Timeline-191 is a fan name given to a series of Harry Turtledove alternate history novels.
TL-191 includes the novel How Few Remain, and the Great War, American Empire, and Settling Accounts series. It has run from 1862 to 1943, and is likely to continue after the 1940s.
It is named after Robert E. Lee's Special Order No. 191, detailing the Army of Northern Virginia's invasion of the Union in September 1862 during the American Civil War. In reality the orders were lost and recovered by a Union soldier, allowing General George B. McClellan to surprise Lee and force the Battle of Antietam.
The Wars between States
In TL-191 Lee's orders were never found by Union troops and McClellan was caught by surprise. Lee forced him into battle on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and destroyed the Army of the Potomac in the Battle of Camp Hill. Lee went on to capture Philadelphia, winning the Confederate States of America diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France, and eventually winning the war.
Abraham Lincoln was defeated in the 1864 elections, and another Republican president would not be elected until 1880. James Blaine was a hard-liner who precipitated a war against the Confederate States over the purchase of the Mexican provinces Sonora and Chihuahua.
Due to spectacular leadership from Confederate general Thomas Jackson against his counterpart William Rosecrans and the assistance of Great Britain and France, the United States was once again defeated and the Republicans turned out in the 1882 elections. In return for British and French assistance, Confederate President James Longstreet was obliged to propose the nominal manumission of the country's slaves, which proceeded throughout the 1880s. The defeated United States, realizing it needed powerful allies to counter the Confederate alliances with Britain and France, begins to accept the assistance of the German Empire.
A battle in the Montana Territory against the British produced two American heroes who would be rivals for forty years: General George Armstrong Custer and Theodore Roosevelt, colonel of the Unauthorized Regiment.
Witnessing the collapse of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, now an orator, allied with American socialists and led left wing Republicans into this new party.
- How Few Remain (1997)
Great War
- The Great War Trilogy
- American Front (1998)
- Walk in Hell (1999)
- Breakthroughs (2000)
The Road to War
For the next thirty years, the Democratic Party dominated the politics of the United States. The Socialists eventually displaced the Republicans as the opposition party, and the GOP devolved into a small regional party of the Midwest. The United States economy and military were reformed along Prussian lines: peacetime conscription and a naval buildup began, and resources such as coal, kerosene, and food products became subject to rationing. Large trusts held untrammeled power over the economy, with government encouragement, and labor rights largely ignored. The US eventually formally allied with the German Empire and joined the Quadruple Alliance.
A racial caste system similar to apartheid had been instituted in the CS, where Negroes were defined as "residents" rather then citizens, and who could not vote or even move freely about the country. Under the weight of this oppression the socialist theories of Karl Marx had taken hold among southern Negroes. White politics, meanwhile, was dominated by the Whigs, a conservative, mostly upper-class party, opposed by the Radical Liberals, a small opposition party which was popular in the fringes of the Confederacy, such as in Louisiana, State of Sequoyah, Sonora, Chihuahua, and the state of Cuba.
Canada was largely unchanged, except for the Anglo-Quebecois rivalry being overshadowed by fear of the United States, and universal conscription for the armed forces.
Overseas little seems changed, except that Japan, in addition to holding Chosen and Formosa (Korea and Taiwan, respectively), had also seized the Philippines from Spain during the Hispano-Japanese War (c. 1905). There was no Russo-Japanese War. Alaska was - for understandable reasons - never bought by the USA, and remained a Russian colony.
Relations between the two American nations had been tense since the Second Mexican War of 1881–1882. The Confederates joined their traditional allies Britain and France alongside the Russian Empire in the Quadruple Entente. Incidents such as border raids and the Anglo-Confederate proposal for a Nicaragua Canal nearly brought the two alliances to war many times. But when the spark for war comes, it is not in America but in the distant Austro-Hungarian Empire.
1914: Declaration and Invasion
The Empire's Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his family were killed by a terrorist bomb while touring the town of Sarajevo in June 1914. The Austrian government quickly learned that a Serb group was responsible, and accused the government of nearby Serbia of colluding with the terrorists. The Russian Tsar Nicholas II backed Serbia, and German Kaiser Wilhelm II backed Austria-Hungary, and the major powers of each system mobilized their militaries, effectively signifying their intent to go to war. The Great War began in August 1914, initially pitting Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Across the Atlantic, Democratic President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the US military to mobilize in late July, following Germany's lead. In response Confederate President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Confederate military to do the same, and fighting soon broke out on their common border and the high seas. The United States began the war in North America by officially declaring war in early August. President Wilson responded in kind, although he had hoped to avoid a war. Wilson's speech, given in a tightly-packed public square of Richmond, Virginia decorated with statues of southern war heroes George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston, became particularly famous.
Hoping to emulate General Lee, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia launched a massive invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania in August, targeting the northern capital of Philadelphia. The ANV quickly overran the old capital of Washington, D.C. and pushed on through Maryland.
The US Army took a different approach, and ordered First Army under Lieutenant General George Custer and Second Army under Major General John Pershing to cross the Ohio River and invade Kentucky. Although Confederate resistance was high, especially from river gunboats modeled after the original Monitor, they succeeded in establishing a bridgehead on the southern bank. A US invasion of Sonora, intended to capture the Confederacy's sole Pacific port of Guaymas soon bogged down. A young army captain named Irving Morrell was wounded in this venture, and spent much of the next six months in Tucson, New Mexico Territory recuperating.
The US also launched attacks on the British dominion of Canada, specifically in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Perhaps the most successful maneuver during these early stages was the US Navy's capture of the British base at Pearl Harbor in the Sandwich Islands in a surprise attack.
1915: Stalemate
These offensives soon stalled, however; the US armies found it difficult to push south, and the ANV was slowed by the 1914–15 winter and the invasion of Pennsylvania ground to a halt at the Susquehanna River, only a dozen miles from Philadelphia. From that high-water mark, US forces slowly pushed them back into Maryland.
Although the US forces easily conquered the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River, crossing it proved another matter. The geography of the Niagara Peninsula soon bottlenecked the invading army, and though Winnipeg, Manitoba, a major rail junction, lay relatively close to the US border, the War Department allocated too few troops to capture it.
Trench warfare became ubiquitous as each side dug in for protection from machine-gun fire. Troops huddled in these trenches as heavy artillery in their rear pounded the enemy lines night and day. They dreaded the order "Over the top!" which meant they would have to leave the safety of their lines to charge into No Man's Land, in the hope of capturing the enemy trenches on the other side. Far from the quick, glorious conquest each side had imagined, the Great War became a long, bloody stalemate.
Early in 1915, another front was opened when the Utah Mormons seceded from the US and declared themselves the independent nation Deseret. Mormon relations with the rest of the country had been hostile since the Utah War of the 1850s and the brief uprising during the Second Mexican War, and they believed the distracted US government would be unable to subdue them. They were wrong; Utah sat on one of the major transcontinental rail lines, and President Roosevelt stated the US would not tolerate unlawful rebellion. The Mormon rebellion raged until mid-1916, when it was finally crushed and Salt Lake City captured.
In the autumn of 1915, with the armies of the Confederacy locked in mortal combat with those of the USA along the border regions, the CSA's blacks rose up in revolt. Bitter over their treatment by the whites, and fueled by rhetoric of Marxism and the teachings of Abraham Lincoln, the blacks declared Red revolution in several areas across the CSA and established "socialist republics", while massacring whites and seeking justice against their former white masters, although most trials were shams, and the executions brutal. These rebellions were gradually crushed by 1916, although white justice mellowed out a bit as thoughts were preoccupied with winning the war. Ironically, this revolt actually made white people start to believe in the military potential of blacks.
1916: Slaughter
Taking advantage of the Confederacy's plight, the US First Army finished slogging through western Kentucky and marched into western Tennessee, while the CS Army of Northern Virginia was pushed south toward Washington. In mid-spring of 1916, a new armored technical advance called the "barrel" (called a tank by the British) was introduced to combat for the first time by US forces operating in the Roanoke Valley. In Tennessee, General Custer transformed his tactics for cavalry into a doctrine for the new barrels, but the War Department would hear none of it. When Custer's summer offensive opened that summer, tens of thousands of US soldiers were lost attacking Confederate lines, and the new barrels broke down in the hilly terrain, not being used the way Custer thought they should be.
The lack of British troops in Canada meant that the USA, while initially held back by Canadians, would slowly advance toward their triple objectives of Quebec City, Toronto, and Winnipeg. Largely thanks to the efforts of Irving Morrell, US forces pushed up to Banff in the Canadian Rockies and cut the Pacific coast off from the rest of the country. At sea, the great Battle of the Three Navies between the USA one one side, and UK and Japan on the other, prevented the Entente from recapturing the Sandwich Islands. With the Central Pacific in US hands, a US Navy flotilla made its way south toward the Cape of South America and the Atlantic on the other side, with the intent of cutting off Argentine grain and beef shipments to the UK.
On the Maryland front, the state was cleared of Confederate soldiers save for those holding Washington, the nominal US capital. In Tennessee that autumn, more attacks toward Nashville gained the USA nothing but a possible Democratic loss at the polls, with the possiblity a Socialist President would seek peace with the CSA and renounce all the bloody gains. Save for a local attack on the Roanoke Front that pushed the USA out of western Virginia, the Confederates stayed on the defensive that autumn and attempted to drain the USA dry, hoping to sicken the US population of war.
Nevertheless, for all the wishes of the Socialist Party and the Confederates, Theodore Roosevelt was re-elected. In Richmond, the hopes of President Gabriel Semmes and his Cabinet were dashed. The USA had another four years to crush the CSA, and the Confederates were already running out of white men to fight. A bill was passed authorizing the training and arming of Negro troops who would serve in the lines, with civil rights given after the war.
In Europe, the war seemed little changed from our world, with the exception of Verdun's capture by the Germans, and an apparantly heavier use of African infantry by the French Army. Also, Italy stayed neutral in the conflict.
1917: Breakthroughs
General Custer secretly developed a scheme to quickly end the war in the USA's favor, using a massed-barrel (tank) formation forbidden by the War Department. Disguising his true intentions to all but Lieutenant-Colonel Morrell and his adjutant, Major Abner Dowling, and lying to the president, Custer launched his Barrel Roll Offensive on Remembrance Day—April 22, 1917—and quickly broke through the Confederate trench lines north of the Tennessee capital. The Southerners withdrew to a line centered on Nashville, where Custer hit them again three weeks later by outflanking the city using a plan concocted by Morrell. Nashville fell, despite the best efforts of the newly formed CS colored regiments to stave off Custer's barrels, and the state capitol became First Army headquarters. From there, in July, Custer attacked in the direction of Murfreesboro, and near Nolensville received a Confederate request for a local armistice. President Roosevelt assented, and peace on the North American front came to Tennessee a week before the rest of the US-CS frontline. At the same time, mutinies in the French Army led to that country's exit from the war, while Russia collapsed into revolution and anarchy.
On the same day the Barrel Roll Offensive began in Tennessee, the US Army in northern Virginia attacked southward toward Manassas at the same time as US troops entered occupied Washington DC. The de jure US capital was recaptured after several days of intense street fighting, which leveled the city and its famous landmarks. In northern Virginia, US attack after US attack forced the CS Army of Northern Virginia to retreat south. In battles at Round Hill, Centreville, and Bull Run creek, rear-guard actions led by a few battered batteries of the First Richmond Howitzers prevented the complete destruction of Robert E. Lee's fabled army, but it was obvious the war was on the verge of being lost—a notion that did not bode well with several Confederate soldiers, who reckoned the war was won only months before.
In Canada, Custer's methods were used to break through the Anglo-Canadian lines south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the provincial capital was taken in late May. The same strategy was used by US forces battling their way into Toronto, Ontario, the fall of which precipitated a British Empire request for a cease-fire with the USA on all land fronts. The armistice was granted in early June, and, with US-German naval operations cutting off Great Britain from its Argentine and Australasian food suppliers, the United Kingdom sued for peace later that summer—the last opponent of the Quadruple Alliance still in the war.
The Confederate States of America started sending peace feelers to Philadelphia as early as the fall of Nashville, but Theodore Roosevelt refused to grant a cease-fire until certain the CSA was severely hammered elsewhere. The last hammers on the Confederate Army came in late July, when fighting reached the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, which was only fifty miles from the Confederate States capital. With a cease-fire already in effect in Tennessee, Sequoyah overrun, and fighting out west in Texas and Arkansas sputtering down, the CSA agreed to a general armistice on land and at sea. For the first time since August 1914, the guns fell silent in North America.
At sea, however, the submarine CSS Bonefish, led by Confederate Navy man Roger Kimball, carried out a sneak attack on the USS Ericsson even though he was fully aware of the war's end. For a long time after the war, both North and South believed the ship's destruction was a work of the Royal Navy, as the war between the USA and the British Empire at sea had not yet ended.
The American Empire
The American Empire Trilogy:
- Blood and Iron (2001)
- The Center Cannot Hold (2002)
- The Victorious Opposition (2003)
1918: Old Animosities Rekindled
The United States celebrated hard during 1918 as it reveled in the euphoria of having won revenge on the Confederate States, with parades and parties lasting well into the autumn. President Roosevelt and General Custer (general being his true rank now, as Roosevelt promoted the aging officer in Nashville as the war was ending) rode together in the Philadelphia Remembrance Day Parade—the biggest one to date. The tradition of showing the national flag upside-down to show distress was put aside to show the USA had reversed the outcome of 1882. But, the U.S. and C.S. navies still had to deploy minesweepers to clear their harbors, which kept them busy until the end of the American Empire trilogy.
Not everyone celebrated hard, however. Returning veterans found scabs working for cheaper wages in the factories and mines they had worked at before the call to arms during the war. More veterans found themselves being put down by capitalists and factory owners, and went on strike in industrial centers like Pittsburgh and Toledo. The owners sicced the Pinkertons and police on the strikers, but were repulsed by the war veterans, having faced far worse challenges in the trenches. The country seemed to be on the verge of revolution, and the Socialist Party capitalized on gains among the lower classes. In November 1918, they captured the House of Representatives for the first time, upsetting Theodore Roosevelt's plans for domestic and foreign affairs.
Citizens of the defeated and truncated Confederacy were hardly in a mood to celebrate. President Roosevelt had forced humiliating terms upon them in return for peace, and President Semmes had no choice but to agree to it. Kentucky was lost to the United States. So was Sequoyah, and western Texas—which the USA admitted into the Union as the state of Houston, with its capital at Lubbock. Pieces of Arkansas, Sonora and Virginia held by US troops at the armistice were also admitted into respective US states. The CS Army and Navy were severely curtailed, and massive reparations had to be made to Philadelphia. These terms angered Confederates, but they had no choice. It was Roosevelt's peace or the war renewed, and they were in no condition to fight. Due to the payments being sent North, the Confederate dollar spiraled out of control, as hyperinflation ruined the CSA economy. In reaction, hatred against the USA went up among the white population, with several reactionary political parties sprouted up across the South. One of these fringe groups was the Freedom Party, founded by Anthony Dresser in Richmond, Virginia.
As for the British Empire, the Dominion of Canada included, President Roosevelt forced recognition of the Republic of Quebec (established in April 1917 as the war in Canada was drawing to a close) and the Republic of Ireland out of London, along with relinquishing claims to the Bahamas, Bermuda, and the Sandwich Islands, and all of Canada. The Dominion government was made an illegal assembly, with US Army authorities setting up occupation headquarters in Winnipeg and turned each province into a military district. Occupied Canada was declared to be US territory as part of the new American Empire, "stretching from the Gulf of California to the Arctic Ocean." In 1919, General George Custer requested and was granted the post of governor-general of Occupied Canada in retribution for what he perceived to be a Canadian "murder" of his brother Tom in the fighting of 1881.
1919-1924: American Blood & Iron
The Freedom Party was doing well for itself in Richmond. Its chief speaker—vengeful, spiteful and bitter ex-sergeant named Jake Featherston—harangued crowds at public meetings and squares on how the Confederacy had been "stabbed in the back" by the Whig Party, the War Department, and, most of all, the black minority, who had risen up in Red rebellion in 1915. His angry mannerisms connected him and his Party to the masses, and soon the Freedom Party became the white man's proto-version of the Socialists popular with Confederate blacks and Northerners in the USA. Everyone who knew better saw Featherston as the Party's true leader, and the "Sarge" won leadership in a power struggle against Dresser in mid-1919. Once he was comfortably settled in his new office, Featherston reorganized the Party into a political party revolving around his goals and ambitions, and white-shirted "stalwarts" were soon elected into the Confederate Congress, while their assault squads took on Featherston's enemies.
The victorious United States, with its American Empire, ignored political events occurring down south, save for a worried Representative from New York City named Flora Hamburger. Despite her calls for action, her party took no notice, preferring on ousting President Roosevelt out of office in 1920—which it did, when Upton Sinclair becoming president of the United States on March 4, 1921. That same year, Jake Featherston ran for office against Wade Hampton V of the Whigs and Ainsworth Layne of the Radical Liberals. He lost by a narrow margin but resolved to fight on. In the meantime, a deranged stalwart assassinated the new president in Alabama, and the Freedom Party immediately began to lose support—which hurt the Party a lot in the elections of 1923 and 1925. Another factor that limited the Freedom Party's chances for success was President Sinclair's lifting of the war reparations, which took meat out of the Freedom Party's platform. Featherston and his most ardent stalwarts had nothing to look forward to for the next several years.
In Canada, Governor-General Custer ruled the former dominion with an iron-felt glove, surviving several assassination attempts by Manitoban farmer Arthur McGregor, whom he killed in the farmer's final attempt as Custer was parading through his town. At that point, the war hero was retiring, having been forced out by the new Socialist administration, who wanted to shelve the USA's militarist-feel and go back to the days of peace, hoping that by treating its neighbors with respect there would never be another war. Sinclair was popular enough to win re-election in 1924—the same year the Freedom Party started involving stalwarts in the Mexican Civil War, an action the USA did nothing to stop.
1925-1933: Freedom on the Brink of Power
Radio had just been discovered, and was now starting to reach the people. Jake Featherston was the first politician to realize its potential, and soon people sitting in their homes could hear his raspy, thundery voice shouting from their radio sets, telling them the "truth" about the Yankees, Whigs, and blacks. Even with this broadened appeal to the masses, the Freedom Party's hopes ebbed further with Featherston's defeat at the polls in 1927 against incumbent Burton Mitchel III. The Confederate people were just starting to enjoy the fruits of peace and prosperity, and the war and black uprisings were the mere past—despite Featherston and his stalwarts doing their utmost to remind them. It seemed nothing could change the fortunes, then in 1929 the world's stock markets crashed.
In the CSA, Burton Mitchel III was blamed. In the USA—having come out of the 1920s with a booming economy and a Canadian revolt having been crushed in 1925—newly elected President Hosea Blackford took the heat. Millions lost their jobs, and in Utah, occupied since 1916, Mormon fanatics gunned down Governor-General John Pershing. When Japan and the USA went to war in 1932 after Japan was caught smuggling weapons to Canada by the USS Remembrance, and Japanese bombers attacked Los Angeles, Blackford was turned out of office by Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Coolidge died before he could hold office, and Hoover installed his platform policy of government non-intervention in the economy.
Things were happening in the CSA, however. Whole cities echoed to the boot-steps of marching stalwart formations as the Freedom Party, whose ranks were flowing once more with the angry and the wrathful, prepared for Election Day 1933. Jake Featherston attacked the Mitchel Administration with the most vulgar venom and hate, blaming Mitchel for the crash and his response to the floods that devastated the Mississippi. Millions of Confederates lapped it up and shouted for more, which he had. When he took the oath of office on March 4, 1934, the world held its breath. "Freedom" was on the march.
In Europe the storm clouds were also beginning to gather. The final vestiges of Bolshevik revolution were crushed by 1927; among the last holdouts was the Volga town of Tsaritsyn under Joseph Stalin and his second in command the Hammer (Molotov). Under Tsar Michael Russia remained a primarily agricultural, backward country. Frequent anti-Semitic pogroms and foreign loans managed to deflect further restlessness, but the latter contributed to the Business Collapse in 1929 when Austria-Hungary demanded the repayment of a loan Russia was unable to fulfill.
Austria-Hungary itself remained a united empire, but only the Austrians and Hungarians felt any loyalty to the Habsburg monarchs. In fact, the multi-ethnic federation seems to have been held together only by German aid and bayonets. The Ottoman Empire also appears to be in the same boat, undertaking the ethnic cleansing of its Armenian population. Despite strong censure from the US and more lukewarm protests from Berlin, the killings continued until there were hardly any surviving Armenians.
Kaiser Wilhelm II ruled a strong Germany, and his troops continued to occupy Belgium, the Ukraine and the puppet Kingdom of Poland, but post-war relations with the US was such many on both sides of the Atlantic believed that the two countries would come to blows someday. The Collapse put an end to that, however, and the old enemies reasserted themselves once more.
After the Collapse, France found itself under Action Française and its king Charles XI, who began making noises about the return of Alsace-Lorraine to French rule. In Britain the Silver Shirts under Oswald Mosley held similar views and popular support of Action Francaise, though they never became more than a minority in Parliament. Italy never came under Mussolini's rule; not much else is known about it.
Japan did not remain quiet either. Prior to the Pacific War with the US, she persuaded France and Holland to hand over Indochina and the East Indies. Though there were British fears Hong Kong and Malaya would also be annexed this way, Japan showed no interest in doing so. Japan also gained much influence in China during this period, and seems to have annexed Manchuria as well.
1934-1941: The Victorious Opposition
The Depression lingered on in the USA and Occupied Canada through 1934 and 1935, with millions of men out of work and productivity down. President Hoover's only highlight during this time was ending the war with Japan, but many people still questioned why it had been fought in the first place. In Congress, Flora Hamburger Blackford questioned why Hoover and the Democrats were allowing the Confederate States to enlarge its army in violation of the peace treaty. At the same time, she had to deal with several Freedom Party congressmen from the former Confederate states of Kentucky and Houston (formerly part of Texas), who stalled Congressional sessions with calls for a plebiscite in their home states. When Socialist Al Smith was elected over Hoover in 1936, the Freedom Party's shouts started to get heeded.
The Freedom Party in the Confederate States had already turned the government into a one-party rule, with the Confederate Congress passing laws proposed by President Jake Featherston. He faced no opposition from the Confederate Supreme Court because he maneuvered the high court into making its position vulnerable, whereupon he merely extended executive power and abolished the judicial branch. Forced-elections in 1935 and 1937 solidified and confirmed Freedom control of the House and Senate, while state legislatures and governorships were captured. The Army had been purged in 1936, and conscription renewed in 1938. The troublesome Vice President Willy Knight was removed from office after his attempt on Featherston's life later that year, and was soon imprisoned. The police was slowly padded with stalwarts, and soon, with a nod from the national administration and Attorney General Ferdinand Koenig, the states were installing correctional camps for "rioteous" and "unruly" Whigs and Radical Liberals. Radical Liberal Louisiana was toppled by Freedom stalwarts, with Huey Long's regime replaced by a more agreeable administration with Featherston's interests in mind. And, with black rebellion flare-ups popping up all over the CSA, the president had begun looking for quiet and suitable places to exact revenge for wrongs, real or (mostly) imagined, that the blacks had done. Louisiana was the perfect place to begin "reducing population."
Al Smith finally agreed to hear Jake Featherston's demands for the former Confederate states. In the resulting plebiscites of January 7, 1941, Kentucky and west Texas voted to return to the CSA, with promises from Featherston to not remilitarize them, or to ask for Seqouyah (which had voted pro-USA) or any other former CSA territory. Within weeks, Featherston broke his promise and planted his modernized and expanded Confederate Army on the Ohio River, convincing Smith that the time to face Featherston down had finally come. When Germany's longtime ruler died, tensions rose in Europe. The new Kaiser Friedrich I refused to return French territory that France's ruling party had demanded. Britain, France and the CSA soon declared war on Germany, with Russia joining in days later. With war breaking out in Europe, Jake Featherston felt it was time to have his revenge against his greatest enemy: the United States of America. On the first day of summer in 1941, he ordered Operation Blackbeard to begin. The Confederates opened the 1941 War in North America with a surprise attack on Philadelphia and Ohio the next day, June 22, 1941.
Settling Accounts
The Settling Accounts Tetralogy Return Engagement (2004) Drive to the East (2005) The Grapple (due for 2006) In at the Death (due for 2007)
1941-1942: From Columbus to Kiev
At 3:30 am on June 22, 1941, the North American war kicked off with massive bombing raids on Philadelphia and military installations all over Ohio. In an immediate joint session of Congress, President Smith called for - and received - a unanimous declaration of war against the Confederate States. Soon afterwards Churchill and the rest of the Entente announced hostilities against the USA.
Philadelphia had expected Featherston to strike in the east as the CS Army had done in the last war. Though Brig. General Abner Dowling and Colonel Irving Morrell knew better and had prepared for the coming strike as best they could, US forces in Ohio simply did not have the equipment or manpower that were needed to halt the Confederate army under George Patton. Within two months Sandusky on Lake Erie fell to CS soldiers, preventing raw materials in the west from reaching the factories of the east (See Operation Blackbeard for a detailed description of the campaign). Just before Sandusky fell, radical Mormons armed with Confederate weapons began a new drive for independence in Utah, capturing the settlement belt from Ogden in the north to Provo in the south (see Utah Troubles).
At sea the US fared little better although neither side won control of the sea lanes. In July the Royal Navy lured the carriers USS Remembrance and Sandwich Islands away from Bermuda. The island, a strategically valuable submarine and air base, fell to a joint Anglo-CS task force as a result. The Bahamas soon followed, the US Marines fighting island by island before surrendering. Stalemate characterised the war in the Pacific, until December 1941. At the Battle of Midway the Remembrance, sent around the Horn earlier that year, was sunk and the island itself taken. Although Japan also lost a carrier and had another one damaged, the US Pacific Fleet was left devoid of carriers and reliant upon land-based air cover.
The war in Europe spawned less triumph for the Entente. In the Ukraine, the local soldiers and population welcomed the arriving Russians as liberators, ensuring that most of the German satellite was lost. But elsewhere the manpower-swarming tactics of the Russians, unchanged from the last war, ensured that they suffered heavy losses for small gains. The Kaiser's army, particularly its panzers and 88 mm gun flak cannons, proved instrumental in preventing the loss of East Prussia and Poland.
In the West the French Army swiftly recaptured Alsace-Lorraine and stood on the Rhine. Ireland was overrun by the British, while the Anglo-French thrust through the Low Countries succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. The Belgians welcomed the Entente as liberators. The Dutch, though more pro-German, were brushed aside, and some of the North German Plain was overrun.
Yet victory did not follow. The British end-run through Norway, made for unclear reasons (Swedish iron-ore through Narvik? Naval bases? Both?) failed spectacularly. Churchill's bright idea did nothing more than drive the furious Norwegians into the Central Powers' camp. France proved unable to cross the Rhine and the Germans on that front soon rallied. Austria-Hungary, despite its clear weakness, remained united, and though Bulgaria wavered as a German ally she never abandoned Berlin entirely. Only the Low Countries campaign still showed promise by the end of 1941, but Hamburg still remained unconquered. By February 1942 the German Army felt confident enough to launch counter-offensives against the British outside Hamburg and the Russians in the Ukraine.
In North America the post-Blackbeard season proved uninspiring for both sides. Shortly after Sandusky fell, Jake Featherston declared that he would make peace with the US if his 'reasonable' demands were met. All the 'unredeemed territory' was to be handed back, the post-WWI reparations that had destroyed the CS economy were to be repaid and the Northern (but not Southern) side of the border was to be demilitarized. Smith replied that night with the heaviest air raid on Richmond yet, before announcing on the wireless "I have not yet begun to fight!".
Yet despite his bravado, the situation for the US seemed bleak into February 1942. The counter-attack in northern Virginia under Daniel MacArthur soon bogged down. With too many men sandwiched between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, the US Army crossed the Rappahannock River but were held at the Rapidan line. A subsequent Confederate counter-attack under Patton failed to dislodge the Americans, and both sides settled in for the winter. Featherston realised that another knock-out blow was needed, and began planning for a drive eastwards for the spring of 1942. Ohio remained quiet, with nothing more than local offensives. The revolt in Utah showed no signs of ending; by Christmas American forces were stalled within Provo.
Neither side achieved a decisive advantage in the air war. Characterized by Clarence Potter as a "duel with machine guns at a pace and a half", both air forces soon resorted to night attacks only on the east coast, as flak and fighters made daylight raids too costly. Farther west, daytime raids still went on. On a tactical level, dive bombers proved damned effective at hitting ground targets and hideously vulnerable to fighters and flak; Confederate 'Asskickers' suffered enormously from both. Neither American Wright-27's nor Confederate 'Hound Dog' fighters had any great advantage over the other.
It was during this time that the 'population reductions' in the South began in earnest. Any black man whose passbook was out of order was immediately arrested and shipped out to a camp; in the cities Negroes were used as war plant labor while suffering reprisals for black car bombs and other terrorist acts. In the Lousisiana camps the slaughter had begun with submachine guns, a method that proved inefficient. The camps simmered at the edge of rebellion, while most guards couldn't stomach the job and some committed suicide. Soon gas was found to be easier, both for the guards' minds and for order in camps. Sealed trucks were ostensibly used to transfer blacks between camps; in practice the fumes would leave them dead and ready for disposal in mass graves.
Despite the Freedom Party's best efforts, news of the killings reached Philadelphia. Congresswoman Flora Blackford announced to the world Confederate crimes...only to receive scathing comparisons with Utah from the Entente and sympathetic but indifferent reactions from US citizens.
In February 1942, Confederate bombers, bombarding Philadelphia since the war's beginning, managed to hit the Powell House. Al Smith at the time was in the building and was killed. His vice president Charles La Follette was sworn in as president. La Follette vowed to continue the war and win it for the United States.
1942-1943: Under the Heel
The American determination to keep fighting after the Ohio campaign ended with the United States cut in two was a major setback to Confederate plans which had counted on a short war and quick victory. The Confederates decided to concentrate troops in Ohio for an attack into western Pennsylvania to capture Pittsburgh, a major industrial center for the United States. To find these troops, the CSA was forced to pull troops off of other fronts and to bring in under-equipped allied forces from the Empire of Mexico.
The campaign succeeded in reaching Pittsburgh but was unable to fully occupy the city. General Forrest, the head of the Confederate military, advised that the fighting in Pittsburgh had achieved its strategic aim of destroying the city's industrial capacity and recommended pulling the Confederate troops out. President Featherston refused to allow any withdrawal. American forces under General Morrell attacked and surrounded Pittsburgh, destroying the light Mexican screening force. Featherston refused to allow the encircled forces to attempt a breakout. The Confederate Army was whittled down to a few ragged survivors by determined U.S. resistance and brutal house-to-house fighting. The Confederates inside Pittsburgh were forced to surrender. As a result of this defeat, General Forrest began to discuss with Clarence Potter the possibility of overthrowing Featherston.
In other plotlines, Flora Blackford became more hawkish on the war, opposing the administration's attempt to negotiate a settlement in Utah. She found herself frequently agreeing with Robert Taft, the Democratic Senator from Ohio.
The Utah uprising continued. When it became clear to the Mormons that they cannot achieve a military victory, they began a series of suicide bombings throughout the United States - first with car bombs and then with humans strapped with explosives. Blacks in the CSA soon began imitating these attacks.
The extermination campaign against the CSA's black population continued and was expanded with Jefferson Pinkard remaining a pivotal figure. However, the Confederates worried when a diversionary attack launched at the same time as the Pittsburgh campaign and led by General Dowling, threatened to capture the main extermination camp in Texas and expose its operations to the world.
There were no dramatic actions in the naval war. The Americans beat off a Japanese attack against the Sandwich Islands and achieved an advantage in the Pacific. In the Atlantic, the main activity was preventing British convoys from bringing supplies to the Canadian underground. A battle was fought between the Royal Navy and the German High Seas Fleet late in 1942, but both sides claimed victory.
Britain and France were still bogged down in western Germany, while in Confederate newspapers the Russians were reported to be driving on Warsaw. Partisan resistance was a large problem for both sides: Britain had to contend with Irish rebellion, Russia fought Jews, Finns, Chechnens and Azerbaijanis, while Austria-Hungary bled from (amongst others) Serb, Bosnian and Romanian rebels.
Both the United States and the Confederacy, along with other countries, had initiated programs to develop atomic weapons. While no power had developed a weapon yet, it appeared that the American and German programs were ahead of the Confederate one. The British and the French were also rumored to be working on atomic weapons.