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The Presidents: 1836-1936 - An Interactive US AAR

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I only posted those who I had a problem with. The other clauses are fine and I agree with them. I am not trying to tarnish nobody's image, just point out some clearly visible facts that most people don't see, like we losing liberties our founding fathers fought hard to adquire.
 
((We haven't had many votes recently, and they all seem very likely to pass (11/3, 11/3 and 12/2 respectively); is there going to be an update soon?))
 
theAhawk said:
((...is there going to be an update soon?))
Click to expand...

Polls are Closed.

All three acts pass.

As for the update, test week crept up on me, so the update's gonna be pushed to Saturday. :(
 
((It's been a long time since I've come here, and Brockman is dead.))
 
The Great War
1914: The Year of the Mud​

The winter of 1913-14 proved to be exceptionally warm in Europe, foreshadowing the year that followed it. For the opposing armies in the Great War, the lack of snow was a godsend, as it made the digging of fortifications easier, although in the southern reaches of the Franco-German front, these fortifications would soon be rendered unusable by battle and nature. In early March, after three months of silent recuperation by both sides, the Tripartite armies launched a general offensive on all fronts.
In Italy, the thin defensive lines collapsed yet again as Austrian forces headed into the top of the boot, and the Russian 5th Army marched its way to the French border. US troops, numbering 290,000 men, arrived at port in Leghorn on March 24th. The Italian Expeditionary Force positioned itself in the way of the Austro-Hungarian advance in the next two weeks, but for Italian morale the damage was done.
Less than a year into the war, Italy became the first nation to fold under the financial and military pressure of World War when it signed a peace treaty on April 5th 1914. In the terms, Italy agreed to demilitarize its Austro-Hungarian border for the next ten years. In refraining from asking for a renunciation of Italian claims on its western lands though, Austria-Hungary revealed that its military successes in Italy hid a nation that was nearing the breaking point as nationalist fervor rose increasingly to the surface, and decades of government debt crippled Europe’s oldest empire’s capacity for action.
In France however, the war only escalated. In the south, the “March Offensive” drove the French back to lines that were now held by American troops, at Dijon and Lons. For the first time in the war, American troops would experience combat. On March 16th, units from the German 2nd Corps engaged General Jonathan Lee’s 6th Army, composed almost entirely of conscripts.

1stdijon.jpg

1. A dead American soldier near Dijon, March 1914.​

The battle was a complete disaster for the Americans. In three weeks, the 6th Army suffered 28,002 casualties, a third of whom died. On April 2nd, Lee’s force finalized its retreat from the city of Dijon, the first American engagement of the war having ended in defeat. The only solace was the fact that the German advance was ended at Dijon by a combination of exhaustion among the German troops, and the beginning of the wettest spring in recorded history.
Similarly, the Battle of Lons ended on April 16th when the German forces could advance no further due to the roads and fields they fought in having become a muddy hell into which 4,719 American and 2,325 German troops sank dead. Elsewhere in the South, the battles between the French and Germans had met similar ends, albeit with much higher casualty rates [1].
Further north, the mettle of American, French and Tripartite armies was truly tested in a confrontation over the area that each and every man knew would decide the war. The “March Offensive” in the north began with a bang, as French forces to the east of the main American force at Troyes fought back with a renewed determination unseen since Meaux. Despite this, the defenders began to slowly get pushed back, and in response the US sent 50,000 men to reinforce General Nivelle’s 1st Corps in the crucial Charleville Sector.
The Battle of Charleville became the showcase of the difference between Allied and Tripartite planning [2]. Tripartite forces, consisting of Dutch, Russian and German units, were almost completely under German control. As a result, orders became garbled as efforts at translation were made half-way through the chain-of-command when it became clear that the German generals had no intention of translating orders themselves. This of course, proved no help in making non-German troops more likely to follow German orders.
In the Allied camp, US and French Command remained separated as a way to appease American generals and the isolationist wing, and contact was largely limited to general planning sessions and situational reports between Generals Anderson and Nivelle. Surprisingly, this method proved to be more effective during the Great War, as it allowed for much more flexibility, and French generals were not giving orders to inexperienced American troops as though they were speaking to battle-hardened Frenchmen.

frenchcharleville.jpg

2. French troops near Charleville, April 1914.​

Between April 12th and June 18th, the Tripartite forces would launch numerous failed attacks on the Franco-American lines. The final result was the first proper Allied victory of the “Rebound Summer” of 1914, with 11,000 German dead and 4,456 French and American dead. Back across the Atlantic though, the seemingly endless fighting and defeats in early 1914 only fueled anti-war sentiment, and allowed the President to push through three “emergency bills”.
The Trading With the Enemy Act and Strategic Sites Acts both passed with ease, and were geared toward the economic side of the war effort. The Federal Executive Act on the other hand, was part of Terrance’s plan of laying a base for the social reforms he hoped to push through after the war, by streamlining co-operation between government departments. Outwardly, Terrance exuded confidence in the war effort, but behind closed doors he suffered from stress-induced sleep deprivation that left him with an average of 20 hours of sleep per week throughout 1914.
His worst week though, proved to be in May, when the disastrous invasion of Vladivostok finally ended. 50,000 troops had landed close to and captured the eastern port in early March, just as the Franco-German front flared up again. Almost immediately, Russian forces in the east had been redirected, and 75,000 soldiers had descended upon 37,000 combat-capable troops in late April.

vladivostok.jpg

3. US troops in Vladivostok, April 1914.​

The result was a desperate attempt to convince the Japanese government to allow the Eastern Expeditionary Force to retreat to Korea, before it was forced to surrender en masse. Eager to show the Russian Empire up somehow, the Japanese agreed in early May, and a phased withdrawal saw the last US troops abandon Vladivostok on May 19th, having left 12,341 Americans dead in the city. Vladivostok would eventually prove to be the Tripartite’s last hurrah in 1914, but before the “Rebound Summer” in France, it and the fighting in Troyes and Charleville put the isolationist lobby in a prime position for 1915’s mid-term elections.
The battle that defined the war for Americans began during the March Offensive, and would not be over when 1914 ended. The US 2nd Army, stationed on a line from Troyes to Saint-Dizier, came under attack on April 2nd. The rains reached northern France around the same time, although they weren’t as bad as the ones that had stopped the Germans further south. In the first month of fighting, 24,000 Americans became casualties, and so did an unknown amount of Germans, probably more than defenders. At this point, 120,000 Tripartite soldiers were engaged in the drive toward Paris that the assault at Troyes was intended to be.
Even larger estimates of enemy strength drove Allied Command to pull American troops from any place they could be spared, even redirecting most forces from Italy headed to the southern front to Troyes. The French too sent support from wherever they could. This in turn forced the Tripartite to strengthen its attacking army for fear of a defeat leaving a hole in their lines facing an unknown, but massive, Allied army, and so the forces swelled to 210,000 Allied troops and 170,000 German troops on the soon-to-be-infamous Troyes-Dizier Sector.
The Rebound Summer of 1914 began with the defensive victories at Charleville and Chalons, where the Germans ended their assault on July 1st. In the aftermath of these two victories, General Jonathan Lee took his reconstituted 6th Army, now also comprising regulars from the IEF, and launched an offensive to take back Dijon. In heavy fighting between June 28th and Independence Day, the 6th Army pushed German forces back from the areas they had taken in the March Offensive. The cost was 12,157 German dead and 28,103 US casualties, including 16,231 dead.

2nddijon.jpg

4. Veterans of the 1st Battle for Dijon parade through the city park, July 1914.​

Similarly, in the southernmost tip of the German advance, Lons, the US 4th Army smashed the Austro-Hungarian forces that had replaced the German troops sent to Troyes, and subsequently held off a German counterattack in August with ease. The battles, and continued resistance at Troyes, proved to be the most effective morale-raiser of 1914, with support for the war jumping from a low of 37% in April-May to 67% in early August.
Another factor in Americans’ renewed faith was the advance southward in Chile. Slowly but surely, US troops came closer Santiago throughout 1914, and met little resistance from Chilean troops. In October 1914, the first battle of the South American war was fought in Iquique province, and resulted in a decisive American victory after seven days of fighting. The Chilean Army suffered twice as many losses as the Americans, whose casualties amounted to 2,989 dead. The war in Europe was a bloodbath, but whenever the pro-War lobby needed a picker-upper, they reminded Congress of Chile.
Iquique was made even more useful as a morale booster by September in France, where the torrential rains that had skimmed northern France in the spring and been reduced to sporadic drizzle in the summer returned with a vengeance. Progress in the south stopped as the roads and fields returned to mud, even worse than that seen in spring. In Troyes, the downpours threatened to flood unlucky trenches and battlefields became muddy deathtraps that didn’t need bullets to fly for them to be deadly as soldiers literally sank into the mood and drowned, but German and Allied troops were forced to keep fighting by command.

mud1914.jpg

5. Muddy fields in the Troyes-Dizier Sector.​

Mud was also the enemy that halted the Franco-American assault in the Auxerre Sector. When the fighting stopped in October, 21,279 Americans had died since the beginning of the offensive in July, and so had 32,452 of the Russo-German defenders, making Auxerre one of the deadliest battles of the war so far. The mud and rain, which continued deep into December, halted the war outside of Troyes-Dizier, where both sides had become attached emotionally as much as strategically to victory.
The year of 1914 thus ended with the largest battle in European history within a day’s drive of Paris, the British unwilling to send troops to the killing fields of France, the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires beginning to collapse financially and, more so in the case of the former, politically, and American opinion beginning to swing back to opposition of the war. With the French and Germans becoming ever more exhausted and yet determined, it seemed that the war would be decided by which ones allies gave out under the strain first.

[1] – It became a regular occurrence in the US that anti-war newspapers made no mention of the fact that the French continued to take the brunt of the dead outside of the Troyes-Dizier Sector, while pro-war newspapers played it up as much as possible in arguments over “Americans doing a European job”.

[2] – Allied Nations surpassed Entente Nations as the preferred name in politics around early 1914, as it was felt that “Entente” was too easy a target for the isolationist wing’s accusations of a European War being fought by Americans in Congress, especially as the American contribution became ever more crucial as the war dragged on.

------------------------------

Exceptional Situation(s):

Sorry it’s taken so long.

Anyway, bills can be proposed, and I’d like you all to declare whether you’re anti-war or pro-war, so I can use it along with the story to decide what the mid-term elections will turn out like.
 
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((I think it rather goes without saying that I am for the war.))


The United States must ask of every citizen for sacrifice in this time of trial. Unlike most other nations of this world we have extended the vote to a massive portion of the population and until now they have not been required to contribute significantly to our victory in this war, however it would be impossible for that to continue. I must ask now of the women of this nation to do their duty for their country so they too may continue to enjoy the liberties it provides. Every man in a factory is a man who isn't on the front lines, every man producing weapons is a man who isn't firing one at the enemy. But of course we couldn't not produce munitions. That's why I present to Congress the Women's Work Act; with the intention of freeing up American men in the factories so they may be moved to the front lines that need them most by allowing women to work in their place.

Women's Work Act

Article I:
All women between the ages of 18 and 35 are required to register with the National Work Board

Article II:
The National Work Board has the authority to assign women jobs in industries deemed essential to the war effort.

Article III:
Disability is the only exemption from service if called up.

Article IV:
Those who break this law risk fines of up to $100 and imprisonment for up to 4 years.

Article V:
Three services are to be created; the Army Nurse Corps, the Navy Nurse Corps and the Women's Auxiliary Military services. All three are to be voluntary
Section I. The Army Nurse Corps is to be an organisation within the Army to allow for female provision of nursing.
Section II. The Navy Nurse Corps is to be an organisation within the Navy to allow for female provision of nursing.
Section III. The Women's Auxillary Military Services is to be a separate organisation under the authority of the Secretary of Defence. It shall be tasked with providing women to serve in the armed forces as clerks, telephonists, waitresses, cooks, and as instructors in the use of gas masks, or any other non-fighting activity conductive to the war effort.

Article VI:
Women shall not be called up if they are in certain professions as decided by the National Work Board, or are in the Army Nurse Corps, Navy Nurse Corps, or Women's Auxiliary Military Services.​
 
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I support our continued engagement in the war. ((which probably also goes without saying))

Do the more militarily minded people among the senators and generals in D.C. have any particular plans for the forces in Chile if peace is negotiated there?
 
I support our engagement in the war. And Furthermore, my company shall donate the sum of 1.5 Million USD to the government to aid them.

~ William F. Anderson, Senator for Tennessee
 
I am pro-war

The dangers of sovereign debt have been shown by the imminent financial collapse of the Austrian Empire; therefore I commend the following bill to the house;

Financial Stability Act
(i)The Federal government and all American states are not allowed to have negative budgets for two consecutive years
(ii)Sovereign debt must not go above 1 years gross income for these governments.
(iii)These governments shall not be in debt for a protracted period of time. Depending on the size of the debt and efforts made to decrease it, this period would be between 5 and 20 years (it would be decided on a case by case basis by the AFSB(see iv)).
(iv)The American Financial Stability Board (AFSB) shall be created to regulate state and national budgets.
(v)The AFSB will be under the duress of the Department of the Treasury, and have a representative from every state.
(vi)The AFSB will have the power to raise extra taxes and limit spending if states or the federal government do not comply.
(vii)Only emergency services shall be exempt from spending cuts and increases in tax shall be percentage increases (ie new taxes cannot be levied; only old ones raised)
(viii)Governments are expected to set up committees to self-regulate their budgets.

((Would this count as a change to the constitution? Does that mean it needs 66%?))

I also commend the following bill to the house, to reduce the incidence of spying activities carried out by enemy powers;

Passport Act
(i)All American citizens are required to hold a valid federal passport.
(ii)All inhabitants of the United States must hold a valid visa if they don't have a passport.
(ii)Everyone crossing a United States border must hold a valid passport from any country.
(iii)The United States Border Agency can refuse entry to anyone without a valid passport, or who is a citizen of an enemy state, and can deport anyone who is in the country illegally to their country of origin.
(iv)A valid passport, or other federal identification, are required for citizens to vote, and to hold governmental positions.
(v)US Governments are required to push for the global regulation of passports and their format, an the extension of travel rights for American citizens throughout the world.
 
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I have decided to abstain from the voting, as I am neither for the loss of life nor against the preservation of liberty.

---Damien Diante---
 
I'd be curious as to what Fitz thinks of the FSA, seeing as I know he's been mulling over reforms of that nature.
 
I wasn't aware anyone else was thinking of a similar bill; I hope I'm not intruding... I would also be very happy to cooperate with anyone who wants to input towards the FSA.
 
Pro-War

Lieutenant Bradley, United States Army
 
I am anti-war.
 
Anti War
 
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