If the Fashoda Incident had lead to a war between Britian and France how would it play out? Were would the major fronts be? How might it end?
Why no front in Europe? Also what might the state of each countries colonies be at the end of this war? Might some change hands or gain independence? Also I might add that the 2nd Boar War started 13 months after the hight of this incident so the French might likely aid the Boars if it still starts.Royal Navy would blockade Brest and Toulon.
British troops would attack in West Africa, maybe Indochina. They would probably pick off French Pacific Islands and maybe treaty ports in China. But I don't see and invasion of France or the UK in the cards.
If the French could break out of Toulon, they'd go after Malta and the Canal. In fact control of Suez would probably be central to both Empires.
Britain didn't have a large enough army to invade France.Why no front in Europe?
Thank you, I will take a look at it. Your material seems to be rather extensive though. Where should I start to understand your changes involving the Fashoda incident? Also could you give me a breaf summery of your TL's plot involving the incident?The Fashoda incident is actually pretty hard to progress to a war, and there's surprisingly few timelines that actually attempt to show what might have happened. I did something using it in "Fight and Be Right" (see my sig), so you may want to have a read; essentially, there's would be a Nile campaign, which the British would win, a lot of colonial skirmishing, and considerable degrees of French commerce-raiding, which I suspect they'd be surprisingly effective at. Eventually France would cave in after the British use their massive naval superiority to pick off French possessions one by one, despite a few embarassments on the part of the Royal Navy.
There's no way the French could win- which is partly why they didn't push for war IOTL, of course. Even when you throw in the Russians on the French side, and use that to open fronts in Afghanistan and Korea, the British are still going to come out on top.
Like I say, you might find reading the section on "the War of the Dual Alliance" in Fight and Be Right helpful. I think it covers your questions fairly comprehensively.
I have always thought that the "French won't fight because they would loose" argument is very weak. Kitchener was very diplomatic with the French expedition, allowing them to use his telegraph to seek instruction from Paris. His firm but not overly aggressive stance dispelled a lot of the original tension. France was allowed a way out that permitted them to save face.
We tend to forget just how jingoistic the press and indeed the populace could get in the second half of the 19th centenury about colonial "incidents" and matters of national pride.
Thank you, I will take a look at it. Your material seems to be rather extensive though. Where should I start to understand your changes involving the Fashoda incident? Also could you give me a brief summery of your TL's plot involving the incident?
There is a lot to read there! You may want to just read from about half way through Chapter 22 – the ebook is here.
My view of Fashoda is that as constituted OTL, the crisis is very difficult to get to war, but some sort of conflict over the Upper Nile is possible. For a start you need to change the main players to make them more confrontational. To achieve this, I got an aggressive colonially-focused French Government by collapsing the Third Republic in the 1880s, leading to a regime headed by General Boulanger. Even he doesn't really want war, but is eventually forced into it by his own rhetoric. I also aligned France and Russia much more closely a good deal earlier. On the British side, foreign policy expert Lord Salisbury is replaced by the far spikier Lord Randolph Churchill, who is also very close to Joseph Chamberlain, who OTL was one of the hawks on the issue.
I also took the view that Marchand, and that the French position more generally, is too weak IOTL to make a war plausible. So I ensured that the French grabbed what IOTL is Uganda, bolstering their position in the south, and also beefed up Russian meddling in Abyssinia, which was surprisingly extensive IOTL but never led to anything. IOTL, the French tried to set up an Abyssinian expedition coming from the East to link up with Marchand ; I had this effort be rather more successful, and the crisis begin when British troops who have just occupied Khartoum find a large army of Abyssinians, with Russian and French advisors, moving to take the city for themselves.
Finally, I manufactured a second crisis in Siam to crystallise British fears of encirclement and Franco-Russian plotting. The resulting war pits Britain and Italy against France and Russia, and should hopefully be reasonably instructive about the way an Anglo-French war would play out in the period- although it’s worth bearing in mind that I shifted the scales in the favour of the French as much as I could without being implausible and they still lose.
I'll look at it right away. Could you also tell me were to start reading to find out how you collapsed the 3rd Republic and how it leads to closer relations with Russia? And are there any maps that show how the war changes colonial claims?
I find it interesting that you have France able to take Uganda. I'll have to look at how you did that. I recently worked out a POD to make OTL's German East Africa a French colony by killing off Karl Peters and having French diplomats gain the allainces he did in OTL.
I havn't finishe your TL yet but I've been looking over you map and I have couple questions. Why is western Australia seperate from the rest?
Also is the Congo Free state under the control of the USA? The design within there boarder are quite similar if not.