My fellow posters have said plenty about the pure madness of this, so my question is: What's a Custer Lizard?
"What Madness Is This?" Volume I: The Union Forever
- Thread starter Napoleon53
- Start date
I could be wrong but I think that's this world's name for dinosaurs? It was used in the context of extinction, no?
Where was that? i don't remember that, but if Custer have a crocodile would not be the less weird here
Haha! Somebody finally asked. Custer Lizard is a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
I'm just shocked no one has commented on Samuel P. Bush making an appearance only to talk about "unaccomplished missions." Lol
I'm just shocked no one has commented on Samuel P. Bush making an appearance only to talk about "unaccomplished missions." Lol
I cannot mention enough how awesome that is:
The mighty Custerefeta Aetheling (Imperial Custer Lizard) from the hit film Jurassic Park, a movie about the Union's special weapons project island in the Caribbean where they were experimenting with bringing dinosaurs back from extinction, only to be attacked by their creations after sabotage by Illuminati agents
Shouldn't dinosaurs be called something else ITTL, like, I don't know, draconids?I cannot mention enough how awesome that is:
The mighty Custerefeta Aetheling (Imperial Custer Lizard) from the hit film Jurassic Park, a movie about the Union's special weapons project island in the Caribbean where they were experimenting with bringing dinosaurs back from extinction, only to be attacked by their creations after sabotage by Illuminati agents
Speaking of prehistoric life, is Lamarckism or something like that the scientific consensus in Europa or did someone fill OTL!Darwin's role?
I really like the idea of America calling them leviathans and the rest of the world calling them draconids. That's dope. I tried to work in a bunch of world building in that last chapter. Wyatt Masterson hadn't been mentioned since The Shatter of 1801, but he seems to now be enjoying popularity as a Davey Crockett type mythical figure.
I would imagine Lamarckism is quite popular in Europa as it could still be accepted by Catholics to a degree. After the war there will probably be a massive plunge in the faith and many will likely start pushing the idea of godless evolution.
I would imagine Lamarckism is quite popular in Europa as it could still be accepted by Catholics to a degree. After the war there will probably be a massive plunge in the faith and many will likely start pushing the idea of godless evolution.
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Considering everything else that's going on in this timeline, it wouldn't surprise me if this was actually true
Just revised chapter 55, which incorrectly listed "Legate Generals" as "Field Marshals." (I hadn't quite finished setting up the Union rank system). I also edited in the table of ranks to make that chapter much more educational on how the GAR functions instead of having it in a random comment, lol. I also just edited the story of Italy's unification in the last chapter to make proper sense. My work is never done. 
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 63
SOUTH AMERICA ON THE ROCKS
Brazilian troops prepare to assault Georgetown, Grand Panama
SOUTH AMERICA ON THE ROCKS
Brazilian troops prepare to assault Georgetown, Grand Panama
The winter of 1912 was one of the most brutal on record. The temperatures were bone-chilling, and snow fall in the mountains of California, Central and Eastern Europe, Britain, and China slowed things down to a crawl. Joe Steele pressed on against the Californians, having to travel by land rather than aeroship thanks to copious ice slowing down his ship. In Budapest, brutal fighting was still raging between the Russians and Europans. Field Marshal Perrault had managed to break through Nordic lines in Northern Germany, taking back a small portion of the territory lost. Italy fought long and hard to take back Dalmatia from Grand Serbia, but brutal conditions continued to play havoc. Even Europa's sizeable aeroplane fleet, one of its biggest advantages in the war, was grounded for much of the winter due to the brutal cold stalling planes and freezing pilots. The Beckie Flu was also making headway on the Eastern Front, leaving devastation and death. In Catalonia, more reprisals from Spanish garrisons were spiraling into open civil war. Catalonian separatists bombed the capitol building in Barcelona and burned Europan flags, proclaiming independence before being brutally put down. This violence seemed to spread to other regions of the Empire, particularly South America.
The long-standing plan had been for the United Empire of Brazil and Rio de la Plata to seize Gran Colombia, a neutral state, and from there assault and capture the Panama Canal from the Americans. Earlier that year, Dutch Guiana had seized the nearby Europan Guiana and held strong against UEBRP incursions to take it back. No one had realized that the UEBRP had been forming a perimeter around the colony, as its reconquest was but a minor secondary objective. In reality, a huge buildup in armed forces was aiming for an invasion through Gran Colombia. In early November, in a shocking move, the UEBRP military invaded Gran Colombia and quickly overthrew the government, exiling them to the Galapagos. This rocked Peru, the other neutral power on the continent. Peru's military junta, in power since the Nordic-backed Lima Coup of 1891, reacted with complete rage and blamed the blatant violation of neutrality squarely on Caesar. While Peru remained neutral, it began a fresh buildup of troops and supplies, wary that Caesar might decide their time was next at any moment.
The Gran Colombia campaign was hardly as vicious as other fronts of the war and a puppet government was soon installed under General Julio Augustin Ramirez. The Brazilian-born UEBRP Field Marshal Bento Almir was responsible for the swift action against Gran Colombia and the following decisive victory. Now, his men stormed the Union State of Grand Panama and headed straight for Georgetown, the heart of the shipping world and the home of the Canal. But as his troops, who had a nominally high morale due to their success in Gran Colombia, stormed full-speed ahead into Yankee territory, they were surprised to find only a single legion, Legion XX, of Edelstein's Army Group VI, manning defenses. While Edelstein had just seized Baja California, only Legion XX under Major General Stanley Q. Sherman, great-nephew of the more famous general and president William Thomas Sherman, was left behind to hold the line. Cheered on by the fact that only 20,000 men were against their 80,000, the UEBRP eagerly attacked, only to find that Legion XX had been given orders directly from Point Overlook that the Canal was to be held to the last man and was absolutely not to fall. They were reinforced by RUMP units mustered from Waynestown, to the north, and from New Oxford and Sweetwater, in the neighboring state of Oxacre. The campaign waged against the Canal's defenders was relentless, with wave after wave of troops going into Georgetown to push them out, only to be relentlessly barraged from every window and alleyway by determined defenders constantly getting resupplied from the north.
Driving Colonel Fords that had seen better days, American militiamen patrol the outskirts of Georgetown for Imperial invaders
By late December, morale was plummeting after an outbreak of measles within the UEBRP Army and two entire months of missed pay. Many of the UEBRP soldiers were just ordinary farmers and laborers who counted on their army checks to feed their families back home. Most had no great love for the forced union they were in and cared little for Europans, who they saw as crusty bourgeoisie living the high life while they suffered in poverty. Now, this was becoming a much bigger problem. The Union Army believed it was literally fighting for God. The UEBRP Army fought for a paycheck, and those paychecks had stopped coming. This was only the beginning of the nightmare. Field Marshal Almir warned Paris that further delays in pay would likely end in mutiny, and that he was beginning to fear for his own life. The weeks of relentless unsuccessful attacks rolled on into the early days of 1913. Over 25,000 men had been lost, and their brothers in arms were slowly beginning to refuse to assault the American trenches again. At last, social order began to break down in Gran Colombia. The rightful president, Jose Tancredo Quirino, had returned from exile with Peruvian assistance and had declared himself under the protection of the "South American Alliance for Neutrality."
Now, Almir's men were cut off by hostile Colombian territory and Peru was itching to assault the motherland while they were trapped fighting the Americans. Faced with starvation and running low on ammunition, huge droves of UEBRP troops began to surrender to American troops. Luckily for them, they were not captured by ORRA units, but by the regular Grand Army of the Republic and RUMP forces. Over 20,000 men gave up the fight this way, with many finding themselves in the POW camps of Springfield, Oxacre. Desperate, Almir launched a mad assault into Gran Colombia, reuniting with forces loyal to Ramirez's puppet government and attempted to cut through back to the homeland. However, this was not to be. On February 20, 1913, Almir was shot in the jungle not far from Caracas by Colombian freedom fighters. Out of the 80-90,000 men he had started the campaign with just a few months earlier, only 20,000 were left to surrender to the Gran Colombian Liberation Army. Faced with fears of a Union retaliatory strike through their territory, the Gran Colombian and Peruvian governments quickly negotiated the Cooperative Pact of 1913, with Peru and Gran Colombia joining the fight against the UEBRP and Europa without formally joining the Central Powers. The UEBRP's neighbors could smell blood, and many thought revolution was coming.
If the UEBRP was in a extraordinarily tough situation before, it grew much graver in March, 1913, when Australian forces touched down on the very southern tip of the continent, having come all the way across the Pacific to throw the country into chaos. The attack was repulsed to some acclaim, but this would be the final victory of the UEBRP. Peruvian troops had a field day cutting through the center of the country, even being gladly welcomed as liberators by some Spanish-speakers who loathed their forced union. On April 1, 1913, in Buenos Aires, a revolutionary government proclaimed the sovereign Republic of Argentina and announced their entrance into the South American Alliance for Neutrality and the Cooperative Pact. Civil war was devastating the country, with the government-favored French and Polish-speakers being pushed out or massacred. In several locales, radicals set up Beutelist communes, such as the Patagonian People's Anarchist Republic.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, the government was now faced with angry, starving crowds hearkening back to the French Revolution. Many officials escaped across the Atlantic and back to Europe, but others were unfortunately part of the May Coup of 1913. Radical republicans basing themselves off the writings of Robespierre and Beutel, stormed the government palaces and began beheading anyone they deemed "foreign." There had been decades of internal strife within the United Empire, and now it all came to a boiling point. Covered in blood and wielding farming implements, the peasants faced down French troops guarding the Imperial Palace in Sao Paulo and demanded Imperial Governor Jean Christophe Jourdain be given to them. The troops fired into the crowd, killing dozens, but the mob soon tore them apart. As they stormed inside the palace, they were greeted with every symbol of luxury and excess that could be imagined. Full cellars full of wine were soon looted, as were priceless works of art and endless mountains of food. The starving farmers finally captured Governor Jourdain and dragged him through the streets, calling him "Murderer of our sons!" and "Foreign devil!" In scenes again reminiscent of the French Revolution, Jourdain was publicly beheaded and his head placed on a pike in front of the Imperial Palace.
French troops scramble to defend the Imperial Palace in Sao Paulo in this rare photograph
Revolutionaries backed by the Neutrality Alliance pose for a photo in Teresina
While the people of Brazil had initially succeeded in destroying foreign rule, the mobs soon turned on each other. Brazil would never join the Neutrality Alliance, as it had no recognized government. There were still thousands of Europan troops in the country, adding to the chaos as they rode across the Pampas and through the jungles, looting and murdering as they went, cut off from the homeland and becoming mere warlords. When Custer received reports of the Brazilian Civil War, he remarked, "It looks like China down there." Again, Beutelists kept popping up all across the nation, but they were now finding most of their membership drifting toward something called the "Brazilian People's Army," founded by Reynaldo Edu, a professor from Sao Paulo who had written several radical texts that had seen him banished to Peru. Now he was back, championing the idea that "The workers should seize the means of production and redistribute the wealth of the nobility." As can be imagined, this greatly appealed to the downtrodden citizenry and was less chaotic than Beutelism or Egoism. Quickly spreading this new gospel of "Eduism," his followers raced across the country to recruit for the People's Army. Before long, Edu's signature plain green banner bearing a yellow star became a common sight across the land. A new era was coming for Brazil as well as for South America....
Eduist militias march through Sao Paulo, June, 1913
An Eduist painting depicting the abuse of laborers by the upper classes
A soldier carries the flag of the Neutrality Alliance in this propaganda painting
Reynaldo Edu greets crowds during a People's Army rally in mid-1913
Political map of the world, early 1913
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I was say right down the middle. Imagine Leninist Syndicalism. As per my general rule of thumb, no ideaology ITTL can be just like OTL, hence why fascism has a completely different origin and why real communism hasn't appeared.
Damn, there ya go, major difference seems to be somewhat successful revolutionary leftism. That could be a major impetus for increasing radicalization under Steele; now you have a major leftist power preaching a coherent ideology of liberation to the Inferiors.
Man, Europa is so screwed right now, that only an intervention from God Himself could save them.
Maybe you can further differentiate it from OTL by having religion be embraced by Edusim rather then rejected like communism. A Peoples Pope elected from the faithful in South America would do wonders for pulling in the more moderate factions. That said, it may make to it too close to religious fascism of the RU.
Either a Palace Coup or a Beckie Flue outbreak explosion are really the only ways Europa can sue for peace
