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

Between Two Chiles

    • KingSweden24

    "...rejecting the treaty would have immediately suspended the ceasefire, this time with Axis troops (including, at this point, a company of Peruvians) in Santiago already and US Marines based in Valparaiso. The thousands of loaves of bread and tens of thousands of tins of canned meat that had flowed into the capital since May 5th would have been instantly cut off, too, threatening once again starvation in the Chilean capital. Altamirano had understood from the moment that the armistice was agreed to that the northern departments won in 1879-80 were as good as gone, with Bolivia's pre-1866 claims the likeliest outcome. "A defeated party dictates no terms," he justified in his diary. Nonetheless, the ruinous economic sanctions and humiliating naval restrictions were, quite honestly, even more unpopular with the Chilean street than the territorial losses, because a great many citizens had interacted in some capacity with Patco's hated agents at some point in their lives.

    The ink dry on the treaty, the Axis now set about evacuating Chile in an orderly fashion, especially after anti-American riots on June 20th saw four occupiers killed, presaging the kind of acute and frequent insurgent violence the United States would encounter in its 1917-21 occupation of much of the Confederacy. [1] General Wright announced to Altamirano in a bilateral meeting that his forces would withdraw to Valparaiso fully by July 1st and would occupy that city for the remainder of the year, to be fully gone by the end of December; this was, secretly it turns out, in part at Altamirano's request, because of fears of what the Suristas might do.

    Argentina's Dellepiane made clear as his forces marched back up to the Andes - the border having been adjusted by five or so kilometers in several places in the final treaty in Buenos Aires' favor - that as far as the Argentine government led by Luis Drago (formally - it was widely understood that former President Leandro Alem still held considerable behind-the-scenes power) was concerned, the cohabitation of civilian power under Barros Luco and the military under Altamirano were the sole and exclusive legitimate powers in Chile. This was in part a way of conferring legitimacy upon the Council of the Republic, but also a way to wash the Axis' hands of the growing problem of the Suristas south of the Lantue. About a third of the Chilean Army had defected and just over half of its officer corps, and the core of both of the right-wing parties at the heart of the Old Republic had under Ochagavia in early June formed a "National Assembly" as their legislative body. News from the north was not much better - under the nose of inept Bolivian occupation authorities, consejos had popped up in almost every town from Antofagasta to La Serena, and Recabarren, leader of this leftist movement, had found his way to Copiapo as his new center of power, moving south with heavily-armed and strongly motivated radicalized syndicalist workers as the Bolivians evacuated north to consolidate their gains; the border in the Atacama had already descended into near-lawlessness and before long the consejos became associated not with revolutionary labor radicalism but as one of the few forms of functional authority in the region, on both sides of the 25th parallel. [2]

    Still, Altamirano correctly regarded Aldunate as the bigger threat. Recabarren's call for a worker's republic was a good deal more radical than he was comfortable with but not a far cry from the muscular radicalism of Alessandri and his ilk, a line of thought common within the remaining officers which even Altamirano was sympathetic to. The gamble for Altamirano - who was rapidly emerging as the key force in the government beneath the tired and aged Barros Luco - was that Recabarren had even more contempt for the Oligarcos than he did for the Council of the Republic and that ending the threat in the south was immensely more important. His instinct was not wrong, and Recabarren's advance in the winter of 1915 ground to a halt as he proposed to the Consejo de Consejos on August 2nd, 1915 that the key was to implement socialism in the territory they controlled first "under the auspices of local governance within the Republic," which while unsatisfactory to the hardened revolutionaries nonetheless bought the Socialists time to consolidate their position and have considerably more leverage once Santiago and Concepcion had finished beating each other to a pulp in the south.

    Aldunate's condemnation of the Treaty of Lima earned him nationalist credibility, and the trap laid for the Figueroas in having their names appear on the Treaty instantly diminished their status. The looming battle for Chile, with Concepcion's frontier a mere two hundred kilometers from Santiago, would be for everything..."

    - Between Two Chiles

    [1] Hand, tipped
    [2] IOW, Bolivia has an issue with socialist insurgencies here, too - as one would expect, considering that Antofagasta is where Recabarren launched his movement.
     
    • wikipedia.en - Treaty of Lima (1915)

    • KingSweden24

    The Treaty of Lima (1915) was a treaty signed on June 17, 1915 between Chile and the Axis Powers of the United States, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia that formally ended Chile's participation in the Great American War. Chile, one of the four Bloc Sud powers, had entered the war in September of 1913 with a surprise attack against the Chimbote naval base where parts of the US Pacific Fleet and most of the Peruvian Navy were docked, destroying them together; seven months later, two American fleets sank the majority of the Chilean Navy at the Desventuradas in the Eastern Pacific. From then on, Chile had been on its back heels and suffered defeats on land starting in November of 1914 at Iquique (November), Antofagasta (December), and La Serena (early February). The advance of the Amero-Peruvian army inland from La Serena and the Argentines from the Andean passes, in addition to the collapse of the Chilean government of Juan Luis Sanfuentes and a three-way standoff over the fate of the capital between a conservative, liberal and military faction, effectively ended Chile's ability to defend itself.

    The Treaty itself was designed to humiliate Chile, broadcast to other Bloc Sud members what would happen if they fought to the bitter end, and in the case of the South American members of the Axis correct what they viewed as territorial gains made by Chilean aggression during the Saltpeter War (1879-80) and a near-war in the Andes thereafter (1881). All of Chile north of the 25th parallel was ceded to Bolivia and Peru, with the latter regaining its territories up to the Loa River. Argentina, meanwhile, made small adjustments in the Andes to enjoy better control over critical mountain passes but then absorbed the entirety of southern Patagonia and the Tierra del Fuego by setting a new border at the Deseado and Baker Rivers, both of which flow from the same source at Leandro Alem Lake (at the time, Lake Buenos Aires). The United States set strict limits on allowable Chilean naval tonnage and the size of the Chilean Army, and then extracted ruinous financial penalties from Santiago.

    The Treaty is viewed as the direct precursor to the Chilean Civil War that erupted soon after its completion, and the economic dislocation from the Great American War, civil war and punitive financial conditions imposed upon Chile took the country from one of the wealthiest per capita in the Americas (albeit grossly unequal) to one of the poorest, with it becoming one of the few South American states with net outmigration in the 1910s and 1920s. This crippling poverty and political instability was a direct cause of the final rise and consolidation of the Socialist Republic in 1924, which would last for the ensuing sixty-six years.
     
    • Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War

    • KingSweden24

    "...economic fallout from the war in adjacent states. While the war years were excellent for Canadian agriculture and manufacturing, the period between September 1913 and the end of 1915 were economically ruinous for Caribbean countries that had eagerly looked forward to the opening of the Nicaragua Canal as forever changing their economies and placing them square on the path of the newest global trade route, only to see trade via the Canal crawl to about a fifth of its expected volume thanks to the outbreak of war just two months after its inauguration. This stretched from European colonial outposts in the Lesser Antilles having to buff up their military presence to defend themselves out of fear of attack to the Haiti of Cincinnatus Leconte, targeted explicitly by Confederate wolfpacks due to her relationship with the United States and contributing to a siege mentality in Haiti that solidified an esprit de corps across the country and ended any threat to Leconte's Presidency - though ample German investments, and his descent from the Dessalines dynasty, certainly did not hurt. [1]

    Particularly hard hit, however, was Cuba and the other Spanish "insular provinces" of Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico. Spain's national economy was oriented towards protecting its domestic industries and despite the dominance of the National Liberal Party it had shifted in a more statist, economically nationalist direction that aimed to keep labor and capital in the metropole alike happy. While Insulares were represented in the Cortes, they were politically diffuse (many Cubans elected their own regionalist party, particularly in the island's east) and moderate home rule provisions under the Law of Communities did not solve the biggest issue affecting the three of them - that their trade needs were diametrically different than Madrid's. The evaporation of regional trade at a time when Cuban and Puerto Rican sugar would have been highly valuable thus crushed the islands' economies and plunged all three into a deep depression. While the lion's share of the blame was directed at the Confederate Wolfpacks that made shipping in the region a dangerous proposition (even if they rarely attacked neutral vessels, American ships were responsible for much of non-internal trade with Spain for the three insular provinces), Madrid's increased protectionism and continued - and quite understandable, to be fair to the European Spanish perspective - insistence on remaining solely responsible for a common foreign policy of all Spanish lands became a thing of anger and angst on the western side of the Atlantic.

    It was thus the case that the Confederacy - the bete noire of Spain in the Americas - rapidly losing its ability to threaten the Spanish Caribbean coincided with a return of sentiments against the continuing arrangement with Spain, though of a very different nature. The revolutionary mania of the late 1860s and early 1870s had coincided with the Gloriosa in Spain in 1868 and been driven by genuinely radical republican sentiments outraged at the colonial relationship between the islands and Madrid. By the time of Hilton Head, however, the House of Hohenzollern had rebuilt is prestige in the Americas and codified itself as the defender of local interests, particularly the abolition of slavery, against Confederate and perhaps Brazilian designs upon the islands. The decline of the Confederacy's power projection capabilities after the Great American War would seem to suggest that the Spanish approach had borne out, but the sense of alienation was still very real. The vagaries of the sugar market and other cash crops were warped by Spain's frequent tinkering with trade policy; the hacienda system of agriculture, despite the abolition of slavery, was as strong as ever, and particularly in Puerto Rico inequality was steep and poverty high, even as thousands of immigrants flocked to the islands every year.

    A divide within and changing of the guard and approach to the revolutionary generations in the Caribbean occurred thus in 1915. To an outsider, it appeared that such sentiments were in decline. The Revolutionary Committees, which had always been in exile in New York City but had also often been dependent on Confederate sympathies, were almost broke with their main benefactors parting ways and going to blows. Jose Marti, the Cuban revolutionary mainstay, passed away on May 30, 1915 in Manhattan, leaving a massive power vacuum at the center of Cuban nationalism. The rest of the exilo class of leadership - Jose Maldonado Roman and Juan Rivera from Puerto Rico, Jose Miguel Gomez from Cuba, Juan Isidoro Jimenez for Santo Domingo - collaborated and continued their push for independent republics in the Caribbean, but they would have been as surprised as any to learn from their meagre outpost in New York that events back in the islands were starting to change under their feet.

    The economic depression of the war years had, finally, led even monarchist conservatives to begin asking themselves why Madrid, which had entirely different priorities and ambitions than Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans themselves, were denying them their place in the community of American states. The breach finally came when Mario Garcia Menocal - a member of the Conservative Party! - himself in the Cortes gave a speech which he soon expounded upon in a pamphlet back in Cuba called "A Different Relationship," where he suggested that internal home rule, while certainly fine for Catalonia, was not enough for a place like Cuba with entirely different needs, history and experiences from the rest of Spain. This flew remarkably close to the language of men like Marti or his protege Gomez, but for the fact that Garcia Menocal was a committed monarchist. A different relationship did not mean a full revolutionary break - a different relationship, perhaps, meant exactly what it said it meant..." [2]

    - Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War

    [1] There was going to be more on Haiti, but I found the dynamic in the Spanish provinces more interesting to write about.
    [2] Tipping my hand that I've come around on the provincial method for Cuba, PR and SD probably not working long term and that some kind of Dominion status a la Canada or a junior branch of the Hohenzollerns spinning off their own crown for the area are likely the direction I'll wind up going
     
    • The Central European War

    • KingSweden24

    "...mused that every decade or so the superiority of French versus German military leadership, technology and preparations ebbed and flowed; just as soon as one power was clearly the stronger of the two, the other found a way to be better positioned for a potential war.

    Twin anxieties sat at the heart of the strategic state of play in Europe that had persisted, with very little variation, since 1875. On the side of the French was the mounting concern that their longstanding low birth rate compared to those of Germany and Italy would give them a massive shortage of manpower in case of war; on the German side, the fact that they would be forced into a two-front war and had to account for fighting off both France and Austria in the event of conflict. It was taken for granted in Paris and Vienna that their alliance was exclusively the underwriter of European peace that prevented German domination of the entire continent; this was a point of view shared in Britain, though not in the way the French hoped. Meanwhile, in Germany, awareness of internal divisions between Vienna and Budapest as well as France's slow-growing population but considerable material wealth and technological edge (France had the finest air and automobile industries on Earth and was an early military innovator both in aerial combat and motorization) made it imperative that Germany have not only an army large enough to beat both but also with the best discipline and planning, because they would not win based on geography or technology, even though they were catching up rapidly to Skoda's field guns or the air force built almost exclusively by CASD, the world's first aerospace conglomerate.

    The Great American War's impact on the road to a similar conflagration in Europe is an area of scholarship that has only now begun to assert itself and gain its proper due, particularly in the Old World's academy; the general view, for decades, was that the two were entirely unrelated conflicts that had little to nothing to do with one another. If one is considering all events external to deteriorating European conditions from 1912 to 1919, then the war for supremacy of the Western Hemisphere certainly does rank below colonial disputes in Africa, access to Asian markets and the influence vacuum in European affairs left behind by Britain's turn inwards to focus on pacifying twin crises in Ireland and India. [1] However, it is not entirely irrelevant, and not just because of the boosted presence of German and French vessels in the Caribbean but more around the lessons that war taught the countries that within half a decade would be engaging in an apocalyptic struggle of their own.

    For von Kluck and his chief deputy, Max Hoffmann, what interested them the most was the intersection of industry and warfare that had made itself plain in the United States, one of the few countries in the world that Germany and to a lesser extent France could consider a genuine economic peer. Most remarkable was that there hadn't been any particular foresight to this; the United States had underinvested in her army for decades compared to the European land powers, and before the war began the liberal-conservative Liberal Party of President Charles Evans Hughes had generally viewed the state and industry as occupying very distinct spheres with the former only stepping in to curb the excesses of the latter in the most egregious of cases. Within six months such laissez-faire philosophy that had once been a hallmark of American economic thinking was evaporated; the Hughes administration had put in place temporary price controls and production quotas for grain and nationalized the railroads, and opposition parties despite being very cooperative in wartime suggested that the wartime Cabinet had not done enough. The War Department of the United States, after an inept start in the first few months of combat, was now a well-oiled machine coordinating shell and casing production across an economy larger than Germany's and Britain's combined and over fronts the size of the whole of Western Europe, all while making sure vehicle production grew month-over-month though carefully-monitored contracts and aggressive testing and quality control.

    The sheer scope of the theaters of war across North America made that aspect of the Great American War difficult to compare to the relatively narrow fronts that were likely to develop in the event of a war between Berlin and Paris, but the lessons on economic planning and coordination as an aspect of modern war leapt out at the Generalstab, particularly Hoffmann. In July 1915 he published a confidential but highly influential report in his role as Generalquartermeister titled "Auf Totaler Krieg" - On Total War. In it, he outlined the lessons drawn from his military observers on the front lines in far-off Virginia and Tennessee, detailing the remarkable ability of the War Department of the United States to quickly learn from its mistakes and despite a fairly anti-statist point of view compared to many European countries rapidly build a behemoth of a war machine based on a triangular partnership between military, civilian and industrial leadership. "The American, a comfortable and heterogenous race that has never been particularly warlike unless they have the ability to beat down on the Indian of the North American continent where they enjoy every advantage, have in less than two years time reoriented the entire industrial capacity of their state, one of the most fearsome in the world, around their war aims and view every factory laborer as being as key to the final victory as the soldiers in the field, a view shared unilaterally across their state."

    Explicitly expounded upon in Auf Totaler Krieg was the longstanding German stereotype of Americans as a soft and affluent people who were decidedly un-martial in their thinking, and if they could place their entire economy behind the war machine, then the German Army could do wonders with a similar approach. Thus as early as 1915 the Generalstab began to re-draft their war plans to not only account for the lessons of trench warfare and aerial combat that had become critical to incorporate after the Great American War but also the ideas of total war, planning out a dedicated office of the Prussian Army to directly coordinate military goods and the mobilization of the entire industrial capacity of the state behind the men mobilized into the field and giving the former a weight nearly equal to the latter, a dramatic change in Prussian thinking. [2]

    By contrast, France - which was already starting to buckle a bit under the expense of its extant military spending by late 1915 - continued to rely upon its large standing army and technological edge, and looked instead for lessons from across the Atlantic about how to incorporate concepts of combined arms into its doctrine, a comprehensive reform of French strategy that would only be fully implemented down to the division level by the time war broke out in March 1919. It can thus be said that the flow of military advantage was already flowing back to an emboldened Germany as early as 1915 and would never ebb back, and that the choices both countries made in how they drew upon the tragic conflagration in North America spoke to the initial successes of the French in the opening months of war followed by the long-term position of Germany to sustain a total industrial war from then on..."

    - The Central European War

    [1] Something to consider here is that the collapse of British authority and ability to pay attention to what's going on elsewhere in the world thanks to labor unrest, Ireland and now India has arguably caused both the GAW and soon the CEW - this is a Britscrew precisely because people are deciding they don't really care what London has to say anymore, Royal Navy be damned.
    [2] To put it mildly, this was always something that eluded Germans in both WW1 and WW2
     
    • Long Branch Conference

    • KingSweden24

    "...fresh sea air. Six Presidents before him had summered at Long Branch to the point that it was known as the "summer capital" in the late 19th century, and the small Episcopal church where all had at some point attended private or public services is today known as the Church of Seven Presidents. By the mores of 1915 politics, Long Branch was the ideal place for Hughes, his War Cabinet and Congressional and military leaders to convene ahead of the end of the war.

    Six cottages in a small cluster near the beach were the accommodations, and Hughes wound up being the only man to enjoy a summer cottage to himself. Also there were Root, Stimson, and Ballinger, and Senators Kern, Turner and Cabot Lodge, in order to represent the input of the three men who would be most responsible for shepherding any peace agreement with the Confederacy through the Senate. From the military side, Bliss and March both made the trip, as well as the new heads of Army Command Ohio and Susquehanna, John Pershing and Michael Lenihan, respectively, as well as Admirals Knight, Sims and the heroes of the hour, Reggie Belknap and William Rodgers, as well as their staffs, who stayed in the city's inns and boardwalk hotels.

    The spirit of the Long Branch Conference was one of coordination and collaboration (though Speaker Clark and House Minority Leader Mann, excluded from the affair, would of course disagree), built upon the surge of optimism in Philadelphia upon the news of the collapse of Nashville's lines and the sinking of the Confederate Combined Fleet at Hilton Head as well as Chile's surrender further off, which boded well for Argentina (the Argentine ambassador was too ill to attend) in their two-front war in South America. There was generally a feeling that the war, having already seen its tide turn upon the Susquehanna and the breakthroughs in Kentucky the year before, was now definitively in its home stretch. The purpose of the conference then was to agree upon the rough contours of how the Army and Navy, along with civilian authority, would bring about the end of the war and what a potential peace might look like, which was more the focus of Root and the three Senators.

    Hughes bounced back and forth between these poles, hosting full group meetings with wide-ranging agendas and then smaller discussions with narrower focii. By the end of the six days in Long Branch, he was physically and mentally exhausted and looking forward to getting some rest, but felt like its purpose had been achieved. In broad strokes, the agreement to press aggressively the offensive against the Confederacy and bring about an "unequivocal victory" was continued, and Root expressed openness for the first time at the nudging of Kern and Turner to accept potential Mexican overtures about their early exit from the war to "kick the legs out from under Dixie." In that sense, the discussion around Mexico become one of what kind of settlement the United States would accept with Emperor Maximilian's regime, which was now headed by a previous non-entity in Prime Minister Francisco Carbajal who it was thought had been installed due to his more moderate views on a potential peace agreement. [1]

    The terms of a potential settlement with the Confederacy were much less clear. Turner, himself a famous hawk, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Lodge on a "maximalist" end to the war that would see terms even harsher than those imposed upon Chile at Root's insistence. Territorial concessions such annexing the Arizona Territory, parts of northern and western Virginia, demilitarizing the Mississippi and making permanent access to New Orleans were just the start; strict limits on the size of the Confederate Army and Navy and a unilateral right to intervention in Confederate politics "in case of national endangerment" were red lines for the men once known as the Hawk's Nest. Even Kern proposed that the Confederacy be reduced to an economic colony, a free market for American goods that would pay ruinous reparations and export raw materials at Philadelphia's behest.

    The issue of slavery was trickier. All men at the table were in agreement that it was a grievous moral sin and needed to be eradicated from the war, as the Emancipation Order had proclaimed. Most of them were also quick to admit, however, that the Emancipation Order was just a piece of paper and that in practice enforcing it would be hugely impossible. Lodge's suggestion of a decades-long occupation that included land reform, literacy campaigns and imposing a ring of Dixie-born, American-resident Black officials to run the Confederacy "until the venom of the slaveocracy has been bled from its body politic" saw more than a few eyebrows raised, especially considering the otherwise infamously right-wing source. It was Lenihan's idea, raised in one of the joint all-hands discussions, that eventually got the most purchase - weapons would simply find themselves behind enemy lines in the hands of slaves, both to bring about a quicker collapse of the enemy's society but also to help freedmen defend themselves in the aftermath, and the United States would simply improvise from there. It was a temporary solution, but it would work for now.

    The only question now was how to bring it about..."

    - American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes

    "...letters to Helen [2] from Long Branch were a key part of Pershing's posthumous biographies and even today shed light on the personalities at play and, of course, Pershing's typically laconic and skeptical attitude towards others that was often quite cutting.

    It would be an understatement to say that Pershing came away impressed with his interlocutors at Long Branch. He sensed in Lenihan a certain resentment, as his colleague had desired to keep pressing the advantage in the Midlands theater where he had made his name rather than take over in Virginia, and he didn't think that March gave Bliss particularly good counsel. The less said about the "pretentious" Navy men the better, particularly Sims, whom Pershing's icy description of as a vainglorious, narrow-minded New England aristocrat presaged Sims' disastrous and divisive campaign for the Presidency nine years later. Civilian leadership did not get off scot-free, either; Pershing was complimentary towards Hughes, whom he thought brilliant but perhaps a bit too aloof considering the circumstances, but other than Henry Stimson whom he found incredibly well-prepared and knowledgeable he was dismissive of all the others. Root "is a public servant of great repute, particularly for his reforms of the War Department twenty years ago, but in the end an administrator first, second and last, in his advancing age lacking creativity and flexibility as he holds his experience up as an end to itself." Of the Senators present, Pershing knocked the Democrats John Kern and George Turner as "men of a certain political buoyancy, well-meaning but unserious, their ideas unworkable and too quick to express doubt." Henry Cabot Lodge received the worst of his ire, however - "a temperamental fool convinced of his own brilliance as a statesman, rigidly conservative in his ways as he expresses a program so radical that it took effort not to laugh it out of the room."

    These were the characters with whom Pershing had to debate the strategy that would win the war and bring their desired peace forward. Pershing's advantage at Long Branch was that Bliss took his advice seriously (as in the case where he cashiered Charles Treat in part at Pershing's behest) and their longstanding personal and professional relationship meant that Pershing's ideas carried enormous water compared to Lenihan, who had developed a reputation as a bold general but one not as attuned to the political game.

    Part of why Lenihan disliked Pershing so was that Lenihan correctly deduced that his offensives in Virginia were not the main event of the war, which everyone agreed would by and large be won in the Midlands. The question was simply how to do so - the Confederate Army, after their defeat at Nashville, had nonetheless evacuated most of their artillery successfully regrouped in the Eastern Rim and along the Duck River, excellent defensive positions from which to arrest a breakout from the Nashville Basin. While Confederate forces along the Tennessee River had withdrawn southwards to avoid being placed in a salient between Memphis and Nashville, the numbers available to the enemy in increasingly mountainous Appalachian terrain were stark and Pershing's Army Command Ohio was exhausted after the ten-month siege, even with fresh reinforcements. His demand to regroup and rebuild strength before attacking was not popular, but eventually granted.

    Root and Lodge teamed up to suggest that Pershing take the "easy" route - punching south across the Tennessee somewhere in the vicinity of Huntsville or Decatur, Alabama, towards Birmingham and the constellation of industrial towns around it. Birmingham was after all the most important production center of Confederate steel and the western anchor of Dixie's factory belt. Lenihan expressed some skepticism at this idea, and Pershing appreciated him for it; marching to Birmingham would not solve the problem of Atlanta, the largest industrial city in the Confederacy and a rail hub that connected north to south and east to west. Yes, less steel was made there, but it was the beating heart of the Confederate economy and seizing it would cut the Confederate States in half. Attacking it would require attacking via Chattanooga, also an important factory town, and would have the secondary effect of helping to knock out access the mines of Knoxville. It was clear to Pershing what was the superior strategic target, and the only argument against it was that it would be a much more difficult campaign with casualties considerably closer to the bloodbath at Nashville than what a march on Birmingham would entail.

    Everybody is in broad agreement what Pershing's response to that complaint (from Lodge, of course): "Then we shall have another Nashville. And another, and another, until the enemy is broken in body and soul, until their railroads are tied around trees, until their farms burnt and their crops torn from their fields, their horses and cows shot, their slaves liberated, all while the skies of Dixie are black with smoke. Only then will they stop, and only then will we have peace. There are few things I would not give for peace, but peace from this craven, this vile of a foe must be taken - it cannot simply be demanded."

    The remarkably bleak assessment of the Confederacy's commitment to fighting and what kind of scorched earth strategy it would require to bring them to their knees apparently swayed the room, though Stimson and Bliss - the voices that mattered most - agreeing that the United States in the summer of 1915 could not yet do both offensives while keeping up operations in Virginia certainly helped. With that, Pershing had drawn his line on where he would go and what he would do - his mission was Atlanta, and Atlanta would vault him from mere general to the highest echelons of American military fame..."

    - Pershing

    [1] Our friend Henry Cabot Lodge, shall we say, is probably a good deal less open to this idea.
    [2] Helen Pershing not being at the Presidio in the summer of 1915 means her - as well as the three Pershing daughters - don't all die in a freak fire
     
    • Burning Punjab

    • KingSweden24

    "...puffed out his chest and declared, "The Crown has called in her hour of need, and Canada will answer!" The response to the crisis of the Empire in other Dominions was no less ebullient than that of McCarthy; Prime Ministers Merriman (South Africa) and Fisher (Australia) were eager to demonstrate to their monarchist, working-class constituents that they, too, would not hesitate to stand up for British interests, and troops setting off from Durban and Sydney had the added advantage of not having angry Punjabi militants throw rotten vegetables or even stones at them as they boarded Royal Navy vessels bound for Calcutta or Bombay, as was the case for the Canadian divisions departing from Vancouver.

    In all, the Dominions supplied close to a hundred thousand men, most of them volunteers. Propaganda across the British Empire in the spring of 1915 played heavily on stereotypes of Indians as an uppity people revolting against their rightful betters, and leaned in on institutional memory in London of the Great Mutiny of 1857. The advantage in present day, of course, was an even greater technological edge for the British Raj than the East India Company had enjoyed sixty years prior, particularly with artillery, but also the speed with which British forces could be routed to India and also the speed with which rumors of atrocities committed against white Britons, in particular women, could be relayed back to an outraged public.

    This worldwide eagerness to answer the call to defend the Crown, steeped in grotesquely racist and paternalist sentiment, would support the India Field Force being formed by Lord Kitchener in Aden and then Bombay, drawing upon lessons learned by the British Army in the Boxer War. [1] Kitchener was of course not just famous for his brutally savage but effective service in China in 1901 or his brief tenure attempting to pacify Ireland's sectarian violence but also a long career in the Indian Army and he was familiar with the various princely states he would have to draw on for support, the geography, the capabilities of the Indian Army and the culture and attitudes of the enemy he was meant to crush. Kitchener understood as well as anyone that time was of the essence; the Punjab Mutiny needed to be destroyed before it could capture the imagination of the Indian street.

    In that effort, the British counterattack was fortunate that the Ghadarites had failed in their core mission of achieving an all-Indian uprising across the subcontinent, for the variety of reasons discussed in previous chapters. That being said, most of Punjab and much of western Haryana had by early May fallen into enemy hands and a large but ragtag army of rebels was marching north of the Thar Desert towards the Yamuna and the capital at Delhi. General Duff and his men were well aware of the horrifying stories of the sieges of Delhi and Cawnpore in the hot, terrible autumn of 1857 and were keen not to see a repeat; studying Kitchener's own reports of the conditions around Tientsin and Peking, Duff built a massive line of fortifications running from the Delhi Ridge to the Yamuna throughout late April, as the Ghadarites consolidated in Amritsar and then lunged southeast around the upper northern edge of the Thar, really the only direction they had available to go, their force of nearly a hundred thousand men - most of whom were not professional soldiers or even men with any combat experience - aimed straight at the triangle formed by the cities of Panipat, Karnal and Kaithal, north of Delhi and just west of the Yamuna.

    The sporadic rioting and communal violence in Bengal notwithstanding, the concentration of the mutiny in Punjab allowed Duff to concentrate his forces near Panipat, near the far end of the realistic supply lines of Ghadarite forces led by Bagha Jatin, who was nobody's idea of a military commander. Duff further had the advantage of artillery and heavy machine guns, which were generally only allowed to be used by European cadres of the Indian Army and thus in short supply for the rebels. Seeking to avoid a situation similar to the Siege of Delhi fifty-eight years earlier, Duff made clear to his men that a decisive rout of the enemy was the only acceptable result at Panipat - a place where in 1761 a battle between the Marathas and the Durranis had augured the end of Indian independence - and on May 11th, 1915, the battle began.

    While not the killing blow Duff had boasted of in telegrams back to London, Panipat was still a clear British victory. Nearly ten thousand Indians were killed over the course of a day and thousands more wounded or captured, but the rest of the army was able to retreat back in relatively decent order to Kaithal, and Duff elected for the time being not to pursue them (to Kitchener's chagrin), instead deciding to regroup after the savage violence of the day in which over two thousand of his own men fell and maintain the Yamuna Line to defend Delhi and the Ganges Plain east of the Yamuna.

    Both sides had thus at Panipat learned valuable lessons - the British that they could indeed rely somewhat on their superior firepower and the disinterest of the average Indian in the revolt, and the Ghadarites that despite their relative lack of discipline they could still credibly fight even if their threat to the capital was largely over and that their campaign to win over the skeptical, mainstream leadership of Indian nationalism embodied in the Congress was perhaps not entirely at an end..."

    - Burning Punjab

    [1] Suffice to say, much like Weyler was not a guy you want running loose in the Philippines, Kitchener is not a guy you want running loose in the Punjab
     
    Last edited:
    • War in the Cone

    • KingSweden24

    "...thrusts across the river under cover of dreadnought fire in the early morning, once Argentinean bridgeheads had already been established. As with the Battles of Santa Fe, the central hingepoint of the front was once again the main focus of Operation Repulse (Repulsa in Spanish), with close to a hundred and fifty thousand Argentines punching through Parana while an additional fifty thousand, two divisions apiece, went over to both north and south at Santa Elena and near Rosario.

    Contemporary and later historians have generally viewed Repulse as a failure that ended the future political ambitions of Chief of the Army Staff Ricchetti; disaster is too strong a word, but it was definitely not a successful operation. Launched on May 28 to take advantage of late autumn dry and cool conditions and a lull in rains that delayed the operation by two weeks, by June 7th the Argentines were in retreat, pulling back across the Parana to the safety of their lines. The precise reasons why Repulse, which was the first major offensive operation of the Argentinean Army in the war, didn't work are myriad and unclear. Ricchetti himself suggested that he had insufficiently prepared and briefed his commanders and that while his forces were extremely tenacious on defense were unsuited for and undisciplined on the attack. Other less charitable interpretations suggest that the attempted operation was too large and ambitious, with too men untrained men with too few supplies. Brazilian veterans always responded that their superior manpower, weaponry and tactics carried the day.

    Whatever the reason, the feints to north and south were total routs, surrounded and destroyed almost instantly, and the main force attacking through Parana was forced to fall back to the river within days, with most of the force retreating while a hardened core of elite troops were left behind in the city under covering fire that prevented Brazilian airplanes from getting in close. In that sense, the operation had one partial success - Argentina once more had a foothold east of the river. However, it had come at the cost of over twenty thousand killed and near three times that figure wounded, captured or both.

    As June advanced, Fonseca elected to press his advantage with the collapse of the Argentine offensive and "throw the die," so to speak, on attempting a breakout from the Goya Pocket in the north of the front. Already holding the town of Reconquista on the right bank just south of the impassable Ibera Wetlands, Fonseca sent four divisions across from Goya to march south along the river road, cutting off Argentinean supply routes to Paraguay, while sending another two divisions across from Esquina while his first wave attacked defenders who could have prevented their crossing. Suddenly, a very formidable force of Brazilians was across the river, albeit far from the core of the front. Fonseca's plan was to throw his six divisions down the right bank into the rear of Argentine defenses near Santa Fe, weaken them, and then smash the city once and for all. It was a daring and necessary gamble, considering the frustrations at home with his adamancy that the war had to go on until the green-and-gold Imperial banner flew over the Plaza de Mayo.

    Like most of Fonseca's more ambitious gambits in the wake of Uruguay's successful capture, however, the "Goya Breakout" failed. Ricchetti's forces may have been incapable of sustaining an offensive into the teeth of Brazilian defenses but knew how to fight tactically and with discipline when attacked, and had the advantage of not having to face the same kind of overwhelming combined arms tactics of air power and artillery as they had just a month prior during Repulse. The Argentine Army held at San Justo, counterattacked at Ramayon while inflicting disproportionate casualties, and then scattered the larger Brazilian force at San Javier on the marshy banks of the Parana on July 10th. The Brazilians retreated in shambles, with only a single division pursuing at a distance to make sure they put distance between themselves and Santa Fe, to their stronghold at Reconquista to lick their wounds. Fonseca was once again humiliated, unable to force a result even after the enemy had embarrassed themselves, and with Argentina being able to bring the full force of its soldiery to the Parana with Chile out of the war and American naval assets now in the River Plate, Brazil's window of opportunity to strike a killing blow was gone.

    The Goya Breakout thus was, in the middle of the Argentine winter, the last major offensive undertaken by Brazil in the entire war..."

    - War in the Cone
     
    • A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy

    • KingSweden24

    TRIGGER WARNING​

    "...no real way to sugarcoat what had happened at Nashville. Even if much of the city's heavy and medium industry had been evacuated south in anticipation of its fall, it was still a critical strategic target and the Confederacy's command understood the significance of the United States capturing control of the Nashville Basin in May of 1915, perhaps most critically in that it left positions along the Tennessee River to the west unsustainably vulnerable, and a retreat eastwards to a forward base around Corinth, Mississippi was ordered once it was clear Nashville was lost. In one fell swoop, the CS Army was evacuated from almost all of Tennessee west of Dickson County, and the same kind of rapid collapse in order that had been seen in Kentucky followed.

    A French observer attached to Confederate command near Jackson, Tennessee remarked in later years that what made lessons from the war difficult for European general staffs to incorporate was the vast size of the theaters involved; only in Virginia, relatively concentrated between the Appalachians and the Chesapeake, did the circumstances even begin to resemble anything approximating a typical European theater of war. The Yankees could not reasonably hope to occupy all of Kentucky and the majority of Middle and West Tennessee, such a task was simply impossible, and so the heavy reliance on small scouting teams - S2s, as they came to be known - as cavalry detachments or driving around on narrow dirt roads in rudimentary automobiles was necessary for patrolling the Confederate countryside. In a scene soon to be repeated in central Virginia and Georgia, the already strained Confederate society living under rationing of supplies as simple as a helping of butter, a paucity of adult men due to the needs at the front and infirm veterans increasingly a burden on meagre resources was not equipped to handle the psychological blow of falling permanently behind enemy lines.

    That was way the sudden break of Confederate positions in Tennessee in May and June 1915 started what can best be described as an anarchic civil conflict between neighbors and, most importantly, their slaves. Weapons had a curious way of finding their way into Black hands across the plantations and farmsteads of West Tennessee and the horse ranches south of Nashville as the Confederate Army vanished into thin air and Yankees approached; rumors had already arrived ahead of guns and bullets that Yankee soldiers meant formal emancipation, so the swirling firepower that the land found itself awash in meant informal emancipation until they arrived. Slaves, many of whom had never held a gun before in their lives, shot and killed their overseers and gathered in small groups to defend themselves as they hurried north towards American lines. The white citizenry, engulfed in horror at the idea of the mass slave uprising they had feared their entire lives, responded with a campaign of reactive terror; freedmen in their communities were lynched even without the accusation of a crime simply out of fear that they would join what were quickly becoming known as the "Black Bands," slaves were preemptively sent south ahead of their fleeing masters and those who could not afford to be sent on were summarily executed and left for the advancing Yankees to find.

    American soldiers were not of as much help to fleeing slaves as they had hoped, either; they were often marching on fairly empty stomachs after long, brutal and bloody battles and high on victory. Anybody with a rifle was treated as an enemy combatant on several occasions in which excited slaves were gunned down in misunderstandings, and the Army had no orders on what to do with the "emancipees" other than point them in the direction of Kentucky and tell them to get out of combat areas while they could. Refugee trains wandering north were easy pickings not only for Confederate irregulars and militias but simply hungry brigands; upon arriving in Kentucky, they were often shepherded into camps where they could be held for the time being until the Yankees decided how exactly to process them, and while most were eventually sent further along or volunteered to join American forces and such help was readily accepted, a great many - particularly women and children - starved or died of disease outbreaks in squalid huts and poor conditions as the US Army twiddled its thumbs on whether to send them further north.

    The US Army's advance into Confederate territory matched with the formation of defensive Black Bands broke the white locals the most, however, and radicalization was rapid. Lurid stories of Yankee infantrymen encouraging freed slaves to gangrape white women after lynching white men from trees spread like wildfire across Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia along with southbound refugee trains; while there were hundreds if not thousands of instances of rape by American soldiers, it is generally accepted by most mainstream scholarship that Yankee infantry was considerably more restrained in occupation than their Confederate counterparts had been in Maryland and Pennsylvania and that strict orders from generals such as Pershing, Lenihan and Farnsworth to refrain from such behavior were generally taken seriously by junior officers. These kinds of rumors, then, instead represent a specific form of white panic common to Dixie, of the fears of bestial Black behavior, used to justify unthinkable cruelty and violence in a self-convinced form of self-defense. Within weeks of the fall of Nashville it was simply taken for granted that the Yankee army represented a rolling wave of looting, debauchery and the rape of the white Confederate woman by freed slaves taking out their revenge. To understand why the last year of the war came to be seen in the Confederacy in uniquely apocalyptic terms and as a civilizational struggle - compared to, say, Mexico or Brazil, which elected in the interim to find peace agreements they and the United States or Argentina could all live with and get out of the conflict - that they were losing, one must understand the Confederate mindset that was witnessing the collapse of its racial slave hierarchy in real time and its anticipation that "Continental Haiti" was afoot, and that it was this foundational horror finally coming to fruition that motivated the spectacularly chaotic atrocities that erupted behind Confederate lines and evolved into such campaigns of terror such as the Red Summer..."

    - A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
     
    • The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33

    • KingSweden24

    "...presenting the new coalition regime in the Confederate Congress as nonpartisan and rather as a united front meant to bring a tangible peace about more effectively; the decisive losses at Nashville and Hilton Head put paid to such delusions, and suddenly even the small boost in morale from February's successful Occoquan Offensive was insufficient to improve the mood in Richmond. The damage had in part already been done, though; Martin's putsch had been meant to place all blame for the war's failures on an inept White House led by President Smith and his chief defender in Congress in Senator Tillman, and soon thereafter the two worst losses of the war had been inflicted upon the CSA. Red Scarves marched in the streets of Richmond daily demanding more money be spent on the war effort and harassing men, often wounded veterans, whom they encountered with the question of why they were not at the front; in an infamous incident, a cavalry officer named William Tilly scoffed, showed his shrapnel wounds on his left side and demanded to know why his accusers were themselves not fighting, an altercation that ended in Tilly's stabbing death.

    The National Alliance for Victory that Martin had transactionally cobbled together to enhance his own power was not so much an ideological big tent as a complete circus, and Martin quickly set about placing cronies such as fellow Virginian Claude Swanson, Murphy Foster of Louisiana and Duncan Fletcher of Florida on key committees while handing out choice chairmanships to his new fellow travelers like Georgia's Thomas Hardwick. Questions of conscription and patronage had already helped trigger a political crisis in Texas and Martin was keen to avoid any further deterioration of the domestic unity, and so he knew that speed was of the essence. Smith, despite being profoundly weak, would be at Heritage House until February, but the Alliance for Victory needed to keep its foot on the neck of any attempt by the Tillmanite remnant to join forces with what remained of the NFLP or Socialist Parties at fight them back, and so Martin made his fateful decision to work to coopt the Red Scarves militia into the superstructure of the new coalition government by making James Vardaman's personalist paramilitary into the Alliance's paramilitary - Vardaman, a man about as far ideologically from Martin as it came, was his preferred choice to run for President. In return for allowing Martin a say on patronage appointments equal if not in excess of the power Tillman had held for over a decade, Vardaman would see the Bourbon wing of the Alliance stand down in his favor and allow the Red Scarves nearly free reign. It was a deal too good to pass up, and Vardaman quickly accepted, agreeing with Martin that the Confederacy needed a presumptive President in the wings ready to do battle in February.

    More than a few Red Scarves felt betrayed by Vardaman's move to align with the despised planter class, but most of them were enthusiastic about the pugilistic hero of Confederate neo-populism rising to the top of the heap. It should be noted that both Vardaman and Martin were fairly certain that they could use the other; Vardaman was of the view that once in the Presidency he would simply purge his enemies and threaten others to get in line thanks to his small but devoted personal army of followers and rebuild the old Tillman machine in his image, whereas Martin thought Vardaman was "an upjumped cracker" whom he could make as much of a lame duck as Smith from the moment his hand would touch the Bible on February 22, 1916 and continue the slide into legislative supremacy in the Confederacy. For now, though, the two men continued to bury the hatchet as they had since their putsch against Tillman in January and Vardaman acquiesced to Martin's preferred choice of running mate, the Virginian Congressman George Patton, who like Vardaman had lost a son on the battlefields of Middle Tennessee and was regarded as a moderate Bourbon who had worked well with Democratic colleagues after the Great Schism of 1907.

    The ticket compiled, Martin set about making sure that it faced no threats in any of the legislatures that his operation controlled and pushed rapidly for the absorption of wavering Democrats into a collection under his banner as quickly as he could. The rapid erosion of the Tillman machine at the federal level was starting to trickle downwards as the case for a united government under one party for the rest of the war began to appeal even to the strongest skeptics of traditional Bourbonism - that, and the threat of angry, oft-violent Red Scarves..."

    - The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
     
    • The Radical Republic

    • KingSweden24

    "...an itinerary that often included six or seven stops for speeches in a day, six days a week; only on Sunday was reserved by Alem, never the most religious man until the war, as a day of rest. His fiery but upbeat addresses were held in working-class industrial barrios and plazas of rural farm towns alike, and everywhere he went he was met with a crush of people who had heard of this prophet of Argentina's civic religion arriving in their town during such difficult, meagre times. Alem proselytized of an Argentina besieged by the forces of reaction, making the war in his view explicitly ideological, even as the Drago administration increasingly began mulling a status quo peace with Brazil as it became increasingly clear the Parana would remain a hardened frontier for the foreseeable future until one side or both bled themselves dry.

    This was in part why Alem was not in the capital very often, because both the Civic Union and Drago did not want him there ruining their best-laid plans for pocketing the considerable and popular wins over Chile and thus giving them the perfect escape hatch with the public over the stalemate in the north against Brazil. Alem was no fool and understood that this was the case quite plainly and promised Barroetavena he would not interfere but rather keep whipping up public support for the war with his traveling oratory, though the toll it took on his health as he approached the age of seventy-five was considerable. He had a strange sense that he would "die with the war" - in other words, pass like a Moses in view of the Holy Land once peace had arrived, no sooner and no later. Thus it was imperative to him that the cementing of Alemism as the civil religion of the state go on uninterrupted over the weeks and months of the winter and spring of 1915, ensuring his legacy outlived him, and thus his rhetoric sharpened and he moved leftwards closer to the position of Yrigoyen. Conservatism was not merely bad on its own merits as an idea and ideology but, he suggested, perhaps fundamentally "un-Argentinean." Insinuations became implications that the Church hierarchy sympathized with Brazilian reactionaries and that the UC's enemies in the Congress would have acquiesced themselves into a government of occupation to undo all the achievements of the revolutionary generation of Mitre and Alem were they to come to power.

    Argentine politics thus shifted leftwards and left a whole host of Civistas profoundly uncomfortable with the direction their north star was headed, creating a major opening during the war years for somebody on the center to center-right who could capture the attention of the reformist but not revolutionary middle class that supported the war and the principles of 1890 but were fundamentally cautious and moderate and unlikely to move in support of Yrigoyen. Thus the permanent fracture of the Civic Union and the emergence of the two-party Turno Pacifico can be seeded in Alem's own attempts to define Alemism at the twilight of his life and the internal republican struggle of the war..."

    - The Radical Republic
     
    • American Royalty: The Roosevelt Dynasty's Enduring Legacy

    • KingSweden24

    "...familiar to a great many American families. Thus, the training accident in an airplane at takeoff that left Quentin with a broken left leg but no other injuries came as something of a relief; Theodore was certain he would have been broken both physically and mentally had he lost a third son to the war, particularly his youngest and favorite. Due to the long recuperation Quentin would have to endure (and a noticeable limp he would carry with him for the rest of his life) at Sagamore Hill, it was likely that the youngest Roosevelt boy would never see combat again.

    With Junior and Kit dead in the hills and forests of Nashville, however, it meant that the family needed a new champion other than Archie, who was excelling in his role in Army Intelligence in Lancaster. Roosevelt's cousin, Franklin, had made something of a name for himself at Hilton Head managing to give orders to the crew of his ship despite being pinned to a wall by a bulkhead that left, ironically enough, also his left leg severely damaged. The heroism of this young, handsome Roosevelt the naval officer was splayed across the pages of the Journal and made the former New York state representative something of a celebrity back home, with Theodore's considerable help.

    This was really just part of a broader push by the Roosevelt papers to take an increasingly hardline stance on the war. Liberals or Democrats who suggested peace feelers to the Confederacy were condemned as traitors; indeed, vitriolic coverage was a major factor in the collapse of the attempted Anglo-French Mission for Peace over the summer of 1915. It is worth saying, however, that Roosevelt's grief being channeled into his murderous hatred of the Confederacy was just a single factor. The collapses at Nashville and the "Actium of the Americas" at Hilton Head had persuaded a great many that the Confederacy looked to permanently be on the back foot, now, and that there was no sense in not pressing ahead with whatever advantage they could, and newspaper coverage in outfits such as the Journal group reflected as much..."

    - American Royalty: The Roosevelt Dynasty's Enduring Legacy
     
    • Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100

    • KingSweden24

    "...unhappy; despite the posting being very explicitly a promotion for his talents in the field, Lenihan nonetheless would have preferred to finish the job with the men he had fought with since the start of the war rather than being sent to the ruins of Washington to command a push deeper into Virginia. In his view, he had been exiled to the secondary, more difficult front of the war because Pershing was Bliss's favorite, and Liggett's failures needed to be cleaned up.

    Military scholars generally disagree with Lenihan's presumption that the men of Army Command Ohio were better trained, disciplined and commanded, but it is true that by June 1915 the now-reconstituted Army Command Potomac was exhausted after brutal fighting to clear Maryland of Confederate soldiers, get over the Potomac River, and then its frequent stalemates around the Occoquan, ending with the near-defeat of the whole army at Quantico in February. Over the following three months the Eastern Front had stabilized into a grim stalemate, with a handful of failed offensive jabs by Lejeune's frontline forces against Yankee divisions but little in the way of major movement. Lenihan thus walked into a situation where he had a rested and recovered force in a difficult but not untenable position north of the Occoquan, and decided to press ahead with plans developed by Liggett before his departure.

    The ACP, while it did not enjoy the resources that the "first front" in the Confederate Midlands would, did have one boon, which was considerably more air power. The Army had been spooked by sabotage in occupied Kentucky and Tennessee of aircraft by Irregulars and thus had limited what would be made available to Pershing's coming offensives considering the heavily losses that Billy Mitchell's Army Air Corps had taken; no such concerns existed with airships and airplanes launched from Maryland across the Potomac, allowing for coverage across the frontlines and the safety of US territory to return to. Lenihan thus made a few adjustments to the plan for an offensive in early July, moved it forward for late June, and gave the order.

    On June 27, 1915, a massive aerial bombardment rained down across the Confederate trenches behind the Occoquan, and Mitchell's fighters attacked supply trucks, suspected horse barns, and other juicy targets behind the lines. As this was being paired with clustered artillery strikes, the main force of Lenihan's men, under the dogged Ed Wittenmyer, confounded Alexander Dade by pushing ahead out of Winchester (rather than Middleburg) not southwest towards the Shenandoah, as the Confederates suspected and had prepared for, but southeast, into hilly terrain separating the town from Warrenton which was crawling with Confederate defenders but was difficult to establish full trench networks on.

    The Warrenton Campaign lasted a little less than a month, and introduced Lenihan to the kind of grinding, brutal combat the East had become accustomed to; he observed that it was like a Nashville engagement every day. Supported by landship fire once clear of the Chester Gap and bringing this armored cavalry, with a fair amount of traditional horse troops, south from Middleburg to collapse Confederate positions, the ACP ground slowly along, with a day maybe earning the men as little as a hundred feet at a time. Warrenton was 70 kilometers from Winchester and 30 from Middleburg, hardly great distances to modern people, but an extremely difficult churn at the time as Dade's forces desperately shifted off of the trenches on the Occoquan to avoid getting cut off from behind.

    The successful capture of Warrenton on July 18th essentially forced Dade's hand on the matter; Warrenton lay behind the Occoquan and commanded high ground from which American artillery, combined with the type of relentless aerial attacks from Maryland, could decimate his supply lines or even set up his armies to be surrounded and destroyed in detail. Dade gave the order even before Warrenton was in American hands to fall back upon pre-pared defenses around Stafford and to the main defenses below the Rappahannock near Fredericksburg, regarded in part as the key to the entire front. Lenihan, not one to cease pressing his advantage, ordered his exhausted men to push forward, but fresh Confederate soldiers repulsed them first at Bealeton and then at Remington, preventing what would have been a potentially disastrous crossing of the Rappahannock, and they were dealt another bloody nose near Stafford as Dade's men successfully executed a fighting retreat that rescued much of the Confederate artillery and ammunition stores and got them across the river to Fredericksburg with minimal losses.

    On paper, this was similar to previous campaigns - the Confederates doled out disproportionate casualties and then pulled back to prepared defenses (and there was little defensive ground in Virginia better than at Fredericksburg) before their numerical disadvantage overwhelmed them. Lenihan's severe losses in pushing to Warrenton and forcing the abandonment of the Occoquan Line by Dade was similar to previous bloody victories earned by the United States. However, circumstances in Richmond had changed drastically. The new ascendancy around Thomas Martin and the pressure upon the new Army Staff Office to perform was not keen to listen to excuses and was horrified that much of northern Virginia had just been abandoned, and thus Dade - since the beginning of the war the Confederate point man on the Eastern Front - was unceremoniously cashiered and replaced by his more aggressive lieutenant, Lejeune. The desperation after the Black May now required offensive victories or holding the line; Fabian strategies were no longer an option..."

    - Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100
     
    • An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924

    • KingSweden24

    "...early green shoots of the New Culture Movement in the early 1910s, particularly under the nurturing of Cai Yuanpei, the famed essayist-turned-chancellor of Peking University and one of the leading lights of Chinese liberalism to this day. Before "New Culture Movement' had earned its name, though, it was simply an amalgam of new ideas sprouting up across China in the uneasy peace that had followed the Civil War. A generation of young Chinese who had never known anything but blood (mostly against their countrymen) and the state tottering on near-collapse, and the defeat of the Qing dynasty in China south of the wall, now looked to an uncertain but intriguing future not just politically but socially as well as the constrictions of the arch-reactionary Qing society evaporated. China could become whatever they wanted, and what that whatever might be lay at the core of the debates that exploded in academic circles in Peking, amongst publishers in Shanghai, and amongst revolutionaries in Canton.

    Thousands of intellectuals educated overseas - typically in the United States but increasingly in Japan - streamed back to Chinese shores during the middle period of the Second Republic bubbling with excitement and new ideas. They wore Western clothes, consumed Western literature and had often adopted Western mores, and took a particularly harsh view of Chinese culture and history. It quickly became taken for granted that China's weakness vis a vis the West and its frequent humiliations had been due to something rotten at the core of Chinese traditionalism, of a stultified culture whose insularity and stubborn clinging to its unique attachment to Confucian thinking had left it in decline and exposed to the vagaries of Western chauvinism. This was a conclusion similar to the one drawn in Japan in the 1870s - that the country would need to drastically reform to keep up with Europe and the United States - but unlike the more muscular and ambitious Japanese imperialism that had finally sprung through in making the Philippines a semi-protectorate in 1903, there was an element of self-loathing inherent in the New Culture Movement that sought nearly to entirely reject the old ways and, in its own words, create a new culture from whole cloth.

    The ultimate embodiment of the New Culture was republicanism, and many young Chinese intellectuals, artisans and merchants saw the Republic, flawed as it was, as a direct rejection of the Qing-era backwardness but considered the Second Republic insufficiently revolutionary, not having done enough to throw off the yoke of old what with the multitudes of former Qing officials still dotting its upper hierarchies and the corrupt conservatism of Li Yuanhong and his ilk still in charge. A truly new China needed to entirely reject the past, they said - it was in this context that a new vernacular Chinese was instituted, and thousands of these young Chinese converted eagerly to Christianity, particularly in Guangdong and Fujian, associating Christendom - particularly Protestantism - with innovation and renewal. This urge of republicanism and political religiosity, combined with the tens of thousands of new businesses and schools Westerners were permitted to open across China during the Second Republic correspondingly led to a burst of Sinophilia in the West, including in the United States, which saw in the Republic of China perhaps more of a natural ideological counterpart than monarchic and aggressive Japan. Chinese became huge fans of transliterated copies of classic American books, and missionaries from Britain or Germany found themselves introducing football to compete with the Americans teaching Chinese students baseball, both of which remain China's dominant sports to this day.

    Such romantic sentiments about "New China," while common in the West, perhaps overstated the revolutionary nature of this new Republic. The New Culture Movement was, at least up until the 1920s, very much an academic pursuit, an interesting line of thought that had significant political implications in Nanking (Song Chiao-jen was not favorable towards it, while Sun Yat-sen was at the very least intrigued, particularly in the rise of legal evangelism as he himself was a baptized Christian) but little day to day impact on the average Chinese. Indeed, this explosion of Western dress, attitudes and ideologies in tandem with more and more foreign businessmen and missionaries arriving to establish firms and churches that seemed to benefit them more than locals elicited more than a little tension on the ground, and a great many Chinese spent the late 1910s revisiting the works of Confucius not to reject them but to reinvigorate traditional Chinese thought, and traditional dress and folk religions enjoyed something of a renaissance in a quieter rebellion against foreign influence than the savage violence of the Boxers nearly twenty years before..."

    - An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924
     
    • A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia

    • KingSweden24

    "...Maklakov brothers. Their emergence late in the summer and early autumn of 1915 stemmed from several factors; the first, and perhaps most obvious, was Durnovo's resignation due to his advancing illness and his subsequent death on September 24 less than a month after relinquishing the post of Minister of the Interior. Nikolai Maklakov, appropriately reactionary in his attitudes towards revolutionaries but not a "bloodhound" like some predecessors in that office. Near simultaneously, Vasily, the elder brother, emerged victorious in an internal struggle within the liberal faction of the Duma against Pavel Milyukov thanks in part to his alignment with Alexander Guchkov over a grand debate over military expenses in which Maklakov swung behind the more conservative of the two grandees of the Duma and from then on had Milyukov as a fierce enemy - a position that endeared him to Stolypin.

    Despite their very different politics - though a monarchist, Vasily's liberalism never wavered and he regarded his abandonment of the Milyukov line more a reflection on the man than his beliefs - the brothers Maklakov were personally fairly close and thus a useful tandem for the Tsarist government. In Nikolai, Stolypin had a reliable loyalist in the mold of Durnovo but also a man who could influence his brother; in turn, in Vasily there was a figure held in great esteem by the emerging liberal middle class of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev who was nonetheless pragmatic and cautious in his reforms, unafraid to speak his mind but nonetheless deferential to the extant regime. Nikolai could pull his brother rightwards and, by that same token, pull Guchkov right too, and in turn Vasily could facilitate connections between the Council of Ministers and the Duma's leading lights. Vasily thus formed something of an informal "third leg" of the Duarchy of Stolypin and Sazonov, their eyes and ears in the Duma as a man who took the body seriously (unlike its most right-wing parliamentarians, who opposed its existence and thus were little use in dealing even with the most conservative of liberals), and whose ongoing game of back-and-forth with his younger and more hardline brother began to become one of the key features of the Duarchy era as the Duma and the Ministers played off one another for influence, to the extent that even Stolypin himself frequently mused that perhaps the brothers Maklakov were more cunning than their different beliefs suggested..." [1]

    - A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia

    [1] We're rapidly approaching a point in time where I'm going to start running out of Tsarist figures prominent in history, since a lot of their Wikipedia entries end in, say, 1917/18 or thereabouts or with "and then they lived in Parisian exile." That being said, the continuing tension between the fairly toothless Duma and its various sclerotic factions and the Tsar's ministers will be a feature moving forward in all Russian action
     
    • The Central European War

    • KingSweden24

    "...importance which "peripheral" events had to the increasingly-complicated relationship between the five powers at the center of the conflict, but broader context nonetheless suggests why relations in Europe deteriorated so drastically between the Congress of Budapest in 1913 and the eventual beginning of the war in spring 1919. Key to understanding Italy's involvement, in particular, requires understanding Italian geopolitical goals in the Mediterranean and increasingly North Africa, and the hostile Franco-Austrian reaction to said goals.

    In 1915, for instance, the Greek government, with the help of considerable British but also Italian loans, announced that it was budgeting for the purchase of a dreadnought vessel as well as two battlecruisers to secure its territorial waters and join the ranks of naval powers in the Med, of which there were now increasingly many. In most of Europe, this move was mostly met with eye rolls and derision. Greece was after all a small, poor country that almost certainly would struggle to afford such an investment and the implications of the move were not taken particularly seriously; Germany's foreign ministry even circulated a memorandum to the Naval Staff suggesting that it be viewed in the context of Britain "perhaps seeking to offload an old vessel upon the unsuspecting Hellenes for cash rather than sinking it in training exercises."

    The Greek Naval Act of 1915 was not taken so lightly in the Ottoman Empire, however, which viewed the move as not only a direct threat to the integrity of her own Aegean waters but even a potential cassus belli. Only twelve years had passed since the violence of the Cretan Crisis in which the Ottomans had feared a European intervention to pry Crete away and hand it to Greece, and now Athens was seeking to secure the means to actually enforce potential territorial claims. The dreadnought would most likely be surplus, but the battlecruisers that the Gounaris government had ordered would be brand-new and built in Belfast by the British shipbuilder Harland & Wolff, thus making them first-class vessels and likely superior to anything the Ottomans could put to sea. While much of the money and technology backing Greek then was British - a holdover of the staunch Anglophilia of the Hellenic government of Gounaris that matched the impulses of the long-reigning George I, who though seventy was as spry a King as ever - the Greek military was increasingly drifting in a different direction, one that shifted from Anglophile neutrality to an Italophile position, particularly within the Navy, as viewing the "Roman cousins" as increasingly important for bringing Greek ambitions in not only Thessaly but all of its irredenta on either side of the Aegean into play, and that was before one considered the admiration that Greek Army officialdom held for the Prussian military and the Crown Prince Constantine's love of all things German, passed-through from his wife.

    A ticking clock was thus started in Constantinople as the delays to the Turks' own Naval Act of the previous year now became not a frustration but a potentially deadly wait; realistically, the battlecruisers would take no more than thirty months to complete, bringing a conflagration in late 1917 into play as a possibility. The fear in the halls of the Porte, including amongst otherwise relatively liberal officials such as the Grand Vizier Prince Sabahaddin, was that a future Cretan revolt would be able to be supported by Greek vessels that, potentially with Italian reinforcements, could signal the end of Ottoman control of the island and encourage further uprisings across the Empire, particularly in the rugged and ethnically Serb countryside between Sarajevo and Nish or in the complicated swath of land between the Balkan Mountains and the Danube in northern Bulgaria.

    Though French connections to the Ottomans had declined considerably in the wake of the Cretan Crisis and Cattoro Note that ended it, a potential time bomb in southeastern Europe nonetheless worried France, especially as the Quai d'Orsay came to see an ambitious Italian government under Giolitti as the chief instigator, a position that Austria shared with alarm. The collapse of Franco-Austrian influence in Constantinople, and the rapid growth of Italo-German influence in Athens and elsewhere in the Balkans, suggested that the potential "guarded flank" of the Iron Triangle was at risk, not in the sense that the Ottomans were about to go to war with Austria, but rather that the stability of the firm alliance system that had kept Europe in a tense but straightforward peace for forty years was starting to unravel, and unpredictability was likely to reign..."

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

    • KingSweden24

    "...march from Santa Ana towards Guatemala City was predicated on the Nicaraguan National Guard that Butler had spent the last two years building into a formidable fighting force would be enough to keep the threat against forces in eastern Honduras real enough to prevent them from attacking through his rear, and that the newly-formed Isthmian Expeditionary Force of thirty thousand men from the Army meant to serve as auxiliaries alongside the Marines thrusting into the heart of Centro would be sufficient support. The reality of the campaign of summer 1915 was that many of its predicates were woefully wrong; the IEF had, unlike Butler's rugged "Jungle Jims," not been exposed to the kind of brutal, humid and malarial fighting conditions in the sweaty, forested hills of the Isthmus that had gotten the core of the Marines in El Salvador experienced in the type of war they were fighting. Yellow fever and other diseases ripped through the Army men, slowing Butler's march as much as frequent guerilla attacks and the extremely difficult terrain between Santa Ana and the capital, where a single narrow road looped through high mountains and thick foliage, and retreating Centro forces alternated between staging ambushes from the trees or burning the jungle so that it was so thick with smoke Butler's men could not advance. The Nicaraguans, meanwhile, bent but did not break, relinquishing a fair deal of land to Centroamerican-Mexican forces to the point they had to withdraw south of Esteli, but this fighting retreat into the teeth of American defenses set up in Nicaragua did pull that weight of forces away from Butler's columns.

    This was the context in which the events of August 2nd, 1915 occurred. The Americans were winning, but they were winning slowly and brutally and at great cost. The Centroamericans were collapsing, but not so quickly that it threatened Mexican positions, with the road network in Honduras essentially still intact for Huerta's men to move via Tegucigalpa, the place he had initially expected Butler to strike towards. Resupply for the Bloc by sea was impossible, and Mexican soldiers were getting increasingly hungry, antsy and frustrated, with fights frequently breaking out between Centroamerican recruits and Huerta' more professional men, who pejoratively called their allies monos - monkeys. Huerta, no stranger to ambition and ruthlessness in his rise in the ranks of the Mexican Army, finally had had enough. After two years of war, Estrada Cabrera had done nothing but complain about Nicaragua daring to exist and indulged corruption and incompetence within his own ranks as Mexico bled in the Isthmian jungles to defend him. Above and beyond that, it was not an uncommon view in Mexican circles that Centroamerica existed in the first place at Mexico's pleasure, as it had been the unequivocal support of the Emperor Maximilian in the 1870s and early 1880s for Justo Rufino Barrios' project of uniting Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras into a single state that had seen the federation come about. To put the overriding Mexican attitude into American colloquial terms, it was Mexico that had brought Centro into the world, and thus Mexico who could take it out.

    Early on the morning of August 2nd, 1915, the ostentatious Presidential Palace in Guatemala City was attacked - not by American Marines, who were about sixty-five kilometers away, but by elite Mexican forces personally loyal to Huerta. Surprised, the Centroamerican guards were rapidly overwhelmed and killed to the man. Soon afterwards, President Manuel Estrada Cabrera, one of the bete noires of the United States in the first decade and a half of the 20th century for his indulgence of Confederate and Mexican meddling with American businesses in Centroamerica and his belligerency towards Nicaragua, was dragged out into the courtyard, placed up against a wall, and executed not to the calm intonations of his last rites but over his livid screams and protests.

    Huerta's decision to simply usurp command over Centroamerica remains controversial even in Mexico, where he is pilloried for the decision. An exploration of his thinking is meant not to absolve him of his unilateral murder of his ally Estrada Cabrera but rather to understand the context of the events of August 2nd. In the view of Huerta and his staff, who were returning to Guatemala City later that day to secure order after the city plunged into chaos, Centroamerica was effectively done the moment El Salvador fell earlier in the year, and they were highly dubious of the ability of Estrada Cabrera's men to defend Guatemala City. Rather than throw more blood and treasure into the matter, they instead proposed the dissolution of the Union, letting Honduras fend for itself, and throw all Mexican attention towards preserving their position in Guatemala, which had always been the main focus of Mexico City anyhow.

    To say that this decision was unpopular in Mexico City would be an understatement, especially as Huerta reorganized the Centroamerican government by force into the "Military District of Guatemala" with himself as its Supreme Commander, viewed on both sides of the border as a prelude to him simply declaring himself as Guatemala's warlord. General Bernardo Reyes, the Chief of Staff of the Mexican Army, issued a warrant for his arrest and court martial, and twenty thousand Mexican soldiers were diverted from marching north to Los Pasos to instead be sent to Guatemala to secure the territory, auguring a potential battle between rival Mexican factions. This debacle was a further sign to Mexico's internal opponents of continuing the war, of whom Reyes was an increasingly important voice, that continuing on the current course would lead to ruin for Mexico and that it was best to simply cut losses and agree to a separate peace with the United States while there was a good deal to be had rather than continue down the sinking ship with the Confederacy and, apparently, Centroamerica, which over the course of August was pulverizing itself back into three separate nation states before Mexico's very eyes, with anti-Huerta riots, mutinies and declarations spreading across Honduras and northern Guatemala with remarkable speed..."

    - The Forgotten Front: The Isthmian Campaigns of the Great American War
     
    • The Opium Lords: A History of China's Drug Cartels

    • KingSweden24

    "...communal societies not just in China proper but in the diaspora; the tong was a central part of the Overseas Chinese community's daily and social life. The Great American War years were highly chaotic, as the limitations on Chinese immigration to the West Coast of the United States expired and tens of thousands of Chinese, particularly from Guangdong and Fujian, made the journey over the Pacific to work in shipyards, rail depots, shell factories or synthetic nitrate plants to keep the war effort going, concentrating heavily in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. For these new arrivals, who were often (though not always) young single men who spoke not a lick of English in a new country that treated them on their best day with hostility and suspicion, the tong was an absolutely crucial network for finding steady pay, for connecting with longstanding Chinese residents, and, increasingly, for protection. Out of the tong emerged close-knit groups of men who made their value to Chinese laborers fairly clear - in return for deference and assumed leadership within the community, and perhaps pay, they would ensure that work could be found and the white majority, particularly in rougher towns like Portland, left them be under threat of organized intimidation.

    Though Chinese were almost uniformly banned from voting in the United States (and Canada, where similar albeit smaller such communities formed), many of the men who went to work and study in North America in time returned home and brought with them the tong's importance, and such societies sprouted up as key pillars of patronage and influence not just along the West Coast ports but in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other outposts throughout Southeast Asia where there were small but concentrated Chinese communities, often merchants who were always a class treated with some skepticism by traditionally Confucian Chinese. From the diaspora tong and similar networks in China proper, one can start to see the architecture of not just the secret societies that had led to the Guomindang's blossoming but also more formal and explicit avenues of influence from pooled pressure and communal support. The tong took care of the people, and in return the people took care of those at the top of the tong. Western societies often dismissed Chinese culture as alien in its respect for hierarchy, but never stopped and really pondered why Chinese immigrants felt such attachment to community and the security of a straightforward transplantation of cultural norms brought from home. Before long, separate tong organizations in San Francisco and Seattle began to butt heads with one another, rivaling one another, needing something that the competition could not provide - much like their counterparts back in China, which increasingly began to look less like fraternal brotherhoods and more like societies with their own internal governance that unofficially but nonetheless quite formally ran entire neighborhoods of Canton, Foochow and before long Shanghai in the absence of a local government sponsored by the rotten Second Republic that people could trust..."

    - The Opium Lords: A History of China's Drug Cartels
     
    • La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers

    • KingSweden24

    "...partially staking his reputation on the summer of 1915's "Anglo-French Mission for Peace." Poincaré was skeptical, [1] worrying that a result that embarrassed France would damage his government ahead of early snap elections he called for late October of 1915 that had already left many of his political allies scratching their heads, but he gave Paleologue the go-ahead provided that France could find a second partner in the endeavor.

    This was more difficult than met the eye. Russia, Germany and Italy were all emphatically pro-United States to begin with and Germany had even provided tangible assistance to American operations in the Caribbean, and exactly none of them viewed a negotiated peace settlement after the titanic defeats at Nashville (on land) and Hilton Head (at sea) for the Confederacy as creating a space where it was in their interest to now intervene diplomatically. Britain, suffering from tight economic conditions due to the war, was via backchannels already trying to find a conclusion to fighting between Brazil and Argentina, and indeed considered the looming American annihilation of the Confederate war economy as something of a secondary concern to its agricultural imports, but the flailing, unpopular Cecil government eventually acceded and agreed to send Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs Ronald McNeill as Paleologue's right hand.

    The "Paleologue Mission," as the affair quickly became known to both its supporters and its much larger legions of detractors, was kneecapped almost immediately from its arrival in Philadelphia. Though American politicos, to French eyes, had famously short shelf-lives - William Hearst's eight years was the longest Presidency in seventy years, after all - there was a lengthy institutional memory of the Havana Conference that left the administration of Charles Evans Hughes polite but deeply skeptical of Paleologue and French intentions. Making matters worse, the bitter violence in Ireland and the Cecil administration's passive allowance bordering on tacit encouragement of paramilitary killings led by Ulster Unionists who were opposed to Home Rule over the island by its Catholic majority had made McNeill, who was Ulster-born and a staunch opponent of Home Rule, a persona non grata in the United States' massive and politically influential Irish-descended community. The Anglophilic Hughes administration was courteous, but Democratic officials, who depended heavily upon the graces of Irish political bosses in cities such as New York, Chicago, Cleveland and increasingly Boston, were loathe to even be photographed next to "Monster McNeill," let alone entertain him formally.

    This deep suspicion from "official Philadelphia" and the American press together made Paleologue's job extraordinarily difficult, but he was game to try nonetheless. In a one-on-one meeting between him and Hughes alone, the exhausted American President outlined a straightforward list of demands that could be made to the Confederacy; when Paleologue noted that these demands made no mention of Mexico, Hughes demurred, and within a few months it had been revealed that backchannels between Philadelphia and Mexico City had been busy negotiating a peace everyone could live with. The American position on their immediate neighbors to the south was a bit too simple for European tastes: unilateral, unconditional, full surrender as the price for a ceasefire or armistice. Paleologue noted that the Confederacy was unlikely to accept such a conceit, what with American forces still only in the northernmost states, and Hughes responded simply that individual parameters of a final peace could be negotiated "as gentlemen, but gentlemen do not negotiate through cannon smoke." McNeill was told much the same from men such as American Secretary of State Elihu Root, Paleologue's direct counterpart, and by Senator George Turner, head of the Senate committee that would have to vote on a peace treaty and who was a Democrat rather than of the Liberal Party of Hughes and Root. There was no politician in Philadelphia, of any party, who would accept anything other than the Confederacy bending the knee. It was Richmond that had started the war, and Richmond that would have to now accept the consequences when it ended. McNeill noted that this view had, from what he gleaned, been longstanding, but that it had solidified after Hilton Head essentially ended any threat to American naval dominance and all the chief principals of the United States had met at Long Branch in New Jersey to agree on a joint position.

    Paleologue and McNeill's efforts in Richmond somehow managed to go even more poorly. In Philadelphia, at least, the uncompromising stance of a people attacked and now on the front foot in the war was fairly understandable; Hughes had little to gain in a negotiated peace in July and August of 1915 when he could likely dictate terms at will by July and August of 1916. The air in Richmond was one of "remarkable delusions," McNeill wrote back to his immediate superior Curzon as well as Cecil. Army officers confidently predicted coming offensives that would drive the "hated Yankee" back across the Potomac, and politicians, in particular President-in-waiting James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, had essentially created a hermetically-sealed environment where the mere idea that victory was not around the corner was tantamount to treason. Nearly the whole city, from its tony Senators and generals to its poor working class, was convinced that they were in a civilizational struggle (here, they were perhaps not wrong) and that they were providentially ordained to secure the last great future of Anglo-Saxon superiority over barbarism. "Having convinced themselves that their mission of racial supremacy is divine, and of the belief that their society will implode from within should anyone breathe the reality that they are beginning to lose this war," McNeill noted, "the entire country, at least its residents of European stock, have concluded that they would rather die than lose. If they cannot defeat the Yankee, the Confederate States will commit mass suicide rather than face what they think is like to be homicide." Ellison Smith, the lame-duck President of the Confederacy who was barely in charge over day-to-day decisions any longer and mostly just smoked cigars and drank whiskey alone at the executive mansion, suggested to McNeill in private and on condition that the exchange be kept utterly secret that Confederate politicians who spoke the truth were likely to be assassinated, and he noted the case in the weeks before the war began of the Speaker of the House, John Sharp Williams, being murdered simply for his language being insufficiently belligerent.

    There was thus little reasoning in Richmond, not while the industrial heartland of the Confederacy and capital remained, for the time being, relatively unthreatened. The Confederacy had their own list of demands drafted, that being the tolling of the Mississippi River, the immediate evacuation of the US forces from their land, and the return of all escaped and captured slaves. Paleologue was utterly baffled by the intransigence of these demands and noted that they seemed utterly divorced from reality; in a few years time, he too would become familiar with diplomatic notes that seemed exist in an entirely different plane of existence, but in 1915 he wrote in bewilderment back to the Quai d'Orsay of the "near-rabid stubbornness of the Confederate political class." He did, however, manage to secure one major boon in his Mission - the release of seventeen American politicians held captive since near the start of the war, including Senators Carroll Prouty and Dudley Doolittle, and their return to Philadelphia in a brokered prisoner exchange in which thirty captured Confederate Army officers and two hundred wounded infantrymen were returned, with the French dreadnought Napoleon III managing the exchange. This was, in the end, the lasting legacy for the Paleologue Mission, a considerable letdown when taking into account the high hopes and hype that it had begun with in Paris.

    By mid-August, Paleologue elected to quit while he was ahead and return to France empty-handed but for the prisoner exchange, which Root graciously credited him for facilitating but which in France was met largely with mockery. In the early days of that month, a reconstituted American naval force recovered from Hilton Head had ambushed a Confederate-Mexican squadron off the coast of Key West near the southern tip of Florida and, in what came to be known as the Battle of the Florida Straits, sunk the CSS Arkansas, the last dreadnought in the Confederate fleet, and several Mexican vessels including two cruisers and so badly damaging the dreadnought Imperador Maximiliano that it was forced to retreat back into port at Tampico where it remained stuck for the final months of Mexico's participation in the war. This elimination of a major force of the Bloc Sud plugging up the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico essentially ended the ability of Confederate-Mexican shipping to occur unmolested in the Gulf and provided a second huge strategic boon, in that commercial shipping in the Gulf was now fair game and, after the Confederacy had sunk American ships at will, the United States Navy announced in a bluntly worded missive to all European powers that it would reciprocate and consider "all waters west of Florida and the Yucatan an area of combat in which prize rules for merchant vessels do not apply, in the manner in which the Confederacy has treated the Caribbean for the past eleven months." Between Hilton Head and now Florida Straits, punctuated by the capture of Key West by US Marines, Europe definitively no longer had any real say on how the US Navy conducted itself in the waters of the Confederacy, nor did it really have any desire to. This battle and its aftermath perhaps put paid to the Paleologue Mission more than anything else that had occurred, because Philadelphia clearly had no incentive to indulge European entreaties any longer, either.

    McNeill turned his attention to brokering a deal in Rio de Janeiro instead, steaming south on the HMS Invincible and leaving Paleologue to rue his failure. But the endeavor had likely been doomed to peace anyways, and in a sense his failure was perhaps better than succeeding. By summer of 1915, the Confederacy was almost as unpopular with European leadership, even its conservative elite, as it was toxic with the European street, which held its slave-owning society in contempt and broadly sympathized with the United States - indeed, the war had perhaps made America more popular with Europe's populace than it had been previously. Politically speaking, Paleologue having his fingers on a peace deal that rescued the Confederacy from its just desserts could indeed have been worse than coming home having given his best efforts to end to bloodshed to no avail. Indeed, the tide was now turning so decisively in public and elite opinion against the Bloc Sud across Europe that it was even rumored that Spain, which was known to despise Richmond but hold great sympathy for Mexico City, had assisted from Cuba in providing key intelligence to the United States and had even mulled intervening in the Florida Straits directly with its own naval vessels.

    Europe's role in the Great American War was drawing rapidly to an end before it even began - and the Poincaré ministry had little to show for it but egg on its face..."

    - La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers

    [1] Raymond Poincaré and peace, name a less iconic duo
     
    • The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924

    • KingSweden24

    "...extent of domestic policy paralysis that typified mid-1910s Britain quite like education. In his cumulative history of "Jix"-era Britain of the 1920s, historian Michael St John Revis-Brown noted that what separated the more conservative but more successful National Party of the Twenties from the flailing ineptitude of the Cecil regime of the Teens was that, in his words, "the Nats had not yet become Nats - they were still Tories who behaved like Tories." The men of the Cecil ministry were not the right-wing mirror of Liberals as middle-class reformers but rather the upper crust of the British aristocracy, a great many of them in the Commons only because they had fathers or elder brothers holding them up from their hereditary peerages and the Lords. Hugh Cecil perhaps personified this type more than anyone in his own government - he was an Old Etonian and had studied at University College, Oxford, and many of his political views and peculiarities were dependent on his experiences at those two institutions. He was of the old High Anglican stock that sometimes still wondered why Catholics had been allowed to enroll at the Oxbridge colleges and was as obsessive over minutiae of traditional classical education at both as he was his frequent insinuations about the inner workings of Anglican diocesal and liturgical politics. That he represented Oxford University in the Commons was perhaps of no surprise to anyone - oozed the place, for better or for worse.

    By the midpoint of the decade, of course, the British educational system was while not a laughingstock clearly a good step behind almost all of its continental peers, and the Cecil government quite plainly knew little of what to do about it. Part of the issue was that Oxford and Cambridge were of course private institutions that set their own academic standards and curriculum, and the docents and dons of both universities were highly resistant to change. The other was that for a generation of well-heeled aristocrats, they took the idea that they had been educated in the manner befitting gentlemen as was necessary for their ability to properly rule Britain, and they too saw little reason to change a system that had successfully produced them. A closer look at British education told a different picture. The quality of education from local council to local council varied widely, but Cecil's brother's efforts to pursue wholesale reform in 1910 had brought down the Curzon ministry, and sour memories of that affair, with a minority government on paper stronger than the current one, left Cecil loathe to touch what he considered something of a poisoned chalice of British politics. [1] The British were loathe to standardize educational policy for fear of giving a future Liberal government the tools to totally nationalize schooling, and thus ignored some of the examples emerging overseas, such as Germany's gymnasia or the straightforward high school movement of the United States. Around tertiary education as well, the type of funding and innovation ongoing at American universities in particular was tossed off despite the rapid enrollment figures that occurred on their campuses after the Great American War concluded, and the money being thrown at German, French and even Italian universities to attract the best scientists, writers and lecturers went unanswered in Britain, where "societies" for science, exploration and literature remained dominant as the main force of academia rather than the university - a model trapped woefully in the 19th century.

    The British schools of the late 1910s and early 1920s, then, were a place of remarkable stagnation in pedagogy, all while British technology continued to fall further behind the "big three" of the United States, Germany, and France, other than in the space of shipbuilding where Britain remained the world standard. It is little wonder, then, that the political conditions that had already produced the Great Unrest and anemic economic conditions, seen governments barely last a full term, and Ireland erupt in violence would soon produce the highbrow thuggery of the 1920s under William Joynson-Hicks - for the average Briton of the age, it seemed that nobody really knew how, or even cared to, govern the modern Britain..."

    - The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924

    [1] Says a lot I suppose that "reform school system" is more toxic to the Nats than "stop turning Ireland and India into bloodbaths"
     
    • The Northern Citadel: Manchuria 1912-1957

    • KingSweden24

    "...poor relationship with the Emperor nonetheless still hobbled him. While recovered by the spring of 1915 from his various ailments, upon his return Duan found a Manchurian civil service turned violently against itself, with murders of low-level apparatchiks common behavior between the various cliques that still feared a major assassination, particularly as the clique around Xu was fairly convinced that Manchuria's government imploding into bloodshed would either invite China to violate Wu-Sazonov and launch another attack across the Wall or a Russian intervention that left the Hongxian Emperor's regime even less independent.

    Of course, Duan's one sole advantage that kept him from being put out to pasture immediately was that the most powerful clique was the one controlled by his ally and protege, Xu, and included the Ministries of Finance and Home Affairs. This left the "Xu Clique" entirely in charge of domestic matters from within the Cabinet and, for the time being, that satisfied Duan, despite it meaning that Wu and other rivals had the initiative when it came to dealing with the Harbin Office, so far as to frequently hold secret meetings with the Russians behind his back.

    The tense, polarized years of the late 1910s were thus an era of cracking stability and increasingly stagnant governance in Manchuria. Kang's singular personality being gone and Duan badly hobbled, domestic and foreign matters were often pitted against one another; crucial army reforms were held up by Wang's penny-pinching at the Treasury, while Wu burned offers of bilateral trade deals that insufficiently cut him in and may have boosted the coffers of his rivals on the domestic side of the table. That Duan and Wu were now very definitively opposed created a wedge in the midst of Mukden that foreign diplomats were curious about how they could best exploit - and exploit they did..."

    - The Northern Citadel: Manchuria 1912-1957
     
    • You must log in or register to reply here.
    Top
    Top