Eine Geschichte des Grossdeutsches Reich - Germany/Road to Doom's Day

Herbert - Relax, I didn't watch anything past about season three of TNG, I have no idea what he's talking about.

Trekaddict - I've been pretty clear since the beginning: this is not the Best of All Possible Worlds. It's not "Domination of the Draka" bad (and don't even start me on the logical flaws in 'let's establish a scientific revolution in an unsettled territory...') but it's certainly not the best possible outcome. It is very tempting to write basically "THE NAZIS WIN THE SUPER BOWL!" but I'm trying to avoid that in the invasion of the United States.

Nathan - I had a geology professor once who really drove home the problems of the Appalachians. Basically once you're west of them, in his words, "that's a million square miles of flat-lying bedrock." It was made for mobility, and tankfights in, say, Kansas are nowhere near as exciting as in Appalachia, where, to explain the Hatfields and McCoys... "the rocks were folded, they couldn't help it. You lived in your valley and you didn't talk to the neighbors, because of the folded rocks." Plus I just finished Shelby Foote's "Civil War" trilogy, and he went into great detail about how both sides thought that Sherman just couldn't march through the South Carolina Lowlands.

I've got a bit of writer's block on taking New York - I know how to do it (go around, encircle, and squeeze), but the words aren't lining up right. I may do another appendix post discussing the history of the Waffen-SS. I've also decided to follow Nathan's route and go back and scrub this thing when I'm done.

EDIT - Why is the title of this thing an angry smiley?

5. The Battle of New York City

To call the New York campaign a "battle" is a misnomer, just as it is incorrect to call it the battle of New York City; Hauptgruppenführer Bittrich did his utmost to avoid direct combat in the city itself. Among the senior Waffen-SS commanders to rise out of the Second Great War, Bittrich was one of the few prewar military professionals, like Hauptgruppenführer Steiner, who was about to assume command of the South Carolina front independent of Ramcke, and like Reichmarschall Hausser, who had commanded both of these men in the early days of the Waffen-SS. Together, they formed part of the so-called "Das Reich" clique in the upper ranks of the SS, and their prewar background collectively informed their warfighting policies. Unlike Party soldiers like Hauptgruppenführer Dietrich or Hauptgruppenführer Eicke, they did their best to avoid battles of attrition, relying heavily on firepower and maneuver rather than manpower to win their battles.

Thus, the first stage of the New York campaign was to bypass the existing centers of resistance entirely. Stealing a note from the American President Washington, Bittrich launched a nighttime assault across the Delaware River north of Trenton, New Jersey, and severed Philadelphia from American control. General Westmoreland, seeing that the Franklin Line was no longer tenable at all, made a fighting withdrawal toward New York City, aided by a fleet of coastal vessels that evacuated his soldiers from the embattled position at night. Philadelphia became an open city, and Bittrich paraded his headquarters staff past Independence Hall to emphasize the point. Even as the battle at Philadelphia ended, the troopers of his four SS divisions, the regulars of Panzergrenadier "Hohenstaufen" and Panzer "Hohenstaufen," and their reserve twins, began operations to reduce New York proper.

Three American infantry divisions - 10th Mountain, 6th and 7th Infantry - and the forces of the New York and New Jersey National Guard provided a strong defense to the city. The New York militia force included two infantry divisions, one which had included former President MacArthur in the Great War, and the New Jersey militia was an armored division, one of a handful of reserve armored formations in the United States. These were reinforced by further reservists from the New England states and, most ominously for the United States, the activation of the Corps of Cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point as a combat command. This was not the first time the United States had turned a cadet formation into a front-line combat unit, but it was as if the Reichsführer had transformed the Sepp-Dietrich-Schule into an infantry brigade. The United States had reached a point where it was consuming its present to preserve its future, and President Kennedy acknowledged as much when he uncased the brigade's colors for the first time. Significantly, the West Point Brigade's ranks were those of the old Academy, not those of the regular Army.

For his role in the preservation of the Franklin Line forces, Lieutenant General Westmoreland was promoted to full general and placed in command of the Military District of New York, an umbrella organization that included every force currently committed to the state. He began by pulling the New Jersey 50th Armored Division back to act as a quick reaction force, rather than meeting Bittrich head-on. Unlike Bittrich, he made the grim decision to fight the armored divisions in the urban centers, turning houses into miniature fortresses that concealed his armored force. This was to remove the Reich's technological edge and force the engagement at close range. The 10th Mountain Division was deliberately committed to the more rugged land northeast of the city and set to operate more or less autonomously on ground for which it was well suited. Its commander, Major General Kinnard, was equally suited to the task, a master parachutist who had participated in the limited American involvement in the Great War and had become convinced by experience in South America that there was a future for light infantry forces on a battlefield dominated by armor.

Westmoreland continued preparing the defense of New York by appealing to President Kennedy and Governor Harriman for, and receiving, a declaration of martial law. The construction and engineering firms of New York City found themselves and their equipment drafted wholesale into the production of a vast array of defenses, hastily constructed under the guidance of the US Army's Corps of Engineers, and civilian employees of every federal agency found themselves turned out into newly organized militia divisions often uniformed only by red, white, and blue armbands. Everyone who was incapable of defense service was ordered out of the city, and evacuation began on 1 March 1965, just as Trenton was coming under assault. New York City was very much a city under siege, even though Bittrich had not even begun his encirclement yet.

Reichsmarschall Rudel, a former Stuka pilot, knew precisely how to deal with the evacuation, and the Luftwaffe acted immediately to begin sealing the evacuation corridors. The skies over the Atlantic seaboard were now in Reich hands, so bombers were able to operate continuously with impunity, and guided munitions and jellied petrol devices provided a far more effective means of herding refugee columns than high explosives delivered by Stuka had twenty-five years prior. The civil toll of the Battle of Baltimore had been high, and Bittrich had regretted it deeply; when he heard Rudel's orders for New York, he was apoplectic. In one seventy-two-hour period, Bittrich flew from Philadelphia to Berlin, burst into the Air Minister's office, and shouted down the younger aviator. Bittrich had been a pilot on the Western Front in the Great War, and went so far as to throw the qualification badges he had thus earned on Rudel's desk. Hans-Ulrich Rudel, however, was a man of extremely firm convictions, and simply pushed the badges back, quietly informing Bittrich that operations would continue as directed, and that the matter of insubordination - Reichsmarschall Rudel outranked Hauptgruppenführer Bittrich - would be overlooked this once and only this once. Bittrich returned to the American front and gave an order that downed aviators were to be rescued only if other operations did not place any demands on Hohenstaufen resources.

Bittrich continued to oppose direct ground involvement in New York or its suburbs, fighting instead across the hills to the northwest of the city and, save for counterbattery fire, conserving his artillery rather than engaging the Americans. By the sixth, he was in possession of Stroudsburg, and sent SS-Panzergrenadier "Hohenstaufen" dashing up the Delaware valley to seize Port Jervis. Hohenstaufen was now operating on the soil of New York State itself. One consequence of this was that Grossdeutschland, to the west, found their northeastern flank suddenly free of obstruction, and von Kleist surged north to form a bulging salient pointed at Ithaca. It was not his hoped-for drive on Buffalo and Lake Erie, but it was better than he had expected.

Southeast of Port Jervis, Bittrich's troops continued to take advantage of the terrain, using the northeast-southwest ridges and valleys to screen their advance as best they could. This phase of the Battle of New York City ended at Sterling Forest, where SS-Panzer "Hohenstaufen" was trapped by terrain into fighting across a series of ridges that separated the long, narrow lakes of the region. For three days, SS-Panzer "Hohenstaufen" was engaged directly with the American 50th Armored Division in the hills and trees of Sterling Forest park, and Westmoreland reluctantly kept feeding his armored force in to keep the Reich from breaking through completely. Bittrich, however, had no intention of forcing through at Sterling Forest. Like a magician, he kept Westmoreland distracted by the armored fight while SS-Ersatz-Panzergrenadier "Hohenstaufen" followed its full-time counterpart along the Delaware, then burst into Middletown. The regular Panzergrenadiere continued their thrust along the Delaware valley, following the river's former course and battling 10th Mountain Division the whole way. On 13 March 1965, a week after his return from Berlin, Bittrich received word that SS-Panzergrenadier "Hohenstaufen" had established its headquarters in President Franklin Roosevelt's old home at Hyde Park. The Hudson had been breached, and the SS grenadiers now faced the West Pointers.

48th Armored Division broke contact with Panzer Hohenstaufen to their front and fell back on the strong position of Schunemunk Mountain. Bittrich visited the front and took one look at the long, low mountain, heavily wooded and already well entrenched by the Corps of Engineers, and shook his head. He faced a difficult choice: the mountain could not be taken without Luftwaffe support, and it made an excellent artillery position. Westmoreland was an artillerist by training, and the Americans had superb artillery. In the end, Bittrich decided to give the mountain a wide berth and instead chose to shift his attention to the more profitable northern flank of his advance. SS-Panzerarmee Hohenstaufen's south flank would now begin a holding action, containing the Americans in New York City while the noose was fitted and tightened.

Both active and reserve SS-Panzergrenadier Hohenstaufen advanced together down the Hudson, SS-Ersatz-Panzergrenadierdivision "Hohenstaufen" on the west bank and SS-Panzergrenadierdivision Hohenstaufen on the east. They knew that the West Pointers lay before them, and knew the ground over which they were advancing was rugged and well-suited to ambush and a fluid defense, which Westmoreland had already conducted well. Thus, the divisions leapfrogged down the river, providing fire support for each other rather than engaging in the continuous advance which Guderian the elder would have preferred. Poughkeepsie fell on the sixteenth, and Newburgh two days later. Both divisions struck together for West Point itself, beginning the hardest fight of the New York campaign. Four thousand cadets and a thousand cadre defended the fortress, its works dating back to when New Amsterdam was a Dutch colony. Against this came roughly ten times as many men of two of the Reich and Party's elite. The West Pointers refused to withdraw, and the United States Military Academy was a well-constructed institution. Bombardment merely reduced the barracks to rubble strongpoints, and the cadets quickly learned the knack of hiding in them until the SS troopers advanced past them, then striking hard from behind.

In the end, it became a battle of carbine, flamethrower, and trench knife, fought at arm's length. For three weeks the West Pointers fought a determined but ultimately doomed defense, giving Westmoreland much of the time he needed to dig in at Yorktown Heights. It was not until Bittrich, exasperated, ordered that West Point be fully reduced by 20 April that the American cadets were completely routed, and even then it took an all-out two-day push to take the last bastion of defense at the Academy. Bittrich's troopers were exhausted, and, for three precious days, the battle of maneuver ended so that they could lick their wounds. Instead, he released SS-Ersatz-Panzer "Hohenstaufen," which had thus far acted as a reserve, to attack southeast into Connecticut to take Danbury and return the battle to the relatively flat coastal plain, thereby once more bypassing a strong American position at Yorktown Heights. On 1 May, the reservists reported that Long Island Sound was now under their guns from Bridgeport, and that New Haven had declared itself an open city.

The blockade was complete. Bittrich cut the city's electrical power supply and its water and simply began to wait as summer and starvation did their work. His units began to receive replacements while Westmoreland's merely tightened their belts. Finally, on 1 June, Bittrich sent in a request for Westmoreland's surrender. The American general refused at first, but was invited to visit the Hohenstaufen artillery park at Stamford. Gamblingon persuading him through a ruse, Bittrich concentrated all of his artillery, from army level to divisional anti-tank guns, at Stamford for Westmoreland's visit. It had its intended effect; the American commander did the requisite mental calculus and determined that his position was lost. On 3 June 1965, General William Westmoreland surrendered New York City and his army, including mobilized civilians, and Bittrich let food, water, and electricity flood into the city. In defiance of the order, 50th Armored Division attempted a furious, desperate breakout, and was destroyed at Schunemunk Mountain. Bittrich ordered a monument constructed to their stand, and to the West Pointers, and turned his attention northeast, toward Boston.

After New York City, the Reichsführer returned to Washington DC, to reward Bittrich and to hold a conference with the highest-ranking American prisoners of note. Most significant of these was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, followed closely by Senator Richard Brevard Russell, the seniormost member of the United States Senate. Scarcely his junior, though, was Senator Prescott Bush, who had been the one to present New Haven's surrender in person to the Hohenstaufen representatives. Johnson and Russell had been captured in the fall of Washington; Bush had, like Westmoreland, made a calculation to the future of the United States, and found it wanting.

New York down. Next: An ailing Felix Steiner does a reverse Sherman and Heydrich lays out the future of North America.

The same.

Nikolai - The US and Canada get partitioned as severely as possible. I believe my initial math left the "United States" with nine states, but I may revise that map because looking at it more closely I don't see my original idea of "hand everything from Hudson Bay to the Red River back to the Indians" as practical in the same way that the other nations of post-US North America are. There aren't any administrators with the needed experience, and even among the various tribes there are no unifying interests.

Nathan - Rockefeller occupies a Cabinet position in the Kennedy administration. Unfortunately the presidential cabinet lacks a good fit analogue to "Armaments Minister," which is his HoI cabinet title. Neither Commerce nor Transportation are influential or prestigious enough to draw him out of New York.

I suspect that initially they will be as "independent" as Western Europe under the Marshall Plan was, then, as time goes on, the same things that happened in Western Europe would happen, minus the reunification. The obvious means of control is a zero-sum aid game, to keep the American states fighting each other over help from the Reich, but for whatever velvet glove, there has to be an iron hand.

I've been asked to prod those of you who might be interested into voting in the ACAs. I have nothing to offer in return, but speaking for myself, it really helped motivate me early in the game. For myself, I intend to circulate enough to vote, though I expect some of my votes are foregone conclusions. In any case, it is a good opportunity to get outside your usual AAR box and look around the forum.

From tablet, no umlauts.

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6. The Vikings of Atlanta

As one of the first "Germanic" divisions of the Waffen-SS, SS-Division "Wiking" had an unusual history, and was in many ways the prototype of all SS divisions raised outside the Reich. It was not unique in the way that its commander had turned it into a personal fief - Totenkopf and the Leibstandarte had the same kind of territorial commanders, though both Eicke and Dietrich had slowed considerably as they aged. In contrast, Hauptgruppenfuehrer Felix Steiner had concealed his illness at this stage even from his subordinates. Steiner was vigorously energetic, driving his men almost as hard as he drove himself. Only a very small handful of men knew about his increasingly poor health.

Wiking was unique in other ways, in that it gave Steiner full rein to express some of his more unorthodox views. Thus, in the 1950s, when the rest of the SS was drawing down, Wiking went from division to corps to full-sized army. The umbrella organization included SS-Panzer (and paired Panzergrenadier) divisions Waraeger, Wotan, and Walkuere - all raised from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Steiner resisted the "reserve" formations that characterized Hohenstaufen, Frundsberg, and Polizei, with Steiner insisting on active duty and relentless training. The thought was that superior training in wartime would justify the increased cost of maintaining such a large active force in peacetime. Thus, enlistments into SS-Wiking were restricted to Wiking and Wiking alone; the only circumstances under which Steiner allowed transfer out of his command was if there was no vacancy on promotion, which was far more common for senior officers than junior. The result was an exceptionally close-knit force with a strong recruiting pool and an intense sense of identity and unit pride. Competition with each other was as much a motivator as a desire for outside attention for Wiking troopers.

When SS-Wiking arrived in South Carolina, Steiner met with Degen to determine what was going to be required to break out of Charleston. Steiner immediately dismissed Deutscher Orden as a spent force mostly suited to defending Savannah, and sent a memorandum to the Reichsmarschall recommending that the division be pulled out of the front and re-trained. At the same time, he organized his arriving forces. The immediate problem was a breakout from Charleston to the slightly higher elevations around Columbia; the Carolina lowlands were simply unsuited to armored warfare. In comparison, the ground between roughly Fayetteville and Pensacola was mostly rolling hills made of clay harder than concrete when it was dry and treacherous in the extreme when it was wet.

The main terrain obstacle to breakout were the lakes between Charleston and Columbia. These were reservoirs, formed by large dams built in the Roosevelt administration. They provided power to Charleston; destroying them would flood a wide area of the state and possibly inundate the city in addition to leaving it without electricity. Political considerations also restrained Steiner, because the Reichsfuehrer wanted the cooperation of captured American politicians who did not want the south wrecked. Steiner reluctantly committed to an assault along the highway corridor to the west of the lakes. If the Americans adopted a scorched-earth defense, which Lieutenant General Puller might indeed choose, then the Wiking forces would be trapped.

To distract Puller from this, Steiner drew his attention to an institution sacred to the United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. The trainees had already been converted into an emergency division, part of the forces under Puller. SS-Panzerkorps Wotan struck southwest along the coast twenty-four hours before Steiner's other six divisions lashed out perpendicular to them along the MacArthur highways. Felix Steiner lived up to his name: he caught 1st Marine Division in the flank as they shifted south to defend Parris Island. The United States Marines fought well, but they were turned and pinned back against the reservoir. Puller was ordered by President Kennedy to evacuate; he refused, transforming from corps to divisional commander overnight. His leadership made the Battle of Lake Moultrie far more bloody for both sides than it might have been under a lesser man. The last American airplane into the Moultrie Pocket, two weeks after the fighting began, delivered Puller's fourth star and Medal of Honor, and begged him to escape. Puller's response was characteristic: "Retreat, hell! We're surrounded, we've got them exactly where we want them!" General Puller was severely wounded the next day, and 1st Marine Division's resistance collapsed in the following hours, completely spent, on 16 March 1965. Steiner ordered Puller's evacuation to Charleston; he survived his wounds.

Parris Island had by then fallen, and the South Carolina defenses had collapsed without Puller's inspired leadership. 48th Armored Division had retreated on Columbia, South Carolina. Waraeger and Walkuere encircled and reduced the city, complete with the Georgia division, as Wiking was destroying the Marines. In a separate coup, Wotan had struck onward from Parris Island and taken Savannah. Steiner now faced a problem: his forces were farther dispersed than he wanted, but they had been far more successful than he had hoped. Without Puller's leadership, there was a sudden vacuum in the region. The First Armored Division had mobilized from its base at Savannah for the Virginia Front, and was instead ordered to stop at Atlanta to form a new nucleus of resistance, 1st Armored Corps, under Lieutenant General Creighton Abrams. The elder Patton had once described Abrams as his one peer as an armored commander in the United States; Abrams now had the chance to prove Patton right in facing SS-Wiking.

Abrams and Steiner were a unique match: both hard-charging and believers in furious training; Steiner's hand in Wiking had made them the closest-knit of the SS formations. Abrams was a close associate of the founder of the United States Army's special operations command, Lieutenant General William O. Darby, who had survived the Gavin purges of the 1950s and had sheltered the specialist divisions of the United States Army - the airborne and mountain divisions - from assimilation back into the mainstream when Gavin's fall had threatened them. Abrams had argued in favor of the expansion of these forces, and when he asked Darby for operational control of the nine separate Ranger battalions, Darby granted it without hesitation. The Ranger Force began concentrating at Atlanta at the same time that Steiner turned his attention that way, giving Abrams the equivalent of six divisions in Georgia, of which only his 1st Armored Corps and the Ranger Force were fresh.

Against this, Steiner had the full force of SS-Wiking and Gebirgskorps Dietl. He chose to turn the mountaineers toward Henningsen's marines to the north, squeezing the American airborne force between them. They entered Charlotte at the end of March, and met Henningsen at Concord on the seventh of April. They were, however, too slow: the parachutists made a fighting withdrawal into the foothills of Appalachia and continued their defense. However, replacements were growing scarce for the elite formations of the United States; training camps were established west of the Mississippi River, but the first replacements would not begin flowing freely until at least June. By that time, of course, New York would have fallen, and Steiner, too, smelled blood.

His armored forces were organized into two columns, one with the main body of SS-Wiking, re-concentrated west of Columbia, South Carolina; the other contained SS-Panzer and SS-Panzergrenadier Wotan at Savannah, Georgia. Of these, SS-Wotan was the weaker, and therefore Abrams struck there first. At Hinesville, 1st Armored and SS-Panzer Wotan collided, and Abrams conducted a corps-level ambush worthy of Hannibal. He had placed his two mechanized infantry divisions, 3rd and 4th Infantry, into flanking positions with 1st Armored at his center. Without knowing that they were outnumbered, Wotan pursued in the hope of eliminating one of the American mobile forces, and were taken in both flanks simultaneously by the American infantrymen. Abrams completed the destruction of SS-Wotan by infiltrating the Ranger Force between Hinesville and Savannah, so when the SS men tried to retreat, they found themselves completely surrounded. For the first time, an SS corps surrendered.

It was not enough to stop Steiner, who was incandescent at the recklessness displayed by his subordinates. SS-Wiking struck into the weaker militia lines at Augusta. Abrams was unable to follow through on his success and retake Savannah because he had to scramble backwards to protect Atlanta. The two forces were now more or less even in numbers, and the battle of Atlanta promised to be the closest thing to an even struggle on open ground of the conflict. SS-Wiking was better equipped and more experienced; the Military District of Georgia had the Ranger Force and the defensive advantage. It was a balanced contest, all in all.

At Wrens, on the twenty-third of March, Steiner and Abrams came to grips for the first time. It was an unplanned engagement; Steiner's goal was now Atlanta, and Wrens was far off the direct route. A Sturmbann of SS-Panzerregiment "Germania" had moved into the town with the expectation of a night's sleep under a roof rather than on the march, and found themselves in contact with 2nd Battalion, 1st Armored Regiment. Neither had expected to find the other, and the Americans were faster, leaving three Leopards burning in exchange for a pair of Pattons. Both sides rapidly concentrated to the northwest of town. The ground was split by hills and intermittent streams, without the concentrated ridgelines of New York, and were so thickly wooded that infantry were scarcely more mobile than armor. It was a very confusing battlefield. For three days, Abrams and Steiner sparred at Wrens, neither able to achieve an advantage. Abrams made excellent use of the terrain; every downed tree became part of a bunker, every stream the site of a trench line. The American artillery never ceased firing, making it impossible for the Wiking troopers to rest. Despite that, Panzergrenadier Waraeger finally broke through at Stapleton, and Abrams was forced to pull back. Unlike in the north, Abrams made no effort to put together a "line," instead fighting a delaying action from Wrens back toward Atlanta. It worked; Steiner had hoped to take the city by the first of May, but that date found him in Madison, just outside the city. The vital rail hub of Atlanta still held.

There could be no encircling Atlanta; Abrams was too fast and too slippery for that, and there was no coast against which to trap him. Thus, the relatively bloodless victory that Bittrich achieved at New York was not possible for Steiner. He was left with only one course of action: SS-Wiking would be a battering ram. They assaulted from Madison to Covington, then rebounded northward into Lawrenceville. By now, Abrams had put his artillery into the commanding position of Stone Mountain to the city's east, and 3rd Infantry Division had dug into the suburbs to the city's northeast. Steiner readied for one last assault, knowing it would be bloody, but seeing no alternative to reducing Abrams.

On the third of May, 1965, the Battle of Atlanta began in earnest, after three days of jockeying. Steiner's men advanced in bounds, by platoon strength. The Americans had learned one important lesson from the Reich, issuing machine guns down to squad level, and every suburban street became a killing zone. Abrams knew that Atlanta could not be held in the face of a truly determined assault. He was instead determined to make Steiner pay more dearly than the German would pay. The evacuated city was transformed into a battleground, and SS-Wiking ground forward despite their casualties. Battalions became companies, and companies, platoons. Finally, on the twenty-eighth of May, the Germans had reached the Coca-Cola campus in central Atlanta - and the forces under Abrams mysteriously melted backward out of the city. They fell back on Chattanooga, leaving behind SS-Wiking as a totally spent force. Felix Steiner's elite army had been reduced to corps strength, and he was horrified at the cost of Atlanta. Stone Mountain, site of the partially completed Confederate Memorial, was seized outright, and turned into a Waffen-SS cemetery. The total cost of Atlanta was more than eighty thousand German casualties, of which a third were dead.

With Atlanta fallen, and New York in the process of collapse, the breach of the Appalachians was the Reich's next objective; it was time for Heydrich to consider the future of North America.

7. The Washington Conference

With the majority of the American Atlantic coast in Reich hands, the Reichsführer felt confident that the time had come to begin settling the postwar shape of North America. The Appalachians had not yet been breached, and the Kennedy stronghold of New England was rapidly transforming into "Fortress Boston," but the south especially was ripe for reorganization. The capture of the influential American senator Richard Russell and the Vice President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, gave Heydrich two men with whom to negotiate. There were other figures of importance, such as Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who were known to be in the occupation zone, whom Heydrich had instructed the Gestapo to locate and bring in as guests rather than prisoners, but Johnson and Russell were enough to begin negotiations.

The Reichsführer arrived in North America in the last week of May, 1965, and before meeting the American politicians met with his commanders in-theater. Von Kleist and Guderian raced to beat Ramcke to Richmond; they failed, and the parachutist was the first to present his view of the situation. Bittrich, Steiner, and Vahl of SS-Das Reich were in no rush, Steiner because he was burying his dead still, Bittrich because he knew his position was politically and militarily secure, and Vahl because Das Reich, the most professional of the SS formations, was engaged in New England along Bittrich's flank. Thus it was that Heydrich promoted Ramcke to Reichsmarschall and presented him with the larger baton of the Reich's highest rank. Ramcke must have thought his position was thus secured. It was not: Ramcke was transformed from commander of the invasion to military governor of occupied America. A handful of Polizei units were the only forces under his control, and the military situation was transformed from a unified command to multiple autonomous armies. From north to south, these were Army Groups North, Center, and South, respectively under Bittrich, Guderian, and Steiner; of these, North was the strongest, but faced with the greatest opposition in New England and Quebec, which the Reichsführer had designated a target of significance second only to Boston. South was the weakest, but both Abrams and Steiner needed to lick their wounds. Skirmishing between Atlanta and Lookout Mountain stayed at a constant simmer, but never boiled over.

Having established the basic framework that would remain the same until the introduction of Army Group Canada, he traveled north to Washington, where the seniormost American prisoners were being kept. With some difficulty, the occupation force held a reception for Heydrich, Russell, Johnson, and the recently arrived American Senator Prescott Bush. It was hardly in keeping with prewar Washington society, but Heydrich felt it important to show these men that America was not to be treated as the Sowjets had been. There would be political adjustments, of course - he made that clear in his opening remarks - but America was not to be an occupied continent.

What Heydrich proposed was the partition of the United States. Unlike the Reich, with one consistent political vision, the United States was a disparate mass, with regional and sectarian interests perpetually threatening to tear it apart. The election of 1960 demonstrated that: Johnson was only vice-president because Kennedy had needed the South. There were large sections of the United States which felt neglected, spurned, or shackled by the central government. The obvious split was between North and South, and it was along this divide which the Reichsführer began to work. Almost exactly a century after the last shots of the American Civil War, he offered the southerners their independence, in exchange for cooperation. True, much of the Old South was still in American hands, but from Virginia to Georgia, the states at its core were German-held.

Against this must be weighed the character of Senator Richard Brevard Russell. Russell was a deeply honorable man, who knew that if he chose this route, he would not be acclaimed, as Jefferson Davis once had, as the man of the hour, but as a traitor who had accepted nominal independence in exchange for a foreign overlord. It was anathema to the American character, and Russell initially refused. Others, such as Thurmond of South Carolina, protested. Surely this freedom from Yankee interference was precisely what they had sought for years? It took a different influence entirely from these men, who could not work any change on Russell, to persuade him. This was the man they had called the "Master of the Senate."


Lyndon Johnson was from one of the poorest regions of Texas and was filled with a burning ambition. Further, he had become one of the Kennedy Administration's most bitter foes. He was not on speaking terms with Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, he viewed Senate Majority Leader John Kennedy as a wasteful playboy who made no use at all of the power Johnson had built in that office, and he had been marginalized completely in President Joseph Kennedy's administration. He was certain that the Kennedy family was conspiring against his further advancement to the Presidency, and had barely been able to remain in office in 1964. Johnson was, in short, certain that political time was running out. He therefore began to work on his old Senate mentor Russell. Conversation after conversation, conference after conference, Johnson first mustered Southern political opinion on his side, that the South would be better suited to watching its own affairs if that was indeed what the Germans were offering, and Germany was certainly not going to be kind to New England when the time came. Finally, on the anniversary of the last shot of the American Civil War, on 22 June 1965, Russell publicly signed the Washington Accord, affirming the alliance between the Confederate States of America and the Greater German Reich. A constitutional convention was to be held in Richmond as soon as the conflict had settled, and Russell was announced as interim president.

Johnson now played perhaps the most devious card which this most devious of American politicians ever played. On 20 June, knowing Russell had agreed reluctantly and would publicly bind himself to German policy, Johnson approached Heydrich personally under the guise of bearing a message from the negotiations. "Now, sir, you know that Texas used to be a Republic, I'm sure," he began, Stetson in his wringing hands, all smiles and deference. The Reichsführer listened in silence to what Johnson was proposing. Johnson knew that the old-blood South would never accept a Fredericksburg Texan schooled at a third-rate teaching college as its leader. He also knew German, a legacy of those early Fredericksburg years, and he swore that he had been on Nimitz's side during the American purges of the 1950s. "Why, I knew Chester when he was a midshipman," he bragged; this was patently false, as Nimitz was an ensign before Johnson began speaking, but the truth never stopped Johnson from selling his story. In any case, what Johnson proposed was in Heydrich's interests anyway. He had decided that the United States was to be shattered; shattering it into one more fragment was therefore no great object. Thus, on the twenty-third, Johnson and Heydrich met with Russell. Johnson was tense and awkward in the meeting; Heydrich did the majority of the speaking.

Texas would not be part of Russell's Confederacy. Instead, he would compensate the Southerner with the territories of Cuba, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Maryland. Given that none of these - or, for that matter, Texas - were in Reich hands, it was an empty promise, but Russell's choice was quite clear. It was accept these terms, or accept none, and with Steiner burying men at the feet of the Confederate Memorial at Stone Mountain, even the stiff-backed Russell was forced to bend. Johnson attempted to shake Russell's hand afterward; the Georgian merely turned away from him, nodding to Heydrich. Russell and Johnson, formerly close friends, never spoke again.

If Johnson's naked ambition and Russell's upright devotion to the South were important factors in the Washington Conference, the motivations of Prescott Bush are much more mysterious. Bush had extensive business ties to the Reich, and was politically allied with the rather weak anti-Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party in New England, though he himself was a Republican. His known feud with the influential Chairman of President Kennedy's Council on Industry, Nelson Rockefeller, distanced him from the Administration, leaving him a Senatorial backbencher. Unlike Russell and Johnson, and in breaking with his (for an American politician) extensive prewar writings, Bush left few papers and no official memoir. Therefore, any attempt to understand the man is speculation. However, the fact that he approached Bittrich directly to open up Connecticut to the Reich may explain some of it. Knowing that New England was to be a Kennedy stronghold, and being as devoted to his region as Russell to his, Bush perhaps saw only one way to save his region from the destruction that was sure to come with the Kennedy brothers' Fortress Boston: Collaborate with Heydrich. He saw as clearly as Russell that he might be condemned by his own people for doing so, but saw more clearly than the Southerner what the alternatives were. Unlike Russell's public proclamation of the Confederate States, the New England Republic's announcement came only in New Haven, Connecticut, with a brief statement by Bush in front of the courthouse that was, for the moment, to be the Republic's capital.

At the end of June, Heydrich returned to Berlin, with every cause to be deeply satisfied. Bush was attracting other disaffected New Englanders, including the man who had preceded Joseph Kennedy as Senator for Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, Junior. Johnson was wisely laying low, and refusing to allow public speculation on Texas. Surprisingly, even Russell was abiding by this agreement, and had returned to Georgia to recover from the shock of Johnson's betrayal and begin building the South in his own image. Agents of the Abwehr began to spread the news of the Washington Conference in Quebec, sowing the seeds for the future partition of Canada. The war, meanwhile, focused now in Pennsylvania and New England.

How could I NOT use that picture, given that post?

Also - I finally got around to "The Passage of Power." It's not Caro's best, but Caro on a bad day is most people when their muse is breathing fire down their pants.