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stnylan: aint that the truth? :p

GeneralHannible: that is a good idea....not in new england tho ;)

coz1:wow! such a prestigious family tree!

Oranje Verzet:unfortunatly that clash happens almost everywhere in history :(

JackoftheNight:or neither:p or maybe a more militant new england...better not give away too much tho :D

BigBadWolf: but then again it is those colonists that is the cornerstone of US history :)

kenneththegreat:ahh the good old days...i think that was the only aar i completed fully to my expectations :p
 
King Philip's War Part I

KingPhilipmapcopy.jpg



The one who started the war, was Metacom, Metacomet, or Pometacom, chief of the Wampanoags, but the colonists commonly knew him as King Philip because of his haughty mannerisms. He was the son of Massasoit, who had made a treaty of friendship with the Pilgrims of Plymouth soon after their landing. The event that finally spurred the Indians to go on the offensive against the colonists was the death of Wamsutta of Alexander the leader of the Wampanoags at the time. He was summoned by the major of Plymouth Colony, Josiah Winslow, and while held at gunpoint, questioned him in an arrogant attempt to exert control. However, after the questioning, he sickened and died leaving Philip to take control.

kingphilip.jpg


The war began with an attack at the town of Swansea in 1976, where several men, women, and children were killed. Other towns were soon raided with most of the white occupants slaughtered. Soon after these atrocities reached Boston, a contingent of men armed with muskets marched in the direction of the Indian country. Other towns in the colonies also responded in kind, and sent large numbers of men to gain revenge for their fallen comrades, hoping to meet the Indians in open combat where they would have annihilated them. However, King Philip chose the tactic of attacking the lonely farmhouse, the unprotected settlement, or to creep by stealth at dead of night upon the sleeping hamlet and with fiendish yells to fall upon their victims with the tomahawk, making it very hard for the militia to face them. Soon, Philip succeeded in enlisting the aid of the Narragansetts, who lived near Narrangansett Bay in present-day Rhode Island, and also portions of Connecticut, and eastern Massachusetts, and Nipmucks who occupied central Massachusetts after the colonists resorted to similar methods of warfare that antagonized other tribes which caused more tribes to join Philip. However, many of the Indians assisted the colonies especially those who converted to Christianity.

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This formidable force soon converged on Brookfield, a frontier settlement deep in the land of the Nipmucks. The army first laid an ambush for a platoon of soldiers who were approaching the town and killed eight of them with the rest barely scurrying back to the garrison at Brookfield. The Indian warriors pursued them into the town and buried every building there with the occupants of the town and remaining soldiers seeking refuge in the wooden garrison. The Indians then pushed a flaming cart to the side of the building and watched as the flames began licking their way up the wall. Only through using the last of their drinking water were they able to slow the flames. They would have been burned inside if it hadn’t been for a rain shower that doused the flames and soldiers from other settlements arrived and scared the Indians back into the woods.

Next, the Indian force turned their attention to the fertile Connecticut River Valley, which produced thousands of bushels of grain each year and was known as the breadbasket of New England with farms scattered throughout the region. Soon, other tribes that lived along the Connecticut River including the Pocumtucks, Squakheags, and the Norwottocks joined Philip’s army and together, the concentrated their attacks on the area known as Pioneer Valley and attacked town of Deerfield. After the attack there, a company was ordered to march to Deerfield and bring back any remaining grain and transport it to other garrisons nearby. The trek there went without incident but on the trek to the towns, the soldiers let their guard down on this warm day leaving their muskets in the wagons. At the point where their path crossed a brook, large trees felled by the Indians, blocked their way. As the English bunched together on the trail, the Indians sprang their trap and within minutes, 71 soldiers were killed and the wagons laden with crops, burned with some of the crops being carried back into the forest to the Indians forts. The brook was called 'Bloody Brook’ because the water ran red with the dead soldiers’ blood.

After this disaster, the colonists were in disarray and chaos. This disarray was further inflamed with raids on the towns of Hatfield, Northampton and Springfield where 30 houses were burned. Philip once again had another Indian ally in the Agawam. Although once peaceful, they became hostile after settlers took some of their children as hostages as a precautionary move against an attack enraging them and they extracted their revenge with the burning of Springfield. The Indians then attacked Hadley, and while the villagers were fighting desperately it is said that an aged man with flowing white hair and beard appeared and took command of the battle, and the savages were soon driven off.

Soon, winter came and the attacks diminished with the Indians settling in their forts for the winter and dined on captured crops and crops grown on plots at the fort while the warriors went out and established “week-camps” further east to strike at towns, living off the land and with captured supplies. However, a close call came to the powerful Narragansett tribe as a thousand soldiers from Massachusetts Bay Colony, Plymouth Colony and Connecticut Colony, led by General Winslow and celebrated Indian fighter Benjamin Church marched into Narragansett territory in southern Rhode Island. An Indian traitor betrayed them and told the frustrated colonists the location of a large Narragansett winter camp. A palisade deep within a swamp surrounded the fortress-camp making it very defendable. The soldiers descended on the camp during a blizzard and tried to breach the walls. However, a scout saw the traitor conversing with the British and reported back to the camp, warning them of the upcoming attack whence the leader commanded that entry to the fort be blocked (in this case a felled tree) and for the warriors to man the walls. He considered sending a messenger to nearby tribes for help but with the blizzard, they would probably be late and suffer from hypothermia from the trek to the fort. He sent a messenger anyway as he had a fore-reckoning that he would need them. Seeing that the only way to the fort was blocked, General Winslow decided to camp outside the camp, out of range of the muskets and bows that were being fired at them. He too, decided to send a messenger to ask for more soldiers but he decided to wait until the blizzard was over and could send more troops with the messenger to protect it from ambushes. And so begins the seige of Fort Swamp as it was to be called by beseiging soldiers*

*All of the last paragraph is fiction.
 
Is that because this is where you start laying the ground-work for your timeline, or because there is simply a lack of detail?

All very interesting, which ever way.
 
stnylan:groundwork. just imagine a new england controlled by the state, for the state. like half-life 2...but without zombies :D
 
The war began with an attack at the town of Swansea in 1976, where several men, women, and children were killed.
They must have just seen Taxi Driver. ;)

Seriously though, seems a rough slog for the moment. But old King Philip will most likely regret these actions in the coming months and years.
 
lifeless said:
The war began with an attack at the town of Swansea in 1976, where several men, women, and children were killed.

Damned evil time travelling Indians! You just can't trust 'em. :)

A serious question. The ground work change is the siege of the swamp instead of the tribes rampaging through the winter?
 
oops :p actually no, in real life, the seige was the Great Swamp Massacre which was the beginning of the end for the indians. plus the indians should be starving in the winter instead of living like kings. in fact there wasnt a seige at all.
 
tp640871 said:
This must be the first HoI2 AAR with pictures, but no screenshots :p
Who is to say that this one will not have screenshots in time? But like kenneththegreat I am not so sure of the assertion - there are so damned many HoI2 aars.
 
The blizzard raged for almost a week before finally relenting and allowed General Winslow to send a messenger to Providence on horseback along with 4 escorts also on horses. Winslow predicted it would take him 9 days to get to Providence. It would take him 12. The weather soon deteriorated into unrelenting rain with winds gusting at 4 miles per hour. General Winslow had opted to bunker down outside the swamp fort to starve the Indians into surrendering. Meanwhile, the vanguard of the relief Indian force was arriving to the west of Winslow’s location and were preparing for an assault on Winslow. However, since the swamp was cordoned off by Winslow, they had no way to coordinate their efforts with the commander in the swamp other than by smoke signals which would have revealed their location to the colonists. The Indians outside the colonists’ camp decided to wait until the rest of the Indian warriors who were held up by the blizzard to, in one warrior’s words, “envelop and engulf the dirty white men into the earth.” Contrary to public belief, to attack the colonists at that exact moment would have spelled disaster for the relief army since it would have alerted them that another detachment of Indians were coming and the exact location of where it would be coming from. It would take the others 4 days to arrive.

indianmanwatching.jpg

Indian scouts look toward the colonists’ camp

The detachment with the messenger was attacked about 20 miles from Providence. Instead of stopping to try to fend them off, they decided to just gallop through them, dodging a fury of arrows and tomahawks. Of the ten men, only 4 survived to make it to the walls of Providence where approximately 1900 men had arrived from neighboring towns and more were coming Boston as they were on their way to try to dislodge King Philip from the Connecticut River Valley. On December 19, they set out from Providence to Winslow’s location on forced march. They brought with them three 2 lbs cannons to help damage the walls of the fortress and making it easier to breach the walls. By now, the rest of the Indians relief force had arrived outside Winslow’s camp and was ready to attack. However, they disagreed when to attack. Some wanted to wait for everyone to regain energy and to attack on Sunday, when they believed that the soldiers would be caught off guard. Others wanted to attack later tonight as they feared reinforcements might arrive any minute. In the end, they decided to attack on Sunday. The fortress had 21 days of supplies left.

The New England Confederation had, in a hopeless plea, asked for a military unit from Britain. To protect its colony and its investment, Parliament had decided to send a division would arrive in a month. The French, in reply to this new military presence in North America, in turn sent military assistance to the Indians and sent military advisors and “volunteers” to “further the Indians cause.” The support was immediate, with caravans from Quebec sending muskets and ammunition to King Philip. A new “Indian” regiment comprising mostly of ex-soldiers who were granted land in New France was raised at Montreal and they set off to the borders to New England. In response to this, Parliament decided to sent another two divisions to augment the troops in New England with “naval assistance” which were in reality, going to disrupt French trade. On December 21, the New England Congress decreed “…All able bodied men must enlist to the New England Army and protect the land of our forefathers for an undetermined amount of time…” making it very much like the modern Swiss army. These new “recruits” were trained at the new Boston Military Academy otherwise known as Fort Charles, a new fort erected to defend Boston. With events escalating, two of the world’s superpowers were converging on New England.
 
Tit for tat. I can't imagine the Indians will come off well from a large war, however.
 
It's hard enough to fight a winter campaign, much less between Natives and Colonists. But the response to the French sounds like the beginning of a strong military in eventual New England.
 
Only 2 comments!? :mad: lol jk :p any comments is good. plus im getting lazy again...:(

stnylan: of course they wont. they never will. unless you're talking about indians from india of course....:p

coz1: thats the idea yea :)

pics for the next update will be coming up later. for now enjoy the bliss of words, words and more words :p
 
Time ticked away as it always does and then it was Saturday. Tomorrow at sunset, the attack would begin against the colonists. Once again, the weather picked up and winds swept across New England. Unlike their tactics against settlements, they were now facing regular troops who were given time to prepare. In retrospect, the Indians should have attacked the colonists’ position as soon as possible instead of waiting until Sunday when they believed that they would be resting. In preparation for the siege, General Winslow commanded that everyone begin building fortifications to deny any movement in or out of the Indian fort through the one entrance. Soon, low walls were emerging which provided some means of defense against an Indian attack. General Winslow likened himself to Julius Caesar at the siege of Alesia after reading Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallic. However, he had not read through the entire book so he did not read to the part where Vercingetorix surrounded Caesar. Likewise, he did not get to the part where Caesar defeated the relief force, forcing Vercingetorix to surrender. Unlike Vercingetorix, the Indian commanders of the relief force did not send raiders to attack the fortifications while they were being built but if done so would have caught the colonists off guard as Winslow ordered everyone to construct the walls leaving very few to actually guard the workers from attack. By now, the living conditions in the Indian fort were horrendous.

Memoirs of A Soldier During the Indian Wars said:
“As far as the eye could see, laid dead or dying people. The dead were tossed in a pile, away from the rest who were nominally alive. One could see that the month siege did it damage. Blood splattered on the streets, savages fighting over a miniscule grain of wheat. The old, sick and young were all but gone from the fort; most of them dead except for the lucky few who somehow managed to steal some food away. In one corner, I saw a mother cradling an infant to her breast. The infant however, was dead. The mother looked up at me quizzically only to turn back to her dead child cooing to it. With these scenes of death and disease, the air however was remarkably clear. No signs of death was in the air and we were eternally grateful for that.”

With the dead piling up from malnourishment, disease had stricken the ranks of people inside, both warriors and civilians. The disease, which was then identified as smallpox, had thought to have been originated by blankets the warriors had seized during an excursion to a farmhouse of a family whose child had smallpox. Soon, nearly half of the occupants of the fort had caught the disease and the epidemic spreading to the entirety of the confined space. Soon, everyone was sick, dying or dead, leaving none to man the walls. Finally, after 28 days of being besieged, the fort surrendered, sending out a single messenger waving a white piece of cloth, smeared with blood. General Winslow happily accepted the surrender and proceeded to march into the fort, victorious.

The Indian relief force was shocked to see that the fort had surrendered just hours before the attack was about to be launched to relieve it. Undaunted however, they had now decided to torch the fort while Winslow and about 300 soldiers were inside. Although they were saddened to know that their compatriots were still inside, they took faith that they would do the same thing if they were in their situation. They proceeded to throw flaming torches inside the captured fort and fired volley after volley of arrows inside. They also tried in a futile attempt to capture the colonists’ garrison outside the fort but failed costing them dozens of lives. Although they initially had some success in capturing the embankment the colonists soon rallied back and fended the Indian attack off. Meanwhile in the fort, Winslow and his detachment were caught off guard and soon descended into a panic. They shoved flaming roofs and carts away from the entrance of the fort and fled back to the garrison. However, on the way back arrows hit many, including Winslow who died just a few meters away from the safety of the garrison’s walls. Soon, the assault had to be stopped since the Indians had suffered too much casualties and soon disappeared into the forest to rehabilitate. Even with the death of General Winslow, New England praised the victory, the story in the paper for several weeks. Soon, the reinforcements received news of the victory and doubled-timed back to Providence and from there to Boston for their next assignment.

Even though the death of hundreds of Indians is saddening, it severely weakened the Indians ability to threaten the colonists. However, with increasing French support and supplies, this loss was trivial in the grand scheme of things. Things were looking up for the New Englanders against the Indians but were going down against the French…
 
What Winslow should have done was throw a few of those blankets over the walls as a friendly 'present' to the besiegers. Fighting the French will take more skill.
 
The two opposing powers were already bitter over each other’s failures in the Third Anglo-Dutch War and even during the war, both were distrustful of each other. Even though both hoped to create a Dutch puppet state, using the enormous Dutch mercantile assets to gain world trade dominance, each expected that any moment the Dutch might surrender to either one of them, but greatly feared they wouldn't be the main beneficiary. This suspicion led to the defeat at the battle of Schooneveld and the battle of Texel, which if won, would have successfully invaded the Netherlands, forcing peace. Once former allies through the secret Treaty of Dover, they both found themselves now enemies. The Royal Navy was still licking its wounds dealt by the Dutch, but was ready to go back to war against the hated French.

“Ugh…”

Robert Barnes ripped out the paper out of the typewriter and crumpled it, and threw it into a wastebasket a few feet away and promptly missed, the wad of paper hitting the rim and bouncing back onto the floor. He spinned in a circle in his chair and stopped facing the window with a view of the Boston skyline. He turned back to his desk and leaned back, making the leather crack.

“Arg…” he groaned under his breath.

His secretary’s head peered in from the door in a way that her hair fell at an angle.

“Something wrong honey?” she inquired.

He sat straight and eventually leaned forward to his desk.

“Oh, nothing is wrong Molly. It’s just this book…it was interesting in the beginning but now I just lost all interest…Plus Jake wants a draft of at least 50 pages on his desk in New York by tomorrow. I barely have 10. Plus, this doesn’t have the feel of a good book. I mean its just facts! Why must history be so...boring?”

He groaned again before covering his face with his hands. By now, Molly had stepped into his office and sat in front of him in a chair.

“Yeah, publishers can be that way but you know…they’re only publishers because they aren’t cut out to be authors. I mean come on! Being a publisher…” she laughed, “Why be a publisher when you can be an author and write works of art? Why be a critic of the art when you can make the art? Right? Plus I think he’s a bit uptight about being a publisher...Who cares about the publisher? What readers care about is the writer. It’s the writer’s name that is on the cover of the book, not the publisher. Lets see him write a book. Just keep going with this. If not, you can always scrap it and write another book. Go back to writing fiction. I loved your first book, 99 Days in New England. Was kind of sad to see Albert die after expecting him to escape his debtors but…”

Robert peeked out from the gap between his hands. Soon, he pulled them away and gripped the edge of his seat.

“Yeah I guess you’re right…maybe I should go back to fiction…Thanks honey.”

With that last word, Molly got up out of the chair and walked back outside to her desk. Robert’s eyes glanced across his desk to pictures of Molly and their son, William outside their house in the suburbs. He glazed at the clock on the wall behind the typewriter and even though it was just 1 PM, he decided to go for a walk. He got up out of his chair and put on his coat and hat before leaving his office and turning off the lights.

“I’m going out for a walk honey.”

“OK” she said from behind a book. A Farewell to Arms he saw it was. Hemingway, that short-tempered bastard. Why can’t my books sell like his? he thought as he went out the door, closing it with a high tinkle sound from the bell at top. He went around the corner and stopped in front of an elevator and pressed the button. Soon, it came up and the elevator operator opened the gate for him to step in.

oldelevator.jpg


“Ground floor please.”

When they got down, the operator once again opened the gate for him to get out and Robert stepped out of the glass doors framed with steel and into the busy streets of Boston. Its not as crowded as New York he thought as he walked with the crowd with no destination in mind. But then again that’s a good thing. He recalled being pushed and shoved by New Yorkers as he made his way to John’s office. On the corner, a newspaper boy was harking out his wares.

“US calls for diplomatic actions against the USCA! Warns against massing troops on the border of Yucatan state!”

He went over to the boy and bought a paper. I wonder how’s life in the South USA? Or should I say Mexico? He had been taught from his schoolteachers that Mexico had ceased to exist by the early 1900’s due to the Second American-Mexican War but his late father still used the old name and like him, had taken up calling extinct countries by their old names. Might as well call Germany Prussia he thought. He folded the paper back up and tucked it under his arm while he walked to a park nearby. He sat down on a bench and opened the paper to a random page. In a corner was an advertisement for tourist for the Great Lakes Confederation. “Come see Lake Michigan!” it boomed over a picture of a beach with a fleeting image of a city to the left that he assumed to be Chicago.

Soon he was finished with the paper and left it on the bench so someone else could have a go at it. Shouldn’t be a waste he thought. He started to walk up the street but he glanced at his watch and saw that half an hour had passed so he turned in the opposite direction and started for his office. This time, he walked up the stairs instead of taking the elevator and by the time he reached the 9th floor where his office was located, he had broken into a slight sweat. He opened the door with the familiar tinkle and saw that his wife was still reading. With the sound of the bell however, she looked up.

“Back already?” she asked.

“Yeah. Any calls?”

She looked at her notepad and nodded.

“Yeah…Tim said he wouldn’t be in today. A bit late if you ask me after all, almost 5 hours had passed before calling in sick.” She winked at the word.

Robert chuckled. “Yeah…” He turned in the direction of the aspiring author’s office, door shut and lights off. I wonder if he got any work done…He had been working with him on the history book and was working with the Revolutionary War.

“And where’s Jake?”

“He’s on vacation in the GLC, don’t you remember? His wife is expecting too. Should be due in 7 months if I recall correctly.”

He remembered the ad for tourists in the paper. “Really? Guess more leave for him and his wife then.” He frowned at the thought. But if I am going to go back to fiction, it won’t be my problem anymore. Don’t even know how I got cajoled into this job anyway. Oh right. The pay made available by the government of the NER and my extensive knowledge of history. He laughed to himself that drew a curious look from Molly. He went into his office and began thinking on a new book. Maybe an alternate history novel…a what-if New England hadn’t succeeded from the US. He remembered reading Men Like Gods by HG Wells a while ago. Or, I could write about a man who had lived through the Socialist Crisis of the 1900’s or the Economic Crisis of 1929… He dwelled on the thought for a while and decided to think up a plot for the second thought. And so begins a new chapter of my life. He laughed at that too. The absurdity of that phrase used by an author.