With the examples of Oman and Egypt Britain and to a lesser extent France must realize that they cannot ally with the US and hold their colonial possessions, so it's going to come down to a choice between throwing more money and lives down the drain for the sake of National Pride and alienating their main ally against the USSR, or abandoning their empires, and right now it looks like they are choosing option 1.
The North Star is Red: a Wallace Presidency, KMT Victory, Alternate Cold War TL
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A lot of money and lives have been lost, but they have been sort of successful at keeping some of their colonial possessions. The best example are the Dutch (who have been fighting the longest), who although expending a ludicrous amount of money and manpower relative to their relatively small country, have managed to more or less hold onto the West New Guinea and the Moluccas, and create a vaguely sort-of friendly (or at least nonaligned) regime in Sulawesi. Weird stuff is going on in Borneo though, which I should talk about. But more or less, it seems the Dutch are holding onto...some parts of Indonesia, I guess.
Though it is important to note that they tend to be the most fringe, poorest regions, with an economic value far below the level of fighting expended to hold onto them (lol, combined, they're only like 3% of Indonesia's population)
Chapter 123 - The First Indonesian War Ends
The First Indonesia War Ends
By late 1958, Kennedy's strategy of "nationalizing" the Indonesian War had largely succeeded. Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, commander of the pro-American nationalist splinter, had been able to roll down Sumatra due to a safe flank with the Aceh Islamists. After the Americans more or less forced the two to work together at gunpoint, the two had begun to more or less got along fairly well. Eventually, a deal was brokered whereupon Aceh was to be governed as an Islamic state, autonomous within the United States of Indonesia, which was then ruled by Islamist friendly Nationalists. Islamist-National Indonesia proved to a fearsome military juggernaut due to Islamist zeal, Nationalist military expertise, and American arms, crushing both dissident Islamists and Suharto's main group of Nationalists (which were squeezed by Prawiranegara in the West and the Communists in the East). What seemed like clear success for Kennedy in Indonesia, a success gained by going against the advice of his generals, further emboldened his belief that the generals were not to be listened to.
After the majority-nationalists were defeated in Sumatra, a subordinate of General Suharto, taking advantage of his trip to Iran (where he hoped to rally support), officially overthrew Suharto, claiming that the Nationalists were losing in Java, as the Communists pressed from the West. Throwing his support to the USI government, this only caused confusion as the Nationalist Armies collapsed against a Communist offensive. In the East, the People's Republic of Indonesia had built an increasingly prosperous "revolutionary base area", as it had seen the fewest fighting. With increasingly well-trained, well-educated, and comfortable troops, the PRI easily bested confused Nationalists in the East. However, the immediate deployment of American troops prevented Western Java from falling completely to the Communists. Although Bandung was lost, a fierce American resistance was able to prevent the PRI from surging into the suburbs of Jakarta. As a condition for joining forces, the Nationalists and Islamist-Nationalists agreed that the United States of Indonesia would unilaterally declare independence from the Dutch and offer statehood to other regions of Dutch Indonesia.
The Dutch reaction was horror. They were immediately afraid that they would lose their bastions in East Indonesia, especially as they did not trust the Islamist government of South Sulawesi. Unable to actually go against the United States (due to having very few forces in Java or Sumatra), they offered every imaginable concession to the South Sulawesi Islamists and any other power they believed necessary to keep control. The Philippines, long engaged in Borneo to assist Dutch forces due to entering the war with Kennedy as an American ally, were bought off by Dutch forces promising Sabah (claimed by the Philippines) to the Phiippines. The only problem was that Sabah was a British colony (linked closely with Sarawak), not a Dutch colony. To buy off the British to buy off the Philippines, the Dutch agreed to grant the Pontianak Sultanate independence and link it in a custom unions with Sarawak and Brunei (the Pontianak-Sarawak-Brunei union of monarchs quickly became just known as Sarawak). In addition, the Dutch granted North Kalimantan to the Filipinos as part of their new province. In many ways, this wasn't actually a terrible idea for the Dutch, because the new Filipino possessions in North Borneo immediately broke out in revolt against the Philippines, beginning one of the longest ethnic conflicts of the 20th century.
In the rest of rump Dutch Borneo, comprising of South, Central, and East Kalimantan, the new Netherlands Borneo was built on exploiting tensions between the Dayaks, Banjars, and Javanese. The Dayaks were the most originally indigenous peoples of Borneo, disproportionately Chrsitian and concentrated in the more mountainous regions of Dutch Borneo, such as Central Kalimantan. The Banjars, a predominantly Muslim Malay ethnicity, migrated primarily to South Kalimantan shortly soon-after. Finally, the predominantly Muslim Javanese had come in the last two centuries. However, relations between the three groups were actually traditionally very good, so the Dutch attempt to exploit ethnic divides didn't work very well. Regardless, the Dutch had retained control of Borneo, Sulawesi, the Moluccas, and West New Guinea, a feat that was credited to the cruel but effective tactics of General Raymond Westerling.
Westerling however, became one of the most controversial figures of the war. Official Dutch military records indicated 74,600 Dutch died in the First Indonesian War, an astounding death toll considering that the Netherlands only had roughly 10 million European residents. With an estimated 150,000 Dutch wounded in the war, the Netherlands had distinctly transformed into a society at war, with wounded war veterans being noticeable by almost all Dutch. Similarly, an estimated 140,000 pro-Dutch Indonesians also died in the war, with civilian casualties estimated at anywhere between 900,000 and 1.8 million (albeit probably on the lower end). The Netherlands had distinctly lagged behind its neighbor, Belgium. Dutch politics had significantly radicalized on both ends in addition. Pretty much all of the postwar economic recovery granted to the Netherlands by the United States was directly plowed into the war effort. Regardless, some of the Dutch viewed this as a tremendous success, the American "betrayal" notwithstanding. Admittedly, the territory held onto by the Dutch (part of Borneo, Sulawesi, the Moluccas, and West New Guinea) only comprised around 10-14% of the total population of Indonesia, so a bit under 10 million people, many of whom were still quite angry at the Dutch. However, this was still significant territory.
As a result, no regions under Dutch-influence accepted the statehood offer of the USI. Ironically, the proclamation of the USI meant that the Dutch had largely exited the war against the People's Republic of Indonesia. In the Dutch view, the Communists were now the American's problems. The Dutch political class quickly grew to realize this whole enterprise had probably been a mistake, but they were unwilling to walk away from a bloody war in total defeat, having no face-saving consolation prize. However, they now had their face-saving prize. In 14 years of war, they now had something to show for it. In late 1958, an easy peace began settling over what was left of the Dutch East Indies. The 1960's saw an incredible boom in the Dutch economy as trade links with the rest of the European Economic Community and war demobilizing greatly boosted the living standards of the Dutch. However, political scars (both literal and figurative) still festered. Most interestingly, the postwar economic boom also attracted large amounts of immigrants from the Dutch East Indies, something that began to worry other EEC members.
The Dutch exit from the Indonesian War and the stop of the Communist advance in Java made the Americans uneasy about continued engagement in the Indonesian War. The Communist Indonesians, directly supplied by North Japan (and to a lesser extent, North China), quickly grew to be very canny, as both the Nationalists and Communists found themselves bogged down in a brutal stalemate. An estimated 18,000 Americans 90,000 Nationalist Indonesians, and 170,000 Communist Indonesian soldiers died in the next year as both sides battered each other along the narrow Javan front, which combined both the horrible disease-infested trenches of World War I with the horrible diseases of jungle warfare. Immediately, with fears of internal insurrection on both sides and anger over the horrific death toll for both sides, the 1959 Geneva Conference finally led to an official "peace", whereupon a cease-fire along the line of control was more or less declared (east of Jakarta), officially formalizing the creation of both West Indonesia and East Indonesia.
Most controversially, the Dutch government had recognized the results of the Geneva Convention, withdrawing its remaining forces from Sumatra and Java. This was condemned as acquiescing to "American perfidy" by certain elements of Dutch society, especially those linked with angry war veterans and colonialists such as Carel Gerretson and Prosper Ego. However, the Dutch had amusingly been scared off by (erroneous) British reports that the Americans were funding the IRA, and fearing that the Americans would fund Islamic terrorism in the Dutch East Indies, eventually went along with the American scheme. The Americans in turn strenuously discouraged the West Indonesians from funding terrorism in the Dutch East Indies, though this obviously had no impact on the East Indonesians...
One legacy of the First Indonesia War was that the Netherlands explicitly implemented laws illegalizing and prosecuting "secessionist speech," laws that were not only applied strictly in Europe and in the Dutch East Indies, but also in Dutch Suriname and the Dutch Antilles.
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I wonder how Malaysia will be impacted by the events in Indonesia.
Strictly speaking, Malaysia hasn't gotten formed (yet?). Malaya is independent, but that doesn't include North Borneo and Singapore. Course, OTL Malaysia wasn't formed until 1963...
Chapter 124 - The Postwar British Commonwealth
The Postwar British Commonwealth
Canada was a rare power to have been involved in fighting on both sides of the world - Canadian troops had joined the fight not only in Finland, but they had also joined the fight in China as well, supporting both the Americans and South Chinese in their fight. Although the Canadians weren't sending hordes of troops, they were one of the primary logistical suppliers to both fronts, including tanks, aircraft, and ammunition. The Conservatives under John Diefenbaker made the very grievous mistake of accusing the Canadian government of being "American's lapdog." While most of Europe blamed the United States for the eventual thermonuclear destruction of Stockholm, Canadians, engaged in a war in both Asia and Europe, had a broader view of things and tended to primarily blame the nation that actually destroyed Stockholm. In 1953, the Liberals won a modest victory against the Progressive Conservatives, taking only 143 seats (down from 191 in 1949) against 77 for the PCs.[1]
The PCs, Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation, and Social Credit Party also castigated the Liberals for approving a large natural gas pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver that was primarily being funded and owned by an American corporation. When the PC, CCF, and SoCreds attempted to filibuster the act, the Liberals simply removed the filibuster by unilaterally changing the rules of Parliament.[2] This succeeded because the Liberals argued that this was necessary to support Sino-American troops in Asia fight against Communism. Finally, in the height of the war (in 1957), the Liberal government notably was thus able to easily pass the Defence Procurement Act, which permanently formalized the extraordinary powers granted to the federal government during World War II and the Three-Years War. All the opposition parties were opposed, although the CCF were the far more vocal, calling it the death of Canadian democracy and the beginning of a Canadian military-industrial complex.
The 1957 election campaign was one of the most dramatic in Canadian history, as the thermonuclear destruction of Stockholm took place during the actual campaigning (the election itself was on June 10th). Similarly, the election was held during the actual negotiations at the Melbourne Conference. As a result, it was both a war election and a peace election. The general thrust of the campaign was a genuine debate over the future of Canada - whether it should have adopted a Europe first or Asia first strategy. The Liberals under St. Laurent called for closer relations with the United States in the fight against Communism, while the Conservatives under Diefenbaker called for closer relations with Europe, especially the United Kingdom. One of the pivotal moments of the election was the decision of Maurice Duplessis, the long-time premier of Quebec, to endorse the Liberal position on these issues, arguing that America was more reliably anti-Communist and that the large French-Canadian population in Northern New England required cooperation with America.
The results were a resounding victory for the Liberals, even as their vote share modestly declined. However, because the PCs had declined even more due to the growth of the CCF and the SoCreds, the Liberals actually increased their seat count to 157, with the Tories dropping to 60 seats (while the CCF went to 25 and the SoCreds to 19). With 133 seats needed for a majority, the Liberals had a comfortable majority, continuing a tradition of Liberal rule that had lasted since 1935. In many ways, this was compared to the dominance of the Democratic Party in the United States, which had ruled consistently since 1932 (at least at the presidential level). Notably, the Liberals once again won a landslide in Quebec, where the Francophone St. Laurent was supported by Maurice Duplessis. Another reason that the Liberals won such a convincing victory were that British intervention in Egypt, Burma, and other colonial hotspots were unpopular among most Canadians, and the Conservatives suffered by association.
However, in many ways, the Liberal dynasty seemed doomed. After winning another 4-year term, Louis St. Larurent was still 75 years old. The most influential and power cabinet minister in Canada, C.D. Howe (even more powerful after the passing of the Defense Procurement Act) was 71 years old (and not in great health). His planned successor, Walter Edward Harris, was largely unpopular in Parliament as being the harsh caucus leader who destroyed the filibuster. Their saving grace however, was that the opposition party was even more confused. Having lost another election after being stereotyped of being the party of urban, anglophone, rich Canadians (as the West went SoCred or CCF and Quebec went Liberal), what was left of the PCs was remarkably unfriendly to Diefenbaker (as it was primarily Ontario- based). After Diefenbaker lost a vote of no-confidence in the caucus, the PCs selected Sidney Earle Smith, a respected academic and President of the University of Toronto who was drafted into the race. Although a great academic, Smith was not a great public messenger, and support for the PCs continued to sag as the party descended into worse in-fighting. Finally, when Smith died in 1959, this triggered another acrimonious leadership election, where Diefenbaker tried to run again. However, he was defeated by Donald Fleming, who had previously challenged him in 1957. A moderate lawyer from the International Monetary Fund, Fleming suited the leadership electorate of the PCs better than the Diefenbaker and won out. This did very little to staunch the bleeding of the PCs.
In Australia, H.V. Evatt had become one of the most globally renowned leaders in the world, due to his role in facilitating the Melbourne Conference which had ended the Three Years War. Right after the end of the Melbourne Conference, Evatt called a snap election to capitalize on his newfound nomination. However, the Democratic Labor Party, the Liberals, and the Nationals truly loathed Evatt and in opposition, they had been ferociously organizing to bring him down. The Liberal-National-Democratic Labor Coalition (or just Coalition) had agreed to nominate one Prime Minister - with two Deputy Prime Ministers from the Nationals and Democratic Labor Party. With the election so focused on anti-Communism, the Coalition selected as their leader Richard Casey, former ambassador to the United States and member of Winston Churchill's War Cabinet. A widely respected military figure, Casey promised to "roll back Communism" and support both the United States and United Kingdom, while calling for a truce on social and economic issues at home. His message resonated and on election day, the Coalition won their greatest landslide ever, as they surged to 90/122 seats (leaving Labor with a rump caucus of 32 MPs).
Immediately, Prime Minister Casey, rallying the old Menzies partisans, declared that Australia would be following the example of the United States, and deploy forces to Indonesia in order to support Dutch and American troops. As part of this, Casey, who was once deployed to Bengal to fight the 1943 famine, announced a further end to the White Australia Party, alienating many of his own supporters. It was feared this would cause a horde of Indonesian refugees to move to Australia, but most of those refugees moved to the Netherlands instead. The Australian deployment to Indonesia was justified by the fact that Dutch New Guinea bordered Australia New Guinea, even though Dutch New Guinea was easily the least violent region of the Dutch East Indies. In addition, Australia made the decision to deploy troops to support the remnants of the National Burmese government, which fled to the southern coast, which was highly defensible due to that region, the Tanintharyi salient, being extremely defensible (the border with the rest of Burma was extremely narrow). When the Britsih were crushed in Burma, instead of completely evacuating the country, they evacuated most of the government to Dawei. [3] With Australian troops holding the front, this freed up the Anglo-Thai troops, which were respectively redeployed to the rest of the British Empire and Laos respectively. Although being totally irrelevant in size (being only 1/15th of Burma's population), the rump Union of Burma was psychologically important as a consolation prize for the British intervention in Burma.
The nation most affected by the war however, was small New Zealand. Over 40,000 New Zealanders died in the Three Years War, almost entirely on the Asian front, out of a population of only 2 million. Statistically, this was a larger proportion than British who died in World War II or even World War I, leaving a country that was deeply shell-shocked and divided between a deeply disillusioned intelligentsia and a remarkably militaristic and nationalistic citizenry. This primarily happened because New Zealand, unlike most of other countries, still had universal male conscription - and when the war broke out, New Zealander conscripts were rushed to desperately counter-attack before the other Allies could mobilize. Prime Minister Nordmeyer, a devout Christian, was horrified by the death toll of the war. Despite being personally popular, Nordmeyer retired to take responsibility for the war deaths. Unfortunately for Labour, the rest of his policies weren't popular, especially the fact that he had significantly raised taxes in order to pay for the war effort.
Furthermore, the 1958 elections saw the Nationals nominate several star candidates who had just returned from the effort, chief among them, Duncan MacIntyre, Commander of New Zealand Armored Forces during the Three Years War. MacIntyre had the unique fame of leading New Zealand armor to assist ROC armor in the famous tank battle of Tiananmen Square. The new Labor leader, Walter Nash, promised to end the universal military training and conscription of New Zealand, something ferociously opposed by National Party leader Jack Marshall, who was actually neutral but understood what the party base wanted.
The Nationals ultimately won a landslide victory and emboldened by his victory, Prime Minister Marshall immediately implemented his beloved policy of ending compulsory unionization, a policy that greatly angered Labour. In international affairs, much like Australia, New Zealand attempted to establish close relations with all of the non-Communist powers, trying to stay out of any disputes between the US and the UK. However, unlike Australia, New Zealand was not willing to support the apartheid regime in South Africa, primarily due to mass public outrage over South Africa refusing to allow Maori rugby players into South Africa. As a result, New Zealand was slightly closer to the United States than Australia was (and father from Europe). That being said, New Zealander troops tended to join Australian troops, both in South Burma and Indonesia.
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[1] Weaker than OTL without the glow of the Korean War ending.
[2] OTL, passing this pipeline hurt the Liberals. ITL, it's justified by the war.
[3] Yeah, I'm doing it, minor retcon, but South Burma is a thing now, and it's modern day Tanintharyi, Mon State, and the Southern edge of Kayin State.
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Poor Dutch, getting screwed by their own ally.
Edit: Btw, why the hell aren't the Dutch fighting for every inch of
Exhaustion and just lack of military capacity. At the end of the day, it is really really hard for a nation of 9 million to hold onto a colonial region of 90 million. When the Americans snatch Sumatra/West Java out from under them, they're fuming outraged, but there's nothing they really can do.
Chapter 125 - The Political Abuse of Psychiatry
The Political Abuse of Psychiatry
One of the most common "rebuttals" to returning American veterans from the Three Years War, especially those returning from captivity (such as most of the troops captured in the fall of South Korea), was that their political advocacy was the outcome of "Communist brainwashing." Edward Hunter, a CIA agent and journalist, spuriously claimed that North China had developed secret Communist brainwashing abilities. Speaking to Congress, he sparked a nationwide frenzy. The mass media was broadly sympathetic to a fellow journalist and a CIA agent and quickly spread his congressional testimony. As a result, hundreds of veterans were targeted by annoyed local and state governments, and involuntarily institutionalized on fears of "Communist brainwashing." Returning veterans were disproportionately likely to demand that the United States recognize radiation sickness - the US government notably did not recognize the fact that thousands of American veterans were suffering from radiation sickness due to the atomic bombing of North China. Conflict between "Bork's Boys" and local governments was commonplace almost everywhere they went to, since their veteran's radiation sickness advocacy was seen as an example of "Communist brainwashing." Arrest warrants were put out for them in many states. Similarly, Curtis LeMay was arrested in Chicago while travelling to the Republican National Convention in 1960 (he was a delegate) and forcibly institutionalized as a "Communist sleeper agent" due to his history as a POW in Korea (and opposition to the administration). Realizing that he might himself be targeted, his martial arts aide, Carlos Norris, distinctly chose not to come back from his trip to South China, denouncing the arrest of his patron.
Interestingly, President Kennedy himself did not authorize any of this. In fact, he issued an executive order asking his subordinates to research the effects of radiation sickness and ordered his Secretary of Defense to order the US Army to not recognize "Communist brainwashing" as a real mental illness. However, the military more or less ignored his orders to research radiation sickness and although they obeyed him with results on Communist brainwashing, the FBI and CIA had more or less turned into totally autonomous agencies that could ignore him, working with Kennedy partisans who were far more gung-ho than the President himself actually was (for example, it was Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley who ordered LeMay's arrest).
Only a day after the Republican National Convention, a pro-Republican newspaper, the New Hampshire Union Leader dropped a bombshell that they had been saving up - that President Kennedy had been engaging in a long series of extramarital affairs. At this point, Kennedy had already been nominated, which was almost certainly part of the Union Leader's calculations. His approval ratings cratered overnight from the low 60's to the low 40's - extramarital affairs were scandalous in a nation where adultery was still technically illegal in many states. The next Gallup poll actually had Senator Chase Smith leading Kennedy, 45-43. However, the pro-Democrat media also had their own bombshell to drop. Immediately after, the New York Times notably took a survey of thousands of members of the American Psychiatric Association (who generally leaned Democrat). The majority of these psychiatrists agreed that Senator Margaret Chase Smith was "mentally ill", despite having no personal relationship with Chase Smith and no information to assess her mental health outside of a prejudicial background blurb that talked about her "close association with Communists" and outdated Victorian-era "evidence" of "female hysteria." Interviewing dozens of (entirely Democratic) psychiatrists, the New York Times found plenty of prominent academics willing to go on record to call Senator Chase Smith "mentally deranged", "mentally unwell", a "poster child for female hysteria", "temperamentally, menstrually unfit for office", "mentally infested with Communists", and many other comments. One academic even went as far to posit that the presence of socialists in the Republican Party was a manifestation of "the Senator's delayed-onset menopause, a herpes of the soul." Slowly, the race returned to a dead-heat, 46-46.
As a result of this, the 1960 elections might have been the ultimate cultural contrast. The dashingly handsome young man with a sordid history of affairs against an older woman attacked by the mainstream media as "menstrually unfit" for office. Similarly, their Vice-Presidential nominees seemed like very different people. Kennedy had picked the liberal Scoop Jackson of Washington, while the segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was more or less foisted onto Chase Smith. Interestingly, despite the psychotic vitriol in the mass media against both candidates, Kennedy refused to comment on Chase Smith's gender, campaigning primarily on his relatively popular and successful domestic agenda. Chase Smith in particular refused to comment on Kennedy's affairs, focusing her campaign on the authoritarian excesses of Kennedy cronies.
Over in the Soviet Union, a very different political abuse of schizophrenia was growing. Beria's massive focus on scientific development in the aftermath of the Voyager and Asterix embarrassments were a huge boon to all kinds of Soviet scientists. Lysenkoism was finally trashed as psuedoscience and Soviet cybernetics and computer science were given a huge boost, which would eventually lead to the modern Cybernet. However, this was also a huge boon to one man in particular, Andrei Snezhnevsky, who proposed the idea of "sluggishly-progressive schizophrenia", his theory that only a mentally sick person could oppose the obviously successful and superior Marxist-Leninist socialist system. Beria's NKVD often came under suspicion that Beria favored it and gave it too much funding at the expense of other agencies. To deal with those suspicions, the NKVD gladly redirected hordes of funding to Snezhnevsky to set up a massive network of "mental hospitals" with NKVD assistance. At these institutions, hundreds of dissidents were typically given "electroshock therapy" until they were cured of "sluggish schizophrenia." In practice, the treatment did not resemble anything like actual electroconsulsive therapy - it largely just consisted of torturing people with electrocution until they renounced anti-communism or died. Ironically, Beria was able to take credit for phasing out the use of capital punishment in the NKVD - largely because he replaced it with lobotomizing dissidents as the "last-resort" cure for "sluggish schizophrenia" (lobotomy was illegalized in the USSR in 1950, but re-legalized in 1960). When the United States condemned the Soviet Union for more or less cutting out the brains of political opponents, the Soviets easily retorted that the Americans were hypocrites - the NKVD then immediately revealed that President John F. Kennedy's sister, Rosemary Kennedy, had been lobotomized in the 1940's, adding to the scandals around the Kennedy family. The Americans immediately withdrew their objections when American journalists and intellectuals began floating lobotomization as a "solution to Communist brainwashing", though this proposal was never actually implemented in the USA.
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Baldrick
Banned
*claps hands*
America on the verge of becoming a police state in the 1960s.
What could go wrong?
Damn Chuck Norris almost got send to the loony.
But I sure he were had fought his way out with fists and kicks of fury.
But I sure he were had fought his way out with fists and kicks of fury.