The Great War
1913: The War of Movement
1913: The War of Movement
Terrance informed the man on the other end of the phone that the United States would indeed honor its alliance. Once he put down the receiver, the President then called for his cabinet to assemble in the Oval Office while he informed congress of the state of affairs. In front of 535 Representatives and Senators, Terrance said that “there comes a time when each and every nation is called upon to answer for it past promises; to keep them, or throw them by the wayside. Recently, I informed a man in Paris that the United States will always keep its promises, and so, we are now at war with the Empires of the Triple Alliance”.
Over the next three weeks, the nation was awoken to the news of war, while generals and statesmen in Washington deliberated on what the United States’ role would be in the conflict. Through numerous plans proposed in the myriad cabinet and military meetings the president attended, the Harrison-Terrance Plan arose. Drafted by the Secretary of State based on the views of generals and Secretary of Defense Ecossais [1], and tweaked by the President, the Plan called for American action on almost every conceivable front.
It was presented to congress in the same session as the legislation that would come to define the Great War for the American people. The American Conscription Act and War Economy Act were both essentially unprecedented, especially the latter. The WEA faced opposition mostly due to Article II which repealed the right to strike in industries “vital to the war effort”. Labor Unions and the Democratic Party lobby both condemned it.
The WEA however, was supported by the Federal Party, and those who believed in the doing what was necessary to in the war. The Republican Party did see a major split in the ranks over Article I’s handover of control to the government over private industries, but mostly ended up supporting the bill. WEA passed 280-94 in the House, with Republican and Federal opposition mostly abstaining.
The ACA however, was the more controversial bill. A draft had last been ordered by President Jeremiah Williams more than 50 years earlier in 1860, when the nation was three years into its bloodiest war. Even then, it had been controversial, now the possibility of conscription inflamed the passions of congress. Eventually, ACA passed by a thin margin of 200-167 with Federal votes. At the time, most Americans considered the bills to be necessary to win the war, but slowly they became lightning rods for Americans’ issues with the conflict.
1. Kevin McCahill, creator of the ACA.
Almost immediately after the ACA and WEA were passed on July 27th, the machinery of war went into full gear. The Department of Industry issued an order for a million rifles from almost every American arms manufacturer, rifles that would have to be bolt-action. Airplane manufacturers began demanding funds for the creation of combat aircraft, carmakers for armored vehicles and artillery, and young men began to get their names drawn out of a hat in the state draft lotteries.
To make all this possible, money was needed, and that was one commodity of which the United States did not have a shortage. However, as the days ticked by, Secretary of the Treasury Fitz Harrison noticed that even the massive surplus of the US Treasury Department might not be enough for the job. While the government would indeed survive without loans through 1913 and 14, “Fitz” began drafting up the idea for a more reliable banking industry in the fall of the Great War’s first year.
Meanwhile, the war that prompted him to do this was entering its first phase, known as “The War of Movement”. In 1913, the United States Army grew from 441,000 regulars to some 1 million men, pushed up from the Terrance-Harrison Plan’s initial 811,000 soldiers as plans were revised due to Italian failures and underestimated Chilean strength. In the drafts that created the new divisions and armies which would fight the Great War, the first combat experience came for American forces.
The Battle of Walsh Street begun on August 16th in Chicago, when the local communist party organized a protest against the draft with every member they could muster. The 23rd Infantry Division, quartered ten miles outside the city after its formation two weeks earlier, was called in to break up the protest. When they arrived however, they found Walsh Street barricaded, and the communists firing at them with weapons. The protest had spun out of control after the crowd had taken up the chant of revolution. Walsh Street, the seat of the Chicago City Council, had soon become covered in guns passed out by hardliners.
The 23rd Infantry’s commander, Major General Buckner, attempted to negotiate, but was rebuked by a bullet that skimmed off his helmet, and an accusation of being imperialist scum. Buckner then ordered his troops, who had only just been taught how to fire their guns, to clear out Walsh Street by any means necessary. The brutal urban battle that erupted after the communists opened fire on the advancing 23rd spilled over into 3 different districts, and ended in the deaths of 732 infantrymen and 1,492 communists.
2. A Democratic Party-funded re-enactment photograph of the Battle of Walsh Street.
In later years “Walsh Street” became a synonym to many for the wrongs of the Great War. In August 1913 however, the nation denounced it as a despicable attempt at harming the war effort as it was starting to get going. The draft continued, and in October 1913, 350,000 American troops left Washington for France, one month after the United States Occupational Force in Peru had been transported to the coast of Northern Chile to perform an amphibious invasion near Arequipa.
While American forces were still crossing the Atlantic, Europe had already delved right into the traumatic hell of modern warfare. In July 1913, the German army had crossed over the border in Alsace-Lorraine into France, and Austro-Hungarian forces had swarmed through Lombardia into Northern Italy. The initial fighting around the borders lasted only a few days before the Tripartite forces forced breakthroughs on both fronts, yet managed to cost some 68,000 lives on both sides.
The next two months in France were spent in a complete panic. The German armies made fast progress in the Franche-Comte, and headed up the Franco-Belgian border in their attempts to outflank the French armies in Northern France. In early October however, the French rallied, stopping the German armies in the south in a series of engagements on the Troyes-Dijon axis. French High Command then ordered a general advance in the south, which threw the battered offenders off guard, and saw German forces pushed back to a line stretching from Montbeliard, on the Swiss border, to Saint-Dizier. Here the war of movement ended for the French southern front.
3. Painting of a French assault near Saint-Dizier.
In the north, the addition of some 100,000 Dutch troops buoyed the efforts of the German armies by freeing up extra divisions for the drive on Paris. It was in this last ditch German effort to deal a quick knockout blow that the French army saw its finest hour since the days of Napoleon. The final push for Paris began at dawn on October 13th, even as the southern German forces seemed to face imminent collapse. The next one-and-a-half months of fighting would add another 42,000 German and 53,000 French soldiers to the death toll of 1913 [2].
The German advance began slowly and only bogged down further as the weeks dragged on. In the end, German forces came within some 10 miles of Paris, holding a line of battle stretching from Meaux to Saint-Witz at the tip of their spearhead. However, 380,000 American soldiers landing at ports from Dieppe to Amiens and heading south to reinforce Paris prompted the Germans to call off the offensive and pull back to more defensible positions.
As it turned out, US troops saw no large-scale combat in 1913. That however, was sure to change in 1914 as US forces in Chile drew closer to Santiago and the battered state of the French military left more and more gaps that US troops would likely have to fill. For American military planners though, the Italian front posed a more immediate problem. With Italian forces having collapsed spectacularly, and nobody else being available to support them, the American Armed Forces seemed poised to take on a larger role than ever imagined by the President or his cabinet in the dark meeting of June 15th.
[1] – The invasion of Vladivostok was added after Secretary Ecossais proposed opening a Russian front at a meeting on June 30th.
[2] – French and German analysts estimate that combat-related casualties in 1913 numbered some 143,000 for the French and 152,000 for the Germans.
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Exceptional Situation(s):
I hope the tone of that last paragraph tells you what’s ahead. We are going to be messing in Italy a lot next year.
For now however, it’s time for a short planning session again. Bills may be proposed.
