the rest of the Confederacy were on 5ft. While boils down to the Midlands campaign had to deal with different gauges, the Eastern campaign did *not*. (And Texas is a completely different question)

 

[Darth_Kiryan]

Well, if we know that the war is going to end in November, after the US election and a path opens up to Richmind in April - I wonder what occures that allows the Confederates to hold out for the next six(ish) months. Would Vardaman and the government be able (or willing) to flee Richmond if it falls. We know that Ol Cotton gets captured furthered South by US forces; but one wonders if he's there because the government fled to South Carolina or somewhere else.

What is happening in the Gray House right now:

Clearly there will be a hidden confederate army somewhere that will save Vardmann....
/s

Thank you! I’ve enjoyed Wilson being something of an unseen POV character even if it’s purely as a textbook author

I love that you took this suggestion of mine. Woodrow Wilson, Historian.

 

[KingSweden24]

Not to be the "well actually" guy, and I can't speak to what @KingSweden24 has written subsequent to OTL, (not that I haven't been reading, but CdM had gotten pretty big over the years) but it seems that the idea of Southern railroads being unusually non standardized before the war is largely a myth. See: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/railroads-after-a-confederate-victory.537466/page-3
Posts # 50 and 52 for some research @Geekhis Khan and I did on the subject.

My research on this was based exclusively on the railroad map regarding gauges in the pre-ACW South - basically, there’s two networks that are incompatible, but that’s only an issue at basically two interchanges (then there’s a random railroad here and there doing their own thing). So it’s certainly not like every state is just YOLOing with their own gauge

 

[dcharles]

My research on this was based exclusively on the railroad map regarding gauges in the pre-ACW South - basically, there’s two networks that are incompatible, but that’s only an issue at basically two interchanges (then there’s a random railroad here and there doing their own thing). So it’s certainly not like every state is just YOLOing with their own gauge

And that's basically consistent with what we found. The interesting thing about it was, the South was actually more standardized than the rest of the country. It seems that the Southern railroad problems lied less in the nonstandard gauges and more on the fact that they needed more track in general and they lacked the capacity to repair what they had when it broke or was destroyed.

 

[naraht]

My research on this was based exclusively on the railroad map regarding gauges in the pre-ACW South - basically, there’s two networks that are incompatible, but that’s only an issue at basically two interchanges (then there’s a random railroad here and there doing their own thing). So it’s certainly not like every state is just YOLOing with their own gauge

Yup. Two interchanges, not one. And with the Norfolk & Western, the troops can get all the way to Lynchburg, Petersburgh and Norfolk. Somebody has to keep blowing that one up, I think...

 

[ChrisTheCat]

Def more of the Spain analogy than a Turkish one; think of Paris as an uber-Madrid economically, especially when comparing its wealth and influence to the countryside.

Fair enough - still, in IRL, Spain had one of the most explosive economic growths in the world, second only to Japan. France does also have a lot going for it geographically (unless Germany literelly takes away  all the coal and drastically changes their borders, and even then they have so, so much good arable land) so while they'll not be wealthy wealthy, I can't see them being horrifically poor overall assuming they grow at similar rates for similar reasons, and they should have the recipe to become better still post-1993 either way.

How badly will the French State and its reputation affect the view of French culture being the default "high culture" to emulate? It's so ingrained in many places around the world already, and I'm sure the memories of the Belle Époque aren't going away any time soon. Would it become German culture as default high culture? Because German high culture would already be deeply steeped in French high culture by this stage unless I'm really misremembering the timeline.

 

[KingSweden24]

Fair enough - still, in IRL, Spain had one of the most explosive economic growths in the world, second only to Japan. France does also have a lot going for it geographically (unless Germany literelly takes away  all the coal and drastically changes their borders, and even then they have so, so much good arable land) so while they'll not be wealthy wealthy, I can't see them being horrifically poor overall assuming they grow at similar rates for similar reasons, and they should have the recipe to become better still post-1993 either way.

How badly will the French State and its reputation affect the view of French culture being the default "high culture" to emulate? It's so ingrained in many places around the world already, and I'm sure the memories of the Belle Époque aren't going away any time soon. Would it become German culture as default high culture? Because German high culture would already be deeply steeped in French high culture by this stage unless I'm really misremembering the timeline.

That’s sort of where we’re kind of headed with France - meeting it’s remarkable agricultural capacity but punching well under its OTL weight with industries and possibly even the service economy with Paris’ decline as a financial center for things other than the Francophonie (which is still nothing to scoff at!). As an example, Bordeaux for instance maybe never stops being the dreary Bordeaux of 1993 rather than the quite pleasant city it’s become today

I’d say French culture is still highly regarded, if for no reason other than A) inertia and B) an arguably more successful Belle Epoque. German might be more well regarded in the sciences, but so many things are downstream of French cultural norms that it’d still be hard to dislodge. Plus, well, Paris is Paris

 

[HIM Dogson]

I don't know off the top of my head what the combined Entente tank production per month was in OTL WWI, but I have to imagine it's less than 400, right? This is an America that's had cause to stop pulling its punches in a WWI style war and it makes sense that the US would be able to roll over the trenches with sheer industrial might. I almost get the sense that the US is able to afford to fight a WWII style war a generation early

 

[Reisen Storm]

In the former, the new landing vessels were deployed both from the Chesapeake and the Atlantic to storm the shore of Virginia Beach, a sleepy resort town that nonetheless enjoyed a large, sustained open beach abutting flat (if marshy) land for a thrust at nearby Norfolk. These landings were supported by coastal bombardments from the US Atlantic Fleet that had little else to do at that point in time, shattering most of Norfolk's ample coastal defenses over the course of three days as Marines and Army infantrymen pushed their way in to take the city

I called it. America is just overkilling the South to assert their dominance.

 

[naraht]

I called it. America is just overkilling the South to assert their dominance.

And the problem with this is? This isn't TTL's equivalent of WWI in terms of war, it is WWII. It pinches in Richmond from yet another direction.
The Confederates should consider themselves lucky if Richmond by November 1916 isn't in as bad of a shape as Washington DC was in the first month of the war.

 

[Mayukh]

I wonder what occures that allows the Confederates to hold out for the next six(ish) months.

Seige of Petersburg in Otl lasted for 6 months.

 

[Reisen Storm]

And the problem with this is?

America is being too conservative. They need multiple naval invasions on the confederacy to assert, once and for all, their dominance, not just in North American, but in the Americas. They also need to write and sing these two songs after the war, as a last final humiliation to the South.

 

[RanulfC]

And the problem with this is? This isn't TTL's equivalent of WWI in terms of war, it is WWII. It pinches in Richmond from yet another direction.
The Confederates should consider themselves lucky if Richmond by November 1916 isn't in as bad of a shape as Washington DC was in the first month of the war.

Kind of surprised that the US hasn't mounted some naval guns on rail mounts and started shelling Richmond by this point.

Randy

 

[KingSweden24]

I don't know off the top of my head what the combined Entente tank production per month was in OTL WWI, but I have to imagine it's less than 400, right? This is an America that's had cause to stop pulling its punches in a WWI style war and it makes sense that the US would be able to roll over the trenches with sheer industrial might. I almost get the sense that the US is able to afford to fight a WWII style war a generation early

Maybe not entirely WW2 style but yes, definitely

I called it. America is just overkilling the South to assert their dominance.

Baltimore and DC were overkill, turnaround is fair play

Kind of surprised that the US hasn't mounted some naval guns on rail mounts and started shelling Richmond by this point.

Randy

This is actually a terrific idea haha