American Carnage - A United States Kaiserreich AAR

[Tommy4ever]

Goodbye to the Bambino – October 1951 – January 1952

October was greeted with the passing of a bona fide American icon as baseball legend Babe Ruth passed away following a short battle with cancer. It is hard to underestimate Babe Ruth’s cultural impact in the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the national pastime of baseball dominated the sporting landscape and a superstar of Ruth’s calibre – winner of seven world series between 1915 and 1931 with the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. Retiring from the sport just two years before the nation’s descent into Civil War, he was a living representation of both the more innocent pre-Civil War era; and of the modern industrial society.

Even at a time of war, the news of his passing was deeply felt across the nation – with more than 100,000 attending a memorial at Yankee stadium, while many tens of thousands lined the streets to greet his funeral procession and the President sent his personal condolences. Such an outpouring of grief for a sporting figure had never been seen before.

While the Andalusian front was beginning to settle during the first week of October, American armour made a crucial breakthrough just north of Faro and raced through the breach at breakneck base across the land lands of southern Portugal. By 9 October, the American spearheads had reached the coast at Comporta – cutting off more than 90,000 syndicalist troops to the south – while they were continuing to push northwards, with little more than battered Iberian units standing between them and the great prize of Lisbon itself, a city American forces had failed to take during the ill-fated Portuguese campaign of 1949.

Maintaining momentum, through the next week, Clark’s troops secured the surrender of the syndicalists caught in the Beja pocket, a major victory, and pushed into Setubal – leaving them separated from Lisbon only by the wide mouth of the Tagus river. However, this represented the peak of a campaign that was running out of steam. Unable to push on, Clark’s troops paused while the syndicalists rushed in reinforcements and launched a counterattack of their own between 17 and 23 October that pushed the Americans all the way back to the Algarve coast, where they were able to dig in.

After the unsatisfying conclusion of the Beja campaign, General Clark remained determined to make inroads deeper in Iberia while Entente forces still had an edge in numbers and troop quality. Nonetheless, the next course of action was far from obvious as the American General faced off against his counterpart, the French Marshal Koenig – who had been given overall responsibility for the leadership of all Internationale forces in Iberia. With the American troops on the Portuguese portion of the front in no fit state for offensive operations, and the syndicalists heavily reinforced in the flat Guadalquivir Valley surrounding Seville, counter-intuitively Clark looked towards the eastern portion of the front and the unforgiving terrain of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. With Koenig believing an Entente offensive through the mountains unlikely, he had left his lightest defences in the sector – despite the crucial logistical hubs of the old Moorish city of Grenada and the port of Almeria being in striking distances of the Entente lines.

The resulting Granada-Almeria offensive lasted just six weeks between the end of November and the start of January and saw the largest deployment of Canadian troops of the campaign to date. However, despite some early successes in overwhelming the weak troops Koenig had initially placed in the Entente’s way that allowed them to reach the environs of Grenada and Almeria by early December – the situation soon turned into a bloody quagmire. Losses were obscene, supply lines through the mountains uncertain and the syndicalists’ defence of the two core objectives stubborn. Indeed, although the cities were pounded into rubble by the heavy artillery and rocketry of Entente forces, leaving the stunning Medieval Alhambra Palace in Grenada almost totally destroyed, Entente prospects of success were fading fast by Christmas, with the offensive paused entirely early in the New Year. After this failure, Clark would inform Patton in Morocco that, with the syndicalists continuing to bring more and more troops to the theatre, he could see no more viable routes for offensive action.

Far away from the slaughter in Southern Iberia, the small nation of Iceland was falling into a state of turmoil and peril. Although the isolated and forgotten island had enjoyed a sudden up tick in prosperity through much of the 1940s under the auspices of the Third Internationale – with the scale of the Union of Britain’s military investment seeing wages and living standards soar – the 1950s had not been nearly so kind. Indeed, as the US Navy gained the clear upper hand, the British bases that had once been a source of valuable economic stimulus now made the island a key strategic target.

For their part, the American approach to Iceland was to avoid a head-on offensive put to instead blockade the island from receiving any supplies from Scotland to the south – with dozens of US submarines prowling the icy waters surrounding it. While this was damaging enough, in 1951 the Americans changed course from merely targetting supply shipments – with the aim of degraded the syndicalists ability to operate their Icelandic bases – to instead target civilian fishing vessels in a hugely controversial move within the naval leadership. On an island with such limited capacity for agriculture and few other sources of food, this was a matter of life and death. By the winter, famine conditions were taking hold.

In late November, after an entire family living in a poor Reykjavik neighbourhood was found starved in their home the city exploded into two days of vicious rioting. Fearing the breakdown of society, elements within the ruling syndicalist clique launched an internal coup – with neutralist elements slaughtering those parts of the elite that remained aligned to the Internationale. The tiny Icelandic military, alongside auxiliary police and militiamen then moved to surround the British at their main military base at Keflavik – placing them under siege. The new ruling group, eager to extricate Iceland from the war, then invited previously banned anti-syndicalist political parties to form a coalition government within them and reached out to the Entente for peace.

While some in the American military leadership were keen to push for occupation of the island, the opportunity to bloodless break the nation away from the syndicalists was enough to win the day – with the Entente agreeing to accept Icelandic neutrality in exchange for an indemnity and the surrender of all Internationale men and materials on the island over to them.

While fighting was underway in the Beja campaign in southern Portugal, US forces in North Africa made a second effort to conquer Algeria. Advancing out from Oran, the Americans sent the syndicalists into headlong retreat all the way back to Algiers, where they again made a last stand, just as they had done in the summer, and again ground the Americans to a standstill – inflicting heavy losses while also countering a failed attempt by a second prong of the American attack to outflank the city from the south. After the failure of the second battle of Algiers, the syndicalists did not follow up their victory with another counteroffensive against the tired American troops – and instead used the respite to reduce their commitment to the theatre, withdrawing soldiers back to the harsh battlefields of Iberia.

For a time, it appeared that North Africa would remain in stalemate for some time to come, locking up hundreds of thousands of American troops needed elsewhere. However, in the first week of December a crucial breakthrough was made in the passes of the Atlas Mountains, right on the southern border of syndicalist Algeria. Exploiting this narrow gap, fast moving US units raced through and found the syndicalist rear almost entirely open. Despite the efforts of the Internationale to wheel their troops on the frontline near Algiers around to counter the American incursion, by the end of the month the Americans had overwhelmed Tunisia – trapping three syndicalist divisions in the interior around Kairoun and initiating the collapse of the Tunisian syndicalist regime – while isolating the remaining part of the syndicalist army in North Africa between Algiers and the Tunisian border. In the space of a few weeks, the long running North African campaign had been upended and appeared to be approaching a rapid victorious end.

Despite the positive news in December from North Africa, by the end of 1951 the US military was facing a serious manpower crisis. The fighting across all fronts had grown more intense than anything seen through the first three years of the war. Iberia in particular was a spiralling hell scape of death, with the sky lit red even at night as rockets, aerial bombardment and artillery fire pounded ceaselessly. Between August 1951 and January 1952, American forces suffered 600,000 casualties – more than doubling the total endured throughout the entire first three years of fighting and a level comparable to the very bitterest phases of the Civil War. Coming at a time when the military was also continuing to expand rapidly in size, fielding whole new divisions on a monthly basis, the manpower shortage was growing acute, carrying significant military and political risks.

At the onset of the war, the nation had implemented a draft that primarily targetted men between the ages of 20 and 33 – with fairly significant exemptions dependent on occupation and personal circumstances, and exclude all non-whites. While this level of conscription had been sufficient to support the rapid expansion of the military through the first three years of war, and replenish losses in campaigns, the sudden upturn in casualties from the autumn of 1951 had seen this equilibrium lost. From late November, General Patton had informed the White House that by the end of the year he would no longer have sufficient numbers of recruits coming through to ensure that all frontline combat units could operate at full strength. The US war machine needed more men.

With little prospect of working through Congress at the necessary pace, President Thurmond would pass through an Executive Order in mid-December – extending the ages for the draft to 18-35, removing many existing exemptions and most notably, and for the first time during the war, expanding the draft to African Americans for the first time – who would operate in fully segregated auxiliary roles in order to free up manpower for the frontline.

With the opposition howling in protest, this extension of further recruitment came at a time when the American public’s willingness to fight on to the end was already being shaken by the terrible casualties being seen in Iberia and North Africa. Coming into a presidential election year, the warhawks knew they had at most months to provide a clear path to victory or else public opinion would force Washington’s into peace negotiations whether the military brass liked it or not.

Amid this wavering on the home front, the United States had caught up with the leading superpowers of the world in developing its own atomic capability. Japan had led the way, being the first to successfully test a nuclear weapon as early as 1949 with the Russians following the next year; while the African city of Lagos had witnessed the devastation of the syndicalists’ nuclear efforts – the only occasion to date when an atomic weapon had been used in warfare. For their part, the Internationale had struggled to rebuild their nuclear programme after the loss key infrastructure and knowledge in Lagos; not to mention easy access to key raw materials in West Africa that were far harder to procure in continental Western Europe. Meanwhile, the United States had caught up – successfully testing a weapon deep in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1951, and shipping out an useable bomb to Morocco by the end of the year.

Now in possession of a super weapon capable of tipping the balance of power in the conflict, questions in the American leadership now turned to weighty questions both moral and practical. The horrifying impact of nuclear weapons had been made clear by the destruction of Lagos – could the United States in good conscious claim moral superiority over the syndicalists if they followed suit? How could the bomb be successfully deployed in the absence of total aerial superiority over the reds? If it was to be used and could be effectively, where would it provide the greatest strategic advantage?

 

[Tommy4ever]

Catalonia Tears – January 1952 – February 1952

The speed at which the Internationale’s position in North Africa unravelled after the American breakthrough in the Atlas foothills was astounding. After racing into Tunisia in the final week of December, the Americans turned their attention towards the Algerian coast between Algiers and Constantine – still defended by a syndicalist army numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Outflanked and slow to react, the syndicalist failed to re-establish clear defensive lines and instead through the first two weeks of January saw their armies hemmed into a series of ever smaller pockets along the coastline. As it became increasingly clear that either rescue or reinforcements were not arriving – morale among the syndicalists collapsed and one by one the armies in these pockets began to surrender, with Algiers itself falling to the US army on 19 January. This was a true disaster for the Internationale – with around 400,000 men being taken into captivity, including sizeable contingents of French troops, among the finest in the entire alliance. While the Internationale still clung to a foothold on the African continent in Tripoli, the most substantive stage of the long Weltkrieg struggle for Africa was over.

In the midst of the abandonment of Algeria, the syndicalists had forlornly attempted to break an Entente blockade in order to evacuate their forces out of North Africa. However, a Canadian-led force, that was also supported by large contingents of Brazilian and American ships, easily repulsed the syndicalists and meted out horrendous losses on the Internationale – claiming no fewer than 8 British capital ships in the first weeks of January.

The fall of Algiers, perhaps the greatest American victory of the war to date, marked the liberation of the Pied Noirs. Algeria’s white European population had peaked at more than a quarter of the population at the end of the 1930s – falling during the Weltkrieg as many emigrated in the face of syndicalist bombing, later heavy fighting in North Africa between 1943 and 1946 that ended in the fall of the French Republic. During these years large numbers left for Quebec, South Africa and Egypt among other locations.

Their very future in the country was brought into question after the syndicalist conquest, with the newly empowered Arab Algerian Republic eagerness to repatriate them back to metropolitan France being shared by a suite of influential Parisian intellectuals, most famously the philosopher Jean-Paul Satre who wrote a polemical text calling for their expulsion. Nonetheless, hostility from local Communard functionaries, who balked at the idea of resettling traitors in their communities, and from the military who saw the Pied Noirs as a likely fifth column, meant that no largescale programme of forced repatriation took place. This is not to say the Pied Noirs did not suffer. Tens of thousands who had served in the National French regime were taken away to far flung prison camps around the Internationale, many others were simply executed. Those fortunate to survive these purges were relegated from the ruling clique to ‘resident foreigners’ within Algeria – with the new Arab regime granting them only partial citizenship rights and providing them with the lowest priority for rations and employment.

After seeing the Pied Noirs of Oran, the largest population outside Algiers itself, celebrate the arrival of the Americans wildly; the syndicalist authorities grew increasingly hostile to the whites – never more so than during the three battles of Algiers – opening them up to increasingly punitive abuses and ghettoisation as their neighbourhoods were segregated and placed under summary martial rule. Now, the Entente moved to turn the clock back and restore them to their old power.

Picking up the pieces in Algeria, the French government in exile took up residence once again in Algiers. The National French government had collapsed in 1946, after three years of fighting against the syndicalists in North Africa – with those that could escape, relocating to Montreal in Canada. Riven by infighting and ideological divisions that ran the gamut from Integralists on the far right to liberals on the left; and the attrition of age among a leadership many of whom drew prestige from their backgrounds before the 1920 French Revolution – the exiled government had shrivelled with time. By 1952, the exiled government was headed by Charles De Gaulle – a man who had been pushed to the sidelines after losing a power struggle to succeed Marshall Petain during the 1930s while allied with monarchist factions; but had emerged on top of the pile in Quebec with the death of his key rival Henri Mordacq.

De Gaulle would face a daunting task. The French exiled government was granted courtesy by the Canadians – who had half a decade ago fought shoulder to shoulder alongside it – but struggled to achieve even passing attention from the Americans. As early as the capture of Dakar, which retained a fair sized French population, in 1950 the exiled government had been lobbying for the return of former territories – but had been stonewalled by Washington that was unwilling to commit to returning old colonies, not least due to the potential for conflict with the Cairo Pact that occupied much of the French Republic’s pre-Weltkrieg holdings. Now given some limited authority in Algiers, alongside an American military occupation – a concession pushed for by the Canadians, De Gaulle set about rebuilding a functioning state and attempting to win respect within the Entente alliance, to ensure the nation was not wholly neglected in the future peace.

From the end of 1951, the central question within the American military hierarchy had been how to deploy its newfound atomic power. The Air Force General Curtis LeMay would emerge as the central architect of the nation’s nuclear strategy. One of the youngest members of the nation’s military elite, he had still been in his 20s at the outbreak of the Civil War a decade and a half ago, rising rapidly through the fast-expanding Air Force to set himself up as one of its foremost leaders by the American entry into the Weltkrieg. LeMay rejected those who believed that nuclear weapons could be used tactically at the front in order to achieve battlefield advantage, and instead called for the targetting of major urban centres – that would destroy industry, breakup logistics and sow terror among the enemy.

This would lead to the development of Operation Hannibal, that called for a nuclear strike aimed at the charismatic city of Barcelona, the birthplace of the Iberian Revolution, the second largest city in the nation after Madrid and crucially the central logistical hub through which all supply lines travesing the Mediterranean side of the Pyrenees transited. This strike would then be followed by the opening of a second front on the eastern Spanish coastline that would allow for the Entente to outflank the Andalusian front and threaten to cut off Iberia from the rest of Europe entirely.

LeMay’s Operation Hannibal commenced on 1 February with the detonation of America’s first nuclear bomb over the great city of the Iberian revolution – Barcelona. The atomic bomb had been preceded by the flight of a large fleet of state of the art jet fighters from Oran across the Mediterranean to Catalonia. With this concentration of force, the Americans ensured localised aerial superiority over the Mediterranean Spanish coast for a period of several hours – long enough for the precious payload to make its way To Barcelona unchallenged, raining hellfire down on the city. Given the Entente’s lack of total air superiority, Western European societies had only grown occasional used to indiscriminate strategic bombing – let alone horror of this scale. Internationally, the infliction of nuclear destruction of a famed European city caused far greater shock, awe and condemnation that the destruction of Lagos had - striking fear through the Internationale and disarray through their logistical infrastructure on the eastern Spanish seaboard.

While the syndicalists in eastern Iberia reeled, the next day two large American landing parties embarked on sparsely defended beeches around Cartagena and Alicante. Spearheaded by fast moving armour and motorised units, the Americans burst forth at tremendous pace both along the coastline and inland – reaching the outskirts of Valencia and Almeria by 4 February having faced scarcely any serious resistance. With reinforcements already being rushed across the Mediterranean from North Africa, the Americans were positioned to drive deeply and greedily forward against their disorganised foes.

For a time, Charles Lindbergh had been one of the most famous and powerful figures in America. A nationwide, even global, celebrity in his 20s for his unprecedented feats as an airman – he joined Huey Long’s America First movement in the mid-1930s and won election to the Senate for New Jersey at a special election in the summer of 1936. During the Civil War, he played a crucial role both as a key player in the Baton Rouge government and by courting valuable business support to the Longist cause. But perhaps most famously, he was the man who broke with America First and created the first and foremost opposition to the party’s domination of post-Civil War America – founding the Conservative Party to support his own presidential campaign against his old ally Huey Long in 1940.

After being comfortably beaten by Long, and having been seen to be suspiciously close to Van Moseley during his short-lived coup in the weeks after the election, he found himself largely cut adrift from American politics. Indeed, his own Conservative Party turned itself away from both him and his politics – moulding itself instead around the ideal of his 1940 running mate Robert Taft, with its emphasis on free markets, freedom and scepticism to Federal power. Lindbergh was yesterday’s man while barely scraping middle age – spending most of his time living in an estate in Hawaii, and championing various conservationist causes.

America’s entrance into the Weltkrieg changed things somewhat, with Thurmond inviting him to play a bit-part role in his administration as an advisor on the air force, eventually promoting him to the cabinet post of Secretary of the Air Force. Despite this lofty position, his role remained largely apolitical – and he avoided straying into party politics. That was until January 1952, when Lindbergh appeared at a large rally in Charlotte to endorse President Thurmond as he announced his re-election campaign – coming full circle from defector to prodigal son.

While in late 1951 Vice President Shipstead had considered a challenge in the America First primary on an isolationist platform, even before the end of the year it was clear that he would fail to win over more than a small fraction of the party as America Firsters rallied overwhelmingly behind the war effort. Thereafter, Strom Thurmond would stroll to his party’s re-nomination largely uncontested – bringing a party that had been so fractious for much of the 1940s together as unseen since the days of Huey Long himself.

 

[Tommy4ever]

American Cannae – February 1952 – March 1952​

After the success of the initial landings in Operation Hannibal, the Americans moved and lightening speed through three main axes of attack – northwards towards Catalonia, south west towards the Andalusian frontlines and north west towards the Iberian capital of Madrid. Everywhere, the syndicalist response was cumbersome, slow-footed and off balance as the Americans belied their numbers to make blistering progress.

In the north, after quickly capturing Valencia within days of the first landings, the Americans moved up towards the Ebro River – expecting to sweep effortlessly into Catalonia, still scarred by the nuclear bombing of Barcelona. However, despite the horror wrought on that great revolutionary city, the syndicalists presented an unexpectedly firm front along the river, beating back the American vanguard that had begun to run out of steam after its initial successes. Instead, from mid-February this spearhead diverted north-westward along the Ebro to capture the Aragonian city of Zaragoza on 21 February.

The capture of Zaragoza was a mixed blessing. Although a valuable logistical, economic and population centre in its own right – the thin finger of American control stretching up to the city was highly vulnerable. Indeed, a syndicalist counterattack at the beginning of March briefly cut the salient off from the main part of the front – with connection only restored after two weeks of heavy fighting the distracted US forces from any attempt to renew its thrust towards Catalonia. By mid-March, fighting in the sector had slower to a slow ebb, with the main focus for both the Entente and Internationale laying in other sectors.

It was in the southwest where the masterpiece of the opening weeks of Operation Hannibal was unleashed. After landing at Cartagena, US forces in the sector moved to take the port of Almeria by 17 February after fairly light fighting, a city that that been unsuccessfully contested from the west during the Granada Offensive the previous year amid much loss of life. With this advance, the syndicalists began to pull troops away from the Andalusian front to confront the incursion head on – piercing through the American vanguard at the head of a French-led armoured counterattack. Adjusting promptly to this new challenge, the Americans swept in behind this syndicalist force to complete a spectacular encirclement of over 100,000 men, including some of the strongest red forces in Iberia before the end of the month.

In the aftermath of this disaster, the eastern portion of the syndicalist line on the Andalusian front was extremely vulnerable – holding nothing more than a thin strip of land rising from the coast, through battle-torn Granada up to Cordoba. However, syndicalist commanders reframed from a broader withdrawal, despite strong pressure on the exposed salient from both east and west, and opted to hold their entrenched positions over the mountainous terrain of the region. With the syndicalists pushing back attempts to breach the line, and to push deeper inland with an offensive around Cordoba, the Americans pulled out of further offensive actions in this sector in early March, instead focussing their efforts on closing the pocket north of Almeria with the reds within it duly surrendering by the middle of the month.

The final prong of Operation Hannibal’s trident thrust inland from Valencia, towards the Iberian capital of Madrid. Here, the Americans found the resistance put up by the reds almost shockingly limited – with their forces reaching the vicinity of Madrid by the final week of February. Only around the capital did fighting intensify, with workers’ militias called up from the industrial districts to desperately slow down the Yankee attacks while regular Internationale units moved to support the defence. The Battle for Madrid itself last for almost three weeks, involving intense urban fighting and seeing the Americans recklessly deploy hundreds of rockets to flatten much of the city as the pushed on. Nonetheless, the syndicalists even from an early stage of the battle it was clear that the syndicalists could hope for little more than to delay the attackers, with relief arriving in numbers hopelessly insufficient to turn the tide. On 10 March, the last reds withdrew westward from the city.

By the middle of March, barely six weeks into Operation Hannibal, the Americans had rolled over some third of the Iberian peninsula and stood ready to drive on ever deeper as hundreds of thousands of reinforcements were ferried across the waters of the Western Mediterranean from North Africa. The syndicalists were still yet to fully stabilise the situation and, given the necessity to redeploy troops from the south, were soon to face a renewed offensive from the Andalusian front as well. The Entente’s strategic prospects for total victory had improved immeasurably from the turn of the year.

In sharp contrast to the experience of America First, which had held dramatic primary contests in both 1944 and 1948, the Conservative Party had never experienced a competitive presidential primary in its fairly short history. In 1940, the party had been formed as a vehicle for Charles Lindbergh’s run against his former ally Huey Long; in 1944 Robert Taft had been the largely unanimous choice in a party that was only gradually growing into a coherent force under his leadership; while in 1948 there had been little interest in prevent him from running for re-election despite the nationwide unpopularity of his presidency by election year. Now, in 1952, the contest was wide open and, with the Thurmond administration in a challenging position, the prize for any Conservative nominee appeared to be a better than evens shot at the White House.

The earliest to declare, jumping into the fray well before the New Year, were the opposing characters of Bill Knowland and Harry Byrd. The latter was one of the best known politicians in the nation – the sitting Governor of Virginia, former Vice President and before that an influential and long-serving Senator before, during and after the Civil War. Whether or not he truly believed that a hardline Southern segregationist like himself could win the Conservative nomination in a party that had drifted away from his viewpoints over the past decade; Byrd certainly hoped to sweep the Southern primaries and secure the bargaining power that would allow him to parlay his influence at the convention to protect Southern interests. Much as he had managed to shape the party’s ticket as Vice Presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948.

Two-term California Governor William Knowland was Byrd’s antithesis. He had challenged the Virginian for the Vice Presidential nomination at the 1948 convention, rallying Western delegate’s frustrations with the failures of the Taft administration and perceptions of undue Southern influence. And the match lit at the convention had remained burning – with a movement continuing to kindle in the Western states that mixed nostalgia for the Pacific States, hostility to taxation and central government power and disdain for the Southernisation of the 1940s and the Federally-imposed race laws it had brought with it. Knowland had sought to tap into that sentiment in an effort to propel himself to the top of the party, criticising the Conservative Mid Western establishment for compromising its ideals and failing to deliver the role back in Federal power it had promised.

Senator Vandenberg and Former President Taft (left to right)​

Both Byrd and Knowland represented distinct wings of the party with strong regional bases. However, the favourite for the nomination would inevitably be the future who could best represent the Conservative Mid Western establishment that had held an iron grip over the party leadership for the past decade. By the first months of 1952, none had yet thrown their hats into the ring. Former President Taft still held powerful loyalties and many were eager to see him run again and take on the party’s nomination for a third consecutive election. However, privately Taft had been diagnosed with cancer in late 1951 and in January publicly disavowed any intention to stand for office again.

This left John Bricker, Taft’s fellow Ohioan and since taking over the House Speakership at the start of 1951 the most powerful Conservative in Washington. He had appeared to be positioning himself to take a run at the presidency ever since his party’s storming victory at the 1950 midterms – cultivating a large media presence and engaging with fiery jousts with the White House. However, concerns that a presidential campaign would either undermine his Speakership or force him to step down – relinquishing a power base he had only recently secured – caused Bricker to lose his nerve. Just three week before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary he unexpectedly ruled himself out of the nomination – blowing open the campaign.

With Bricker out of the running, there was a vacuum on the establishment lane of the party that was quickly filled by the senior Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg. First elected to the Senate as a Republican in 1928, before losing his seat to the syndicalists in 1934 and spending the Civil War in exile in Canada, he returned to the United States after the end of the fighting and soon joined the Conservative Party – gaining re-election to the Senate in 1942. There he developed into a powerful force in the Conservative caucus, closely aligned with the likes of Taft and Bricker on both domestic and foreign policy concerns – promising free states, free markets and a negotiated peace.

Vandenberg duly won the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, but was run unexpectedly close by Knowland – rallying grass roots dissatisfaction against him in New England before following up this success by winning outright in Arizona later in March. While Harry Byrd predictably scored a clear victory in South Carolina shortly later, Vandenberg got his campaign back on track a hefty win in Ohio to solidify his frontrunner position.

Even after the first primaries had taken place, the Conservatives would have a final late entry in the form of William Fulbright. Having remarkably twice won statewide in Arkansas in 1944 and 1950; Fulbright could claim genuine electoral appeal and outflanked Harry Byrd among Southern Conservatives with an image that was both reassuring to racial conservatives but not so one-eyed to repulse Middle America. However, it was not race or domestic issues at all his campaign was centred on but foreign policy. Fulbright had been one of the staunchest internationalists in the Conservative Party through the Civil War, being one of the few to rebel against the party’s Congressional leadership to reject attempts to threaten President Thurmond’s war powers in late 1951.

With Patton’s tanks roaring across the open plains of Iberia appearing to offer a route out of the strategic impasse of preceding months, Fulbright feared that his party was staking its platform to an approach to the greatest issue of the day that was both unpatriotic and running against the course of events. He wanted to offer an option to pro-war Conservatives. He would be surprised at the scale of the response he received.

Green – Harry Byrd
Yellow – Bill Knowland
Red – William Fulbright
Orange – Arthur Vandenberg​

By the end of April the Byrd campaign was beaten, the elder Virginian’s support tanking in favour of Fulbright while Knowland too his earlier momentum begin to fizzle. Indeed, while the latter candidate would follow up his early victory in Arizona with wins in Idaho and Washington, he would unexpectedly fall short in the grand prize of his home state of California where his defeat on 3 May, by which time his campaign was already fading, precluded his withdrawal.

Fulbright meanwhile, went toe to toe with Vandenberg – not only winning across four Southern states, but finding a sizeable number of supporters right across the country, even winning in the New England states of Connecticut and Maine where pro-war sentiment was particularly strong.

Despite this, Vandenberg, with his dominance in the Mid West, backing from key party elites and broad national appeal, remained in the lead throughout the campaign and would ultimately seal the nomination not long after that early May victory in California after Fulbright too suspended his campaign.

 

[Tommy4ever]

The Bell Tolls – March 1952 – May 1952​

Through the second half of March and early April the progress of Entente forces in Operation Hannibal continued to build ever greater momentum – putting the syndicalist position in Iberia into a state of total collapse.

Aside from the short-lived Beja campaign in October the previous year, when they had surged northwards towards Lisbon before being beaten back, Entente forces in Portugal had been limited to the Algarve coastline in the far south of the country since the very beginning of the campaign in Iberia. Indeed, the entire Andalusian front had been largely frozen since the failure of the American Grenada offensive before the turn of the year. However, with the syndicalist front disrupted by the large-scale redeployment of forces to the east and north to contain the fast-moving incursion on the Mediterranean, the time had finally come to strike to send American armour rolling in the south again.

Between 14 and 22 March US forces routed the syndicalist lines in Portugal and raced northwards, supported by a substantial contingent of Portuguese exiles – cutting Lisbon off from the wider front and placing the great city under siege. Although the syndicalists mounted strong attempts to relieve the city – briefly breaching the encirclement for the better part of a week at the end of the month – the Internationale was incapable of pushing the Entente forces back as they had done the previous autumn. Instead the noose was tightened around Lisbon by land, sea and air – with its defenders surrendering on 7 April, not long after word had reached the city of the abandonment of plans for a further relief attempt leaving no fewer than 55,000 men to fall into captivity.

To the east, the syndicalists had initially resisted withdrawing from the eastern wing of the Andalusian frontline stretching from the coast through Grenada to Cordoba, despite being reduced to a thin corridor of land by the rapid gains of American forces to their east. While they had been able to rebuff pressure for a time, they had done nothing more that delay the inevitable and, in their stubborn refusal to organise a withdrawal before it was too late, condemned themselves to a strategic disaster.

Through March, the syndicalist forces in the sector had held firm against coordinated attacks from Entente forces on the Andalusian front to the west and under the auspices of Operation Hannibal to the east – make use of dug in positions and the mountainous terrain. However, there was only so long that they could hold on against a concerted pincer attack and at the beginning of April, as the resolve of syndicalist forces across Iberia melted away, the key breakthrough came. Almost simultaneously, forces from the Andalusian front breached the static frontlines to capture Cordoba, while to the north armoured units from the east spearheaded the attack that secured Cuidad Real and connected the two Entente fronts in Spain – completely cutting off over 180,000 syndicalist soldiers from escape. Now separated from their supply lines, with collapsing morale and no prospect of relief – this large army would surrender within days, with a force of around 40,000 men holed up in battle-scarred Grenada holding out the longest, only giving in towards the middle of the month.

While operations in southern Iberia between mid-March and early April resulted in the loss of nigh on a quarter million enemy troops and the capture of key urban centres, most importantly Lisbon, the most strategically significant operations during these weeks were conducted in the north of the peninsula in the shadow of the Pyrenees.

In the first half of March, the Americans had consolidated their positions around Zaragoza – having initially been slowed by strong syndicalist counterattacks in the region earlier in the month. With the arrival of fresh reinforcements from North Africa, a new offensive was launched from Zaragoza ranging northwest – towards the Basque lands. The Americans cut through the red lines with terrifying easy – capturing around 50,000 men just south of Pamplona that had been attempting to withdraw back towards French soil. More significantly, the spearhead of the attack reached the shore of the Bay of Biscay just east of Bilbao – thereby cutting off the entire syndicalist army on the Iberian peninsula from the rest of Europe. Not only would this huge force, which contained the largest part of the Internationale’s most fighting fit units, now be forced to rely on seaborne convoys sailing into a handful of suitably large ports to keep itself in the field, it was not cut off from retreat. This was a potentially war-winning intervention.

Planners in Paris well were aware of the catastrophic possibilities that had opened up with the tiny Entente toehold on the Bay of Biscay and would rally all the strength they had into breaking it – beginning to withdraw significantly larger numbers of troops from the south and west of the peninsula and embarking on a largescale counterattack. After heavy fighting, the syndicalists would succeed in driving the Americans back from the coastline by mid-April, reopening a single crucial rail line across the Pyrenees into France and allowing for the withdrawal of dozens of divisions from Iberia. However, the rest of the Basque sector fell into a stalemate – with Burgos notably trading hands three times through the first half of April.

While the primary thrust of the northern offensives had been aimed at the Basque Country, secondary prongs of attack pushed deeper into Aragon and Catalonia. In Aragon, resistance was fairly light, with the syndicalists withdrawing back to the Pyrenees in order to establish a more stable line – with their Entente pursuers content to end their offensive operations on the southern side of the mountains by the end of March.

In Catalonia, America forces burst across the Ebro – outflanking and surrounding a small force of of around 15,000 men at Tarragona – before capture the irradiated ruins of Barcelona with minimal resistance on 26 March. Fighting for the rest of Catalonia was notable fiercer over the following two weeks. Inland, a red strong point held firm against any attempt to dislodge it, but along the coast American and Canadian troops made incremental progress as they captured Girona at the end of the month and, crucially, made their way through the coastal mountain passes to secure Perpignan, on the French side of the Pyrenees, on 8 April. The arrival of the Entente on French stunned the Internationale and the wider world. Even as the Entente offensive was halted at the city, with more troops redeployed to cauterise the wound, the war had now come to the heart of the revolution for the first time in a decade.

For the Iberian regime, by the end of the first week of April most of its own army had already been captured and destroyed, in the course of a few weeks it had lost its three premier cities in Lisbon, Barcelona and Madrid, while the psychological scars of the nuclear bombing of Barcelona still loomed large. Although the Internationale still occupied much of the north of the country, the will to resist was gone. On 10 April the government of the Iberian Union announced its unconditional surrender to the Entente – the first syndicalist state on mainland Europe to fall.

While Internationale troops were already withdrawing northwards from the beginning of April, the collapse of the Iberian government shifted fighting retreat into panicked flight. Nowhere was this more problematic than in Portugal. There, fresh from their victory in capturing Lisbon, Entente forces launched forward, almost completely unopposed, reaching as far north as Galicia; while syndicalist troops split between those retreating east towards the main portion of the red front in Leon and Asturias and a sizeable force hoping to be evacuating from Porto by sea. However, with American and Canadian ships prowling the waters off the Portuguese coastline, any naval rescue was a high risk prospect that would take time to organise – time that was simply unavailable for the syndicalist army trapped in Porto and facing ferocious attack from pursuing Entente forces. More than 150,000 soldiers would surrender in the city before the second half of the month.

With this capitulation, the total number of syndicalist troops captured since the beginning of Operation Hannibal in February flew well past half a million. This followed the loss of 400,000 men in North Africa in January. This excluded the 100,000s of further losses in combat. Since the beginning of the year the Internationale’s back had been broken. While they still had millions of men under arms, many of their more veteran units were now lost for good, and after 12 years of total war they simply lacked the means to replace their losses. For the first time in the war, the Entente could claim a clear numerical advantage in terms of men under arms.

Certainly, the great victories of the past months – which had placed laurels around the head of American Chief of Staff George Patton – had not come without cost. The endless, often reckless, aggression of American forces had seen combat losses skyrocket. Between August 1951 and the start of 1952 the United States suffered 600,000 casualties and between the New Year and the end of April endured 600,000 more. Since the beginning of the war America had lost half as many men as it had during the entire Civil War of the 1930s. This was not to say that the Americans alone were enduring suffering. The Canadians, who heavily committed to the American-led campaigns throughout Iberia, suffered 200,000 casualties through the first four months of the year – 12% of their casualties through the entire Weltkrieg dating back to 1940. Even smaller Entente nations that had involved troops in the Iberian theatre took on heavy casualties – the likes of the West Indies Federation taking a quarter of their losses from the entire war between January and April.

After the incredible pace of the syndicalist collapse in Iberia through the first two months of Operation Hannibal, the military situation stabilised between mid-April and early May. Through these weeks, the Internationale was able to arrest the disorderly routs of the preceding months and avert both further encirclements or truly substantial loss of territory. The mountainous northerly lands of Spain where the Christians had found shelter from the Islamic invaders of the Early Middle Ages provided ideal terrain for defensive action – even as the Internationale began an evacuation operation aimed at slowly withdrawing troops from Iberia in order to plug the new frontline in the Pyrenees. However, this security was temporary and never fully secure, and before the end of May the Entente had regrouped to renew their offensives once more.

In 1952 the American Liberal Party was in a challenging position. Formed from the regroupment of the fragmented and scattered remains of progressive America around Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1944 presidential campaign; the party peaked through its first few years of existence. In the 1946 midterms it dominated New England’s Congressional representation, won a Senate seat in Minnesota – far from its North Eastern heartland, and picked up House seats across all three West Coast states among 58 seats nationwide. For a time in 1948, it appeared that Roosevelt, in her second presidential, might finish ahead of the troubled incumbent President Robert Taft at the general election. However the American entry into the war pushed the party back to the margins, leaving it in a distant, although credible, third behind the Conservatives and America First. Through the war, it had continued to suffer – struggling to remain relevant, remain free of accusations of crypto-syndicalist sympathies, and find a distinctive and credible position on the ongoing conflict.

Internally, it was riven with divisions. On the war, it was split between outright pacifists, advocates of a Conservative-style negotiated peace and defenders of the White House’s demand for unconditional surrender and the total defeat of the Internationale. On domestic issues there were some who wanted to push for greater radicalism on civil rights and social reform, and others seeking a more moderate path. And importantly for a party so associated with New England that its opponents dubbed it the ‘Yankiecrats’, there were tensions between its heartland and less established powerbases in the Mid West and the West Coast.

In this moment of vulnerability, the party was losing its single greatest figure of continuity. After first winning election to the Senate for New York in 1942 and through her presidential campaigns of 1944 and 1948; Eleanor Roosevelt had been the central figure in the Liberal Party both within Congress and across the nation. Despite the hopes in some quarters that the niece of former President Teddy Roosevelt might remain an active player, perhaps even running for a third time nationally, at the beginning of 1952 Roosevelt announced that not only would she not be seeking the Liberal nomination, she was standing down from the Senate as her term expired as well. As she approached her 70s, the time had come for retirement.

Nelson Rockefeller and Hubert Humphrey (left to right)​

Into the breach stepped a new generation of Liberal leaders to contest the party’s 1952 presidential nomination, who had both contested the Vice Presidential nomination four years previously, a quarter century younger and with divergent answers to the key questions facing the party. The elder of the pair, Nelson Rockefeller, was the most prominent member of the upcoming generation of powerful Rockefeller dynasty. Seeking to rehabilitate the family name in mainstream America after his father’s support for the Federalist cause in the Civil War, the younger Rockefeller had briefly served in the Taft administration in the mid-1940s before defecting to the Liberals and winning election to the Senate for Connecticut in 1946. As an ex-Conservative he was naturally on the rightwing of the party and advocated for reorientating towards mainstream America, and the party’s suburban New Englander base, with a moderate social and economic domestic platform platform. Meanwhile, on the war he was by far the most hawkish figure in the front rank of the party – having been one of the few Liberals to back President Thurmond over the issue of the White House’s war powers in 1951 and strongly supporting seeing through the conflict to a final victory.

On the other side of the coin stood Hubert Humphrey, who had famously seized Minnesota’s Class 1 Senate seat in 1946 aged just 35 before finding his way onto Eleanor Roosevelt’s presidential ticket two years later. In contrast to Rockefeller, Humphrey was in touch with Mid Western progressivism, which was heavily influenced by ex-syndicalists’ Social Democratic reimagining of their political horizons, a passionate defence of maximalist civil rights positions and a desire to untether the party from its Yankiecrat image. On the war, Humphrey, walked a careful line – heavily criticising Rockefeller’s bellicose position and his surrender of authority to President Thurmond; without tying himself down to an uncompromising pacifist position.

The Liberals, much like their Conservative counterparts, had never experienced a truly openly contested presidential primary campaign in their short history prior to 1952. Partly as a result of this, the party had been slower to adopt the democratic primary structures of the larger parties – with only a handful of states offering party supporters the chance to select their convention delegates through open election. This was as much by necessity as design, with the party hardly existing beyond paper in large parts of the country – with Eleanor Roosevelt winning less that 5% of the vote in no fewer than 23 states in 1948 and achieving above 20% in just 13.

The fate of the party’s 1952 nomination would largely be decided in a single crucial primary at the end of May. In early contests, Humphrey and Rockefeller traded blows inconclusively. Rockefeller had dominated in the key New England states – winning New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine while also picking up a razor-thin victory in California. However, Humphrey had won out in Washington, Idaho, his home state of Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois and Delaware.

Going into the New York primary, would would aware a vast chunk of the convention’s delegates, Rockefeller, a native of the state whose family was virtual royalty in the Big Apple, was expected to win and set himself on the way to the nomination. However, Humphrey pulled off a major upset – winning the state by a six point margin after bumper turnout in New York City, particularly in heavily Black and Jewish precincts where his civil rights message had its strongest appeal. After being humiliated in New York, the wheels came off the Rockefeller campaign – with momentum shifting to Humphrey and allowing him to cruise through the few remaining primaries and seal the nomination with ease at the convention.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Endsieg – May 1952 – July 1952

Fighting in Iberia slowed significantly between mid-April and late May, with only modest changes in territory compared to the massive Entente gains achieved during Operation Hannibal. While the Internationale scrambled to try to steady a collapsing ship through this time, the Entente was carefully preparing for its next strike. This would come in a major offensive operation in north western Spain through the final two weeks of May – with a pincer movement aiming to crush the syndicalist army in the sector utterly and capture the last red remnants in Iberia.

The first prong of the attack came along the Asturian Coast and Cantabrian Mountains in the north and saw Entente forced advance rapidly to the vicinity of Bilbao in a little over a week – trapping sizeable syndicalist armies in small pockets on the coast, with 50,000 men near Luarca on 21 May and a further 40,000 at Oviedo and Gijon four days later. Although spearheaded, as ever, by the Americans, the attack was a multinational affair involving Canadian, Portuguese, West Indian and even Kenyan troops. Although this attack faced stiffer resistance around Bilbao, it had achieved it core aims.

Simultaneously, a larger southern axis of attack struck northwards from the city of Valladolid, north west of Madrid. These troops sliced through the enemy line to connect with the coastal offensive on 25 May at the city of Leon – severing around a quarter of a million men into a large inland pocket, without any supply or hope of either escape or rescue. While it would take some weeks for the sate of this large army to be sealed, the operation had been an astounding triumph – further hastening the Internationale’s rapid descent towards total oblivion as they lost not just large numbers of battle-hardened men by valuable heavy equipment and weaponry that had been slow in its retreat out of Iberia following the syndicalists earlier defeats.

Alongside the drive to complete this encirclement, the Valladolid offensive also saw a wing of troops advance north east to capture the city of Burgos – an important supply hub and one of the last strong points defending the southern approaches of Bilbao – on 22 May. With Entente forces approaches the crucial Basque-speaking city from both the west and south, and having been established for some time to its east in Pamplona, through the end of May and early June a two-week assault heavily damaged the city and its vital port, but saw overstretched Entente forces withdraw and bring an end to their offensive operations in north western Iberia. Indeed, the syndicalists were even able to drive forward with their momentum to push into Navarre and recapture Pamplona, a rare victory during a time of relentless failure.

Any short term relief found by these small successes in the Basque lands were rendered almost meaningless by the scale of Entente advances. At exactly the same time as they were tearing their way through battered revolutionary armies in Iberia, Entente forces made a decisive breakthrough at Perpignan that opened up the whole of southern France to American tanks and trucks. Having secured Perpignan at the beginning of April, American forces had been halted there for the better part of six weeks before shattering open the syndicalist line on 23 May. Within two days the Americans had captured the key port of Montpellier and were fast approaching the Rhone, with haphazardly redeployed red troops complete incapable of containing the breakthrough as US forces pushed on in every direction.

As Americans washed over the heartlands of the international revolution in France, the reds struggled to form any sort of stable defensible line, lacking both sufficient troops of an adequate standard to plug the gaps or the logistical capacity to keep up with the Americans in the face of constant aerial harassment and fuel shortages that had been an increasingly severe concern since the loss of North Africa and the flooding of the Mediterranean with American and Canadian vessels. Indeed, it was the speed of the American tanks and motorised divisions that proved almost complete uncounterable. Barely a week after the capture of Montpellier, the Americans seized both Toulouse and Marseilles within hours of one another in the early hours of 3 June after only light fighting, while Patton’s tanks also reached the outskirts of Lyon before being beaten back by a makeshift garrison made up of a Greek division far from home, a battered motorised unit and bands of workers’ militiamen. In a couple of weeks the Americans and their allies had swept across almost the entire French Mediterranean coast and plunged deep into the interior, especially in the Rhone Valley. While few divisions had been destroyed, as had been the case during the offensives in Iberia, the leading nation of the Internationale had lost much of its industrial capacity, the headquarters of its Mediterranean fleet and seen civilian sentiment turn from revolutionary resilience to defeatism and panic.

This rate of progress did not continue. By the second week of June, the syndicalists – peeling dozens of division from the long-established border defences with the Moscow Accord – had stabilised the front on French soil and held back any further Entente gains. The only exception to this was in Provence, where the Entente slowly pushed on through the rest of June to reach all the way to the Alps, where the imposing mountain line brought their advance even in this sector to a close.

In Iberia, Swedish and Danish syndicalist troops attempted a daring raid into Galicia in early June in an effort to outflank the Entente advance. Although initially making inroads against a Portuguese coastal garrison around La Coruna, the arrival of a sizeable Canadian and American force repulsed the Scandinavians. The most long lasting consequence of the Galician raid was to push the US Navy to move to establish control over the Bay of Biscay – seeking to shelter Entente forces on the continent from any further flanking attacks by sea and allowing for bombing of coastal French and British cities from aircraft carriers.

Across the Pyrenees, the syndicalists were heavily entrenched, providing little avenue for successful attacks by either army. However, in the Catalan portion of the mountain range, Entente forces were able to pierce through the Internationale’s lines in late June and complete the encirclement of over 70,000 men – troops that were desperately needed for the defence of France.

Finally, in the Basque lands where the syndicalists had performed better than anywhere else in Europe over the preceding months, there continued to be heavy fighting as the Entente pushed ever more firmly for control over Bilbao. Yet still the city held firm, the Entente not once breaching past its outer defences. In neighbouring Navarre, the pendulum between the Internationale and Entente swung back and forth, with Pamplona trading hands multiple times as neither army was able to establish clear superiority.

Away from the European front, since the fall of syndicalist rule in North Africa at the start of the year the Pied Noirs and French government in exile headed by Charles De Gaulle had gained increasing authority over Algeria as the Americans and Canadians ramped down their commitment to occupying the region in order to redeploy all available resources to the continent. Back in the saddle, the old colonialists had been unforgiving to those who had temporarily upturned the social order – forcibly restoring lost properties and seeking harsh retribution against all who had participated in the syndicalist regime and its Algerian revolution.

Many native Algerians, either fearful of reprisals or angered at the squashing of their national ambitions, took to resistance – being joined by sizeable numbers of European syndicalists who had escaped Entente captivity by one means or another. These rebels took to the hills and mountains of the Algerian interior – establishing roving bands that moved through sympathetic villages and unleashed hit and run guerilla attacks and assassinations against Entente forces and Pied Noir communities.

With an insurgency beginning to take hold, the situation in Algeria was rendered far worse by the attitude of the Egyptians. While Washington had long attempted to balance the Cairo Pact and the interests of its Entente allies – the issue of Algeria proved intractable. The Egyptians regarded any continuation of colonial rule in the Arab world as anathema, while for the French and their Canadian sponsors Algeria was non-negotiably the crucible of the true France that had survived the 1925 revolution. As such, despite the syndicalist-inspired ideology of the Algerian insurgents, the Egyptians eagerly used their control over the Saharan lands south of the Atlas Mountains to provide a steady stream of supplies, intelligence and even volunteer fighters from elsewhere in the Arab world to ensure the Algerian insurgency would grow and endure even in the face of brutal French counter-insurgency operations.

With the lines of engagement beginning to solidify once more, Paris had stemmed the bleeding in southern France and developed a firm line through much of the Pyrenees, the Entente was already probing for new opportunities to test their weary enemy.

The sprawling American military state was filled with individual and inter-branch rivalries between different leaders and the Army, Navy and Air Force. Naval leaders in particular, having been central to American strategy for much of the war, had seen their importance decline over the past year with greater attention turning over the Army and Air Force – who led the way in the campaigns on the European mainland. The Navy had therefore been pushing heavily for some time for a shift in strategy, utilising the ports won in northern Iberia to outflank the syndicalist war machine by opening an unexpected new front in Northern France.

Although somewhat reticent to redirect resources away from the existing fronts in southern France and the Pyrenees, General Patton approved the Navy’s plan for Operation Rollo. The two pronged attack that saw US marines land in Brittany and Canadian forces in Normandy was initiated in mid-July, with the Americans landing just south of Brest on 13 July and the Canadians a week later on 21 July. They Entente invaders found the beeches almost completely abandoned by the syndicalists, whose coastal defences had been heavily stripped back and relied on inland garrisons responding to incursions as they occurred. Although struggling to push deeply rapidly inland as resistance belatedly arrived, the landings were able to quickly consolidate themselves and secure stable supply lines through key ports. The Internationale would yet again be forced to reassess the deployment of its already dwindling forces in order to contain the new threat. But before the dust had even settled on the opening of this new front, word of a far greater disaster was reaching Paris and London.

Back across the Atlantic, in July the United States was gearing up for party convention season in an election year that had been transformed since primary campaigns kicked off months before. The war dominated domestic politics – as hundreds of thousands returned home in coffins or in bandages and the austerity and high inflation of a wartime economy continued to bite; but now the total victory appeared closely in grasp. Despite all three main parties having largely sown up their presidential nominations ahead of the conventions, the 1952 party gatherings would be among the most impactful the nation had yet seen – with television cameras beaming them into the homes of millions of Americans across the nation for the first time and providing them with a more intimate image of their national leaders than ever before.

America First took the opening slot in the season, and the party was in a predictably triumphalist mood – riding on slogans to “finish the job” and “end syndicalism forever”. Majoring on his wartime leadership and foreign policy Thurmond would vividly lay out his vision of a postwar world in which America’s isolation of the preceding decades would be over and it would take on a far larger role in the world – committed not only to the military defeat of the Internationale but the rooting out of syndicalism in its entirety from Europe, and wherever else it might show its face, and the spreading of American values and commerce across the Americas, Europe and Africa. This was to be the dawning of the America century that had been promised fifty years before but failed to deliver.

Thurmond might have united his party around his war policy and to a lesser extent his postwar vision, with some still circumspect at such imperial grandeur, but in domestic affairs the party’s long quiet populist left wing had been growing uneasy for some time and was pushing harder than it had since the mid-1940s to make its voice heard. Earl Long, out of elected politics since his humiliating 1944 defeat to Robert Taft but still highly influential among America First long marchers who had been involved in the movement since the 1930s, notably delivered a well received speech in which he compared the present campaign to 1940, when his brother Huey had promised sweeping social change to reunite and rebuilt the nation after the Civil War.

Thurmond and his allies were attuned to this mood and were keen to energised their electoral base in the lead up to the election, adopting an unexpectedly radical programme than included promises for investment in major infrastructure projects, expansion to existing social programmes, and – at the urgings of the Minutemen veterans groups – a collection of programmes to reintegrate the Weltkrieg soldiery back into civilian society, including educational grants, preferential employment and interest free home loans.

The final major question at the American First National Convention was the vice presidential sweepstake. The sitting Vice President, Henrik Shipstead, was persona non grata at the convention – having turned against the administration and aligning himself with Congressional Conservatives in an attempt to force peace negotiations on the White House. He was clearly therefore not even a candidate to be Thurmond’s running mate in the upcoming election. The President had initially toyed with the idea of placing Charles Lindbergh, the prodigal son who had come back into the America First fold and now served in the administration, on the ticket – but found many of his colleagues slower to forgive a traitor to the cause.

Instead, Thurmond turned to a Wisconsin powderkeg. A Civil War war hero who had fought behind syndicalist lines as a guerilla, House Representative Joe McCarthy had come to true national prominence during his brief involvement in the 1948 presidential primaries – in which he had torpedoed James Cox’s presidential bid by splitting Catholic support, and gained the unlikely endorsement of Father Coughlin. Despite being defeated by a nationwide Conservative purple wave in his bid for the Senate in Wisconsin in 1950, his profile had continued to grow through the past four years as he became an increasingly well-known face in party leadership. During the war he had been a fanatical loyalist to the President and one of the more single-minded and tub-thumping supporters of the Crusade to destroy syndicalism - his swivel-eyed 'red under the bed' paranoia and visceral hated of syndicalism chimed well with wartime sentiment. He enjoyed widespread popularity among America First activists, and a strong connection to electorally decisive Mid Western and Catholic voting blocks that were key to Thurmond’s re-election. Although a loose-canon, he was regarded by the leadership as a ballot box asset and one who would garner support from different wings of the party.

Days after the America First convention, and with the Conservative and Liberal outings soon to come, on the morning of July 22 momentous reports arrived from the east. With the Internationale struggling for its life against the Americans and the Allies on the soil of France, and stripping manpower from their Eastern European defences to hold the line, the old Baron Wrangel chose his moment to strike. Without so much as a formal declaration of war millions of Moscow Accord troops poured across the frontier against syndicalist positions.

 

[Tommy4ever]

New World Order – July 1952 – August 1952

Russia’s entry into the war on 22 July was marked not only by one of the largest military offensives in world history as millions of Moscow Accord troops went on the all-out attack from Scandinavia to Anatolia, but the dramatic demonstration of the terror of Russia’s wrath with a devastating nuclear barrage. Russia had become a nuclear power years before, even before the United States, and despite the inevitability of its battlefield victory over the outnumbered and divided Third Internationale; its Generalissimo Baron Wrangel felt it necessary to show the wider world the extent of this power. In the days after their declaration of war the Russians therefore deployed no fewer than four nuclear bombs – aimed predominantly at strategic locations, seeking to establish tactical advantage, rather than major populations centres. By the end of August bombs had hit the Bulgarian city of Vidin, guarding key crossing points on the Danube frontier, the Greek-ruled Nicomedia – Izmit to the Turks – which housed key military bases and fortifications on the approaches to Constantinople, Debrecen in eastern Hungary and the port of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Left to right: Senators Arthur Vandenberg and Hubert Humphrey​

In the shadow of Russia’s entry, or rather re-entry, into the war, America’s two opposition parties held their own party conventions through the end of July and beginning of August. Arthur Vandenberg’s speech at the Conservative convention in Pittsburgh was perhaps a rather sober affair. He had to reorientate his party’s campaign sharply in the light of the changing military situation in Europe, and, given how strongly identified both he and his party had been with the idea of a negotiated peace for years now, his was a particularly unenviable shift to make. Indeed, while at the beginning of the year it had been assumed that the Conservative primary would anoint a presidential favourite; by July Strom Thurmond was back well ahead in national polls.

However, Vandenberg had no interest in the wholesale abandonment of his party’s long-held isolationist philosophy. Instead, he adjusted its vision to focus squarely on the postwar world. The party’s central message was that it would pursue a return to normality after the war – avoiding lasting foreign commitments, demobilising the military and restoring a peacetime economy, and the traditional Conservative ambition of more limited Federal government. Indeed, Vandenberg was scathing of the notion that the United States had any role to play in the postwar reconstruction of Europe or its defence – accusing President Thurmond of having “taken the party of the old patriot Huey Long, and found[ing] a new one – the America Last Party” by de-facto writing a blank cheque that would see America shoulder a massive financial and strategic burden. Indeed, the immediate shadow of nuclear terror in Europe further fuelled the paranoid and fearful Conservative vision of the costs of entanglement abroad.

Across the other end of the Great Lakes in Milwaukee, the Liberal convention had a somewhat more messianic air. Hubert Humphrey coldly shed the pacifist clothing he had dawned during the primary campaign, while keeping party activists in raptures with a vision of the United States as a beacon of liberty spreading freedom at home and across the entire world. He promised sweeping social change at home – the elimination of all elements of segregation and legally enforced racial inequalities, while also using the platform of America’s impending military victory to spread democracy across Europe, challenge white minority rule among her Entente allies in Africa and champion the cause across the globe. While some elements of the party were concerned by Humphrey’s move towards an international vision that differed from that of President Thurmond more in detail and purpose that specifics; he had provided a sense of mission to the party’s postwar platform.

Just one day before the Russians entered the war on 22 July, US forces made their first breakthrough beyond the Alps and into Italy. This presaged a rapid advance through Piedmont and into Lombardy – with Turin falling on 23 July and Milan a week later on 31 July. Thereafter progress slowed. Despite a significant numerical disadvantage, and by this stage almost no aerial, the Italians were able to use defensive positions making use of the terrain on the northern end of the Apennines Mountains and along the Po river line to beat a fighting retreat east and southward rather than a disorderly retreat, avoiding being drawn into the sort of devastating encirclements that had crushed syndicalist forces elsewhere.

Despite this, the Americans reached Rome at the end of August while also pushing into Italy’s north east. While the Americans had been greeted with a stony reception in the northern industrial cities, in Rome crowds of tens of thousands burst onto the streets to celebrate their arrival and the end of Italian syndicalism – as a city that had lost much of its soul and grandeur with the exile of the Papacy, suppression of religious life and supremacy of the Italian North over the past decade and a half greeted a new dawn. As the end of summer drew near, the Socialist Republic of Italy had been totally driven out of its heartlands that it had ruled in the interwar years; holding out only in the largely rural lands it had acquired in the 1930s where the regime’s roots were shallower and syndicalism itself had much less popular appeal.

To the west, while all collapsed around the Internationale, the Entente made significant progress in France. Certainly, the syndicalists were not without their victories – cutting off around 30,000 American troops from a spearhead of an attack breaking westward from Toulouse before making a similar sized encirclement of over zealous attacks near Clermont Ferrand. Meanwhile, in the south, the Pyrenees front was almost completely static – with what efforts the Entente did launch against Bilbao and Pamplona being easily repulsed by their well dug-in defenders. However, in the northwest, the Canadian-American landings in Brittany and Normandy consolidated into a single front and made slow progress inland – drawing large numbers of syndicalist troops from other fronts. At the same time, from the end of July the Entente made a major breakthrough around Lyon – routing its red defenders and opening a large gap in the front that allowed them to pour into Burgundy and threaten Paris itself from the southeast, although they were initially pushed back in mid-August.

After being repulsed from the French capital, and with the Russians having illustrated their atomic strength; there emerged a faction within the American military hierarchy led by Curtis LeMay, architect of the nuclear bombing of Barcelona, calling for the destruction of Paris. It would take the intervention of the White House to cool the drive to a second American nuclear bombing – with many back in Washington alarmed at the diplomatic consequences, both within the Entente alliance and with the Russians over an attack with nothing more than modest strategic benefit.

On the frontlines, having failed to take Paris in the middle of the month, the Entente re-prioritised its operations to strike to the south of the revolutionary capital with the aim of cutting the Internationale’s forces in France in two. With attacks being launched simultaneously from the Vendee and Burgundy, the two Entente fronts met at the town of Bourges on 25 August – leaving much of the strongest part of the Internationale’s remaining forces marooned in south western France and the Pyrenees. What little fight was left among the syndicalists was fading fast, with little left to do but to bayonet the wounded and count the dead.

While a decade before Russia and the United States had been close allies, the Longist movement grateful for Moscow’s support for Baton Rouge during the Civil War, relations between the two cooled sharply during the Taft administration and had barely improved after Strom Thurmond brought America First back into the White House. Despite the hopes of some, notably the German Republic in Berlin, to coordinate a shared struggle against the Internationale, Moscow had avoided re-entering the Weltkrieg until it was clear that the syndicalists were already on their knees. To the surprise of the Americans, they had also chosen to offer no warning to their erstwhile allies of their intentions.

The shock and awe of their entry into the conflict and nuclear barrage had shaken many, but the White House was keen to cement their relations with Wrangel and bind their broader struggle together. In August, the recently appointed Secretary of State, the veteran South Carolinian operator James Byrne, was deployed for a consequential meeting in Moscow alongside Canadian representatives.

The atmosphere in Moscow was tenser than expected. The Canadians were almost completely sidelined – shunting off to meet with lesser officials while the Russians made cleared that they viewed the Americans alone as serious players. Entente offers to coordinate their war effort together as co-belligerents, as they had done with Brazil, or for the United States to provide their old allies with material aid and advisors were flatly rejected. Indeed, Wrangel appeared to be almost solely on how the booty would be carved up between the Accord and the Entente. The Americans and Russians would agree to recognise clearly defined spheres of influence: with France, Italy, the Low Countries, Britain and Iberia in the western sphere, with their fates to be determined by Washington; and a reunified Germany, the Balkans and Scandinavia in the eastern sphere under Russian domination.

 

[Tommy4ever]

Lavender Surprise – August 1952 – November 1952

The bisection of France secured in late August by the meeting of the Entente front in the north west of France with their main lines at Bourges was a truly fatal blow for the Commune of France. While weeks before the French had fought off an attack on Paris, leaving American military planners contemplated a nuclear assault on the revolutionary capital, a second attack saw the city fall with little more than token resistance on 1 September – entire French units abandoning their posts rather than stand in the face of certain death. This was the end.

Over the coming days the government of the French Commune, which had governed the country for more than 30 years; collapsed – losing control of its own armed forces and any meaningful governance over the territory that was still under its control. Instead, what officials could largely fled across the Channel to the Union of Britain while the hundreds of thousands of syndicalist troops left on French soil haphazardly and chaotic attempted to withdraw. Indeed, through the first half of September hundreds of thousands of syndicalist soldiers would find their way into Entente captivity, as American and Canadian forces overwhelmed northern France – sweeping up the Channel ports, preventing the large majority from escaping to Britain, and driving into the east and north.

In a quiet moment General Patton, who had spent most of 1952 at a military headquarters in North Africa and later Spain; came to Paris – solemnly visiting the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte where he remarked that, with the war over “so ends my usefulness to this world”.

After the fall of France, most of the fight left in the Internationale – at least on the continent – was spent. With syndicalist forces in northern France melting away, Entente troops moved rapidly into the Low Countries and the Rhine – notably crossing over into undisputedly German territory to occupy most of Baden. Despite some frustration on the part of the Russians, when Muscovite and American troops met one another at the front for the first time in late September in the Rhineland, the two sides greeted each other as friends fighting a shared foe, with little obvious friction. Right across the continent, rapid progress was made in the space of weeks as syndicalist regime after regime collapsed.

By late October, the Internationale was almost completely defeated in Central and Western Europe, clinging on only in a handful of continental enclaves and in the Union of Britain. In Greece, the nation’s rugged terrain had helped to slow the advance of overwhelming numbers of the Moscow Accord, which had swept so easily over most of the rest of the Balkans, while Wrangel’s reluctance to destroy Constantinople had contributed to the unlikely holdout of a small syndicalist enclave around the Queen of Cities. After the fall of Rome in late August, the Italians had continued to battle on in a fighting retreat down the peninsula and, eventually, an evacuation to Sicily and Sardinia – with much of their remaining army left intact. One of the largest syndicalist armies left in the field was in the Pyrenees, with around half a million men still fighting at this late stage, showing discipline, resilience and coherence seen on few other fronts – but steadily falling back towards the Basque lands. In northern Europe, the Scandinavian states of Denmark and Sweden, while benefitting from their status as a lesser priority of the Russians, and being beyond the reach of the Entente, had been able to largely hold fast – barely losing ground even while their entire world collapsed around them.

Across the sea in Britain, the Moseley regime had withdrawn what troops it could from the continent during the fateful final days of the French Commune. Yet this decision to cut its losses had surely come too late. Britain’s best units and equipment had long since been lost in the campaigns in Africa and Europe over the preceding years and, after 12 years of total war, the country’s capacity to rebuild its defences was obviously constrained. Nonetheless, Britain’s syndicalists were preparing the island for a final fight – undoubtedly the last serious obstacle to the final defeat of the Internationale.

Although the fighting in Europe was reaching towards a conclusion, the war continued to be fought at a very high intensity – and the almost reckless nature of American commanders ultra-aggressive strategy, urged on by George Patton and his assertive attacking doctrine, ensured that Entente casualties remained punishingly high through the summer and autumn of 1952. Indeed, including the roughly 60,000 men captured in encirclements in France in the late summer, the US suffered just shy of 600,000 casualties between the start of May and end of October; the Canadians meanwhile suffered around 100,000 losses. This represented a slowing of the rate of casualties that had set in during the Andalusian campaign in late 1951 and continued during Operation Hannibal and in the first months of the year – but only modestly. Indeed, American losses in the Weltkrieg were fast approaching the levels of the Civil War in the 1930s, to date the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history. Only a promise of an imminent end to the killing could ease discontent at home.

While the Weltkrieg was moving into its closing stages on continental Europe, across the Atlantic the United States presidential campaign was turning into its final straight. Over the course of 1952, the race had swung wildly from one extreme to another. At the start of the year, with the war in a quagmire, casualties piling up and the cost of conflict on the home front ever more apparent, the Conservatives had appeared a certainty to return to the White House – building on their thumping 1950 midterm victory. However, the staggering military successes that followed the beginning of Operation Hannibal in February had not only rescued President Thurmond but catapulted him into a yawning polling lead that steadily widened through the spring and summer. By party conference season, it was the incumbents whose victory appeared a foregone conclusion.

This America First peak was not to be sustained. With the end of the war in sight by the autumn, voters minds turned away from questions of how best to defeat the Internationale and instead to postwar America – and there Vandenberg’s seduced voters with a promise of a retreat from a frightening world and a return to normalcy. With the gap between Thurmond and Vandenberg in the polls tightening through August and September, in early October Gallup dramatically placed the two leading candidates tied in a dead heat.

It was in this high stakes context that a spooked America First Party leaned into the old American tradition of ‘October Surprises’ and deployed their secret weapon. Arthur Vandenberg Junior was very close to his father, working in his senatorial staff through most of the 1940s and managing his presidential campaign. He was a skilled and influential operation within the Conservative Party in his own right. This is what made the revelations that he was living privately as a homosexual – a proclivity both illegal and widely despised in 1950s America – so damning. As lurid accusations of the younger Vandenberg hit the nation’s headlines, the Conservative campaign – strongly on the up since the late summer – was left to fight fires in disarray. Indeed, while Vandenberg Junior swiftly resigned from the campaign; the refusal of his father to distance himself from his son or engage with what he derided as “tabloid gossip” drew criticism from many of his own colleagues who feared his reticence was adding to the scandal’s political damage to the party. Indeed, in the final stretch of the campaign the Conservative vice presidential candidate, Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, avoided all further appearances alongside his running mate.

Just as they dropped a bomb on the opposition, the Thurmond camp sought to sure up the iconic connection between the President and the historic victory being won over syndicalism in Europe – as Thurmond made a risky trip to Europe, still a warzone, a week out from the vote to be picture arm in arm with Patton and his Generals atop the conquered ruins of the Internationale in Paris.

History will never reveal whether the Thurmond campaign’s dirty tricks in the closing weeks of the campaign changed the outcome of the election – the President had, after all, been consistently polling ahead of his rivals for months. Nonetheless, Strom Thurmond would win re-election by a comfortable electoral college margin. Thurmond had first won the White House in 1948 while narrowly losing the popular vote by 0.4%, but there was no such ambiguity this time as he out polled Vandenberg nationwide by a 2.9% margin. While there was a modest swing towards the Conservatives in a number of Western states, with North Dakota and Nebraska being the only states lost by Thurmond between 1948 and 1952, throughout most of the nation their was a modest swing in favour of the America First ticket. In a number of key states, Thurmond made more significant strides relative to 1948 – adding near double digit increases to his vote share in all three West Coast states, benefitting from a collapsing Liberal vote, while also seeing surges in a number of crucial Mid Atlantic battlegrounds: seeing Ohio and Pennsylvania flip; consolidating leads in Maryland and Virginia – which had shifted from Taft to Thurmond four years previously; and substantially narrowing the gap in traditionally safely purple New Jersey. Alongside his victories in electoral vote rich Ohio and Pennsylvania, Thurmond also picked up Wisconsin and Idaho to ensure a comfortable victory.

For Vandenberg, the credible nature result restored some dignity to the end of his political career, after the unedifying final weeks of the campaign. However it represented a miserable disappointment for his party, that had begun the year expectant of a return to the White House and had seen its hopes raised again on the final straight. Overall, the party marginally improved its popular vote tally on 1948, gaining an addition 1.4% of the vote. However, its gains were almost exclusively concentrated in New England, New York and California – where the Conservative vote share rose markedly amidst sharp drops in Liberal support that saw the party replicate the clean sweep of these states it had achieved in 1944. Yet throughout most of the rest of America, the Conservative ticket ran mostly level, and in places a little down, on 1948.

This also represented the first post Civil War presidential election in which Gerald Smith and his Christian Nationalists did not stand, the party having fallen apart amid factionalism, long term decline and increasingly radicalisation on its fringes during the War. Undoubtedly, this aided America First – padding its typically hefty margins in the South, and turning the small far right electorates found through the rest of the nation towards it in more closely contested states.

Notably, the Liberals had been significantly squeezed – falling back from an impressive 18% under Eleanor Roosevelt to 12.9% under Humphrey. The two larger parties had both appeared to share in the benefits of the Liberal decline, with the America First ticket gainign 4.7% on 1948 and the Conservatives 1.4%. The Liberal decline had not been even across the country. Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesotan Senator, had promised to expand the Liberal coalition beyond its heartlands and into Middle America. Instead, he had seen the Liberal vote fall sharply in New England – losing all five states that Roosevelt had picked up four years before to Vandenberg – and on the West Coast, with supporting dropping by as much as 10 points in California and Massachusetts. However, it had proved much more resilient in the Mid West – where Liberal support was largely even to four years before.

Turquoise – America First hold
Dark Green – America First gain
Dark Purple – Conservative hold
Salmon– Conservative gain
Yellow - Liberal Hold
Pale Yellow - Liberal Gain​

Down ballot, the picture was more mixed than Thurmond’s decisive presidential victory. While America First’s Congressional candidates saw strong gains on their disastrous midterm showing two years before, they generally fell slightly short of the support registered when Thurmond had first been elected, in less convincing fashion, in 1948. As a result, America First fell agonisingly short of a majority in the House by just four seats. This was also partly a result of redistributing – which boosted the representation of the Conservative stronghold of California by no fewer than six new House seats.

The results were a harsh blow for House Conservatives, who lost most of their 1950 gains, but were a particular rebuke for House Speaker John Bricker who had given up his own presidential ambitions ahead of the primary season so as to maintain his powerful role in the legislature. Now, he was set to be condemn back to the status as Minority Leader once again.

For the Liberals, things were even worse – with the party wiped out on the West Coast and losing significant ground in New England to the Conservatives. The main bright spot for the party was in the sprawling conurbation of New York City which was one of the few parts of the country where America First lost ground on 1950, with both Liberals and Conservatives benefitting from the loss of their last remaining Congressional toeholds in the conurbation. Well over half of the party’s House representatives were now drawn from New York alone, with the Liberal caucus consisting of 14 New York representatives, 4 from Mid Western cities and just 6 from their traditional New England heartland.

Turquoise – America First hold
Dark Green – America First gain
Dark Purple – Conservative hold
Salmon– Conservative gain
Yellow - Liberal Hold​

In the Senate, the map heavily favoured the Conservatives – with the seats contested in 1952 having last been fought during Robert Taft’s mid term slaughter in 1946. Indeed, while the Conservatives lost their hard fought House majority and were replaced as the largest party in that chamber, in the Senate they made a net gain of four seats and emerged as the largest party in the Senate for the first time in their history – just two seats shy of an outright majority.

Across the country, the two largest parties traded blows – with the Conservative winning Nevada and Washington from the governing party, while America First stung their rivals in a closely contested race in Ohio and Jack Tenney continued to defy political gravity by once again retaining his California berth. But it was a particularly ugly picture for the Liberals, 1946 having represented a peak in their electoral strength even higher than Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1948 presidential campaign. In New England, they lost Massachusetts and Rhode Island to the Conservatives, even as they clung on in Vermont and in Nelson Rockefeller’s Connecticut seat. Despite garnering strong support in New York City, the party’s weakness up state saw the retiring Eleanor Roosevelt’s New York seat fall as well, meanwhile with Humphrey standing aside from Minnesota to campaign for the presidency the party was beaten there too – losing the seat to America First. Having lost out on the presidential nomination, Rockefeller was left as perhaps the party’s most prominent elected figure while Humphrey was now out of any office.

It was a great irony that the Liberal Party, reduced to its smallest Congressional contingent in a decade, was now in a greater position of political influence that at any other time in its history. The reason for this was simple – it now held the balance of power in both Houses of Congress. On any issue on which America First and the Conservatives were polarised in opposition to one another – it would the Liberals who would had the power to define success or failure. This position of influence was a difficult one for what had to a large extent been a party of protest since its formation and many were reflexively opposition to the political establishment. However, some would see in their delicate position the opportunity to push forward at least part of the party’s agenda for the first time.