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Nay to the WWA, as it will send American women into combat zones in Europe and South America with high potential risk to those drafted and contains no sunset clause.
Nay to the FSA, as it contains numerous provisions that are questionable both politically and economically.
Nay to the PA, as it will unnecessarily curtail immigration and personal liberty.
Nay to the FSA, as it contains numerous provisions that are questionable both politically and economically.
Nay to the PA, as it will unnecessarily curtail immigration and personal liberty.
Women would be drafted to factories in America. Any women sent to Europe or South America would be volunteers in one of the three services established by the act.
No to all three. I told everyone that gradually we'd be losing our freedoms. And here we are, with another set of restrictions.
Also sorry for the delay, but I am Anti War
Also sorry for the delay, but I am Anti War
Abstain on the WWA
- Does pregnancy and some sort of maternity period count for disability? New mothers will not be of greater use in the factories than at home. If both parents are drafted or called away in the fight otherwise, children from families which don't happen to have other close relatives nearby will overwhelm child care organizations. Legislation should reflect that to more strategically select its drafts from where it won't simply cause a greater burden on society.
Nay on the FSA
- Article III and VIII I agree with, and but I think the bill does not achieve its intent. Many of the conditions have arbitrary cut-offs which could seriously hinder productive government work. The AFSB would have control of the purse strings of the Congress - the power to shift and selectively cut or set spending and taxation is powerful for such a board (which is in this doing only what the elected Congress should be doing itself, but with an extra layer of bureacracy).
Nay to the PA
- I do not see the necessity of making a lot of identification documents and making it more difficult for citizens of other countries to enter America on the basis of passports alone (which their country may not have issued, or indeed could even refuse to issue to avoid travel and immigration from them).
- Does pregnancy and some sort of maternity period count for disability? New mothers will not be of greater use in the factories than at home. If both parents are drafted or called away in the fight otherwise, children from families which don't happen to have other close relatives nearby will overwhelm child care organizations. Legislation should reflect that to more strategically select its drafts from where it won't simply cause a greater burden on society.
Nay on the FSA
- Article III and VIII I agree with, and but I think the bill does not achieve its intent. Many of the conditions have arbitrary cut-offs which could seriously hinder productive government work. The AFSB would have control of the purse strings of the Congress - the power to shift and selectively cut or set spending and taxation is powerful for such a board (which is in this doing only what the elected Congress should be doing itself, but with an extra layer of bureacracy).
Nay to the PA
- I do not see the necessity of making a lot of identification documents and making it more difficult for citizens of other countries to enter America on the basis of passports alone (which their country may not have issued, or indeed could even refuse to issue to avoid travel and immigration from them).
After some close consideration, I have decided to change my vote on The Passport Act to Nay. I feel that this law is unfavorable to the masses of Europe and all peoples who wish to come to our nation.
For clarification Alicia, yes pregnancy and maternity period would count as a disability.
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As a military officer and not a politician, am I allowed to vote on the acts?
Major General Walter Mandrake
Major General Walter Mandrake
I believe it is assumed such a high ranking and distinguished figure like yourself, Mr Mandrake, will be able to persuade your friends in congress to vote on your behalf. ((ie yes!))
((Thanks!))
I vote Ney on all three bills.
I feel the WWA should be voluntary enrollment only. It also does not address mothers or women who are with child, which is a major flaw.
While I can appreciate what the FSA bill is trying to accomplish, I do not like giving a federal bureau oversight over state budgets. I also feel that such a bill may hinder the war effort and would force state and federal governments to float bonds or levy a war tax to maintain solvency. If anything, balanced budgets should be encouraged or even enforced during peace time but should be deferred during war.
I think a passport is a good requirement for Americans who wish to travel, but I'm afraid enforcement of this bill will lead to hindrance to immigration, something this nation is built on. An even greater concern is that a passport or federal ID would be a requirement for voting. I see far too much opportunity for that requirement to be used to disenfranchise people.
Major General Walter Mandrake
I vote Ney on all three bills.
I feel the WWA should be voluntary enrollment only. It also does not address mothers or women who are with child, which is a major flaw.
While I can appreciate what the FSA bill is trying to accomplish, I do not like giving a federal bureau oversight over state budgets. I also feel that such a bill may hinder the war effort and would force state and federal governments to float bonds or levy a war tax to maintain solvency. If anything, balanced budgets should be encouraged or even enforced during peace time but should be deferred during war.
I think a passport is a good requirement for Americans who wish to travel, but I'm afraid enforcement of this bill will lead to hindrance to immigration, something this nation is built on. An even greater concern is that a passport or federal ID would be a requirement for voting. I see far too much opportunity for that requirement to be used to disenfranchise people.
Major General Walter Mandrake
Polls are Closed.
The WWA passes.
The FSA fails.
The PA fails.
If time is on my side, you may get the update today.
The WWA passes.
The FSA fails.
The PA fails.
If time is on my side, you may get the update today.
While I am saddened that we are now forcing women to wage war against their will, I am happy that the other two proposals failed to gain any support.
The Great War
1915: The Year of the Blood
1915: The Year of the Blood
The United States opened 1915 by launching a 200,000-man offensive in Chile. In France, the Tripartite opened large thrusts to the north and south of the central battles at Troyes-Dizier and Auxerre-Dijon. The year that lay ahead the two combatants would prove to be the bloodiest, and most decisive of the war. When the dust cleared in January 1916, there would be no doubt of the identity of the eventual victor.
The US offensive in Chile proved to be a success beyond the wildest dreams of its planners. Generals Buckner and Orbison had hoped to push all Chilean forces south slowly, so as to be in a position to assault Santiago by the winter of 1915-16. Instead, the collapse of Chilean resistance in Antofagasta province after only 20 days of fighting, which saw American troops suffer 4,484 deaths to the Chilean 3,932, left some 65,000 Chilean troops encircled with their backs to the sea in Calama province. Resistance by General Freire would continue until April, when the 24,000 survivors marched into American captivity [1].
While in Chile American troops were executing possibly the most undeniably successful US offensive of the war, in France they were being pushed to a state of near-panic by the success of the Tripartite’s double offensives. In the south, German divisions punched through the thin Franco-American defenses at Lons and begun to lay waste to Southern France. By February, the Germans had gone as far as Avignon, which they had taken from the US 16th and 17th infantry divisions in a short battle that had added another 6,000 to the total of 24,492 US dead for the German “Southern Campaign” of January-May 1915. The end-result was all of Southern France east of Montpellier under German occupation.
1. US wounded near Avignon, February 1915.
In the north, things were little better. Austro-Hungarian troops formed the main element of the Northern Thrust, and this proved to be greatly to the advantage of the American and French defenders, who were much more experienced than their enemies. However, the defenders were few and spread thin by the demands of reinforcement at major battles like Troyes-Dizier and Auxerre. This allowed the Tripartite forces to push quickly to the Channel, and then turn westward.
The intent of Tripartite forces was to envelop Paris from the north. They almost achieved this, having troops make it as far as Chartres before the offensive completely ran out of steam and crumbled into an incoherent mess. This halt can largely be attributed to the Battle of Evreux, which lasted for almost two months between February 8th and March 25th. US forces were eventually forced to retreat having suffered 38,000 losses, but the Tripartite armies’ momentum was shattered, and became spread out thin in a hopeless attempt at occupying Normandy.
The Tripartite successes of early 1915 prompted congress to pass the Women’s Work Act in February, which brought the country’s female population completely under the net of the war effort. The result was that, by May, more than 80,000 American women worked for the military in support roles. Most of them would serve as nurses, caring for the hundreds of thousands of wounded caused as the two sides put their all into the gigantic battles of summer 1915.
2. American nurses, May 1915.
That summer’s bloodbath opened with the end of the war’s largest and most costly battle. On May 8th, German high command called off offensive action on the Troyes-Dizier sector. The battle had lasted 401 days, through rain, heat, snow, ice and most of all mud. At least 2 million soldiers had been stationed in the killing field of the sector at some point during their service. The Battle of Troyes ended in an Allied victory, and it had cost the lives of 177,482 American, 46,321 French, and 224,296 Tripartite troops.
The 2nd Battle of Auxerre also ended in May, having begun with a renewed Franco-American offensive in December 1914. The Tripartite defenders were pushed out of the area, at a cost of 82,390 Allied and 61,266 Tripartite lives [2]. The battered armies were immediately sent to new battles, the American 2nd Corps being directed to aid the French defense near Orleans, where a Tripartite offensive had exploited the less intensively defended gap between Auxerre and Troyes-Dizier. The arrival of reinforcements forced the attackers to retreat to their starting lines by May 24th, having suffered 7,432 dead in return for only 2,847 Allied lives.
On May 24th, 100,000 US troops made port in the city of Caen, which had resisted being captured by the weak force of 4,500 Austro-Hungarian troops in the area. These soldiers were mostly fresh conscripts, but they were reinforced by newly trained regular divisions. Almost no one in this force at a rank lower than divisional command had been in the United States Army a year earlier. The United States 6th Army was a perfect embodiment of America’s ace in the hole; the speed with which it mobilized and transported unforeseen numbers of troops to France.
With the arrival of the 6th Army at Caen, and the 7th Army at La Rochelle three days later, the United States launched its counteroffensive in the north on June 1st. US armies struck out from positions at Caen, Le Mans, Rennes and Paris. In Normandy, the Tripartite forces were smashed apart so completely that it wouldn’t be until August that the last units surrendered, by which time the fighting had cost the lives of 17,785 Americans and 53,782 Tripartite soldiers. Around Paris, the offensive was nowhere near as successful.
3. American troops in battle near Beauvais, June 1915.
At Beauvais, the joint Franco-American offensive succeeded in pushing back the German defenders, but for the cost of 11,000 Allied dead to the German 10,000. At Chalons and Charleville, 8,062 Americans died for less than a mile of ground gained by the time offensive action ended on July 1st. Similarly to the south, 6,327 US troops were killed in a failed attempt at exploiting the victory gained in 2nd Auxerre.
The push out of the Paris salient also created the second deadliest battle of the war when the German army counterattacked the US advance at Laon. Laon and an attempt to recapture the Beauvais area launched that August would prove to be the most strategically important battles of the entire northern front. The fact of the matter was however, that by late July the failure of the northern campaign to encircle Paris, and the sheer number of troops the United States had shipped across the Atlantic that summer [3], had irrevocably turned the tide in the north in the Allies’ favor.
In the south, the summer of 1915 saw the 158,000 American and 17,000 French troops stationed in the area in May of that year stem the tide of a seemingly unstoppable German advance. Between July 9th and August 7th General William Banks’ 3rd Army successfully counterattacked and drove back the German 3rd and 6th Corps at battles in Chateauroux, Bourges and Tulle, opening the entirety of German-occupied southern France to an attack when the battle ended on August 7th. The cost was the lives 9,188 of his men [4].
4. Soldiers from the US 3rd Army near Chateauroux, July 1915.
The decisive battle in the south however, was the Battle of Carcassonne. The engagement began in early July, after the battered US 6th Army had been forced to retreat from Montpellier. It was at this point, with the 6th Army being pushed ever closer to the Pyrenees, that General McCook decided that there would be no more retreat. The American force created some of the most formidable defensive positions of the war, all the while under German artillery fire, and sat down to await the German assault.
Unprepared for proper resistance, the German assault floundered, and when it was finally called off in September, the German army in the south had lost 15,380 dead and the initiative. The cost for the 6th Army’s decisive victory was the lives 6,802 soldiers. The Battle of Carcassonne signaled the end of German success in the south, as by October 1st some 320,000 American soldiers, most only recently arrived in France, stood ready to liberate the German-occupied areas.
While the war was being decided in France, the American people voted in the 1915 mid-term elections, effectively deciding whether or not the United States would fight till the end, or seek a negotiated peace separate from France. In the elections, the Federal Party proved to be the big winner, coming to a grand total of 186 seats in the new congress’ House and 47 in the Senate [5]. The first bills this congress voted on were the Financial Stability and Passport Acts. Contrary to the expectations of their main sponsor, Kevin McCahill, both bills failed.
The FSA was defeated by the opposition of both President Terrance and Secretary of the Treasury Fitz Harrison, who opposed the extreme anti-debt measures and questionable constitutionality of having a commission oversee the budget instead of congress. The Passport Act was slammed by both the anti-war lobby, a sizable portion of the Federal Party, and the Departments of State and the Treasury for its effects on immigration, and essential forced registration of all Americans. The Financial Stability Act did however, did prompt Fitz to begin his attempt to put into action the ideas he had begun to develop in the fall of 1913.
5. Secretary of the Treasury John F. Harrison.
The fall and winter of 1915 proved to be the final proof of the turn of the tide in France, and of the inevitability of Chilean defeat in South America. In the Americas, the noose tightened over Chile’s neck as US forces slowly but surely pushed south toward Santiago, suffering 16,379 dead and inflicting 18,333 fatalities on Chilean forces in the latter half of 1915. Even as citizens of Santiago began to contemplate fleeing the city, the Chilean people at large began to feel the effects of the trade embargo and blockade the United States had upheld since the onset of war.
For the European members of the Tripartite, the greatest supply issue was that of money. In Austria-Hungary and Russia, the government had printed so much money since 1913 as to make their currencies effectively useless. The German government meanwhile, unwilling since the beginning of the war to resort to printing their way out of purchases, was drowning in debt. So far, the war had cost six times the nation’s GDP in Marks, and 70% of that money was from loans handed out by the First Bank of Germany and other smaller institutions.
The Anglo-American blockade of the Tripartite Pact was also beginning to be felt, and as the winter of 1915 drew close, Germans, Russians and Austro-Hungarians all scrambled to buy what food they could still get, even as the entire foundations of their respective economies began to falter. To make matters worse, the French Republic and its allies seemed immune to the economic hardships of the war. The truth was that, of the Allied nations, only the United States was not yet in debt, and even there a federal surplus of $70 billion in June 1913, which had been accumulating since the end of the Civil War, had fallen to $30 billion by December 1915.
6. A cartoon depicting a broke Uncle Sam, October 1915.
While men like Fitz Harrison were feverishly working to ensure the government could operate even when the surplus disappeared completely, American troops were weathering the last, ditch battlefield efforts of the Tripartite. In the south, the battles of Aurillac and Rodez became the last great battles fought on the front. Both began in October, with German efforts to counterattack the advancing American armies, and both ended after heavy fighting in early December.
At Aurillac, the German 2nd Corps was utterly devastated by the 17,086 dead suffered in the battle; more than half of the men that General Behncke had started the campaign with. General McCook lost only 5,266 men. Similarly, at Rodez, the German 4th Corps was decimated by its 4,046 losses, while the US 7th Army was hardly fazed by its 4,618 dead. Resistance to the American southern campaign seemed to end with a whimper.
In the north on the other hand, the year ended with a bang. American forces renewed their offensives at Chalons and Chartres on October 23rd, meeting heavy resistance in both areas. Throughout the month of November, Austro-Hungarian and German defenders tried in vain to inflict the kind of casualties that would prompt the Americans to call off the attack. Between November 23rd and 25th, the defenders finally withdrew. 15,936 Americans died at Chalons, and 7,966 at Chartres, the defenders lost 19,403 and 9,667 dead respectively.
7. A painting depicting American troops at Chalons.
The final northern engagement to end in 1915 was the 2nd Battle of Beauvais. Since August, Tripartite forces had battered the defenses with constant artillery fire and the occasional frontal assault. With the defeats at Chalons and Chartres though, the offensive was called off, as the left flank of the Beauvais force, and the right flank of the forces at Laon, came under threat. The Tripartite had lost 13,870 men in its futile effort, and inflicted upon the US defenders 27,072 dead.
Thus the year of 1915 drew to a close, with the Tripartite beaten back on all fronts, and battles still raging across France, most of all in Laon. The year had begun with the Tripartite seeming likely to win, given enough time, as their forces ran roughshod over northern and southern France. However, the great battles of the summer and fall, and the speed with which the United States had brought troops over the Atlantic, had turned the tide. The stage was set for the final act of the Great War.
[1] – In Chile, and lately in the rest South America too, the Battle of Calama has become an enduring symbol of the end of the “South American Golden Age”. This was a period from roughly 1890 to 1913, when the Santiago Pact’s defiance of the United States seemed to promise South America a place on the world stage separate from the monolith of the USA.
[2] – 2nd Auxerre is often called a forgotten battle as, despite being the second deadliest battle of the war for Allied troops, it is often overshadowed by more strategically decisive battles like Troyes-Dizier and Laon.
[3] – Between May and October 1915, the United States shipped about a million soldiers from harbors at New York and Norfolk to combat in France.
[4] – The war in Southern France was always a lower-intensity conflict than that in the north, and veterans from campaigns there usually have a much more positive attitude toward their experiences in the war.
[5] – The Entente Party finished with 72 seats in the House and 12 in the Senate, and the Republicans, as the anti-war lobby, with 177 in the House and 41 in the Senate.
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Exceptional Situation(s):
One last chance to propose wartime bills, because the Tripartite doesn’t look to be capable of lasting through 1916.
((Might I request, if possible, a few in-game shots so I can figure out what's going on? Thanks in advance.))
((I'll try to get you a pic of France on Jan. 1st 1916, but be warned, it's ugly. The way the game's combat system and AI works means there's itty bitty armies all over the map, instead of the relatively solid fronts I've condensed the general flow of the war into in the story.))
To bring some order into the chaos of our nation's current, only at times reliable, banking system, I present the following bill to the Congress for its consideration:
- John F. Harrison, Secretary of the Treasury
NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!
I will oppose any such Federal Reserve system, it will merely give the government more power to print more money for more wars.
I will oppose any such Federal Reserve system, it will merely give the government more power to print more money for more wars.