American Carnage - A United States Kaiserreich AAR

[Tommy4ever]

November Surprise – October 1938 – December 1938

Blue – Full Election (Washington DC Government)
Light Blue – Partial Election (Washington DC Government)
Teal – Full Election (Baton Rouge Government)
Light Green – Partial Election (Baton Rouge Government)
Yellow – Partial Election at Local Level Only (Baton Rouge Government)
Grey – No Elections Held​

1938 was an election year in the United States’ traditional bi-annual election calendar. While the Pacific States of America had held national elections the previous November, the two chief claimants to continuity with the old Republic – Huey Long’s Baton Rouge government and General MacArthur’s regime in Washington DC – were presented the challenging question of whether or not to go ahead with elections and in what form they could take. There was obvious precedent over this question, with both the North and South having held elections midway through the First American Civil War, weakening arguments for suspending them outright.

Baton Rouge moved first on this issue, when President Long announced the starting pistol for a midterm election campaign as early as June. MacArthur lagged behind, seeing a divisive political campaign as an unnecessary distraction during a time of war, but ultimately felt compelled to prove the democratic credentials of his regime. In both governments’ territories, no clean and even slate of contests would be possible, with differing levels of stability, civilian control and trust in the local populace influence the nature of elections in different parts of the country.

Under Washington DC, full elections at Gubernatorial, Senatorial, Congressional and State levels with no restrictions on the franchise were held only in New England, while in New York, New Jersey and Delaware were held in parts of the state but under heavy military supervision and with areas with heavy historic syndicalist or Longist presence excluded. Areas on the frontline in Maryland, Pennsylvania and parts of New York were excluded entirely. In Baton Rouge controlled America, a full suite of elections were held in a total of 10 Southern states, with elections were also held in large parts of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Kansas and Arizona that were sufficiently distant from frontlines. Most interesting in the case of the Longist zone was the regime’s treatment of the sizeable collection of Mid Western states that had joined Jack Reed’s rebellion in 1937. In a total of 5 of these states, all of them still under martial law, elections were held for a number of local offices – with a view to restoring a degree of civilian control over domestic affairs. These elections were geographically limited, were carried out under military supervision and without secret ballots and with tight controls on which candidates could run and who could vote – with known syndicalists denied the franchise outright.

Despite a shared decision to go ahead with elections, the nature of the electoral contests in the two Americas were quite distinct. In Federalist territory, General MacArthur presented himself as above and separate from politics – allowing political debate to operate at a level below his own regime. With both Democrats and Republicans closely tied to the regime, and politics outwith the traditional two parties strictly forbidden, substantive questions over ideology and the conduct of the war were off the ballot. Instead, debate focussed on local issues and key civilian concerns. Progressive-leaning Democrats conducted a number of vigorous campaigns calling for greater state intervention to support civilian economies upended by the war and promoting further measures to integrate African-Americans. These efforts paid fruit, with left-leaning Democrats securing a score of victories, bouncing back from their dreadful performance of 1936. It was notable that Herbert Hoover, despite his side-lining from MacArthur’s Presidential cabinet, chose to place himself at the centre of the Republican campaign – hoping to leverage a strong set of results to rebuild his waning political influence. The poor showing of his party across the region badly damaged his personal prestige and led to his effective retirement from active political life by the end of the year – as he left Washington to take up residence at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

To the south and west, Huey Long adopted a more pointedly party political campaign in which he would stake his own personal political capital on the performance of his America First Party. The party itself would win the elections comfortably with a simple message of ‘keep calm, and trust President Long’. The was greatly aided by a staunch government-aligned partisanship in the press and a massive organisational advantage over its rivals, going uncontested in more than a third of all the Congressional districts holding elections. Huey Long would be surprised to see his candidates generally underperform their 1936 performances anywhere they were confronted with credible opposition. The biggest beneficiaries of this weakness proved to be the extremist Christian Nationalists, who appealed directly to the Longist base, and won more than two dozen Congressional seats and saw Gerald Smith with the Senatorial election in Arkansas, an impressive victory. The Southern Democrats, organisationally and ideologically distinct from their New England cousins in the Federalist zone, also fared well – making measured gains totally around a dozen additional Congressional seats alongside a variety of down ballot successes. There were even a small handful of Independents and former Republicans elected, particularly in border states. The drink issue proved to be especially damaging for America First, with a groundswell of prohibitionist sentiment powering much of the Christian Nationalists’ success and dampening enthusiasm for the incumbent party.

The elections held in the five former syndicalist states were, for the most part, tightly controlled affairs won with ease by America First candidates in circumstances that were as distant from free and fair elections. The one exception to this was Ohio. There, the most powerful office up for election, the newly introduced position of Vice Governor – effectively allowing for an elected civilian politician to act as the deputy of a military governor until full reintegration – was won by a certain Robert Taft, running under the banner of Independent Republican.

Taft was American political royalty, his father William Howard Taft having served as President between 1909 and 1913 and then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1921 until his death in 1930. The younger Taft had been a player in Ohio state politics through the 1920s and 1930s, serving in its state legislature for much of this time. As the country fell into civil war in early 1937, Robert Taft’s home at Sky Farm on the outskirts of Cincinnati was occupied by Red Guards – who seized the property, brutally beat Taft himself and killed one of his two younger children who still lived at home before casting him and his traumatised family out. The Tafts would find shelter among friends within Cincinnati who hid them from the syndicalist authorities before the Longists captured the city weeks after the outbreak of fighting – allowing Taft to come out of hiding and return to his property. Following this experience, Taft became an enthusiastic backer of the Baton Rouge government, although resisting pressure to join America First itself. His victory in Ohio added a new blot to the political tapestry of Huey Long’s America.

Exasperated and downbeat after his party’s humbling electoral performance, Huey Long offered public assurances that his government would respond to popular demands. Hoping to reduce the troublesome influence of Smith and his Christian Nationalists, before the end of the year the President had put legislation before Congress in Baton Rouge that would implement a federal ban on the sale and importation of liquor – with a number of small exceptions including for religious observance and most notably for frontline soldiers, at the behest of key army leaders. Decades of anti-liquor activism had achieved the greatest victory in their history, making the fairly bibulous Long the unlikely face of a bold new ‘Noble Experiment’ in American history.

Just days after election day, General MacArthur pulled off an unexpected second amphibious landing on the Atlantic coastline of Dixie. Drawing troops from both the North East and Florida, the Federalist took advantage of the withdrawal of much of the Longists’ coastal garrison to fight further south to land tens of thousands of troops along the North Carolina shoreline. Faced with open terrain, through the rest of November the Federalist drove deeply inland – capturing the cities of Charlotte and Raleigh – while also advancing up the coast to retake the crucial port of Norfolk for the first time since Eisenhower’s surrender in spring 1937. By early December the Federalist invasion had run out of steam – held back in the west by the Appalachians while seeing heavy resistance around Richmond in Virginia and Columbia in South Carolina. Nonetheless, they were able to settle into a strong defensive position.

This invasion had a number of consequences. By withdrawing troops from Florida, it left the Federalists undermanned on their most southerly front, and allowed the Longists regain significant ground there. However, the fall of Norfolk left the crucial Longist line south of Washington DC badly exposed, with its supply lines shaky and vulnerable without the port city. Finally it left Baton Rouge’s high command panicked and scrambling yet again as it sought to redeploy sufficient forces to contain and push back the landings.

The Longists were hit hard by these sudden losses that saw them lose control of the majority of the East Coast – with morale across the board plunging and fear spreading across the South that the war would soon come to their communities. Most notably, the Federalists made use of a new tactic – offering appeals towards Blacks to defect to the Federalist cause. During its campaigns in Florida, the MacArthur regime had been surprised at the level of enthusiasm Federalist forces elicited from African American communities – with thousands in the state volunteering to fight for Washington during their occupation. This had encouraged Federalist military officials, to make a larger effort during the North Carolina campaign to issue propaganda depicting MacArthur as a latter-day Abe Lincoln who would sweep away Jim Crow and raise the Black man to equality with the White man for the first time in American history. This message resonated, and tens of thousands of African Americans would sign up to support the Federalist occupation in North Carolina, while also providing key intelligence to MacArthur’s troops.

While Baton Rouge scrambled to counter the Federalist campaigns along the eastern seaboard, in the Midwest early December witnessed the first major Longist offensive against the Syndicalists since the Spring. Noticing the difficulties that the syndicalists were having in keeping their supply lines to their outposts in rural northern Lower Peninsula Michigan open in the icy conditions of deepest winter, the Longists sprang a controlled operation in the area. In a matter of weeks, the syndicalists were pushed back into a limited pocket in eastern Michigan around Detroit, Lansing and Flint, with a total of 15,000 soldiers surrendering to the Longists. After a reprieve of several months, the noose was tightening around Red America once again – the ultimate demise of the syndicalist movement appeared certain and close.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Your order is built on sand – December 1938 – February 1939

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As early as the summer of 1937 the Federalists had secured control of the seas in the Atlantic after decisively defeating Baton Rouge’s fleet, although MacArthur’s forces lacked any ability to project power into the Atlantic. Thereafter, Washington sought to choke its enemies into submission by cutting them off from international trade by aggressively policing the Atlantic Ocean. It quickly became impossible for any shipping sailing under syndicalist or Longist banners to operate beyond the coastline at best. However, both the Combined Syndicates and Baton Rouge possessed foreign friends who were willing to sail to their ports under their own flags.

When faced with this challenge, Washington was cautious. MacArthur was eager to avoid escalating foreign intervention, and therefore avoiding a policy of directly attacking neutral shipping. However, over the course of the second half of 1937 and through 1938, the Federalists would gradually increase the restrictions placed on foreign vessels – claiming the right to board and search any vessel that entered American territorial waters and confiscate goods aboard, later expanding this to international waters in the Atlantic Ocean. For the syndicalists, these policies, coupled with the worsening on-land situation, strangled the ability of their European allies to provided substantive material aid. But for the Longists, Russian and later Norwegian ships continued to find their way to Southern harbours by traversing neutral waters in the Caribbean, and sometimes switching to Cuban or Panamanian flags of convenience, before running Federalist blockades in the Gulf of Mexico – where Baton Rouge retained some residual naval strength and Federalist vessels were far less active, far from their ports.

However, even this game could last only so long. Having heavily invested in submarine technology and made use of Floridian ports during their occupation of the state in the second half of 1938, the Federalists began to take a more aggressive approach in the Gulf of Mexico – prowling its waters and announcing their intention to fire upon any vessel breaching a sizeable exclusion zone of the American coast. This policy of unrestricted submarine warfare would lead the sinking of a number of Norwegian vessels, and violent threats of retaliation from Moscow; but ultimately achieved its primary goal of finally completing the severing of Huey Long’s regime from the international economy. Cut off from the seas, and with no prospects of overland trade with syndicalist Mexico to the south, a hostile Canada to the north and its two domestic enemies to the east and west – Baton Rouge was left in a state of total autarky by the dawn of 1939.

After the impact of the Federalist landings in North Carolina in November, in December the Longists began their fight back across the East Coast. First, a sizeable force that had made a beachhead just north of Savannah Georgia as early as the first Florida landings months previously was finally forced to surrender on 14 December – with 26,000 men laying down their arms. Meanwhile, to the south the Federalists had withdrawn a significant portion of their strength from Florida to redeploy to North Carolina in November. This had allowed Longist counterattacks to achieve significant breakthroughs even while they were losing land to the north. As the situation in the peninsular state worsened through December, Federalist command decided to begin an evacuation rather than risk losing all their forces in the sector – with just 16,000 men, many of them militia recruited from the local African American population to fill out ranks, left behind to surrender at Tampa on 11 January. This left North Carolina as the last major Federalist enclave south of the Potomac.

These successes further south allowed Baton Rouge to redeploy troops towards the North Carolina front – pushing the Federalists back from their most protruding inland gains before the front line stabilised by late January. However, while the Longists made progress in western North Carolina, in Virginia, Federalist troops were able to pounce forward to recapture the symbolic and logistically crucial city of Richmond for the first time since the spring of 1937. This left the crucial defensive lines along the Potomac that had held steady for more than a year and a half under significant risk.

Out to the west, the long struggle for Denver was finally coming towards its conclusion. The Four Battle of Denver fought between September and November 1938 had been the largest and bloodiest contestation of the city to date, and left around half of the urban area in the hands of Pacific and Japanese troops, even as the Longists stubbornly held on to the more southerly part of the city. While fighting in Denver temporarily eased through December and January, the Pacific Staters were on the march elsewhere – pushing south from Nebraska into Kansas, while launching continued, albeit unsuccessful, attacks around Omaha and Minneapolis. Facing pressure elsewhere on the long front, the Longists released some of their troops from the Denver area, being particularly concerned about Pacific advances into Kansas – with little standing between the Pacific spearhead and Baton Rouge’s heartland Southern states beyond.

While this tactical redeployment helped to slow the advance in Kansas, it left the battered mountain capital exposed and in February yet another assault, spearheaded by elite Japanese regiments, was unleashed in the Fifth Battle of Denver. This time, the city finally fell, with the Longist General Robert Danford, who had been headquartered in Colorado since the outset of the Civil War, suffering a bullet to the knee as Baton Rouge withdrew its forces into the south of the state at the end of the month.

As a city that had been fought over and held through so much fighting since 1937, Denver enjoyed great symbolic importance to both Sacramento and Baton Rouge. For both, it represented the key fortification maintaining the security of Huey Long’s western frontier – allowing for greater adventurism elsewhere. Now it was lost, and across the Western Front the Longists were outnumbered and on the backfoot. Anxiety over defeat coupled with General Danford’s injury prompted General Moseley at high command to seek to significant reorganise the command structure on the western front. Notably, this would involve the redeployment of George Patton, the hero of 1937, from the frozen wastes of Minnesota, where despite his disgruntlement he had ably held off Pacific Stater attacks through the winter, to take charge of the southern portion of the western front stretching through Arizona, Colorado and Kansas. Meanwhile, Danford himself would, after a short convalescence in Texas, be moved north to take charge of the northern portion of the front through Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota. For Patton in particular, this represented something of a reprieve for Baton Rouge’s most outstanding military talent after his errors in the spring of 1938 had cost his army heavily, with Patton’s new command both larger, more prestigious and far more strategically significant.

In the New Year, all eyes were pinned on the Mid West where the syndicalist movement was struggling for life. On Christmas Eve 1938, the last starving holdouts in Philadelphia finally surrendered to Federalist forces after almost two years under siege and the better part of half a year cut off from any reliable supply line. MacArthur had finally secured uncontested control of the entire Atlantic coast from Washington to the Canadian border, and the wreckage of America’s third city. By this stage, the situation in the syndicalist-controlled territory was desperate. The area still controlled large cities – Pittsburgh, Detroit and Cleveland – and its population had been further swollen by hundreds of thousands of refugees who had fled previous Longist and Federalist advances, and still had more than half a million men under arms at the end of 1938. With such a limited area under control and with their regime cracking at the seems as defeatism spread throughout society, it was increasingly impossible for the Combined Syndicates to sustain this population. By the winter of 1938 shortages was endemic for both civilians and military personnel – food, fuel, ammunition, clothing, shelter, all were in limited supply. By the winter, there was an estimated 800 calorie deficit.

To the west, on the Ohio-West Pennsylvania front, battlelines had been static since the spring with only small sporadic fighting over than long period as deep trenches and fortifications were built on either side. In the second week of January, the Longists broke this peace with a limited attack against Pittsburgh. Although lacking any significant numerical edge and fighting in urban terrain, the Longists found their enemy with little will left to fight – capturing the city with only modest casualties. The limpness of the defence of such a key city, and the miserable condition of its defenders, provided ample evidence of the drastic situation American syndicalism was in. For all, it was clear that the end of nigh.

At the fall of Pittsburgh, the Combined Syndicates of America had just weeks left of their existence. Since their December operations in the north of the state, the Longists had been tightening the noose in Michigan – gradually pushing the large syndicalist army in the state back towards the sprawling auto-city of Detroit as their methodically moved forward, capturing Lansing and Flint over the course of January. By the start of February, the syndicalists still had, on paper at least, around 120,000 men defending their capital – but the combat effectiveness of these troops had been degraded to the point of collapse. Despite bold proclamations by revolutionary leaders that Detroit would be a graveyard for the advancing Longists, the battle for Detroit lasted less than a week – with the attack beginning on 6 February and the final capitulation of the city coming on 11 February.

The battle of Detroit represented the last days of American syndicalism – which had been headquartered in the city since the loss of Chicago in July 1937. As Longist troops approached the city centre, Jack Reed – who had nominally remained President of the United States according the syndicalist movement even after losing effective executive power a year and a half previous – put a pistol to his temple rather than fall to the enemy. Earl Browder, who had seized power from Reed and stabilised the syndicalist cause for a time, announced the final surrender of the city over radio in the late afternoon of 11 February, calling for all syndicalist fighting men still in the field to lay down their arms before following Reid’s example in taking his own life. One member of the syndicalist government, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, would note down in her journal “Order reigns in America again. But your order is built on sand! The thunder of the working man will return far strong before and bring the light of revolution to the entire world!”

Major Hood Simpson had taken over command of Baton Rouge’s forces in Michigan in the spring of 1938 following George Patton’s dismissal from his previously sprawling authority across the Mid West. In contrast to the man he replaced, Simpson was a careful and methodical leader who had skilfully led the campaign through Michigan in the winter of 1938-39 with fairly minimal Longist losses. Keenly aware of the bloody scenes at Chicago two years before, Simpson maintained strict discipline over his troops as they advanced through Detroit and harshly punished any instances of civilian killings or unnecessary collateral damage. Despite this, shortly after the fall of the city, instructions were received from Baton Rouge to begin the process of rounding up a long list of syndicalist leaders than ran into the thousands from the city.

Although the relatively peaceful takeover of the city, at least in contrast to the experience of Chicago, had assuaged some concerns, the beginning of political arrests only added to a stampede to the country. Detroit was nestled against the Canadian border, separated from Canada only by the Detroit River to the south, Lake St Clair to the east and St Clair River to the north east of the city. Although Canada had heavily militarised its borders and cracked down on American refugees since the middle of 1938, the winter months brought a renewed push by those trapped in the Detroit pocket to escape the noose tightening around their necks. Such were the numbers attempting to flee, the Canadians destroyed all bridges between Michigan and Ontario in January and banned all crossings of the frontier for any purpose. Despite this, thousands would attempt to swim across the icy waters separating Detroit from Canada while tens of thousands more took to shops of varying sizes to flee east – often with deadly consequences as Canadian authorities attempted to hold them back. This wave of would-be refugees was only ended after Simpson’s troops began to establish full control of the American side of the border in the middle of February.

 

[Tommy4ever]

No Sovereign But God, No King But Jesus! – February 1939 – May 1939

No force, not history, ethnicity, ideology, institutions nor the power of arms, had shaped American society more than God, and specifically the Protestant faith that had been the foundation of the nation since its birth a century and a half before. However, over the decades leading up to the Second Civil War, Protestantism had experienced a chastening period as it underwent significant internal division and struggled with a changing society. Demographically, the high levels of Catholic and Jewish immigration in the decades before and after the turn of the century had brought an end to its ubiquity across American society, while more troublingly the onward march of modernity had started to secularise the nation, with religion’s unchallenged grip on the American people loosening as never before.

Theologically, secularism and modernity presented challenge to the key cornerstones of Christian faith. Social mores were changing, while new scientific discoveries challenged the word of the Bible. From the end of the nineteenth century, into the 1920s each of the major Protestant denominations witnessed the emergence of a liberal modernist movement that sought to reconcile Christianity with the modern world by moving away from literal interpretations of the Bible, disassociating from the supranatural elements of the religion and loosening long cherished dogmas. These liberal reforms were faced by an equal and opposite reaction from fundamentalists who held true to the old religion and refused to compromise on the tenets of their faith. The debates of this era were perhaps most famously brought to life in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, during which four time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a committed fundamentalist Presbyterian, argued the case against evolution and the slide of the modernists away from God. However, even before the Scopes Trial, the battle had largely been lost. By the middle of the 1920s, the modernists had achieved control over all of the major Protestant denominations with the exceptions of the Southern Baptists, who had a much stronger and more resilient fundamentalist wing, and the growing Pentecostal movement that had itself only been born at the beginning of the century.

The victory of liberal Protestantism, that would come to be better known as ‘Mainline Protestantism’, coincided with a sharp drop off in popular piety in the late 1920s and through the 1930s as the economic troubles of the Great Depression and the rise of syndicalism drastically reduced the influence and centrality of religion to public life. On both an elite and popular level, discourse shifted towards economic and secular ideological concerns, while Church attendance and visible religious enthusiasm fell away. Moreover, the syndicalist movement in particular, heavily imbued with a suspicion of organised religion, and at times a militant atheist spirit, presented an existential threat – drawing millions away from the Churches to a new faith, and threatening persecution for those who held close to God.

As the syndicalist movement grew in strength and began to organise as a paramilitary force with its Red Guards in the mid-1930s, this feared persecution became actual for those in the red hotbeds of the Mid West with Churches and Churchgoers facing harassment, routine desecration and physical violence – many grassroots revolutionaries regarding them as pillars of reaction, even if centrally the Combined Syndicates maintained a nominal policy religious freedom. This period of overt persecution intensified as the nation fell into Civil War, and was only ended by the victories of Longist armies over the Reds across the Mid West.

It was in this context of great hardship that the scene was set for a religious revival, the Fourth Great Awakening. The spark for this revival was born in the unlikely surrounded of red Chicago in the winter of 1937 to 1938. This city had been at the very centre of the syndicalist movement for well a decade and a half. Having been the first major city to elect a Socialist mayor as early as 1923, its votes then powered the party to its first victory in a statewide race in 1926 when Seymour Stedman won election as Senator. Thereafter, the red grip only tightened, with Illinois voting Socialist in consecutive Presidential elections in 1928, 1932 and 1936, the latter of which with an absolute majority of the vote, while the Socialists took control of every tier of government within the state. By the beginning of the 1930s, outward displays of Christian faith had become taboo; courting harassment and even violence from the authorities and revolutionary activists. Chicago had then faced heavy destruction and murderous violence during its occupation by the Longists in July 1937, before languishing in a rotten state for months thereafter with precious few funds offered to support its reconstruction while the war was still raging – leaving behind mass homelessness, devastation and intense poverty.

Many who had felt their faith suppressed in the preceding months and years were desperate for spiritual renewal and satisfaction that appeared lacking from the Mainline Churches, even as the re-opened their doors once more with the passing of the syndicalist occupation. But things would change with the arrival on an unusual Pentecostal preacher in the cold months. William Branham was Kentucky born, but had lived much of his life in Indiana – on the frontline of the struggle between syndicalism and Longism even before the outbreak of civil war. Like so many Mid Westerns, he had seen violence face to face and been shaped by it and felt a mission to revive Christian fervour in the region.

In the 1930s the Pentecostals were still regarded with suspicion, even by other Protestant fundamentalist, with their ecstatic forms of worship, fire-breathing doctrines and claims of miracles during services. Branham in particular was a spectacular performer who claimed to be able to heal the sick with his prayers and channel miracles. Alongside his claims of faith healing, one of his most well remembered routines was to ask former Red Guards to come forward at his sermons where they would confess all the sins they had committed and he would offer them God’s forgiveness. As Branham began preaching in the open air in Chicago his words would explode like a bomb over the city. By early in the New Year he was speaking to tens of thousands at Wrigley Field, taking in the largest mass gatherings in the city since the outbreak of war. While the Chicago revival subsided after Branham left the city in late February, and he would personally never quite capture the same astonishing attention and electricity in other cities, a torch had been lit.

While Branham was himself a Pentecostal, the Awakening was not bound to a single preacher or denomination. Instead, he merely represented the crest of a new wave that was about to sweep across America. With Protestants of all denominations and none being swept up in the new spirit of religious revival, the movement was defined by the tendency towards mass gatherings, unashamed public displays of faith, intense emotion, an emphasis on personal spiritual experience, rejection of immodesty and alcohol and, importantly, a thundering defence of the old traditionalist doctrines.

Although the likes of the Pentecostals and Baptists were at the forefront of the revival spirit, many adherents to Mainline denominations were attracted by the new movement. This caused significant discomfort for Church leaderships, who largely shunned the style and content of the new preachers, ultimately leading towards Evangelical splinters breaking away from the historic Churches – impacting the Lutherans and Methodists particularly badly. Intriguingly, the Awakening also had a degree of influence on the force that many Protestant traditionalists still regarded as the hearth of the Anti-Christ – the Roman Catholic Church. As they sought to rebuild their congregations after the syndicalist period, and reacting to the attractions of the Protestant evangelists, a number of Catholic clergymen took to hold mass gatherings of their own – with Father Coughlin in particular mixing America First activism and Catholic resurgence as he looked to rebuild his historic powerbase among the Mid Western Catholic working class, speaking to large crowds in Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis, Chicago and Cincinnati through the second half of 1938.

From the Great Lakes, the revival spread south by the summer of 1938 and found fertile soil in the most religiously conservative part of America. Another remarkable feature of the movement was that, despite the deepening of racial divides during the Civil War, the spiritual revival effected White and Black communities with the same intensity. This spoke to the significant diversity within the Awakening on issues beyond theological conservatism and style of worship. Indeed, Branham himself was a militant segregationist who had told his Chicago audiences to end of the mixing of races in the north, while some preachers controversially broke segregation laws in Southern states to hold mixed-race meetings and others still aligned with Black pastors to call for reform of Jim Crow.

Beyond Baton Rouge controlled America, battlelines limited but did not entirely halt the spread of cultural discourse. Indeed, connections between denominations on different sides of the Civil War remained and some interactions across the whole of the continent remained possibly – particularly through the use of Canada as an intermediary. By this method, the seeds of the Awakening had percolated west of the Rockies by the onset of 1939, with the inland states of the Pacific States taking to the resurgent Evangelicals particularly strongly.

At the fall of Detroit on 11 February, the syndicalists still had 100,000s of men under arms controlling a combat territory in Pennsylvania, north eastern Ohio and the north western nook of New York state. While some would refuse to accept the end of the revolution and slip away into the Appalachians to fight on as partisans, the large majority of these men were unquestionably eager to follow through on the message received from Earl Browder to lay down their arms. Over the following days huge numbers of men would surrender themselves to Federalist and Longist armies, while many more would simply abandon their weapons and uniforms and seek to slip away into civilian populations, hoping to avoid captivity as prisoners of war. They would leave behind a territory the size of a country with no master, setting the scene for the Pennsylvania Dash.

Making use of the flat terrain and the good condition of the road network, the Longists moved quickly along the coast of Lake Erie from Cleveland, which they surrounded from the west and south at the time of the capitulation, to reach as far as Buffalo and Rochester in north west New York. They were only halted near Syracuse, where the faced their first Federalist challenge, Southern cavalrymen probing their troops before withdrawing at the first sign of serious resistance. Already secured in eastern Pennsylvania at the start of the month, the Federalists focussed their efforts in overhauling the rugged landscape on the centre of the state to threaten its western reaches. In this, they were initially successful, capturing most of central Pennsylvania and reaching within a few dozen miles of Pittsburgh and Allegheny River, where they threatened to cut off the Longist salient around Buffalo, by early March. While the Federalists had their own hopes of encircling overstretched Longist lines, it would be they who fell victim to counterattacks during this chaotic period in February and March, with their most advanced troops in Pennsylvania being surrounded as Baton Rouge’s troops bypassed them to establish a firm front line along the hills of the centre of the state. By mid-March this fluid period on the front had ended, with both armies settling into a familiar pattern of densely packed trench warfare, now extending all the way from the Potomac, through the northern Appalachians to the shores of Lake Ontario.

Further south, the South Carolina front remain largely static through this period, with the only major fighting taking place around Richmond. There, the Federalists had threatened to completely cut off the heavily entrenched Virginia-Washington front, which had remained static since the early days of the war, an issue that was worsened by attacks across the Potomac from the capital through February. As such, the Longists focussed their firepower on limited operations that successfully recaptured Richmond in late March, just as the main focus on the east coast was on Pennsylvania.

On the Western Front, the Fifth Battle of Denver during February facilitated a period of greater fluidity on the front since the start of the war two years before as the Longist military scrambled to reorganise itself after its heavy defeat and the final loss of its Rocky Mountain defensive line. Between February and May, the Pacific States would capture almost the entirety of Colorado and Kansas, reaching as far as the Oklahoma border, while putting heavy pressure on New Mexico. However, by the middle of April their offensive had run out of steam – even facing some reverses to the north around Iowa and southern Minnesota. This was largely a result of a mixture of overextension and the redeployment of Longist troops from the Mid West in the aftermath of the fall of Detroit in February. Indeed, the collapse of the syndicalists would significantly alter the strategic dynamic in the West. While the Pacific Staters had spent as much as a year with the advantage in numbers and firepower across the Western Front, by the late spring this superiority had been reversed and Baton Rouge planners were already devising their first offensive of scale in the theatre since the outbreak of the Civil War.

When Hiram Johnson had been unexpectedly elected President of the Pacific States of America in November 1937, the PSA had faced very little heavy fighting in the civil war but was experiencing a booming economy and was in the midst of a febrile intellectual atmosphere. By the spring of 1939, it has suffered more than 300,000 military casualties, killed, captured and wounded, but much of that early optimism could still be found. Economically, coastal states in particular had continued to go from strength to strength, on the back of growing trade links with Japan, plentiful labour, war-fuelled demand for their industries and de-regulation pushed for by the free marketeer intelligentsia. Militarily too, the situation was promising. Despite the meat-grinder at Denver between October 1937 and February 1939, Pacific arms had never tasted a serious defeat and had instead advanced to capture the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado over the course of the war.

However, Johnson’s Pacific States were not entirely happy. As the President had pushed relentlessly for victory in the east and a restoration of the old Republic, he had been forced to embrace Tokyo ever more closely. By 1939, the Japanese ambassador was frequently allowed to sit in on cabinet meetings, while their military attaché held dual authority with American commanders in oversight of the front. Further to this, Japan had demanded and been granted unfettered access to the Pacific market – flooding it with its goods while also receiving access to key resources, above all Californian oil, at below market rates. Worse yet, Japanese industrialists and the government had taken an interest in deploying significant investment in the country – buying up land, capital and infrastructure at an alarming rate. While all this had aided the Pacific States in its war efforts, and indeed helped to power its economic boom, it was the source of significant anxiety through the country. This was only made worse by the growing isolation of the Pacific States from the rest of the world, with the Entente powers, hostile to Japanese presence in the Western Hemisphere and friendly to the Federalist government in the west, becoming increasingly hostile as the war wore on.

Fear of Japan’s ambitions on American soil coupled with the frustrations of advocates of the ‘Californian Ideology’, a belief in unfettered freedom and free markets that had become a powerful force in the Republican Party after independence. While the Republicans had enjoyed some influence in government given their control of the legislature, the Progressive President had blocked many of their more ambitious ideas and called for a focus on the war effort. The long awaited fall of Denver in February 1939 brought many of these tensions to the fore once again. As early as 1937 there had been a divide in Pacific politics, with many on the right hoping to see a negotiated peace that would allow for Western independence while the left tended to favour the complete reconquest and restoration of the pre-war United States. Johnson’s 1937 electoral victory had quietened the separatist element, but never quite eliminated it. With the Pacific States in a clear position of strength given its victories in early 1939, but with the defeat of the final defeat of the syndicalists turning the wider conflict in Baton Rouge’s favour; there was significant pressure to negotiate.

However, for the President, by 1939 it was simply too late to turn back. Much blood had been spilt, promises made to the people of the liberated Plains states and now the Japanese were so imbedded in the structure of the state that they could not simply be pushed out. This intransigence would see the divisions in the Pacific political class grow more public, with a number of right wing Republicans turning bitterly against the administration and calling for a heavy defeat for Johnson’s allies in the mid term elections scheduled for November.

 

[Tommy4ever]

There are different orders of King – May 1939 – July 1939

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Henry Ford had been convinced to go south to Baton Rouge rather than to the Federalist territories on the East Coast at the onset of the Civil War through his friendship with America First Senator Charles Lindbergh and through assurances from Huey Long of political influence in his government and security for his business empire after the war. From 1937, he had played an important role in building up the South’s industrial power in his capacity as Armaments Minister, with Atlanta and the cities of Texas in particular witnessing significant development, while acting as the bridge between America First and the wider business community.

Indeed, while Ford in many ways opened the door, as he would be joined by other titans of industry in seeking a stake in the Baton Rouge regime, with government and business making a Faustian pact together, trading wartime cooperation for the promise of protection from any efforts at postwar redistribution as well as a share of the spoils of victory.

This latter question had grown extremely pertinent to the fate of the nation with the fall of syndicalism in the Mid West. The region had been conquered by the Longists’ armies in stages between 1937 and 1939. Yet prior to their victory the area had witnessed a genuine social revolutionary upheaval of existing property relationships. The state, unions and workers cooperatives had established control over the majority of the economies of these states, including all major industries, through means both fair and foul.

Baton Rouge had maintained a policy of returning property that had been expropriated by force in the immediate lead up and during the Civil War to its prior owners. However this only accounted for a part of the socialised economic of the Mid West. Large sectors of industry included properties whose owners had since defected to rival governments and were thereby enemies of Huey Long’s regime; properties whose formers owners were now deceased or missing with no clear heir, properties that had legally been purchased prior to the Civil War by the syndicalist sector under varying degrees of pressure – for example the coal mines of West Virginia; and others that had no prior owners, having been established by state or worker-led investments. With no former owner to return this portion of the syndicalist economy to, the American state took de-facto control over the majority of the Mid West’s industrial might. Indeed, in the late Civil War period, Huey Long’s Mid West operated under a near Totalist system of massive state control.

With a significant financial stake in and knowledge of the region, Henry Ford had been the leading proponent of a fast transition back to capitalism in the Mid West. He advocated for a policy of auctioning off all ex-syndicalist controlled properties that could not be returned to their former owners, and allowing the captains of industry who had been loyal to Baton Rouge to lead the way in the redevelopment of the wider region while raising valuable funds to help pay for the war effort. Ford’s argument that this was the most effective way to boost much-needed industrial production in the region to aid the war effort was boosted by his success in bringing a number of Ford Corporation owned factories back on line at breakneck speed after their liberation.

This questions would sharply divide the America First party. On the right, Ford’s proposals were supported by his key allies, Charles Lindbergh and the New Nationalist faction of the party as well as traditional Bourbon Southern conservatives who eyed tantalising opportunities for Southern capital. On the left, the radical footsoldiers of the movement who had rallied around Huey Long’s historic Share Our Wealth Agenda, alongside the Catholic Coughlinites, found the prospect of handing over such wealth to the already rich and further widening inequality completely anathema. Outwith the party, the Christian Nationalists echoed the anti-elitist message of the America First left, holding the President’s feet to the fire on the issue. Even within the America First left, there was division with the Coughlinites generally friendlier to the idea of large levels of nationalisation as a means of ensuring worker justice in certain sectors than the Southern Longists who favoured a more atomised industrial sector populated by smaller scale and more local enterprises. In one heated cabinet meeting discussing the issue Earl Long, Huey’s brother and a staunch Share Our Wealther, berated the right “we swore to make every man a king, not raise the rich man up even higher!” To this, Ford sourly replied “there are different orders of king, Mr Long”.

As had been his instinct for much of the civil war, the President attempted to delay key divisive decisions in order to hold his party and the movement together. Warning that no permanent solution could involve the total replacement of syndicalism with corporate power, but equally that he had no intention of allowing for a permanent socialist economy in the region. As such, for the duration of the war the state and military would retain ownership of the industries that could not be returned to their previous owners, while seeking advice and expertise from industrialists and former manager to increase production to meet wartime needs – with a final economic settlement to be agreed once the war was over.

On the frontlines, after heavy fighting in the winter of 1938-1939 as the Combined Syndicates breathed their last breath and the Pacific Staters finally captured Denver, the Civil War entered a period of relatively light fighting in the spring – with lower casualty figures than had been seen since the previous autumn. This changed decisively from May – with May and June being the two bloodiest months of the entire Civil War to date. Indeed, May alone had witnessed twice as many military casualties as the previous record month of the conflict. Overall, through May, June and July 1939, as many men would be killed, captured and wounded as in the entirety of 1937 – with a total casualty figure of 400,000 across all factions. These casualties were mostly accrued on the East Coast, where Washington and Baton Rouge clashed in a string great battles.

The largest of these battles occurred across the large front from Washington DC to the Canadian border. Battle lines had been drawn through this area in February and March as the Longist and Federalist armies had scrambled to occupy the rump territory of the collapsed syndicalist state. Thereafter, the situation had settled for a time with only minor skirmishes between the two sides for several weeks. However, by the start of May it had become clear to Baton Rouge intelligence that the Longists had developed a modest but very real numerical advantage across the entire stretch of the front, while the balance in the air – which had favoured the Federalists since the start of the war – was now more even than ever before, with Baton Rouge transferring the bulk of its aircraft previously based in the Mid West to the east.

General Moseley had taken a close interest in the emerging opportunities on the east coast, seeing a victory in the east as imperative to reopening the sea lanes into Baton Rouge America and easing the economic difficulties the Federalist blockade was starting to cause. He would therefore devise a grand battle strategy, Operation Cedarwood, designed to break the fighting spirit of the Federalist army, and cut the civil war drastically short. The plan was based on thrusting offensives by three separate armies. In the north, Lewis Puller – who had previously commanded the Longist troops in the capture of Pittsburgh – led the army in Upstate New York ad was tasked with striking towards the state capital of Albany and securing the Hudson River, the last major obstacle before the virgin territory of New England to the east as well as New York City itself to the south. In the centre, William Simpson, the conqueror of Detroit, was given command of the largest portion of Longist troops on the front with responsibility for Pennsylvania and was direct to take Harrisburg before moving on towards Philadelphia. Finally, Courtney Hodges, who after taking Virginia in 1937 had overseen the bitter trench warfare on the Potomac Front, was tasked with launching an all out attack against the entrenched Federalist defences around the capital, pinning MacArthur’s troops there and preventing them from being redirected elsewhere.

The fighting during Operation Cedarwood was to be incredibly ferocious and brutal. In many sectors the attacking Longists were taking on well dug trenches, which in the southern sector included defences built up over the course of two years. The Longists hoped to make use of the superior numbers, the massive use of firepower and high morale after the recent defeat of the syndicalists to break through the enemy positions. In fighting that would carry on from early May through to August, they would bring the Federalist army to the very brink of breaking before ultimately the offensive was called off, with massive casualties having been inflicted on both sides. The Longists would achieve only very modest territorial gains, mostly in the northern sector where Lewis Puller’s men had taken the city of Syracuse and advanced within miles of the Hudson and Albany before running out of steam. Ultimately, the Longists failed in all of their key objectives, at tremendous cost.

While fighting was ongoing to the north, the Longists were engaged in another major campaign in North Carolina and Virginia. Since the Federalist had established their enclave in this region in November 1938, Baton Rouge had only been able to make painfully slow, incremental progress towards pushing them back – gradually isolating them on the coast, huddled around the major port of Norfolk and smaller settlements on the North Carolina shoreline. General MacArthur maintained an imposing force in the area, tying down a large portion of the entire Longist army and allowing for continued efforts to spread subversion among the South’s large and restive Black population.

Coinciding with Operation Cedarwood, in May and June the Longists unleashed a major offensive in this sector with the aim of finally collapsing the enclave. While launching relentless attacks across the length of the front, they focussed their efforts in achieving breakthroughs towards the coastline that gradually split the Federalist army into ever small pockets of resistance before moving to besiege each isolated group one by one. With no prospect of assistance from the north given the coterminous fighting there, the Federalists were unable to hold the line and gradually fell to these attacks. By the fall of Norfolk on 15 June, no fewer than 78,000 Federalist soldiers had surrendered. Despite their relative success in holding back Operation Cedarwood, this represented a catastrophic loss for the Federalists.

Defeat in North Carolina and the losses sustained in Operation Cedarwood had left Washington DC’s armies bled utterly white. While the Longists controlled the largest part of the old United States, the Federalists could simply no longer replace their losses without resorting to a level of military mobilisation that General MacArthur feared might provoke insurrection behind the lines. As such, the Federalist government reached the conclusion that if they did not receive help from elsewhere then their government had little hope of seeing out the year.

The only realistic source for such support was across the border. The Canadians had long been hostile to Baton Rouge, with Prime Minister Mackenzie King viewing Huey Long with particular disdain as a violent demagogue who had destabilised the entire western hemisphere, and had offered their recognition of General MacArthur’s regime in 1937. Although naturally preferable to the syndicalists, Longist control over the Great Lakes was a serious concern for Ottawa that held down the largest part of its military strength at a time when escalating tensions in Europe made a major war, and with it the possibility of the reclamation of the British Isles, an imminent prospect.

Therefore, when General MacArthur arrived in Ottawa to kiss the ring of the King-Emperor and meet with powerful Premier in June, his grave warnings of a weakening military situation and pleading for assistance found a receptive audience. While the Canadians were still reluctant to go to war, they nonetheless signed off on the raising of a large force Entente America Expeditionary Force (EAEF) recruiting from across their global alliance network. By the late summer a staggering 100,000 Canadian, National French, Australian and other Entente fighters had arrived in the American North East to aid the Federalist cause, filling emerging gaps in the line and relieving Washington’s exhausted soldiery.

On the other side of the continent, the Western Front was comparatively calm through the late spring and early summer months. The impressive gains that the Pacific Staters achieved at the start of the year were firmly halted by the arrival of Longist reinforcements from the Mid West, although fighting persisted across the front – in particular around the city of Omaha, which had been bitterly contested for the past year.

This stupor in the west was about to be brought towards an end in the unlikely surrounds of the barren deserts along the Mexican frontier, through an unplanned operations led by old blood and guts himself, the irrepressible General George Patton. Earlier in the year, as they made gains across the front, the Pacific Staters had secured the far south western corner of Longist controlled New Mexico, stretching out along the border. With Baton Rouge’s position improving, Patton was instructed to push the Pacific Staters back to the Arizona border, resuming the defensive line along the state boundary that had held since the start of the war. Patton’s attack began in June and found the enemy undermanned, poorly supplied and slow to react. Over the course of five days of fighting, the Longists almost completely destroyed the Pacific Staters in southern New Mexico, leaving a gaping gap in their lines. Never able to resist and opportunity to go on the front foot, Patton, albeit with limited resources and precious little left behind to protect his rear, poured forward into southern Arizona – the first time Longist forces had entered the state during the Civil War – and on 4 July reached the key city of Tuscon, from where he was able to establish a forward base in the state. With fighting along throughout the front further north, the Longists could hardly believe just how open southern and central Arizona appeared to be in front of them – with not a single division left to defend the state capital of Phoenix. By reaching as far as Tuscon, Patton had already exceeded his order to secure the state border and high command in Baton Rouge had an unclear picture of the situation on the ground. As General Moseley urgently demanded a report on the situation, Patton left behind a curt telegram “situation excellent, we advance”.

 

[Tommy4ever]

I Don’t Give a Damn if You Sonofabitches Are Tired – July 1939 – September 1939

While Operation Cedarwood had petered out in July, with the Longists abandoning hopes of a knockout blow in the North East, their enemies had started to strengthen with the arrival of large numbers of Entente troops following MacArthur’s embrace of Canada. Earlier in the summer, Cedarwood had seen the Longists make marginal territorial gains around Washington DC – advancing incrementally to the west and north west of the city to leave the capital connected to the rest of Federalist territory by only a narrow slithering of land running through Baltimore and across the Susquehanna River. With the balance of power tilting away from Baton Rouge once again, from September, the Federalists and their international allies began a counteroffensive around the capital city – aiming to dislodge the Longists from its vicinity, leading to a further eruption of the costly trench-based warfare that had typified fighting in the North East for so much of the war.

When George Patton captured Tuscon on 4 July, it was the first time since the start of the war that the Longists had taken a major settlement of any kind from the Pacific State. Just four days later on 8 July, his army would enter the Arizona state capital of Phoenix without firing a shot in anger. A mild tactical victory was escalating into a serious strategic opportunity for the wider war effort. Despite the loss of Phoenix, the Pacific State retained a strong numerical position in Arizona, modestly outnumbered but with an advantage in artillery, equipment and air support. However, Patton’s rapid breakthrough had drastically altered the dynamics of the conflict in the state, leaving his enemy bewildered and in organisational disarray.

From Phoenix, Patton would thrust aggressively northwards towards Flagstaff, joining with an attack along the far north of the New Mexico-Arizona border into the Indian reservations of north eastern Arizona. This attack threatened the largest part of the Pacific army in the region, stationed along the eastern state border, with encirclement and led to a chaotic retreat out of eastern Arizona with Patton’s men in hot pursuit.

In the confusion of the Arizona campaign, Patton would make make skilled use of horse cavalry throughout the fighting: scuttling back and forth to repel counterattacks on the flanks of his spearheads, allowing his vanguard to maintain a relentlessly aggressive posture; and moving to move fast to occupy undefended territory before the enemy could reach it. This, one of the last great uses of cavalry in western warfare, was made possible by the absence of armour and motorised troops in a sector that had been largely static since the start of the war – making the horse the fastest moving mode of transport in the fight.

From the fall of Phoenix, the next four weeks would see fighting spread right across Arizona, with the Pacific Staters attempting to achieve an orderly withdrawal back to new defensive lines – along the Colorado River on the borders with California and Nevada in the west and towards the mountains of Utah to the north. However, by the end of the month, morale and order within the Pacific army in the South West was disintegrating, in particular in the north where entire battalions were deserting the fight.

The poor condition of the Pacific army in northern Arizona allowed one prong of Patton’s lance to strike northwards at pace. Having only crossed the Utah border during the first week of August, a division of mountain rangers supported by cavalry and infantry in the rear made quick progress through the mountainous centre of the state to reach Salt Lake City on 23 August, only facing serious resistance after capturing the city as the numerically superior but disorganised Pacific Staters launched a desperate counterattack. Victory in scarcely populated Arizona had been one thing, but the capture of Salt Lake City was a far more seminal moment in the course of the war – the ‘Mormon Mecca’ being the most important city between Denver and the Pacific coast, representing a heavy blow to Sacremento’s prestige in the inland states while also doing serious damage to its ability to adequately supply its armies further east that depended on supply lines passing through the Salt Lake Valley.

While these accomplishments in Utah were significant, a breakthrough of far greater importance was taking place to the south. Patton himself, always preferring to place himself in the heat of battle, had handed responsibility for the Utah campaign to his subordinate Major General Claire Lee Chennault, while he placed himself on the Colorado River. Fighting along the river had started as early as 20 July, less than two weeks after the fall of Phoenix, but here the Pacific Staters had been able to use the natural barrier to hold the line. That was until a comprehensive Longist victory at the town of Yuma near the Mexican border that allowed Patton’s men to secure a safe crossing of the Colorado and gave them control over the southernmost portion of its western bank on 15 August.

With this victory, a number of key officers responsible for the division who had made this breakthrough, many of whom had been among the first to cross into Arizona in early July, approached the General to plead with him for a few days pause to provide time for their exhausted troops to recouperate after six weeks of constant fighting and movement in the blaring summer heat of the Arizona and for their uncertain supply lines to catch up before they even contemplated taking on the Sonoran and Mojave deserts of southern California. Patton responded with fury and went to speak before his men at Yuma: “I don’t give a damn if you sonofabitches are tired. On the other side of that desert, not 200 miles away, is the Pacific Ocean. If we stop moving for a single day, there will be 20,000 barbarian Asiatics with sharpened swords, half mad for our blood, waiting for us there. We keep moving until our boots break and out skin peels, and it will be ours without a fight”. Threatening to court martial any man who refused to carry on, just the morning after the victory of Yuma 15,000 men would march onwards into the harsh Sonora desert with enough food and water for no more than a week under tight rationing at most.

Patton’s harshness at Yuma would be quickly repaid with successes scarcely imaginable at the start of the summer. Behind their line on the Colorado, the Pacific Staters had almost nothing to protect the richness of Southern California – one of the key economic motors of the entire separatist republic. Indeed, Sacramento’s military planners had hoped that the inhospitable terrain of the Mojave and Sonora would at the very least delay any Longist advance, explaining their failure to provide any defence in depth. Instead, Patton’s ragged and parched spearhead would cross the desert in the space of a single week – entering San Diego, a key port and rail supply hub, on 23 August completely uncontested. True to his promise, Patton had taken his men to the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean and the Californian heartland.

Even then, there was not time to stop while far greater prizes lay ahead. Marching up the coast at breakneck speed, the Longists reached the great city of Los Angeles at the end of the month, home to Hollywood glamour and the largest city of the Pacific State and fifth largest of the entire nation. Unlike San Diego, the Pacific Staters were able to cobble together a feint resistance for the city of angels from local militias, before giving up the fight after just a few days. On 2 September, Los Angeles – sparking open celebrations in the streets of Southern cities as Baton Rouge proudly boasted of their victory across the nation and the world.

In two months, the Pacific States had gone from the ascendancy to catastrophe. Ultimately, the losses of Arizona, Salt Lake City, San Diego and Los Angeles would have immense political and military impact on the Pacific States. While in the early summer of 1939, faith in eventual victory had been widespread in the West – the recent reverses had made total defeat appear certain. With the sheer scale of the Western Front leaving troops concentrations fairly dispersed and the wildness of the environment allowing for individuals to simply disappear with relative ease, desertions were growing into an endemic issue across the military, especially where armies were in retreat. Meanwhile, key lines of supply had been broken, crucial industries, and vital sources of limited manpower – particularly in Southern California – had all been lost. Sacramento’s ability to continue to wage war had been critically undermined.

Politically, President Johnson faced calls for his resignation from old allies and opponents alike, with many Republicans pushing for an immediate ceasefire with Baton Rouge while the Pacific States still had some bargaining power. Desperate to keep his regime alive, Johnson would beseech Tokyo to send yet more assistance. However, rather than convince the Japanese of the need to redouble their backing, Patton’s victories had instead degraded their belief in the possibility of a Pacific State victory. With tensions rising in both China and between Japan and the German Empire in the Far East, Tokyo saw little value in pouring more resources into North America with little prospect of lasting return. As a result, President Johnson received little more than platitudes and kind words from his Japanese allies – all while Tokyo began the process of rolling back their aid to his government.

While Sacramento’s longtime Japanese backer was pulling away, the Pacific States would, through a bizarre set of circumstances, find a new ally in the unlikely location of the eastern Balkans. In the late 1930s, Romania found itself in a complex geopolitical situation. In 1937 it had fought in the Fourth Balkan War against Bulgaria before later intervening during the collapse of Austria-Hungary – greatly aggrandising itself territorially with the acquisitions of Transylvania and Dobruja. Meanwhile, domestically, its politics had featured a major confrontation between democratic forces and the National Populist Iron Guard movement – eventually resulting in the victory of the democrats. On an international stage, Romania’s aggressive foreign policy alienated it from Germany while Baron Wrangel’s backing of the Iron Guard made it deeply suspicious of Russia. While these factors opened up Romania’s ears to the plight of the Pacific State, a friend of the Germans’ Japanese rivals and one that shared an enemy with them in Moscow, they do not explain Bucharest’s interest in a war fought oceans away.

This would take the bizarre intervention of a Hollywood star in Romanian political affairs, in a striking example of the cultural soft power of California. Bela Lugosi, a Transylvanian born ethnic Hungarian, was an icon of 1930s Hollywood for his portrayals of Dracula. In 1938 he had travelled back to his homeland, by then under Bucharest’s rule, to visit family and take leave from his exacting production schedules. With such a well-known star, and an ethnic Hungarian no less, visiting the nation, King Carol took the time to invite Lugosi to a private dinner with him during his stay. While there, Lugosi impressed the King with his discussion of the war in America, and the just cause of the Pacific States. Thereafter, the King would push Romania to enter into a friendly trading relationship with Sacramento, which soon escalated as relations continued to improve – with the Pacific Staters putting significant effort into cultivating ties with their emerging European friend. This culminated in the Romanian government agreeing to outfit a force of volunteers to travel to America to fight for Sacramento. The Romanian Legion, numbering at its peak around 20,000 men, would arrive at the port of San Francisco at the end of August, at the moment of Sacramento’s greatest need with the Longists rampaging through Southern California. Over the course of the Second American Civil War, they represented the only foreign power other than Japan to send troops on the ground to fight for the Pacific States.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Wind From the North – September 1939 – October 1939

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Internationally, the world took another step towards war in September as the Italian Civil War reached its conclusions. Despite the failure of syndicalism in the United States, the late 1930s had been a period of rapid expansion for the movement in Europe and Latin America, with its victories in Spain and Italy in particular seeing revolutionary arms outcompete German and Entente backed proxies and dramatically alter the balance of power on the Old Continent in favour of the Internationale.

Chairman Mussolini’s success would have a number of important consequences for North America. Domestically, the victory of the Italian syndicalists raised paranoia in Baton Rouge and especially Washington DC, in whose territories the majority of Italian-Americans lived, about the nation’s millions strong Italian population. As a result, both the Longist and Federalist regimes would launch crackdowns on communications between the United States and Italy, as well on distinct Italian-American organisations – which were seen as possible breeding grounds for neo-syndicalist organisation.

Geopolitically, the rise of red Italy would play heavily on the minds of policy makers in Ottawa. War in Europe now appeared inevitable and imminent, and Canada would be desperately hamstrung in her ability to participate so long as the elephant on her border remained in flames.

The fall of Los Angeles on 2 September was not the end of Patton’s dramatic offensive in the west. After victory in Southern California, Longist forces reeled northwards. There, they would face greater resistance as the Pacific Staters were able to gather together an effective resistance – but found a gaping hole in their lines that allowed for a speedy advance through the San Joaquin Valley, the breadbasket of the West Coast. After Fresno fell on 16 September, the most advanced Longist troops reached the outskirts of San Francisco and the Bay Area four days later. There, they met the Romanian Legion in their first major engagement of the war, bringing their drive north to a halt.

After Patton’s men had finally been stopped at San Francisco, the frontlines in California finally began to consolidate into a stable pattern. Through the rest of September and into the first week of October, the Longists secured control over the Central Coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco – encircling around 14,000 Pacific State troops in the process – drawing a more static front line from the Bay Area in the west, running through Fresno and into the Sierra Nevada and the southern Nevada itself.

The Pacific Staters achieved a rare success at the end of September in Utah as they reclaimed Salt Lake City. The city had fallen at the end of August in one of the earliest victories that followed the breakout from the Arizona campaign. However, almost immediately the Longist grasp on the city had been challenged by Pacific Stater counterattacks. Despite efforts to reinforce its defence through September, eventually the Longists gave way and withdraw back to the southern part of the state. Although temporarily cheering Sacramento after the dark preceding weeks, few victories in North American history were ever so pyrrhic.

The Pacific States' victory in Utah occurred at a time at which they were abandoning swathes of territory further east. Since Patton’s breakthrough in July, Sacramento had started to redeploy troops east of the Rockies to plug the emerging gaps in the front – a process that had been greatly accelerated as the very heartland of their republic had come under critical threat. Initially, the Longists had held back their troops in these areas, preferring to race to redeploy divisions of their own to funnel into the new territories being occupied by Patton’s spearheads. However, by the late summer they had developed an almost two to one advantage throughout the Great Plains. The time to strike had arrived.

Under General Danford, who had previously commanding the long struggle for Denver through 1937-1939, the call to attack came in the first week of September. The Longists would see the enemy, just months before on the front foot across the region, melt away before their eyes. By the start of October, after less than a month of fighting, Danford had wrestled control over almost all of Kansas, South Dakota and the Pacific-occupied parts of Minnesota as well as around half of North Dakota and making more limited progress in Nebraska and Colorado. What had before appeared to be a controlled withdrawal from the Plains was now becoming a rout, with the panic and ill-discipline seen in the face of Patton’s campaigns on the South West playing out once more.

The rapid collapse in the Pacific States of America took Ottawa completely by surprise. All calculations, based on the expectation of a prolonged and fairly balanced conflict were now rendered redundant, with many believing that the Sacramento regime would not survive the winter. This would allow Baton Rouge to concentrate all their efforts against the Federalists and ultimately win the Civil War. With Canada having been openly hostile to Huey Long since the outbreak of the civil war, the prospect of his total victory just as Europe was on the brink of war was a catastrophe. Seeing no alternative, and having long sought to contain his involvement in the war, on 9 October, Prime Minister King approved Canada’s intervention in the American Civil War – promising to aid Washington DC in squashing Huey Long’s ‘rebellion’ and restore the constitution of the United States.

 

[Tommy4ever]

California I Love You – October 1939 – January 1940

For all the fanfare, Canada’s intervention in the war did little to alter the state of the battlefield in the short term, with Ottawa not yet full prepared for major operations. As a result, it was the Longists who made the first, admittedly very modest, advances into enemy territory as they captured Winnipeg in November and forced their way across the Detroit River to occupy Windsor the same month. To the east, in New York State, the Canadian intervention left the Longist position around Syracuse, west of Albany, badly exposed and as a result a withdrawal back to Rochester was made. This early apparent Longist advantage would not last forever, and by December the tide was already starting to turn, as the Canadian army mobilised and moved towards key front lines around Ontario, while in the skies the involvement of Entente aircraft effectively grounded Baton Rouge’s air force in the eastern United States.

On the West Coast, the Pacific Staters, or rather their Romanian allies, had halted Patton’s relentless advance at San Francisco Bay in late September – providing a moment’s reprieve and allowing them to fashion a defensive line across central California. Yet this hastily formed front would hold only for a matter of weeks as the Longists rushed reinforcements, and crucially precious new equipment, westward to support a new offensive.

Among the arrivals in California, the most important would include the famous Black Horse Division, the veteran motorised unit that had played a major role in the early Mid Western offensives of 1937, and the rollout of Baton Rouge’s first armoured division. This division would be equipped with the newly developed M3 Lee medium tank – fresh of production lines in Texas where it had been developed by a joint-project between the military and a number of industrial enterprises led by the Ford Motor Company. The M3 Lee was significant for a number of reasons. Its very name, honouring the famed Confederate general, touched on the widespread Neo-Confederate nostalgia of Longist America, while more pointedly it represented cutting edge technology, superior to the M2 tanks fielded in small numbers by the Pacific States and on a much larger scale by Washington DC. Patton now had the speed and firepower to go beyond the almost nineteenth century infantry and horse-based tactics that had been the basis of his campaigns in Arizona and Southern California.

Noticing the scant defences left by the Pacific Staters in the deserts of Nevada, Patton took the chance to make his move in the second half of October. Securing safe passage through the Sierra Nevada mountains in Yosemite, motorised units, cavalry and infantry raced through the gap, sweeping through largely empty territory in western Nevada to take Reno on 19 October before sweeping west back into California to arrive behind Pacific Staters lines and march straight into Sacramento on 23 October without fighting a major battle. In a matter of days, around 85,000 Pacific Stater and Romanian soldiers had been encircled in central California while the capital of the rebel republic had fallen.

After the fall of Sacramento, the Longists moved to collapse the large central Californian pocket – forcing the large army trapped within it to fall back to the confines of the San Francisco Bay area by the end of October. The city would witness heavy fighting under siege conditions, with Longist artillery and aerial bombardment unleashing a level of destruction that California had never come close to experiencing before. Finally, the tattered defenders would surrender on 2 December, alongside the pride of the Pacific army.

To the east, the collapse of Pacific State power in the interior continued at pace. With Denver, the city over which so much Southern and Western blood was spilt through the first two years of the Civil War, was taken after a short battle on 24 October. This occurred as the Longists struck deep into Pacific territory, facing little in the way of serious organised resistance as they outmanouvered their flailing enemy to capture tens of thousands of troops in their westward march. By the start of December, just as San Francisco was preparing to surrender, all of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado had fallen while the Longists were pushing on into Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

After the fall of San Francisco, Patton men in California prepared to push once more against their increasingly fragile, and by now heavily outnumbered, enemy. Entering a new offensive in mid-December, the Longists pierced through the Pacific Stater lines with ease to the north west of Sacramento and soon reached the sea around Fort Bragg. From there, the fast-moving Black Horse Division, supported by armour following behind, moved at breakneck speed along the shoreline of Northern California, reaching Eureka, home to a key airbase where almost 200 Pacific Stater aircraft were captured on the ground, on 21 December and moving onwards almost completely unhindered into Oregon. Indeed, two weeks after the fall of Eureka, early in the New Year, the Longists reached the city of Portland and were finally halted at the Columbia River that marked the boundary between Oregon and Washington.

With the remains of the Pacific government huddling in Seattle, President Johnson was in deteriorating health – barely able to attend cabinet meetings, while his regime’s power fizzled away. With lines of communication being severed and discipline in the military long since lost, the President’s power was increasingly theoretical rather than actual, with what troops remained in the field largely operating independently and the machinery of state, certainly beyond the Seattle area, ceasing to function. These winter months also witnessed an exodus of officials and politicians out of America – with thousands boarding ships bound for Japan before it was too late.

The Longists’ spectacular successes on the West Coast had economic as well as strategic implications. From 1937, the Federalists had strangled Baton Rouge’s access to the outside world with its Atlantic blockade, while syndicalist Mexico to the south and a hostile Canada to the north had provided no alternative routes to international waters. Indeed, as General MacArthur’s tolerance of neutral shipping waned, the only route for people and valuable supplies to reach in and out of Huey Long’s America was through a dangerous rat run through the international waters of the Caribbean and then the submarine infested waters of the Gulf of Mexico. However, the relatively non-violent conquest of Southern California, with its ports and infrastructure seized in pristine condition opened up a new pathway.

While the Federalists and their Entente allies were dominant in the Atlantic like never before, the waters of the Pacific were far more open. The Entente itself had some strength in the ocean, but was predominantly focussed on the Atlantic, with a limited Canadian station at Vancouver and an Australasian fleet that was more concerned with threats within its immediate vicinity than in North America. Meanwhile, while the Pacific States nominally possessed a sizeable fleet of their own, their ability to put these ships on an offensive footing was limited as the loyalty of sailors and admirals wavered in the midst of the state’s wider collapse and access to fuel, supplies and munitions grew more limited. The Japanese, the dominant naval power of the Pacific and the PSA’s main backer, had little interest in risking open war with Baton Rouge and therefore presented no threat to commercial shipping.

All this made San Diego and Los Angeles the first viable gateways to international markets that Baton Rouge had had in years. Having suffered economically from its economic isolation, Baton Rouge would soon take advantage of this new access – exporting oil to raise much needed revenue and seeking out goods that had been in limited supply.

While the Pacific States were in their death throws on the West Coast, in the east the Entente and their Federalist allies were contemplating their own strategy for turning the tide against Baton Rouge. Looking to take advantage of their domination of the Atlantic Ocean, now more total than ever before with the Canadian and French fleets augmenting Washington DC’s, the Federalists would seek to open up yet another new front in the South Eastern United States. Between 27 and 29 December now fewer than 70,000 Federalist soldiers landed on a string of beaches between Jacksonville and Daytona Beach in north eastern Florida. Although Baton Rouge maintained a fair sized garrison in the state, they were rapidly overwhelmed by this powerful onslaught and forces into headlong retreat in all directions – north towards Georgia, west to Alabama and south to Miami.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Mexicali Rose – January 1940 – March 1940

Racial tensions in California, one of the most racially diverse states in the United States outside of the South with a tenth of residents non-white including sizeable Hispanic, Asian and Black populations, had been high throughout the Civil War. Conflict was especially tense between the white majority and Asians, who many closely identified with Japanese influence, and to a lesser extent African Americans, resented by critics of the Sacramento regime who believed they had inordinately benefited from the civil rights reforms introduced by the Pacific States founders in 1937. As the Longists conquered the great cities of the state in the late summer and early autumn of 1939, many of these pent up animosities were released in a string of race riots that saw white mobs target these communities. The rioting was at its most bitter in Los Angeles, where it raged for over a week and caused large scale destruction.

Among the most enthusiastic participants in the violence were the Okies, recent migrants who had fled west from the devastation wrought by the Dustbowl and often lived close by to similarly impoverished Black communities, most of who had arrived in California from the South in recent decades. The Okies had long been particularly critical of the war with Baton Rouge, in many cases having close family members fighting in Huey Long’s army, and had been particularly horrified to see the degradation of their one source relative status among the California poor – their race – during the Civil War.

This breakdown of law and order was challenging for the Longist military authorities, whose resources were badly stretched by the sheer speed of their advance across the South West – which had stretched its resources to keep up with the fast moving front and had few troops spare to police civilian areas in the rear. They therefore looked to elements of the old administrations to maintain order.

It was through this policy that Jack Tenney came to the attention of Baton Rouge. Tenney had secured a small measure of fame in the interwar years through this success as a songwriter, with his ‘Mexicali Rose’ proving a popular track and inspiring a Hollywood film of the same name. Entering state politics as a Democrat in the 1930s, with the collapse of the party in 1936-1937 he shifted his allegiances to the Republican Party. Critical of President Johnson, he won the Los Angeles mayoralty in 1938 on a vicious anti-syndicalist and anti-Japanese platform that lambasted Hollywood as a nest of subversive activity and Tokyo as would-be slavemasters of the American people.

When the race riots swept his city in 1939, Tenney, having avoided dismissal by the Longists like many local administrators, moved fast to mobilise his police force to restore order. He did this not by quashing the rioters but by forcibly occupying Asian and Black neighbourhoods and conducting mass arrests against ‘treacherous elements’. Having spent the preceding year as a key member of the wing of the Pacific Republican Party that had been calling for a truce with Baton Rouge, Tenney was among the fastest to move on to talk of reconciliation and the legitimacy of Huey Long’s Presidency.

All this brought Tenney to the attention of Martin Dies, the powerful chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Since as early as 1937, Dies had built up significant power in Baton Rouge American, expanding the HUAC into a sprawling agency with significant responsibility for internal security and the identification of political subversives. The HUAC had first been established to root out syndicalism among Southern Blacks, while also clamping down on rampant lynchings and racial violence that was strangling the South in the early months of the Civil War. He later expanded his remit by taking a leading role in attempts at ‘De-Syndicalising’ the Mid West; compiling lists of individuals who had participated in the CSA and the wider syndicalist movement to put onto blacklists and investigating institutions and organisations for ideologically compromised individuals to be purged.

In Tenney, Dies identified a potentially valuable asset that would allow him to further expand his own authority into the newly re-conquered lands of the Pacific States, allowing the HUAC to stake its claim to a key role in the reconstruction of the West, just as it had done in the Mid West. In early 1940, Tenney would be invited to join the newly formed Californian wing of the HUAC – with special responsibility for culture, and by extension a remit over the most influential conglomeration of media in the world in Hollywood.

At the front, having initially been prevented from cross the Columbia River into Washington state at the start of the month, the Longist spearheads quickly moved further upstream to find an alternate and unguarded bridging point that allowed them to bypass the Pacific army entirely. By late January they had reached the southern suburbs of Seattle, where the loyalists of President Johnson and the ideal of Pacific independence sought to make their last stand.

The Longists had advanced with such pace up the western seaboard that they were initially clearly outnumbered in Washington state, allowing the Pacific Staters to mount a strong defence of their final bastion. The fighting around the city would last more than two weeks, with the city garrison surrendering on 8 February as the steady arrival of ever more reinforcements from the south eventually gave the Longists an overwhelming advantage over their demoralised foe. I was just under three years to the day from General MacArthur’s seizure of power in Washington DC that set the nation hurtling into war. The condition of the Pacific President in these final days was a sorry sight. Suffering from a heart attack on 2 February, when he regained consciousness he appeared to hallucinate – holding lengthy conversations with Teddy Roosevelt, his long deceased running mate in the 1912 Presidential election, whom he beseeched for advice. Johnson would pass away on 6 February, two days before the last capitulation of his republic. Without an obvious Presidential line of succession, and no functional civilian government left to speak of, it would come to Pacific Chief of Staff George Marshall – then based in Idaho where he was attempted to rally troops into a mountain redoubt – to formally offer the final and unconditional surrender of the Pacific States of America to the Baton Rouge government. The dreams of an independent West were now over. Having once had four rival governments vying for power, now America had only two.

With few friends on the international stage, Baton Rouge would find an unlikely ally in early 1940 on the other side of the world in South Asia. The collapse of the British Empire in the 1920s had led to the tripartite division of resplendent British India. In the east, syndicalists established a Bengali state based in Calcutta, in the north west a continuing Entente-aligned Dominion administration ruled from Delhi, meanwhile in the south a coalition of indigenous Rajas gathered together in the Princely Federation led by the Muslim Nizam of Hyderabad, the richest man in the world. These three powers fell into a subcontinent-wide civil war from 1936, with the Internationale and Entente actively supporting Calcutta and Delhi respectively, while Hyderabad found few willing allies abroad. Despite this, the Federation’s armies had proven resilient on the battlefield, defeating the syndicalists before reaching a stalemate with Delhi, as significant aid from the Entente, in particular in the form of a large Anglo-French air force and elite Australasian ground troops, held the southerners back from any thought of advancing on Delhi.

Attracted to the enemy of his enemy, the Nizam dispatched the young Maharaja of Travancore, a small princedom on the southern tip of India, Sree Chithira Thirunal, to travel to America on a diplomatic mission. Arriving in California in early January before travelling overland by train, he would meet with the President and his delegation in Dallas. For men of two radically different backgrounds, the stiff Indian royal raised by aristocratic British tutors and the insular Louisiana bayou boy with the popular touch, the two men built a fast bond. The two would agree to a treaty of friendship that saw Baton Rouge and Hyderabad mutually recognise one another as the rightful governments of the United States and India respectively; with Long promising new American investments after his own civil war was through. Tongue firmly in cheek, the Chicago Tribune would carry the headline “Every Man a Raja!”

It wasn’t until January 1940 that the Canadian army began to make its presence felt in the war, with Canadian troops capturing Duluth in northern Minnesota and crossing the great lakes to encroach into northern Michigan while also recapturing Windsor on the border near Detroit. In February, fighting in Michigan intensified as the Canadians pushed on towards the populous parts of the state, capturing the state capital of Lansing and the industrial city of Flint while putting heavy pressure on the defenders of Detroit. To the west, they pushed on from their success at Duluth to push deep into Minnesota and northern Wisconsin – reaching within striking distance of a string of key cities in Minneapolis, Madison and Milwaukee as Baton Rouge scrambled to form stable defensive lines in the icy conditions.

Throughout these campaigns, Canadian troops had been clearly outnumbered by their American counterparts in almost every engagement. However, they had been able to achieve significant tactical successes through their superior training, drilling and armaments – highlighting the massed formations of glorified militia that had typified the battlefields of the American Civil War and a truly modern professional army.

To the south, after their initial landings around the turn of the year, the Federalists replicated their successful amphibious assaults of a year before by quickly overwhelming Longist defences in Florida. By the end of January more than 10,000 Longist troops had been captured in Miami and the whole state outside of the Panhandle had fallen. In February, the pace of Federalist gains slowed greatly and Baton Rouge was able to redirect troops to the newly opened front to stem their advance. Nonetheless, by early March the Federalist were able to capture Tallahassee after a prolonged fight and have pushed into southern Georgia and towards South Carolina.

Far to the north, in February 1940 Baton Rouge achieved an unexpected breakthrough just east of Rochester. With the Longists having fallen back in Upstate New York after the Canadian entry into the war, the Federalists left this sector of the front dangerously undermanned. Testing the Federalist line in the New Year, the Longists pierced the enemy line in early February and moved quickly into the gap – producing a large bulge in the front leading deeper into New York. On 17 February the state capital of Albany fell and Longist troops reached the Hudson river for the first time in the war. From this position both New England and New York City appeared to be under great threat with the Longists pushing south, down river, towards the great metropolis and eastwards beyond its banks – ultimately being halted as the Federalists and their allies shuffled troops to counter the bulge.

While the battle with the Federalists and Entente ebbed and flowed across the continent, Longists attentions were being drawn towards the most static, stable and heavily entrenched battle line of the war – at the Potomac. For three years, fighting around Washington had been fought trench to trench at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. While fighting never truly ceased, even the larger offensive actions launched by either side rarely resulted in more than incremental territorial changes. In the New Year of 1940, the Longists, bolstered by reinforcements from victorious campaigns in the west, embarked on yet another wave of attacks. This in itself was little out of the ordinary, with probing assaults on enemy lines a fact of life on the Potomac. However, this time things were different. In January, the Federalists had appeared notably desperate and from February they began to concede ground through the southern suburbs of the city. As MacArthur’s men visibly buckled under the pressure, early March saw Longist troops reach the boundaries of the District of Columbia itself as the pushed through the wastelands of America’s once shining capital.

 

[Tommy4ever]

World at War – March 1940 – June 1940

Having been inching forward through the desolate and ruined streets of the capital city for days, on 10 March the Federalists’ resistance in Washington DC finally broke and General MacArthur ordered a retreat back from the city, having held it for more than three years. By its final conquest, the city itself was almost totally destroyed – its iconic monuments left in ruins after years of bombing and shelling, its population largely fled to the north and its avenues converted into networks of trenches and defensive lines.

With MacArthur and his government relocating the relative safety of Boston, his battered, exhausted and demoralised army fell back to the city of Baltimore. The loss of Washington was a final straw for the Federalist military. Over the preceding months it had sustained very heavy losses while also seeing its Entente allies shift their troops to the Canadian campaigns in the Mid West. This left it vulnerable and thinly spread, but the fatal blow to its fighting ability was the psychological effect of losing the capital and the legitimacy and resilience that it represented. Nonetheless, the war was not over just yet.

Over the next five weeks, the Longists, energised by their great triumph, would push relentless along the densely populated corridor between Washington DC and New York City – the most urbanised area in the America. Facing continued resistance from the dispirited Federalists, who benefitted from the defensive advantages of fighting in a serious of major urban areas and existing fortifications in south eastern Pennsylvania that had been constructed during the long struggle against the syndicalists in the area, the Longists incrementally moved forward through Baltimore and Philadelphia – with the city of brotherly love only being abandoned by Federalist troops on 16 April.

While the Longists celebrated their momentous successes in the North East, fighting across the Mid West intensified through March and April with the Canadians pushing strongly in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan against entrenched positions. Their armies would achieve a string of successes in these weeks – capturing the key cities of Detroit, Madison and Minneapolis, before the pace of their progress ground to a half, their troops exhausted by their exertions.

On other fronts, the Canadians and their allies were far less successful. To the west, the Longists pushed deeply into the lightly defended prairie states, safely occupying the main population centres of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Meanwhile, on the Pacific coast in British Columbia, a mixed Canadian-Australasian force held fast in Vancouver against a wave of assaults from Longist troops moving on from their success at the Battle of Seattle.

Yet the most spectacular victory by either side on this front came with the Longist breakthrough into southern Ontario. Having left the Niagra border undermanned, Ottawa watched in horror as Longist troops crossed over from Buffalo and plunged into the very heartland of the Canadian nation. These American troops would push deeply into the province, occupying Toronto itself on 19 April, just days after the fall of Philadelphia.

Despite the great troubles of their comrades in the North East, the Federalist troops in the enclave far to the south secured an impressive breakthrough during March as they split open the Longist line near the port of Savannah, Georgia, before pouring into South Carolina and overwhelming the state. Longist counterattacks at the end of the month recaptured Savannah, cutting the forces in South Carolina off from Florida, and pushed the Federalists out of southern Georgia entirely, even retaking Tallahassee in neighbouring Florida once again. However, despite this, the Federalists were able to dig in – securing their position in both South Carolina and Florida.

The events in North America would soon be overshadowed by news from the Old World. On 13 April, after years of mounting hostilities and proxy conflicts, a crisis relating to the mistreatment of the French minorities in Germany’s western borderlands – annexed at the end of the Great War – led to the outbreak of the much anticipated general European war. Seeing conflict as unavoidable, the Commune of France struck first with an aggressive armour-led strike into the Low Countries. Within days all the nations of the Third Internationale – the Union of Britain, Italy, Spain and their Latin American partners were united in the syndicalist crusade against the Reichspakt. As the two mighty armed camps met swords, they brought the weight of millions of men and industrialised war machines on a scale that the world had never seen before crashing down on one another.

Yet soon, a third player entered the fray. Under Baron Wrangel, Russia had been aggressively re-militarising since the mid-1930s. At the same time, the Imperial Regent – nominally serving in the stead of an absent Tsar but de-facto supreme ruler of all Russia – had been rattling his sabre for the revanchist restoration of Russia’s lost lands for some time. Now, with his great German enemy locked in conflict in the west, his moment had come and on 26 April, the Russian Empire, alongside its trusted Norwegian ally, launched its invasion of the German-aligned Ukrainian, Belarusian and Baltic states.

The outbreak of a general war in Europe met the Entente at a terrible moment. In both India and North America, they had locked themselves into participation in continent-spanning civil war that both appeared lost, at enormous cost. Nonetheless, for the exiled British and French regimes in Ottawa and Algiers, this moment could not simply be tossed aside. The French in particular, for whom the American conflict was naturally a far less existential concern, were eager to pull their forces back to North Africa and ready themselves for battle in the struggle to liberate their homeland.

With the scale of the challenge facing the Kaiserreich becoming clear, the Germans had sent their emissaries to meet with the Canadians and French at the Nova Scotian city of Halifax shortly after the Russian entry into the war and at a time when the Japanese were openly sharpening their swords in the east. There, the Canadians were especially nervous to commit themselves given the perilous nature of their situation, with their government divided between doveish native Canadians more focussed on the American struggle and the deafening voice of the British exiles demanding their war of return. Nonetheless, the German offer ultimately proved too enticing to reject, especially with the French indicating that they might sever their ties with the British world entirely if they did not join them. The Entente would enter the war against the Third Internationale, although importantly not its fight against Moscow, in close partnership with Berlin and in exchange would receive much needed access to German finance and assurances on the full restoration of the exiled governments upon victory. As such, on 3 May the Entente powers declared war.

Even after Halifax, there was one last major building block to the emerging World War – Asia. Of all the greatest powers in the world, Japan appeared to be the youngest and hungriest. Within the space of a generation it had established itself as the premier power of the Far East and won respect through force of arms from the western powers. Although its efforts to stretch its tentacles to the other side of the Pacific Ocean had ended in failure with the collapse of the Pacific States of America in late 1939, closer to home its star was still rising. Indeed, the Weltkrieg had gotten underway in the Far East earlier than in Europe after long running tensions between the Japanese-backed Fengtein Clique of Manchuria and the rump-Qing state based in Beijing had led to war. Although the Japanese would stop short of directly entering the war themselves, they be the clear puppet masters behind their Manchu surrogates, providing them with arms, leadership and air support in their campaign. Fearing Japanese imperial ambitions, in the coming months China’s cabal of squabbling warlords would rally around the flag to face down the invaders. Despite these new commitments on the continent, Japanese policy makers were intently interested in developments in Europe – which had seen their premier imperial rival in the Far East, the German Empire, strip its colonial defences in an effort to bolster its forces in the West. With the Imperial Navy itching for an opportunity to prove its worth, on 1 June Japan declared war against Germany and began an invasion of its Asian empire. The war was now truly global.

The outbreak of a new World War was a tense and discombobulating time for Huey Long’s American government in Baton Rouge. Their Entente enemies was now at war with the hated syndicalists and allied to the German Empire, the greatest power in the world; meanwhile their long-time Russian backers had also thrown their lot into the conflict with Berlin; while equally another key international antagonist in the form of Japan was engaged in a fight against German and Entente interests in the Far East. Baton Rouge’s first step was to sever all diplomatic relations with the Germans, a nation that did not recognise them as the sole legal government of the United States regardless but had previously developed less formal ties, and condemn Berlin’s domination of Eastern Europe. Yet beyond this, the situation was far from clear.

President Long was personally frustrated that Wrangel had failed to give him any warning of his plans for war, and was deeply fearful of expanding the conflict in North America yet further – just as an end to the fighting appeared in sight. This threat of expanding the conflict came from both the prospect of German intervention in some form, and the possibility of the war spilling over the border into syndicalist Mexico. This uncertainty was accompanied by heavy pressure from Moscow, with the Russians seeking to call in their debts to push Longist America to provide the greatest possible support to their war efforts, including totally destroying the Canadian regime and even joining the coalition against the Kaiser – something a devastated United States could hardly contemplate at this point.

Although the world’s eyes were now turned far away from North America at the emerging frontlines of the World War, the American Civil War was still not yet over. In May, the Longists embarked on a counterattack in Michigan that achieved significant success – recapturing the cities of Michigan, Lansing and Flint and leading to the capture of almost 28,000 Canadian soldiers. After having been on the defensive in the face of Canadian advances in the Mid West since the start of the year, this was a tremendous victory that forced the enemy to abandon all offensive plans in the region.

In the North East, following the conquest of Philadelphia in mid-April, the progress of Longist forces slowed. While their troops moved through to mop up resistance in New Jersey and Delaware, the City of New York appeared to be a fortress blocking further progress. Then, in the final week of April the Federalists pulled off their last great operation of the conflict, one few would have believed they still had the capacity to accomplish at this late stage of the Civil War. With the Longists seeking to bypass the strong point of New York City by pushing into New England by the inland route east of Albany, Federalist troops moved rapidly up the east bank of the Hudson River to cut no fewer than 70,000 Longists in Vermont and the north eastern corner of New York state. With the Federalists exerting heavy pressure on this large pocket, by the middle of May the Longists trapped in New England were struggling to hold out.

The formation of the New England pocket was to be a last hurrah rather than the moment when the momentum of the war shifted. By this stage the Federalist government was falling apart, all faith in the great Generalissimo MacArthur long since lost. Perhaps most importantly, the final battle for New York City was already well under way. Despite having been pushed back in their initial attacks, the Longists had returned to making slow incremental progress through the urban sprawl west of Manhattan since late April – despite the Federalists augmenting their defence of the city by shelling indiscriminately towards the Longist formations in New Jersey. On 16 May, the Longists would cross the Hudson north of Manhattan near Yonkers and proceed to largely cut the city and Long Island off from the rest of New England. At the same time, the city’s Federalist garrison would see the outbreak of anti-government rioting across Queens and Brooklyn, areas that had seen strong America First support before the war, further degrading their ability to fight on. On 18 May, with no realistic alternative, the Federalist garrison of New York surrendered the city to Baton Rouge. From this moment, events would move very fast.

With New York lost, it was clear, if it hadn’t been already for some time, that all was lost for the Federalist cause. MacArthur had to go, and New England had to give in. After frantic activity through the night, a gang of conspirators led by General Omar Bradley and Governor of Massachusetts Charles Hurley formed with the intention of confronting MacArthur and forcing him to resign and surrender to Baton Rouge. However, just hours before an emergency cabinet meeting scheduled for the morning of 19 May, ostensibly organised to address the fall of New York, MacArthur caught win of the plot. Fearing he lacked the authority to resist Bradley’s coup, he instead looked towards his loyal allies in the navy and fled Boston for Halifax alongside a sizeable naval squadron, issuing a famous radio address from the waters of the Gulf of Maine in which he promised the people of New England “I will return”. He would never step foot on American soil again in his life.

With MacArthur gone, the conspirators moved to formally impeach the General in absentia from the office of President that he had occupied, officially on a temporary basis, since 1937. In his stead, they nominated former President and one-time confidant of America’s failed Caesar Herbert Hoover to take over the role of Acting President and bring about an end to the war. Accepting this position, Hoover was sworn in during the dead of night on 19 May, and then the next morning offered the total and unconditional surrender of Federalist forces to Baton Rouge, announced the disbanding of the Federalist government and offering his recognition of Huey Long as the rightful President of the United States. America had a single government once more.

MacArthur’s downfall would bring down a political colossus in the north. Mackenzie King had dominated Canadian politics throughout the 1920s and 1930s, handling the collapse of the motherland into syndicalism and the arrival of the monarchy and British exile community into Canada before the collapse of their southern neighbour into civil war. King had gambled heavily in bringing Canada into the American Civil War the previous year, and his throw of the dice had failed spectacularly. At the same time, the British exiles and their domestic Conservative allies had been emboldened by the outbreak of the Weltkrieg and by their success in strong arming the Prime Minister into joining the struggle. With the Federalist cause lost, the Anglo-Canadian right were desperate to be shot of King and the end the fighting with Huey Long’s America before it was too late.

On 29 May, feeling heavy pressure from the exile community, not least the military leadership, King George VI dismissed King from office and invited the leader of the Conservative Party Arthur Meighen, despite the Tories possessing barely half the strength of the Liberals in Parliament, to form a new government. Meighen would dutifully do so later that day, stacking his cabinet with prominent exiles including Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill. The new government’s sole purpose was to extricate Canada from its ruinous war against Baton Rouge.

The military situation had not waited to accommodate the outcome of Canada’s internal political struggle. Hoover’s decision to offer a blanket surrender to Baton Rouge, calling for all Federalist troops to lay down their arms and offer no obstruction to the Longists was a catastrophic death knell for Canada. Longist were able to rush to the New England-Canadian frontier in the space of days, faster than Ottawa could move to adequately garrison the border, and push from there into the St Lawrence Valley and new Brunswick with very little impediment. By the time that Meighen’s government came to office, the Americans were all ready deep into Canadian territory.

Ironically, General MacArthur’s small band of loyalists who had joined him in withdrawing to Canada played a key role in holding the Longists back from overwhelming the Royal Navy’s key bases at Halifax by fighting the invaders to a standstill alongside Canadian and French troops at Moncton. However, more important engagements were taking place in Ontario and Quebec.

On 31 May, the national capital of Ottawa fell, the Canadian government scurrying deeper into the interior, before two days later Quebec City fell. By 4 June fighting had commenced in the outskirts of Montreal. The heart of the Canadian nation was being occupied far more quickly than it could be reinforced.

The Meighen administration had been attempting to open back channel negotiations with Baton Rouge from its inception one week before. However, on 5 June a Canadian delegation led by Winston Churchill was finally able to arrange a meeting with the Longists at the town of Kingston, south of Ottawa in American-occupied Canada. There, Churchill and his associates were paraded in front of the flags of the American army in an act of domination before the came to the manor house in which negotiations would be held. The now once more genuinely United States of America had its foot on the neck of her northern neighbour, the only choice remaining was whether to step back or clamp down.