Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries

The Presidents: 1836-1936 - An Interactive US AAR

Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Show only dev responses
Excerpt from a Christmas message by Vice President Gallatin at a rally for War Bonds.

...While there is no immediate relief to our struggle at home - nor to the struggle that our brave men, and the men of Britain, France, Russia (and now many other nations as well), face in the battlefields of the world - I take comfort in the courage of our men and the tenacity of our generals. The war is changing, and in a good way.

It is not an easy task, not as another year of fighting comes to an end. Another year of fathers who aren't home again, sons who will never be home again, blood, sweat, and exhaustion. It is even harder in battered Moscow, war torn Serbia, occupied France. We can offer support - both domestically with legislation to take care of our soldiers, and abroad with what aid and strategies we can use to take the pressure off of our allies - but we cannot offer relief. In a time of giving, we find little to give.

But the war is changing. We are giving what we have, and I thank my countrymen for their support and diligent work in the war effort. I thank those soldiers in far off lands, who are giving their best in our recent offensives. I thank the Russians in Moscow, and all our other allies around the world who are holding strong against the armies of fascism. We have little to give, but it is the gift of freedom - not from a time of riches and idleness, but the from the darkest hour of our modern world. We have little to give, but with every effort the forces of liberty press ever closer to ending this war once and for all...
 
The Soviet entry in the war was the last of Hitler's mistakes. Germany is not capable of fighting a serious multi front war, and if it's something the Russians have it's manpower, loads of bodies to throw at the Germans to keep them occupied in the East. The one thing that do scare me is Stalin's coup though. When I was ambassador in Moscow I always got the feeling the Communist Party feared Stalin. Considered him some kind of loose gun. But all in all the Soviet involvement is all the State Department have hoped for, a ally that can give NATO breathing room.
 
((Hmmm, not sure what to talk about... but by the way, Ahawk, you are now RolePlayAAR of the Month, if you were unawares; congrats! :D ))
 
((Ow, wow, that's cool; it's nice that there's a system in place to inform people of these things [...] considering this is the first I've heard of it! Oh, and thanks for nominating me!

If you want something to talk about, you could always do/announce/say something controversial...))
 
Last edited:
((blast my phone well I'm glad this thing isnt dead i read up till the civil war could someone please inform me of the what seems to be ww2 like axis powers our direct allies the leaders of the war and the political parties))
Name: Richard Wilkes Whipman
Position: Texan capitalist/aristocrat
Party: conservative/reactionary (dont know the actual parties)
((do we stilll do these? and is this going to go on or is it dead, if so could someone direct me to another interactive aar?))
 
((On the front page there are links an excellent recap and party guide made by Gloa, which should get you up to speed, though I must say it's quite impressive you read as far as you did!

I hope it's still going; I believe that BBB has been very busy of late but I think there is still a will to continue. As to other interactive AARs, the HoI forums would be the best place to look, as this is the only one in V2 and EU3 has none (I believe) - though keep your eyes peeled and there may be another at some point in the new year if I (or someone else) get my (/gets their) act together.... :) )
 
((As far as any of us know, it's still churning along, albeit slowly; I for one am ecstatic to see a new member! :D

As for a Conservative/Reactionary Party, you may be out of luck; the Liberals are, well, liberal-socialist-progressive hellspawn! ;) The Republicans are generally neoliberal, small government types, though some of them are conservative. And yeah, Gloa's synopsis of events is pretty much necessary for any newcomer... unless you want to read 500 pages of our trite buffoonery...

In any case, welcome! Glad to have you aboard!))
 
((You know what a good interactive aar would be? an Austrian one! Because there are so many different nationalities that it would be very interesting and many choices for people))
 
Jako473 said:
((You know what a good interactive aar would be? an Austrian one! Because there are so many different nationalities that it would be very interesting and many choices for people))
Click to expand...
((Russia could also be fun, with a reactionary aristocracy, the reformists in the army, the awakening proletariat and all the ethnic groups on the edge of the empire that want out)).
 
((I'm not entirely sure how either of those two would work; if you can come up with an inclusive way of modelling an autocratic absolute monarchy, then it would probably work well, but until then, I think we're probably limited to democracies (even if they are slightly tenuous democracies like Bismarckian Germany - basically the requirements are regular elections for a parliament that actually has some power and an interesting story that hasn't been done recently; the former rules out states like Austria and Russia while the middle makes it unlikely we'd do Bremen and the latter prevents anything really in the Americas.))
 
The Second World War
1943: Hell on Earth​

The year of 1943 began in Russia, and most of the Northern Hemisphere, with a slide into the coldest winter in recorded history. In Moscow, where heavy fighting continued day and night, regardless of the weather, the temperature dropped as low as -46 degrees Fahrenheit in January. Bodies would freeze to the point of effective barricades in the streets and Soviet and German tanks were abandoned in the suburbs as harshly rationed fuel could not be wasted on keeping the tank running and the fuel liquid. In any other conflict, such conditions would have stopped the slaughter, but Moscow in early 1943 was a different beast.
When informed by his aide that Stalin had requested for the February round of US supplies to be expedited and expanded in order to make up for shortfall in frozen Russian factories, President McCahill supposedly asked “are those f**king lunatics still at it in this weather?” before agreeing to the request. These supplies however, would be instrumental in ending the Battle for Moscow. On February 21st, the Soviets launched Operation Anvil, a large-scale offensive on both flanks of the German line around Moscow. Unprepared due to their underestimation of the Soviet ability to find material for such an offensive, Axis troops in and around Moscow saw their flanks cave in around them. When the offensive was finally halted on March 1st due to lack of manpower and materiel, the Soviets had created a pocket of nearly 275,000 Axis troops, connected to their comrades only by a thin stretch of Axis-occupied territory known as the Kalininets Gap.

moscowpocket.jpg

1. Remnants of a destroyed supply column in the Kalininets Gap, c. March 1943.​

Hitler, taking the advice of his generals, ordered a hasty but organized withdrawal from the pocket through the Gap on March 10th. In the month of disturbed silence in the ground conflict between the order of withdrawal, and its completion on April 23rd, the Soviet Air Corps and NATO 4th Air Fleet, stationed in Russia since February 1943, sortied day and night to bomb and strafe the columns of troops and supplies pouring through the Gap. The end result of the five months of warfare around Moscow since Obninsk-Gagarin; some 800,000 Soviet dead, 500,000 German dead, 150,000 Axis dead, and innumerable tons of tanks, jeeps and other materiel destroyed. For an invasion that had relied on a quick knockout of the Soviet war machine before it could muster its full-strength, Moscow was a death blow.
In previous centuries, this would have meant the end of the war in Russia, as the defeated army ran home with its tail between its legs. In the 20th Century though, such a move was not an option. War had become too large, and too all-inclusive, and the Axis, having burned their way through all of Europe and destroyed their chances for a negotiated peace, could not simply fall back and hope for salvation. Hitler and Kaiser Wilhelm had dragged the Axis with them into an all-or-nothing war, and they would now have to face the consequences. The Kaiser though, proved especially resistant to the idea of going down with the ship of state, and this would prove his downfall, even more so than the war he sanctioned.

wilhelmiv.jpg

2. Kaiser Wilhelm IV of Germany attending a General Staff Meeting, c. 1943.​

Wilhelm’s dallying about in early 1943 with anti-Hitler members of the German government and military led to contact with NATO officials through secret channels. The final result of these negotiations was a promise of pardon and a “rescue trip” to England for Wilhelm, who was becoming increasingly desperate as the Soviets barreled through occupied territories in Russia in early May of 1943, in return for eventual abdication and undermining Axis morale through public radio broadcasts denouncing Hitler’s government. A Special Forces raid would “capture” Wilhelm during his visit to the Netherlands, and take him to England. What Wilhelm did not know, was that NATO had never negotiated with him, and the other end of the line was, in fact, Hitler’s personal Secret Police, the Gestapo.
On June 20th, Wilhelm was in the agreed place; his personal manor outside of Amsterdam, where it had been agreed he would be extracted. Expecting British-American troops to be outside it, he opened his bedroom door, only to be met by three Gestapo officers. Wilhelm’s death was disguised as a suicide, the bullet through his head the method by which he took his own life. On the same day, Klaus von Messerschmitt was relieved of his command of Axis troops in Italy, and placed in solitary confinement along with dozens of other anti-Nazi officials and military men, awaiting execution in the Great Purge. The last obstacles to a German fight to the death were effectively removed, and eight days earlier NATO had set in motion the gears for the invasions that would be the Hammer to the Soviets’ Anvil.

italyinvasion.jpg

3. NATO troops on the beach at Anzio.
​
The invasion of Italy began at dawn on June 12th, with American landings at Anzio beach, south of Rome. Originally, the invasion was supposed to be larger, and aimed at capturing the southern portion of the peninsula before making a deliberate advance northward to Rome, but time constraints and fear of overstretch by NATO commanders prompted a revision that made the invasion much more similar to the invasion of Brazil two years earlier, intended to knock Italy out of the war quickly through shock and awe by capturing the capital. The Italians however, proved to be unexpectedly tenacious and prepared in their defense of the 60 kilometers between the landing beach and Rome.
One-and-a-half months later, three weeks after the expected capture of the city, NATO troops had expanded their beachhead to an area 120 square miles in size south of Rome, from which they were still 23 miles away. The invasion could no longer be called off, as the invasion force had more than tripled in size and a retreat was now logistically unfeasible and strategically unwise. There was little fear of NATO forces facing defeat though, as the full might of the Italian armed forces was proving just as incapable of shrinking the Anzio Beachhead as NATO forces were of expanding it. The only thing that could conceivably tip the delicate balance in the peninsula was German intervention, which the Italians had been pushing for since the first week of the invasion.
Hoping to avoid this eventuality, which would likely lead to a costly and humiliating defeat for the exhausted invasion force, NATO commanders requested permission from their superiors on July 15th to finally launch the operation that had been NATO’s goal since the Fall of France. McCahill and Churchill had hoped that they could have politically isolated Germany in Europe before launching the coup de grâce, but strategic reality seemed to have undone this. And so it was that Operation Neptune was given the go-ahead, and the nearly 2 million military personnel that had gathered in Great Britain since 1939 would finally go to war.

ddaym.jpg

4. Anglo-Canadian troops at Juno Beach on D-Day, July 27th.​

Operation Neptune involved landings by nearly 600,000 men on four different beaches on the northern coast of Normandy, and three beaches on the western side of the Cotentin Peninsula. A near-complete surprise, the invasion proceeded with lightning speed for two weeks, capturing most of Normandy and the city of Le Havre before General Erwin Rommel, appointed Commander of OKW a week before the invasion, managed to whip the unprepared and inexperienced German forces in France into shape. In a week of intense fighting, Rommel succeeded in slowing the NATO advance significantly, but was unable to do much more, as Hitler successively refused his requests for reinforcements as the great Soviet counteroffensive launched in early July consumed the Wehrmacht’s resources in a desperate attempt to hold back the tide in the East.
By September 1st, NATO troops in France numbered 1.5 million, with more on their way, coming with fresh tanks, jeeps and abundant supplies of ammunition. Rommel’s army of 500,000 men on the other hand, was stretching its logistics to the breaking point, barely capable of holding up a passable defense all along the front, much less launching any counterattacks. With Italy in dire straits and Germany being beaten back on both fronts that it was engaged in, the fall of the European Axis had only become a matter of time.
Paris was liberated on September 11th 1943, the same day as Soviet troops reached the borders of Alexandrist Russia and captured Kiev. Even Rome finally fell on October 1st after Italian resistance collapsed in late September. By then the Italian capital had been reduced in places nearly completely to rubble by the months of bombing raids launched from Anzio and Sicily, and with it went the will of the Italian people to fight. The government of Italy was captured and forced to agree to an unconditional surrender, with the notable exception of Benito Mussolini, who, in an attempt to flee Rome, was shot and lynched by an angry mob.

romey.jpg

5. NATO troops enter Rome on October 1st, 1943.​

NATO and Soviet progress continued inexorably as 1943 ground on, with German commanders resorting to increasingly inventive and desperate tactics as it became more and more obvious that surrender was not an option in the mind of their increasingly insane-seeming government. The desperation soon turned to scorched-earth tactics on both fronts of the losing war they were fighting. This reaction to impending defeat would ensure that Europe would be a wasteland once the war was over. So far though, the fighting had been kept out of Germany, but as the first winter snow began to fall in December 1943, NATO troops captured their first German city; Aachen, just as five days earlier Soviet soldiers had evicted the Germans from Konigsberg after prolonged and bloody battle.
On New Year’s Eve of that year, the Germans prepared to reap the whirlwind that they had sown in Europe. Halfway around the world, in Tokyo, Emperor Hirohito convened with his War Cabinet as to the state of the Japanese armed forces after nearly a full year of relative peace from NATO forces. In the meeting, he was assured that Japan could not only hold back NATO, but perhaps even launch offensives. Afterwards however, he was told by Admiral Yamamoto that he had little faith Japan could resist the “hellfire that [the Americans] have now been waiting almost five years to unleash upon us.”

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

Exceptional Situation(s):

I know. I know. Bad Bob.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get my sh*t together and get you a 1944 update soon so that we can get to an election and update pushback won’t be as deadly.
 
((Huzzah! Don't worry, sir Bob; I still love you))

With Italy liberated, Paris secure, and the Germans on the run in the east, it seems that the final phase of the war in Europe is commencing; in these final hectic months, I will work with President McCahill and our allies to ensure that Hitler and his cabal are removed from power and tried for their heinous crimes.

In the Pacific, our offence has not yet truly begun, and I have full faith in our commanders and soldiers to win that theatre as decisively the European one.

- Secretary of Defence Richard A. Jarvis, at a short press conference in Washington, D.C.
 
((I can only echo what Riccardo said; you shouldn't go about worrying!

Also, sorry for giving you more stuff to write about... :D))

Speech made to a joint session of Congress 15th January, 1944

It is now seven years since I took office. In many ways, these seven years have been the worst seven years in American history; we have had internal conflict, we have had war, we have known loss. The loss of our sons, our brothers and our compatriots. The shattering of our innocence. It is through force of arms that Europe stands on the brink of liberation. It is through a concerted global effort that the world has been saved from international fascism. Having seen nothing but destruction in the wake of the Wehrmacht, it leaves little doubt in my mind that international action has saved all the inhabitants of this Earth from indescribable suffering. There can be no ifs. There can be no buts. America can never again turn her back on the rest of the world, for if we do, we have failed not just the world, but our sons, our brothers and our compatriots.

The war will shortly be over in Europe, even though it has, compared with the fight still left to come, yet to start in the Pacific. America must be prepared to stay resolute in her aims. Never in her history has America elected a new leader during a war. This time next year she will have. I would dearly love to oversee the end of this war, but I fear that Tokyo will not surrender until the start spangled banner is paraded through her streets. This next year is thus one of preparation; every act I perform seen through the prism that another man will soon be sitting behind that all desk in the Oval Office.

And it is for this reason that I will be departing for the Crimea tomorrow, for talks in Yalta with Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin about the future of Europe. In February, I will be traveling to NATO's London Headquarters for a conference where I hope to affirm our belief in the future of the alliance and then I shall be returning to America where my Secretary of State is as I speak organising a summit in New York, where I hope we can sign an initial treaty affirming the desire, of all the countries who have fought against the fascist menace, to a United Nations that will ensure humanity is never again plunged into such a terrible conflict as the one we are currently embroiled.

Before my term is up, I wish to leave the world with peace in Europe and a diplomatic channel for global discussion. Should either of these things escape me I ask history to condemn me to the darkest depths of failure and offer me but a footnote in memory. Should I succeed, I will be forever endebted to the American people who have made such great feats possible.
 
Last edited:
(( I also echo what Riccardo said. Don't worry, and I'm glad this isn't over! :D ))

With fascist Germany and her allies on there knees, the war is almost over. I would like to congratulate the NATO and American troops on such bringing the downfall of fascist Italy, and securing most of France. With the Russians coming in from the east and NATO coming in from the west, Germany will fall soon.

The Pacific theater has not been progressing very much this past year, but I do hope we may put an end to the "Empire of Japan" and there allies. But I am confident that our troops and navy in the Pacific will bring victory soon enough.

~ Christina Blancharde-Fredrick; Speaker of the House of Representatives
 
Thanks for alleviating my guilt a little guys. :D

Anyway, it is that very special time of year again:
​
 
Soon - and I say it with a certainty that comes now not simply from theory and faith, but from the cold hard facts on the ground - soon, this war will be over. But soon is not now. The war in the Pacific rages on, even as the war in Europe grows close to its bitter but much welcomed end. As we did in the times of fearful hope, we must stand together and resolute in times of hope assured.

We are not a war machine, nor have we ever been, nor will we ever be. The totalitarian states of the world have believed that the power of a nation comes from the cold, calculating, and delusional heart of war. War for the nation. War against the nation. They have honeyed their lies with the idea that only they can control the people to gain victory in these wars - wars of their own creation - yet they have no control over the whirlwinds of hatred they have unleashed. As we see with the horrors of German desperation, their only purpose now is destruction.

But we are a people in control of our own selves - makers of war and makers of peace. It was not our purpose nor our desire to make war. We seek no land, no dominion, no power. We harbor no grudge and no fury. Yet we have risen as the greatest counterexample to the lies of the totalitarians - for we have made war on a level formerly unknown to man. Here I must pause to acknowledge the great sacrifice and courage of our soldiers, the brilliance and tenacity of our military leaders, and the single minded cooperation of our industry and political leadership in providing the material support needed. We have not simply faced the power of the fascist war machine - we have surpassed it.

How would Milton-Spencer and his fascists think, if they saw us now? We have become stronger than they dreamed of, but not because of their control, their hatred, and their lies. We have become strong by working together, by desiring peace, and by cooperating in freedom. We have shown that there is no need for the machine of totalitarianism, for the throne of bayonets, for the cross of iron. Thus we have made war - and thus we must continue to make war for a little longer. We must be ready to continue to make war for this time. It is a hard road, but one we have proven ready to face.

And then we must make peace as well as we have made war.

Around us is a world shuddering as it wakes from a living nightmare. Europe is in ashes, and I am afraid that the Pacific faces a similar devastation. We have carried through two terrible global wars with little time in between. The devastation of the first was horrendous - the current, unspeakable. To rebuild is a task we welcome, but it is not an easy one.

We must form a society of peace. I call on the nations of the world to gather as United Nations. I applaud the president's plans as a sound format for this - but whatever the format, we must have a global discussion for peace. The fascists saw the world around them only as a place to take and steal from - indeed, their own people were simply a tool for greedy gain. They looked only for what humanity offered them - we must look for what we offer humanity.

I call on the American people to continue the free cooperation that has characterized our war effort. We too have faced our struggles, ruins at home, frightening and bloody battles far away. But, by working together we have shown the power of a free people, and the peace available to any nation that desires the best for its people. We must continue to strive towards this unity. I say, look not for what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

We can end the war, and we can rebuild peace after it. We can make a world where disagreements are aired freely, and settled peacefully. We can make a world where nations work together to discuss issues without the threat of war. We can make a world where governments are held up by cooperation rather than by intimidation. We can make a world where peace and strength, freedom and unity, are known as one and the same.

Not now, but soon.
 
I also agree that we need some kind of International Pact for Peace, some kind of organization that can ensure this never happen again. This organization or agreement can not be exclusive. We must allow the former Axis members in from the beginning, and we must convince the USSR to join too. Otherwise it will clearly fail.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back