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The First and Second Wars Between the States
1861-1862: An Independent South
Lee's orders were, in the alternate timeline, recovered by trailing Confederate troops. The resulting Confederate advance caught McClellan and the U.S. by surprise. Instead of fighting at Antietam, General Lee forced McClellan into battle on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and destroyed the Army of the Potomac in the Battle of Camp Hill on October 1, 1862.
After the decisive Confederate victory, Lee and the ANV went on to occupy Philadelphia. As a direct result, the Confederate States of America earned diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France. Both European nations then forced mediation on the United States; this action resulted in independence for the Confederate States. After less than two years, the War of Secession had ended.
While considering the mediation offer, Abraham Lincoln mentioned to British ambassador Richard B. P. Lyons that he had in his desk drawer a proclamation that would have freed slaves in the rebellious Confederacy. Lincoln had discussed the proclamation's viability with his cabinet, but after the U.S. defeat at Camp Hill, he decided against issuing it. He was warned by Lyons that if the proclamation were issued, he would have been perceieved as acting in desperation, since the U.S. was about to officially admit defeat.
1862-1881: American Changes
Confederate general Braxton Bragg completed the conquest of Kentucky shortly after the conclusion of Camp Hill. Sometime after the war ended, Kentucky became the twelfth state to enter the Confederacy.
The pro-Confederate Five Civilized Tribes of the Indian Territory were given territory of their own in the C.S. (later to become the State of Sequoyah). The Caribbean island of Cuba was later purchased by the Confederate States from Spain sometime in the 1870s (exact date unknown).
Lincoln and his vice president Hannibal Hamlin were defeated in the 1864 elections, and another Republican president would not be elected until 1880, when James G. Blaine defeated incumbent Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Blaine was a hard-liner who precipitated another war against the Confederate States over the latter nation's purchase of the Mexican provinces Sonora and Chihuahua.
1881-1882: The Second War Between the States
Because of spectacular leadership from Confederate general Thomas Jackson against his counterpart William Rosecrans, and the assistance of Great Britain and France, the United States was once again defeated. The U.S. officially surrendered on April 22, 1882, ending the Second Mexican War. Humiliating terms of surrender were placed on the United States, including the annexation of most of northern Maine to Canada.
Both American nations experienced major changes after the war. In the United States, many Republicans were voted out of Congress in the 1882 elections. Stung with the loss in the Second Mexican War, Blaine was ousted as president two years later. The elections of 1882 and 1884 began Democratic control over Congress and the White House, which would last 36 years.
In return for British and French assistance, Confederate President James Longstreet was obliged to propose the nominal manumission of the country's slaves, which proceeded throughout the 1880s.
The defeated United States, realizing it needed powerful allies to counter the Confederate alliances with Britain and France, began an alliance with the German Empire and adopted many of its military and economic practices.
One of the few victories for the United States in the war, a battle in the Montana Territory against the British, produced two American heroes who would be rivals for forty years: Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer and Theodore Roosevelt, colonel of the Unauthorized Regiment.
Witnessing the collapse of the Republican Party, former President Abraham Lincoln, now an orator, allied with American socialists and led left wing Republicans into this fledgling party. The Republicans soon began a long descent into general obscurity, never again (as of 1941) winning the presidency.
1882-1914: The Road to War
For the next thirty years, the Democratic Party dominated the politics of the United States. The Socialists eventually displaced the Republicans as the opposition party, but were nothing more than a minority in Congress. As the Socialists were becoming a left-wing, liberal party, the Democrats turned to a more conservative ideology. As their following became smaller, the Republican Party devolved into a small regional party of the Midwest.
The United States economy and military were reformed along Prussian lines: peacetime conscription and a naval buildup began, and resources such as coal, kerosene, and food products became subject to rationing. Large trusts held untrammeled power over the economy, with government encouragement, and labor rights were largely ignored. The U.S. eventually began a formal alliance with the German Empire and joined the Quadruple Alliance, which also included Austria-Hungary and Italy.
A racial caste system similar to apartheid had been instituted in the C.S., where Negroes were defined as "residents" rather than citizens, and were prohibited from voting or even moving freely about the country without a passbook. Under the weight of this oppression, the socialist theories of Karl Marx had taken hold among southern Negroes. Meanwhile, white politics were dominated by the Whigs, a conservative, mostly upper-class party. They were opposed, with limited success, by the Radical Liberals, a small opposition party that was popular in the fringes of the Confederacy, such as in Louisiana, Sequoyah (our timeline's state of Oklahoma), Sonora, Chihuahua, and the state of Cuba.
Canada was largely unchanged from our history, except for the Anglo-Quebecois rivalry being overshadowed by the fear of the United States, and universal conscription for the armed forces.
Overseas, little seems changed from our timeline, except that Japan, in addition to holding Chosun and Formosa (Korea and Taiwan respectively), had also seized the Philippines and Guam from Spain during the Hispano-Japanese War (c. 1905). There was no Russo-Japanese War. Alaska was - for financial reasons - never bought by the United States, and remained a Russian colony.
Relations between the two American nations had been tense since the Second Mexican War of 1881-82. The Confederates joined their traditional allies Great Britain and France alongside the Russian Empire in the Quadruple Entente. Incidents such as border raids and the Anglo-Confederate proposal for a Nicaragua Canal nearly brought the two alliances to war many times. But when the spark for war comes, it is not in North America, but in Europe: the distant Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Great War
1914: Declaration and Invasion
The Empire's Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife were killed by a terrorist bomb while touring the town of Sarajevo in June 1914. The Austrian government quickly learned that a Serb group was responsible, and accused the government of nearby Serbia of colluding with the terrorists. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia backed Serbia, while Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany backed Austria-Hungary. The major powers of each system mobilized their militaries, effectively signifying their intent to go to war. In August 1914, the Great War began, initially pitting Great Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Across the Atlantic, Democratic President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the U.S. military to mobilize in late July, following Germany's lead. In response, Confederate President Woodrow Wilson ordered the C.S. military to do the same, and fighting soon broke out on their common border and the high seas.
The United States officially brought the war to North America when Roosevelt declared war on the Confederate States in early August 1914. Confederate President Wilson responded in kind, although he had hoped to avoid a war. Wilson's speech, given in a tightly-packed public square of Richmond, Virginia decorated with statues of southern war heroes George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston, became particularly famous.
Hoping to emulate General Lee, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia launched a massive invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania in August, targeting the northern de facto capital of Philadelphia. The ANV quickly overran the de jure capital of Washington, D.C. and pushed on through Maryland.
The U.S. Army took a different approach, and ordered the First Army under Lieutenant General George Custer and the Second Army under Major General John Pershing to cross the Ohio River and invade Kentucky. Although Confederate resistance was high, especially from river gunboats modeled after the original USS Monitor, the U.S. succeeded in establishing a bridgehead on the southern bank.
A separate U.S. invasion of Sonora, intended to capture the Confederacy's sole Pacific port of Guaymas, soon bogged down. A young army captain named Irving Morrell was wounded in this venture, and spent much of the next six months in Tucson, New Mexico recuperating.
The U.S. also launched attacks on the British commonwealth of Canada, specifically in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Perhaps the most successful maneuver during these early stages of war was the U.S. Navy's capture of the British base at Pearl Harbor in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in a surprise attack.
1915: Stalemate and Rebellion
Both American offensives soon stalled, however; the U.S. armies found it difficult to push south, and the ANV was slowed by the winter of 1914-15. The Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania soon ground to a halt at the Susquehanna River; the ANV was only 50 miles from Philadelphia. From that high-water mark, U.S. forces slowly started to push the ANV back into Maryland.
Although the U.S. forces easily conquered the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River, crossing it proved another matter. The geography of the Niagara Peninsula soon bottlenecked the invading army. Though Winnipeg, Manitoba, a major rail junction, lay relatively close to the U.S. border, the War Department allocated too few troops to capture it.
Trench warfare became ubiquitous as each side dug in for protection from machine-gun fire. Troops huddled in these trenches as heavy artillery in their rear pounded the enemy lines night and day. They dreaded the order "Over the top!" which meant they would have to leave the safety of their lines to charge into No Man's Land, in the hope of capturing the enemy trenches on the other side. Far from the quick, glorious conquest each side had imagined, the Great War became a long, bloody stalemate.
Early in 1915, another front was opened when the Utah Mormons seceded from the United States and declared themselves the independent nation of Deseret. Mormon relations with the rest of the country had been hostile since the Utah War of the 1850s and the brief uprising during the Second Mexican War, and they believed that the distracted U.S. government would be unable to subdue them. They were wrong; Utah sat on one of the major transcontinental rail lines, and President Roosevelt stated the U.S. would not tolerate unlawful rebellion. The Mormon rebellion raged until mid-1916, when it was finally crushed and Salt Lake City captured. Utah was then placed under military rule by Roosevelt, under which it would remain until the 1930s.
In the autumn of 1915, with the armies of the Confederacy locked in mortal combat with those of the United States along the border regions, the CSA's blacks rose up in revolt. Bitter over their treatment by the whites, and fueled by a rhetoric of Marxism and the teachings of Abraham Lincoln, the blacks declared Red revolution in several areas across the CSA and established "socialist republics," while massacring whites and seeking justice against their former white masters; most trials were shams, however, and the executions brutal. These rebellions were gradually crushed by 1916, although white justice mellowed out a bit as thoughts were preoccupied with winning the war. Ironically, the Red revolt actually made white people start to believe in the military potential of blacks.
1916: Slaughter
Taking advantage of the Confederacy's plight, the U.S. First Army finished slogging through western Kentucky and marched into western Tennessee, while the C.S. Army of Northern Virginia was pushed south toward Washington. In mid-spring of 1916, a new armored technical advance called the "barrel" (referred to as a tank by the British) was introduced to combat for the first time by US forces operating in the Roanoke Valley.
In this case, as in our time line, the name of the vehicle comes from the cover name used. In Britain, those assembling the vehicle were told they were mobile water tanks; in this time line, they were coded 'barrel,' though there was some indication something called a 'barrel' was coming. Private Reginald Bartlett, escaping with a Confederate naval officer, heard U.S. soldiers singing a song, "Roll Out the Barrel." (not related to our timeline's Czech polka "Rosalinda," which became popular in 1938 and was given the English-langauge lyrics "Roll Out the Barrel.")
While in Tennessee, Lieutenant General Custer transformed his tactics for cavalry into a doctrine for the new barrels, but the War Department would hear none of it. When Custer's summer offensive began, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were lost attacking Confederate lines, and the new barrels, deployed singly in an infantry support role rather than massed as an armored fist, broke down in the hilly terrain to little effect.
The lack of British troops in Canada meant that the USA, while initially held back by Canadians, would slowly advance toward their triple objectives of Quebec City, Toronto, and Winnipeg. Largely thanks to the efforts of Irving Morrell, U.S. forces pushed up to Banff in the Canadian Rockies and cut the Pacific coast off from the rest of the country.
At sea, the great Battle of the Three Navies between the USA on one side, and the United Kingdom and Japan on the other, prevented the Entente from recapturing the Sandwich Islands. With the Central Pacific in U.S. hands, a U.S. Navy flotilla made its way south toward the Cape of South America and the Atlantic on the other side, with the intent of cutting off Argentine grain and beef shipments to Great Britain.
On the Maryland front, the state was cleared of Confederate soldiers, save for those holding Washington, the nominal U.S. capital. In Tennessee that autumn, more attacks toward Nashville gained the USA nothing but a possible Democratic loss at the polls, with the possiblity that a Socialist President would seek peace with the CSA and renounce all the bloody gains. Except for a local attack on the Roanoke Front that pushed the USA out of western Virginia, the Confederates stayed on the defensive that autumn and attempted to drain the USA dry, hoping to sicken the U.S. population of war.
Nevertheless, for all the wishes of the Socialist Party and the Confederates, Theodore Roosevelt was easily re-elected over Socialist Eugene V. Debs in the November election. In Richmond, however, the hopes of new President Gabriel Semmes (elected in 1915) and his Cabinet were dashed. The USA had another four years to crush the CSA, and the Confederates were running out of white men to fight. A bill, proposed by Semmes, was passed authorizing the training and arming of Negro troops who would serve in the lines, with civil rights (excepting interracial marriage) given after the war, including citizenship in the CSA.
In Europe, the war seemed little changed from our timeline, with the exception of Verdun's capture by the Germans, and an apparently heavier use of North African infantry by the French Army. In addition, Italy stayed neutral in the conflict.
1917: Breakthroughs
Lieutenant General Custer secretly developed a scheme to quickly end the war in the USA's favor, using a massed-barrel (tank) formation forbidden by the War Department. Disguising his true intentions to all but his adjutant, Major Abner Dowling, and Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell, and lying to President Roosevelt, Custer launched his Barrel Roll Offensive on Remembrance Day - April 22, 1917 - and quickly broke through the Confederate trench lines north of the Tennessee capital of Nashville.
The Southerners withdrew to a line centered on Nashville, where Custer hit them again three weeks later by outflanking the city using a plan concocted by Morrell. Nashville soon fell, despite the best efforts of the newly formed C.S. colored regiments to stave off Custer's barrels, and the state capitol became First Army headquarters.
From Nashville, in July, Custer attacked the C.S. lines in the direction of Murfreesboro. Near Nolensville the U.S. received a Confederate request for a local armistice. President Roosevelt assented, and peace on the North American front came to Tennessee a week before the rest of the U.S.-C.S. frontline.
At the same time, in Europe, mutinies in the French Army proved serious enough to lead to France's exit from the war. Russia collapsed into revolution and anarchy, leaving only the Confederate States and Great Britain to fight against the United States, Germany, and Austria-Hungary.
On the same day the Barrel Roll Offensive began in Tennessee, the U.S. Army in northern Virginia attacked southward toward Manassas at the same time that U.S. troops entered occupied Washington DC. The de jure U.S. capital was recaptured after several days of intense street fighting, which leveled the city and its famous landmarks (such as the Washington Monument and the White House).
In northern Virginia, several U.S. attacks forced the C.S. Army of Northern Virginia to retreat south. In battles at Round Hill, Centreville, and Bull Run creek, rear-guard actions led by a few battered batteries of the First Richmond Howitzers prevented the complete destruction of the latest incarnation of Robert E. Lee's fabled army. However, it was obvious the war was on the verge of being lost; it was a notion that did not bode well with several Confederate soldiers, who reckoned the war was won only months before.
In Canada, Custer's barrel methods were used to break through the Anglo-Canadian lines south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the provincial capital was taken in late May. The same strategy was used by U.S. forces battling their way into Toronto, Ontario, the fall of which precipitated a British Empire request for a cease-fire with the USA on all land fronts. The armistice was granted in early June, and, with U.S.-German naval operations (with help from Brazil) cutting off Great Britain from its Argentine and Australasian food suppliers, the United Kingdom sued for peace later that summer; the U.K. was the last opponent of the Quadruple Alliance that was still in the war.
The Confederate States of America started sending peace feelers to Philadelphia as early as the fall of Nashville, but Theodore Roosevelt refused to grant a cease-fire until certain the CSA was severely hammered elsewhere. The last hammers on the Confederate Army came in late July, when fighting reached the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, which was only fifty miles from the Confederate States capital. With a cease-fire already in effect in Tennessee, Sequoyah overrun, and fighting out west in Texas and Arkansas sputtering down, the CSA agreed to a general armistice on land and at sea. For the first time since August 1914, the guns fell silent in North America.
At sea, however, the submarine CSS Bonefish, led by Confederate Navy man Roger Kimball, carried out a sneak attack on the USS Ericsson even though he was fully aware of the war's end. For a few years after the war, both the U.S. and C.S. believed that the ship's destruction was a work of the Royal Navy, as the war between the USA and the British Empire at sea had not yet ended.
The First and Second Wars Between the States
1861-1862: An Independent South
Lee's orders were, in the alternate timeline, recovered by trailing Confederate troops. The resulting Confederate advance caught McClellan and the U.S. by surprise. Instead of fighting at Antietam, General Lee forced McClellan into battle on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and destroyed the Army of the Potomac in the Battle of Camp Hill on October 1, 1862.
After the decisive Confederate victory, Lee and the ANV went on to occupy Philadelphia. As a direct result, the Confederate States of America earned diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France. Both European nations then forced mediation on the United States; this action resulted in independence for the Confederate States. After less than two years, the War of Secession had ended.
While considering the mediation offer, Abraham Lincoln mentioned to British ambassador Richard B. P. Lyons that he had in his desk drawer a proclamation that would have freed slaves in the rebellious Confederacy. Lincoln had discussed the proclamation's viability with his cabinet, but after the U.S. defeat at Camp Hill, he decided against issuing it. He was warned by Lyons that if the proclamation were issued, he would have been perceieved as acting in desperation, since the U.S. was about to officially admit defeat.
1862-1881: American Changes
Confederate general Braxton Bragg completed the conquest of Kentucky shortly after the conclusion of Camp Hill. Sometime after the war ended, Kentucky became the twelfth state to enter the Confederacy.
The pro-Confederate Five Civilized Tribes of the Indian Territory were given territory of their own in the C.S. (later to become the State of Sequoyah). The Caribbean island of Cuba was later purchased by the Confederate States from Spain sometime in the 1870s (exact date unknown).
Lincoln and his vice president Hannibal Hamlin were defeated in the 1864 elections, and another Republican president would not be elected until 1880, when James G. Blaine defeated incumbent Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Blaine was a hard-liner who precipitated another war against the Confederate States over the latter nation's purchase of the Mexican provinces Sonora and Chihuahua.
1881-1882: The Second War Between the States
Because of spectacular leadership from Confederate general Thomas Jackson against his counterpart William Rosecrans, and the assistance of Great Britain and France, the United States was once again defeated. The U.S. officially surrendered on April 22, 1882, ending the Second Mexican War. Humiliating terms of surrender were placed on the United States, including the annexation of most of northern Maine to Canada.
Both American nations experienced major changes after the war. In the United States, many Republicans were voted out of Congress in the 1882 elections. Stung with the loss in the Second Mexican War, Blaine was ousted as president two years later. The elections of 1882 and 1884 began Democratic control over Congress and the White House, which would last 36 years.
In return for British and French assistance, Confederate President James Longstreet was obliged to propose the nominal manumission of the country's slaves, which proceeded throughout the 1880s.
The defeated United States, realizing it needed powerful allies to counter the Confederate alliances with Britain and France, began an alliance with the German Empire and adopted many of its military and economic practices.
One of the few victories for the United States in the war, a battle in the Montana Territory against the British, produced two American heroes who would be rivals for forty years: Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer and Theodore Roosevelt, colonel of the Unauthorized Regiment.
Witnessing the collapse of the Republican Party, former President Abraham Lincoln, now an orator, allied with American socialists and led left wing Republicans into this fledgling party. The Republicans soon began a long descent into general obscurity, never again (as of 1941) winning the presidency.
1882-1914: The Road to War
For the next thirty years, the Democratic Party dominated the politics of the United States. The Socialists eventually displaced the Republicans as the opposition party, but were nothing more than a minority in Congress. As the Socialists were becoming a left-wing, liberal party, the Democrats turned to a more conservative ideology. As their following became smaller, the Republican Party devolved into a small regional party of the Midwest.
The United States economy and military were reformed along Prussian lines: peacetime conscription and a naval buildup began, and resources such as coal, kerosene, and food products became subject to rationing. Large trusts held untrammeled power over the economy, with government encouragement, and labor rights were largely ignored. The U.S. eventually began a formal alliance with the German Empire and joined the Quadruple Alliance, which also included Austria-Hungary and Italy.
A racial caste system similar to apartheid had been instituted in the C.S., where Negroes were defined as "residents" rather than citizens, and were prohibited from voting or even moving freely about the country without a passbook. Under the weight of this oppression, the socialist theories of Karl Marx had taken hold among southern Negroes. Meanwhile, white politics were dominated by the Whigs, a conservative, mostly upper-class party. They were opposed, with limited success, by the Radical Liberals, a small opposition party that was popular in the fringes of the Confederacy, such as in Louisiana, Sequoyah (our timeline's state of Oklahoma), Sonora, Chihuahua, and the state of Cuba.
Canada was largely unchanged from our history, except for the Anglo-Quebecois rivalry being overshadowed by the fear of the United States, and universal conscription for the armed forces.
Overseas, little seems changed from our timeline, except that Japan, in addition to holding Chosun and Formosa (Korea and Taiwan respectively), had also seized the Philippines and Guam from Spain during the Hispano-Japanese War (c. 1905). There was no Russo-Japanese War. Alaska was - for financial reasons - never bought by the United States, and remained a Russian colony.
Relations between the two American nations had been tense since the Second Mexican War of 1881-82. The Confederates joined their traditional allies Great Britain and France alongside the Russian Empire in the Quadruple Entente. Incidents such as border raids and the Anglo-Confederate proposal for a Nicaragua Canal nearly brought the two alliances to war many times. But when the spark for war comes, it is not in North America, but in Europe: the distant Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Great War
1914: Declaration and Invasion
The Empire's Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife were killed by a terrorist bomb while touring the town of Sarajevo in June 1914. The Austrian government quickly learned that a Serb group was responsible, and accused the government of nearby Serbia of colluding with the terrorists. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia backed Serbia, while Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany backed Austria-Hungary. The major powers of each system mobilized their militaries, effectively signifying their intent to go to war. In August 1914, the Great War began, initially pitting Great Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Across the Atlantic, Democratic President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the U.S. military to mobilize in late July, following Germany's lead. In response, Confederate President Woodrow Wilson ordered the C.S. military to do the same, and fighting soon broke out on their common border and the high seas.
The United States officially brought the war to North America when Roosevelt declared war on the Confederate States in early August 1914. Confederate President Wilson responded in kind, although he had hoped to avoid a war. Wilson's speech, given in a tightly-packed public square of Richmond, Virginia decorated with statues of southern war heroes George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston, became particularly famous.
Hoping to emulate General Lee, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia launched a massive invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania in August, targeting the northern de facto capital of Philadelphia. The ANV quickly overran the de jure capital of Washington, D.C. and pushed on through Maryland.
The U.S. Army took a different approach, and ordered the First Army under Lieutenant General George Custer and the Second Army under Major General John Pershing to cross the Ohio River and invade Kentucky. Although Confederate resistance was high, especially from river gunboats modeled after the original USS Monitor, the U.S. succeeded in establishing a bridgehead on the southern bank.
A separate U.S. invasion of Sonora, intended to capture the Confederacy's sole Pacific port of Guaymas, soon bogged down. A young army captain named Irving Morrell was wounded in this venture, and spent much of the next six months in Tucson, New Mexico recuperating.
The U.S. also launched attacks on the British commonwealth of Canada, specifically in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Perhaps the most successful maneuver during these early stages of war was the U.S. Navy's capture of the British base at Pearl Harbor in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in a surprise attack.
1915: Stalemate and Rebellion
Both American offensives soon stalled, however; the U.S. armies found it difficult to push south, and the ANV was slowed by the winter of 1914-15. The Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania soon ground to a halt at the Susquehanna River; the ANV was only 50 miles from Philadelphia. From that high-water mark, U.S. forces slowly started to push the ANV back into Maryland.
Although the U.S. forces easily conquered the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River, crossing it proved another matter. The geography of the Niagara Peninsula soon bottlenecked the invading army. Though Winnipeg, Manitoba, a major rail junction, lay relatively close to the U.S. border, the War Department allocated too few troops to capture it.
Trench warfare became ubiquitous as each side dug in for protection from machine-gun fire. Troops huddled in these trenches as heavy artillery in their rear pounded the enemy lines night and day. They dreaded the order "Over the top!" which meant they would have to leave the safety of their lines to charge into No Man's Land, in the hope of capturing the enemy trenches on the other side. Far from the quick, glorious conquest each side had imagined, the Great War became a long, bloody stalemate.
Early in 1915, another front was opened when the Utah Mormons seceded from the United States and declared themselves the independent nation of Deseret. Mormon relations with the rest of the country had been hostile since the Utah War of the 1850s and the brief uprising during the Second Mexican War, and they believed that the distracted U.S. government would be unable to subdue them. They were wrong; Utah sat on one of the major transcontinental rail lines, and President Roosevelt stated the U.S. would not tolerate unlawful rebellion. The Mormon rebellion raged until mid-1916, when it was finally crushed and Salt Lake City captured. Utah was then placed under military rule by Roosevelt, under which it would remain until the 1930s.
In the autumn of 1915, with the armies of the Confederacy locked in mortal combat with those of the United States along the border regions, the CSA's blacks rose up in revolt. Bitter over their treatment by the whites, and fueled by a rhetoric of Marxism and the teachings of Abraham Lincoln, the blacks declared Red revolution in several areas across the CSA and established "socialist republics," while massacring whites and seeking justice against their former white masters; most trials were shams, however, and the executions brutal. These rebellions were gradually crushed by 1916, although white justice mellowed out a bit as thoughts were preoccupied with winning the war. Ironically, the Red revolt actually made white people start to believe in the military potential of blacks.
1916: Slaughter
Taking advantage of the Confederacy's plight, the U.S. First Army finished slogging through western Kentucky and marched into western Tennessee, while the C.S. Army of Northern Virginia was pushed south toward Washington. In mid-spring of 1916, a new armored technical advance called the "barrel" (referred to as a tank by the British) was introduced to combat for the first time by US forces operating in the Roanoke Valley.
In this case, as in our time line, the name of the vehicle comes from the cover name used. In Britain, those assembling the vehicle were told they were mobile water tanks; in this time line, they were coded 'barrel,' though there was some indication something called a 'barrel' was coming. Private Reginald Bartlett, escaping with a Confederate naval officer, heard U.S. soldiers singing a song, "Roll Out the Barrel." (not related to our timeline's Czech polka "Rosalinda," which became popular in 1938 and was given the English-langauge lyrics "Roll Out the Barrel.")
While in Tennessee, Lieutenant General Custer transformed his tactics for cavalry into a doctrine for the new barrels, but the War Department would hear none of it. When Custer's summer offensive began, tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were lost attacking Confederate lines, and the new barrels, deployed singly in an infantry support role rather than massed as an armored fist, broke down in the hilly terrain to little effect.
The lack of British troops in Canada meant that the USA, while initially held back by Canadians, would slowly advance toward their triple objectives of Quebec City, Toronto, and Winnipeg. Largely thanks to the efforts of Irving Morrell, U.S. forces pushed up to Banff in the Canadian Rockies and cut the Pacific coast off from the rest of the country.
At sea, the great Battle of the Three Navies between the USA on one side, and the United Kingdom and Japan on the other, prevented the Entente from recapturing the Sandwich Islands. With the Central Pacific in U.S. hands, a U.S. Navy flotilla made its way south toward the Cape of South America and the Atlantic on the other side, with the intent of cutting off Argentine grain and beef shipments to Great Britain.
On the Maryland front, the state was cleared of Confederate soldiers, save for those holding Washington, the nominal U.S. capital. In Tennessee that autumn, more attacks toward Nashville gained the USA nothing but a possible Democratic loss at the polls, with the possiblity that a Socialist President would seek peace with the CSA and renounce all the bloody gains. Except for a local attack on the Roanoke Front that pushed the USA out of western Virginia, the Confederates stayed on the defensive that autumn and attempted to drain the USA dry, hoping to sicken the U.S. population of war.
Nevertheless, for all the wishes of the Socialist Party and the Confederates, Theodore Roosevelt was easily re-elected over Socialist Eugene V. Debs in the November election. In Richmond, however, the hopes of new President Gabriel Semmes (elected in 1915) and his Cabinet were dashed. The USA had another four years to crush the CSA, and the Confederates were running out of white men to fight. A bill, proposed by Semmes, was passed authorizing the training and arming of Negro troops who would serve in the lines, with civil rights (excepting interracial marriage) given after the war, including citizenship in the CSA.
In Europe, the war seemed little changed from our timeline, with the exception of Verdun's capture by the Germans, and an apparently heavier use of North African infantry by the French Army. In addition, Italy stayed neutral in the conflict.
1917: Breakthroughs
Lieutenant General Custer secretly developed a scheme to quickly end the war in the USA's favor, using a massed-barrel (tank) formation forbidden by the War Department. Disguising his true intentions to all but his adjutant, Major Abner Dowling, and Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell, and lying to President Roosevelt, Custer launched his Barrel Roll Offensive on Remembrance Day - April 22, 1917 - and quickly broke through the Confederate trench lines north of the Tennessee capital of Nashville.
The Southerners withdrew to a line centered on Nashville, where Custer hit them again three weeks later by outflanking the city using a plan concocted by Morrell. Nashville soon fell, despite the best efforts of the newly formed C.S. colored regiments to stave off Custer's barrels, and the state capitol became First Army headquarters.
From Nashville, in July, Custer attacked the C.S. lines in the direction of Murfreesboro. Near Nolensville the U.S. received a Confederate request for a local armistice. President Roosevelt assented, and peace on the North American front came to Tennessee a week before the rest of the U.S.-C.S. frontline.
At the same time, in Europe, mutinies in the French Army proved serious enough to lead to France's exit from the war. Russia collapsed into revolution and anarchy, leaving only the Confederate States and Great Britain to fight against the United States, Germany, and Austria-Hungary.
On the same day the Barrel Roll Offensive began in Tennessee, the U.S. Army in northern Virginia attacked southward toward Manassas at the same time that U.S. troops entered occupied Washington DC. The de jure U.S. capital was recaptured after several days of intense street fighting, which leveled the city and its famous landmarks (such as the Washington Monument and the White House).
In northern Virginia, several U.S. attacks forced the C.S. Army of Northern Virginia to retreat south. In battles at Round Hill, Centreville, and Bull Run creek, rear-guard actions led by a few battered batteries of the First Richmond Howitzers prevented the complete destruction of the latest incarnation of Robert E. Lee's fabled army. However, it was obvious the war was on the verge of being lost; it was a notion that did not bode well with several Confederate soldiers, who reckoned the war was won only months before.
In Canada, Custer's barrel methods were used to break through the Anglo-Canadian lines south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the provincial capital was taken in late May. The same strategy was used by U.S. forces battling their way into Toronto, Ontario, the fall of which precipitated a British Empire request for a cease-fire with the USA on all land fronts. The armistice was granted in early June, and, with U.S.-German naval operations (with help from Brazil) cutting off Great Britain from its Argentine and Australasian food suppliers, the United Kingdom sued for peace later that summer; the U.K. was the last opponent of the Quadruple Alliance that was still in the war.
The Confederate States of America started sending peace feelers to Philadelphia as early as the fall of Nashville, but Theodore Roosevelt refused to grant a cease-fire until certain the CSA was severely hammered elsewhere. The last hammers on the Confederate Army came in late July, when fighting reached the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, which was only fifty miles from the Confederate States capital. With a cease-fire already in effect in Tennessee, Sequoyah overrun, and fighting out west in Texas and Arkansas sputtering down, the CSA agreed to a general armistice on land and at sea. For the first time since August 1914, the guns fell silent in North America.
At sea, however, the submarine CSS Bonefish, led by Confederate Navy man Roger Kimball, carried out a sneak attack on the USS Ericsson even though he was fully aware of the war's end. For a few years after the war, both the U.S. and C.S. believed that the ship's destruction was a work of the Royal Navy, as the war between the USA and the British Empire at sea had not yet ended.
