In the Age of Superpowers

Cybvep: The size and composition of the Entente armies remain something of a mystery to me. When they were on the offensive in 1916, they seemed limitless, and I haven't exactly been destroying a whole lot of them, certainly not compared to the Russians.

H.Appleby: Yes, France is in for some very interesting times...

Kurt_Steiner : America has remained a somewhat muted threat, owing to the fact that I was never able to build submarines quickly enough to piss them off!

talt/Viden: The in-game capital has already moved, yes. One of the much-needed improvements over "encircle capital, starve everything else" exploit.


Chapter I - The Great War - Part XII

One again, General Gallieni found himself in command of an army whose task it was to defend Paris from an inexorable onslaught, not even three years since last faced with the last crisis. But now the odds were stacked impossibly in the enemy's favor. Where the German armies of the Schlieffen Plan were once disorganized, tired, and forced to attack strongly-entrenched positions along a narrow corridor of advance, now the French faced a German army of numerical superiority, surrounding the great metropolis on all sides, and eager to finish the work started three years earlier. Indeed, the situation bore greater similarities to the fateful Paris Commune of 1871 than 1914. Gallieni had twenty-six divisions at his disposal, facing an opponent who could bring as many as eighty-one divisions to bear along the circumference of the line, and he had few illusions as to their ability to resist an all-out assault. Discipline and morale had broken down; many were the survivors of the last several months' fighting, and could scarcely resist the temptations of a hot meal or warm place to sleep within Paris itself, in exchange for the hellish life of the trenches. Nor did the government have any great confidence in a repetition of 1914, having already vacated the capital for distant Bordeaux.

For their part, the Germans were eager to roll up the Parisian pocket and quickly bring the war to a decisive conclusion. Unless Gallieni consented to surrender his army, damaging Paris would be a regrettable, but ultimately necessary, fact of war. If France was willing to jeopardize its capital to devastation, then Germany could scarcely flinch from the prospect. But Gallieni refused to consider any terms of surrender. The French commander was adamant that his men would go down fighting; he would not be remembered as the man who handed Paris to the German invaders. In fact, so adamant was he in snubbing German overtures that the lull in hostilities hardly lasted two days between Paris' encirclement and the resumption of hostilities. On August 10, fifty-nine divisions were thrown against the ramshackle defenders. Day and night, Parisians lived with the endless roar of cannonfire; the flash of guns visible from every direction was a sight none would forget; the city streets were deserted, shops closed, churches and cellars packed with civilians. Slowly but surely, the French defenders were pushed back, constricting the pocket more and more each day. But with every scrap of ground taken, thousands of German soldiers perished, and many on the frontlines had to wonder what kind of city was worth this cost.

The defenders fought on for nearly three weeks against seemingly insurmountable odds, defying all expectations within the German General Staff. But at last, on August 29, his situation hopeless but the honor of French arms intact, Gallieni accepted defeat, surrendering his force to the German army. Though he would not long survive this defeat, for years to come Gallieni's actions would be synonymous with treason, his name reviled by France's nationalists. But his three-week resistance had accomplished much. It had given time for Nivelle and Petain to reform some semblance of a defensive line west and south of Paris, and it had shown to the world France's fighting resolve in the face of disaster. Moreover, his ultimate decision to surrender doubtless preserved many tens of thousands of lives, and spared Paris the heaviest ravages of the Great War that had already reduced much of Europe into crater-marked wasteland.


The fall of Paris was celebrated in Germany just as vividly as the many victories scored on the Eastern Front had been. But a new and profound sense of relief tinged these celebrations: the knowledge that the war was certainly nearly over. Diplomats at the Foreign Ministry began jockeying for positions in the inevitable peace conference that would no doubt be an equal to the Treaty of Westphalia or Congress of Vienna, and the Kaiser began to toy with the idea of going in person, a prelude to a breakout from the straightjacket imposed on him by the military dictatorship running the country. But if the German government expected France to quickly surrender, they were sadly mistaken. Indeed, as the days rolled by, there seemed to be no indication that France had registered this defeat. There were no peace overtures, nor even any declarations of resistance calling for all patriotic Frenchmen to rally around the flag. Diplomatically, France was profoundly silent, much to the discomfort and dismay of the Foreign Ministry.

Finally, on September 6, Germany resumed its offensive, directing the armies that had so recently taken Paris to continue onwards both south and west and perhaps finally bring the French government to the negotiating table. The Entente armies remained in a state of disarray, permitting Germany the luxury of a simultaneous attack against Orleans, Le Mans, and the Normandy region. By the end of September, all three regions had fallen under German control. Once again, Marshal Nivelle had allowed himself to be outmaneuvered, and his entire force of twenty-two divisions was trapped around Caen. By now, it was patently obvious that the Entente military situation, at least in western France, had reached a point of hopelessness. Crack German divisions soon found themselves pitted against African colonial militia forces for control of major cities and strategic geographic points, but enough of an effective Entente military strength remained in the center to repel German offensives directed toward Bourges. And in the east, Petain's defenses in the salient bracketed by Verdun-Longwy-Nancy were as formidable as ever. Hindenburg reasoned that taking this strongpoint would be sufficient to demoralize the French into accepting reality and admitting defeat.


On October 1, the assault on Longwy began, thirty-three divisions facing fifteen French counterparts. It would prove to be another grueling attack, as bloody as any yet seen on the Western Front. His defensive positions were strong, but the military situation had deteriorated such that Petain could hope only to repeat the exploits of Gallieni. On October 30, Longwy fell to the Germans, and within days Nivelle's army in Normandy was forced to surrender as well. Yet still the French government refused to face the hopeless situation and negotiate an armistice, even as the army became less and less capable of even offering the sort of dogged rearguard actions of the past three months. Verdun was carried on November 12 after only eight days of fighting as Petain began pulling whole divisions off the line, and the road was now open to and encirclement of the French forces still in Alsace-Lorraine. But to keep those armies pinned in place for long enough, an attack on the city of Nancy, Petain's headquarters, his army's main supply dump, and perhaps the most heavily defended point in the entire world, was required. It took the primary German strike force twenty days to seize control of Chaumont in the south while their comrades to the north were massacred in suicidal attacks on the heaviest French trench lines around Nancy. In many ways, the Battle of Nancy, in which whole German divisions were decimated, only to be replaced en masse by raw recruits and thrown back into the meat grinder, shattered the pride of the German army - not the generals who oversaw these bloodbaths, but the rank and file. The ease, even eagerness, by which commanders were willing to throw away lives for seemingly trivial strategic concerns, was starkly revealed. Soldiers who saw their comrades slaughtered in the countless thousands could no longer see any glory or honor in what was done, nor was it possible any longer to accept the system that allowed such things to happen. It was disillusionment of the highest, saddest order.


But on December 28, lead units of the German offensive at last reached Belfort, severing the last supply link between Alsace-Lorraine and the rest of unoccupied France. In so doing, the Germany army had encircled another thirty-five divisions in the region that had stood the longest and fought the hardest against the German onslaught. Perhaps once this army was finally forced into surrendering, France would at last admit defeat, four months and millions of casualties since Paris had fallen.

Cybvep: A Central Powers victory does not mean an end to the AAR. Why would I end it just as things are starting to get interesting? :laugh:

H.Appleby/Kaiser_Mobius/Timmie0307: I'm still mulling over what direction I want to take in the post-war period. I worry about following the Kaiserreich line too closely, so we may very well see that happen!

Kurt_Steiner/GulMacet/talt: To be honest, I was shocked that France held on for as long as it did after I took Paris.

And now that I have your attention, I was kindly asked to provide this link to the AARland Choice AwAARds, as voting for current AARs is underway. So, go there and vote for this AAR, or other AARs you think might be better, as if there's such a thing.


Chapter I - The Great War - Part XIII

As the year 1918 began, there was little logic in the French government's refusal to accept defeat. Seasoned diplomats in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin were left wondering what madness had gripped the capitals of its opponents: first Soviet Russia's 'no war, no peace,' and now France battling on with half the country already occupied by enemy forces. But the dogged resistance had an effect further afield than the halls of European capitals, in the United States, and in the White House administration of President Woodrew Wilson. The petty squabbles between the Great Powers were of little interest to the vast majority of Americans, certainly nothing worth dying for. Besides, America's army, already strung out in northern Mexico searching for revolutionaries and bandits, was about comparable to Belgium's, and completely unequipped to fight the kind of war demanded by the advance of technology; indeed, so ill-prepared was the U.S. Army that its entire code-breaking and cryptography work was conducted by the volunteer services of an eccentric multi-millionaire industrialist. Thus, when war did erupt in Europe, Wilson was content to declare America's complete neutrality.

But neutrality in practice was more difficult than simple proclamations, just as it had been when conflict engulfed Europe a century earlier. American business sensed a chance to make a stupendous fortune supplying the vast armies of Europe now mobilizing, and in theory, anyone with money was a welcome customer. But the realities of British naval supremacy and the historic connections between America and Western Europe meant that, before long, the vast majority of all American war supplies were being sent to France and Britain. Anti-German sentiment was further fueled by the 'barbaric' practice of unrestricted submarine warfare carried out by Germany and the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania in the spring of 1916. Privately, Wilson believed that the United States was honor bound to ally itself with Britain and France in the interests of civilization, but he found himself entirely at odds with his Secretary of State, the perennial electoral loser, William Jennings Bryan, who adamantly touted a non-interventionist course. Eager to avoid a public rupture inside his own administration with the popular Bryan with the presidential elections drawing close, Wilson took a soft course with the incident, and Germany's quick apology and suspension of submarine activity quickly satisfied American outrage. Britain could at least take some small comfort from the fact their shipping lanes would never again be threatened by German attack for the remainder of the war.

But following Wilson's electoral triumph over the Republicans, he began again to push for intervention in Europe's troubles. With his Progressive reform agenda sidelined, the President took to the country to deliver his case. As he traveled the country, Wilson steadily developed an articulate message, insisting that remaining on the sidelines would lead to disaster. Lusitania and submarines, violent repression in Belgium, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, all pointed to Germany's inherent expansionist ambitions and over-eagerness to achieve its goals by brute force. Could the United States stand by as ancient empires were engulfed by revolutionary extremism? Could America in good conscience make fortunes supplying the weapons of war to both sides of a conflict killing millions? And as the President of the United States made his case to his electorate, France crumbled under the German onslaught.


The encirclement of the majority of Petain's army group in Alsace-Lorraine at the end of 1917 left Marshal Joffre as the only remaining army commander in mainland France. After barely escaping an encircling movement by the Austrian Expeditionary Force at Angers, he hurriedly tried to establish a defensive line from the Bay of Biscay across to the Alpine border with Switzerland. For their part, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were content to allow him this as they focused on the reduction of Nancy. Hammered by a steady German assault and the unforgiving weather, Petain's force disintegrated steadily, finally surrendering on February 15. Those divisions freed up by this victory were given a desperately-needed respite and slowly repositioned for what the General Staff believed would be the final straw to break French resolve: a general offensive across the entire front. On March 20, everything now in place, the attack was launched.

On March 26, President Wilson went before Congress to deliver a speech on the crisis in Europe, an unusual step that rapidly caught the entire nation's attention. In his address, Wilson reiterated his well-worn arguments for intervention, but the stunning intensity and conviction with which he delivered his argument kept the audience spellbound. Germany, he argued, was bent on the domination of Europe, the suppression of democratic government, and would ultimately lead to the ruin of the United States if left unchecked. America's integrity hung in the balance, testing whether the country was still guided in its action by principle, or only by raw self-interest and opportunism. Toward that end, Wilson formally requested the Congress to declare war on Germany and its allies. Wilson's strongest opponents on intervention were stunned to find the chamber erupt in a prolonged, thunderous standing ovation that seemed to rattle the entire building. But even with such a reaction, it would take some time for the assembled politicians to debate the request and vote. And on March 30, the German army achieved its first breakthrough of the offensive at La Rochelle.

The United States formally joined the Great War on April 5, 1918. They were followed shortly by a cascade of Latin American states: Cuba, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. But by now, the Western Front had been blown wide open; Joffre's efforts had failed. Bourges fell on April 10, threatening General Allenby and the remainder of the BEF with encirclement at Tours. Brest was captured on April 15 simultaneous with Auxerre, marking the success of the great offensive across the entire front. Having fled from Bordeaux to Lyon some months ago, the shattered French government of Georges Clemenceau was faced with two alternatives: fleeing to Marseille to prepare a last-stand of what little remained of Joffre's army, or surrender to Germany. Allenby's adjutants in Lyon urged continued resistance, but Joffre threatened to depose Clemenceau if he refused to throw in the towel. Faced with this ultimatum, on April 18, 1918, inquiries were made as to Germany's terms. The reply was immediate: full cessation of hostilities with each respective party retaining administrative control over their occupied regions until a formal treaty could be ratified. With the French army already on the verge of mutiny, Clemenceau realized this was tantamount of unconditional surrender, but consented to Germany's terms. Faced with no alternative other than annihilation, Allenby joined with the French in accepting.


For the first time in nearly four years, the guns fell silent in Europe. Britain and now the United States remained at war with Germany and her allies, but with no armies hostile to Germany remaining on the Continent, Russia, Italy, and now France prostrate before the conquering foe, the lack of formalized treaties could not hide the fact that the Great War was now over.