Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
A pair of very consequential updates here. Happy to see the USN finally get to fully flex its muscles in the Atlantic, Europe be damned. Things just keep getting worse and worse for the Confederacy. Regarding Mexico, the two most important questions in my mind are:
1. How much power does Carbajal really have? The update gave me a sense that he was being set up to be a fairly weak leader.
2. How close is Carbajal's (or Reyes/whomever's really in charge) view of the war to Louis Max's? It should be readily apparent to everyone that the war is now lost, and that formulating an exit strategy is mandatory. But there is a massive difference between Louis Max's sense of urgency and a more cautious approach, which will then have big implications on the how and the when of Mexico's exit, and thus the peace afterwards.
1. How much power does Carbajal really have? The update gave me a sense that he was being set up to be a fairly weak leader.
2. How close is Carbajal's (or Reyes/whomever's really in charge) view of the war to Louis Max's? It should be readily apparent to everyone that the war is now lost, and that formulating an exit strategy is mandatory. But there is a massive difference between Louis Max's sense of urgency and a more cautious approach, which will then have big implications on the how and the when of Mexico's exit, and thus the peace afterwards.
Carbajal has very little real power. His problem is that he’s 100% a catspaw for Reyes specifically as well as allies of Reyes such as Carranza and the BI in the Parliament. that being said, Max didn’t pick him by accident. That Reyes is much closer to the POV of LouMax than Max, and also the very influential/popular hear of the military, weighs on the Emperor’s decisionmaking process here
In terms of food, the other question in terms of food sales with Neutrals is whether Russia is willing to both sides in the CEW. By the logic of the GAW, the British navy should be enforcing that *all* neutral Grain producers (Russia, Canada, USA and Argentina) can deliver wheat by ship to any of the combatants (France, Germany, AH, Italy). Theoretically Germany (or conversely Denmark, who I think is the triangle Failure on the French side) could stop the Russians from shipping out through the Baltic and *possibly* the AH stopping the Russians from shipping out through the Black, but IMO, if Russia is pissed enough to join a side, the war changes *very* quickly for the other side.
Note, for the Argentines, the grain exports to Europe are going to be *very* useful for their postwar recovery. *Most* of the Grain producing areas that came online during this period iOTL Argentina are far enough west that they won't have been impacted by the war. (Mesopotamia, Argentina is too wet for Grain. Rice, OTOH does fairly well there along with native crops)
Note, for the Argentines, the grain exports to Europe are going to be *very* useful for their postwar recovery. *Most* of the Grain producing areas that came online during this period iOTL Argentina are far enough west that they won't have been impacted by the war. (Mesopotamia, Argentina is too wet for Grain. Rice, OTOH does fairly well there along with native crops)
Germany having access to freely traded Russian food staples avoids the biggest pitfall of WW1, when blockades nearly starved the country to death, which has a big impact on their war making capabilities (the scene from “All Quiet” where Foch is bitching that his fresh bread isn’t warmed to his liking while Germans are eating sawdust captures this dynamic nicely)
Abd it’ll hugely help Arg to be shipping lots of grain/beef out during the CEW, and should see a large rise in the wages of veterans after some lean years. Q becomes how many Germans and Italians return to Europe to fight, shrinking the labor pool further
I'm not sure if Ukraine can by itself export enough food to feed Germany. The question is not supply, it is price.
Also, will the Mississippi be cleared of all of the things the Confederacy deliberately sunk in the river by the time that the grain producers can make money hand over fist or will the US still have to ship out via Montreal. I could see *some* of the grain export machinery in Canada prioritizing Canadian Wheat over US Wheat, but I don't think it will be *that* bad. The question is can the Canals handle it. (Do we get the St. Lawrence seaway *earlier* iTTL???)
And if the Germans and Italians do return to fight, they'll be *very* experienced soldiers. The Rhine isn't as good as the rivers of Mesopotamia for making defenses, but any experience helps. (And in this case, holding against France is probably the correct move to make, honestly of the four fronts, the one that I'd *most* like to attack on is Germany into Austria-Hungary,)
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Germany has several routes in; the mountains are formidable but not unpassable, and either at the Inn or via Ostrau/Ostrava are both good axes of attack (the latter has the advantage of being aimed straight at Moravia's mining hub)
The Central European War
"...culturally similar but geographically extremely different from the other Nordic countries. Denmark was not a country of imposing fjords, solemn mountains, or sprawling old-growth forests, but rather an extension of the European North Sea and Baltic coastlines north, both on Jutland and the islands of the Danish Archipelago that sat strategically at the mouth of the Baltic Sea. Denmark was open and flat, with some hilly terrain in its west along the tidal flats that extended from the Frisian coast but otherwise a far cry from the landscapes typically associated with their Scandinavian cousins.
This was also the biggest influence upon Danish culture and economics; they had always been much more of the continent and thus, up until the evaporation of the Kalmar Union and their loss of Norway in 1815, the most powerful and wealthy of the Nordic states. The position of Copenhagen upon the Oresund, the greatest of the Danish Straits, meant that it was a critical entrepot for centuries for trade between the North Sea (in particular Britain and Hanseatic Hamburg) and Baltic ports, by the mid-1910s particularly raw goods exports from Prussia and the Russian Empire even further east such as grains, timber and kerosene. Unlike protectionist, insular Sweden or poor, trade-dependent Norway, Denmark was often able to have the best of both worlds, with a vibrant merchant class but also a culture of influential smallholding farmers that had helped transition Denmark to the most liberal of the Northern European states, with absolutism abolished in 1848 and parliamentary supremacy largely enshrined as precedent by 1905, the same year that Sweden and Norway went to war over the rights of the King in both kingdoms' affairs. Though its industry was small, it was increasingly sophisticated, and as an agricultural exporter Denmark had a reputation for products of the highest quality.
It was also a country, in foreign policy terms, divided against itself, which left it a complicated actor in the escalating tensions between the various European powers in the half-decade preceding the Central European War. In 1875 Denmark had signed a mutual defense treaty in secret with Austria and France, the other two countries that had been defeated and seen territorial concessions to Germany in the previous decade and where revanchism on that point was still a core component of the national interest; for the Danes, it was the hereditary Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein that had been stripped from the House of Glucksburg, and a substantial Danish minority lived in German territory just over the border. The desire to retain all of Schleswig (supermajority German Holstein was accepted as a lost cause), while hardly the dominating question of the day for little Denmark, was nonetheless a live one and a major factor in nationalist sentiment. It was also the case that as inhabitants of a flat, small and low-lying country, defense was always a concern, and while the Royal Danish Navy was impressive for the size of the country, its army had always been fairly miniature.
This had thus been at the heart of the great disconnect of Danish strategic thinking vis a vis its politics and culture for forty years, then. The "Iron Triangle" of states around Germany (and, applicable to France and Austria but not Denmark, Italy) to act as a check on the new rising powers' ambitions had made a world of sense in the murky context of the 1870s in which France and Austria sought to reestablish their credibility, with a treaty that was formally secret but essentially everybody in European diplomatic circles knew existed in some form or another. The treaty required renewal every 10 years, and every 10 years France and Austria renewed it with each other without debate, but that was not the case in Denmark, where the strategic alignment became increasingly contentious. The Iron Triangle was, after all, not just a reflection of military strategy but one of culture as well. Germany and Italy were formally secular, rising nationalist powers and France and Austria were devotedly Catholic monarchies still at odds with Italy over the treatment of the Church in Rome, and the latter was vehemently anti-nationalist in outlook. Little liberal and Lutheran Denmark, then, was an odd fit with the two of them, an attachment born only of tradition from 1875 and fading nationalist anger over the loss of Danish irredenta in Schleswig. This dichotomy did not go unnoticed in Danish politics, either.
The renewal of the treaty had been controversial as early as its first time in 1885; though the assassination of conservative Prime Minister Jacob Hagerup that year is not thought to have been related to it, that cannot be ruled out. By 1915, it was an open question if the renewal would occur, even if the debate was held largely behind closed doors. The Danish public, while reserved and somewhat socially conservative, were like their Norwegian "cousins" a fairly Anglophile people, enamored with the half-Danish George V who had a soft spot for Copenhagen and visited his cousin Christian X often, and by 1915 the longstanding rift between London and Paris had begun to widen both over colonial policy in Africa and the Far East as well as British frustrations with French support for the conservative "Bloc Sud" alliance in the Great American War. While Russophilia was not a particularly publicly held point of view either, it was the case that Russia's government tended to be favorable towards Denmark - the Tsar, Michael II, was himself partly of Danish descent through his grandmother - and their relations with both France and Austria were in decline over matters not only in the Balkans but in the Orient as well. Culturally, Danes were most similar to Germans, who shared their faith and their attachment to the North and Baltic Seas, and trade between Denmark and Germany had quadrupled in the decade since the last renewal of the Iron Triangle, and the hegemonic rise of the German economy in Central Europe augured a new age of cosmopolitan wealth and partnership.
That was, at least, the position of Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius, of the Radikale Venstre Party that at that time dominated Danish politics as a liberalizing force, and Scavenius was very influential as the head of a growing - numerically and vocally - Germanophile party in the Folketing. The circumstances had thus never seemed riper for a dramatic change in Danish strategic thinking: Germany desired a closer relationship, Denmark was economically more reliant upon Germany as well as the British and the Russians, and the likelihood of Schleswig ever being Danish again was extremely low. But logic did not always carry in the thought processes attached to European power politics of the 1910s.
The mid-1910s were an extraordinarily emotional hour for Danish nationalists, who were overrepresented in elite intellectual circles that carried influence with the leadership of all the major parties from Hoyre on the right to Radikale on the left, at least in comparison to their share of the otherwise apathetic mass electorate. 1915 marked a century since the Congress of Vienna and end of the Napoleonic Wars, which was widely commemorated and discussed across Europe, leaning heavily on a thematic focus on how defeating and defanging Napoleonic France - and her allies, including Denmark - had ushered in an unprecedented century of peace in Europe save for the brief 1864-67 interregnum of wars that unified Germany and Italy. This is of course a remarkably oversimplified version of European history in the Concert era, ignoring pointedly the upheavals of 1830 and 1848 as well as wars in the East, but it was the narrative that European academics and politicians congratulated themselves with at the centennial.
Of course, Danish memories of Vienna were considerably cooler, as they were held responsible for their alliance with Napoleon’s France and stripped of Norway, an integral part of the realm for centuries. The remarkable burst of pro-Congress of Vienna sentiment in elite European circles in 1915 was thus deeply offensive to Danish intellectuals, especially on the heels of the previous autumn having to note that it had been a half century since the loss of Schleswig. This emotive hour thus worked at crosswinds with the otherwise considerable incentives for Denmark’s revised approach to its security; an emotional attachment to France as a fellow “victim” of the Congress of Vienna made cold logical revisionism around the Iron Triangle a tougher sell.
It was also the case that, as the Iron Triangle was formally a secret (albeit an open one), this was a debate exclusively conducted behind closed doors in Danish elite circles of governance. King Christian X was authoritarian (though not autocratic) and like many in Radikale placed high value on traditional models of authority and social hierarchies, and thus his opinion held great sway despite his declining formal power - and despite being a firm Anglophile who was at best ambivalent about France and its muscular political Catholicism, Christian X was a devoted Germanophobe and shared in the sentiment of Danish nationalist thought that the First Unification War (Second Schleswig War in Danish historiography) was a national trauma for which the Prussian government could not be forgiven. An alliance with Germany was thus, for the Danish royalty, out of the question.
The unlikely ally of the King on this question was Prime Minister Kurt Zahle, who was a pacifist who had come to power on a platform of reduced military spending (which he was unable to achieve, but nonetheless remained committed to). Zahle’s pacifism was, ironically, contingent on a security umbrella underwritten by another, bigger power. Denmark had learned in the trauma of 1864 that war was no longer a viable political tool and that it was a European minnow, and needed strength in friends; Danes also felt considerable resentment at Sweden, which it felt had abandoned Scandinavism in the 1860s out of cowardice and then had crushed Norwegian nationalism. It became an article of faith in Danish strategic thinking that Sweden’s long-standing formal neutrality could be assured only if Denmark stood between them and Germany as part of an alliance network; the flaws in this thinking are apparent just from looking at a map, but again, the question of Danish security was grounded more in emotion and the nationalist project than logic. As Denmark’s closest trade partners Britain and Russia were unlikely to sign a formal alliance with Copenhagen (in no small part because as traditional rivals, one of Britain or Russia would take grievous offense if the other entered alliance with Denmark), that left France as guarantor of Danish safety.
And so, despite the incentives - indeed imperatives - for Denmark having dramatically changed since 1875, emotional nationalism and elite inertia, along with a King welcoming French diplomatic courting, saw the Iron Triangle renewed once again. The impacts of this on Denmark were profound, and indeed Scavenius being one of the few voices against it (he had to be sacked as Foreign Minister in protest for the treaty to be renewed) set him up well for a postwar career of dominating Danish politics…”
- The Central European War
(So this update is inspired in part by @Zulfurium and his wonderful ADiJ, which has great detail on contemporary Denmark around this time. What were really trying to cover here is the strategic context of Denmark as war creeps closer…)
This was also the biggest influence upon Danish culture and economics; they had always been much more of the continent and thus, up until the evaporation of the Kalmar Union and their loss of Norway in 1815, the most powerful and wealthy of the Nordic states. The position of Copenhagen upon the Oresund, the greatest of the Danish Straits, meant that it was a critical entrepot for centuries for trade between the North Sea (in particular Britain and Hanseatic Hamburg) and Baltic ports, by the mid-1910s particularly raw goods exports from Prussia and the Russian Empire even further east such as grains, timber and kerosene. Unlike protectionist, insular Sweden or poor, trade-dependent Norway, Denmark was often able to have the best of both worlds, with a vibrant merchant class but also a culture of influential smallholding farmers that had helped transition Denmark to the most liberal of the Northern European states, with absolutism abolished in 1848 and parliamentary supremacy largely enshrined as precedent by 1905, the same year that Sweden and Norway went to war over the rights of the King in both kingdoms' affairs. Though its industry was small, it was increasingly sophisticated, and as an agricultural exporter Denmark had a reputation for products of the highest quality.
It was also a country, in foreign policy terms, divided against itself, which left it a complicated actor in the escalating tensions between the various European powers in the half-decade preceding the Central European War. In 1875 Denmark had signed a mutual defense treaty in secret with Austria and France, the other two countries that had been defeated and seen territorial concessions to Germany in the previous decade and where revanchism on that point was still a core component of the national interest; for the Danes, it was the hereditary Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein that had been stripped from the House of Glucksburg, and a substantial Danish minority lived in German territory just over the border. The desire to retain all of Schleswig (supermajority German Holstein was accepted as a lost cause), while hardly the dominating question of the day for little Denmark, was nonetheless a live one and a major factor in nationalist sentiment. It was also the case that as inhabitants of a flat, small and low-lying country, defense was always a concern, and while the Royal Danish Navy was impressive for the size of the country, its army had always been fairly miniature.
This had thus been at the heart of the great disconnect of Danish strategic thinking vis a vis its politics and culture for forty years, then. The "Iron Triangle" of states around Germany (and, applicable to France and Austria but not Denmark, Italy) to act as a check on the new rising powers' ambitions had made a world of sense in the murky context of the 1870s in which France and Austria sought to reestablish their credibility, with a treaty that was formally secret but essentially everybody in European diplomatic circles knew existed in some form or another. The treaty required renewal every 10 years, and every 10 years France and Austria renewed it with each other without debate, but that was not the case in Denmark, where the strategic alignment became increasingly contentious. The Iron Triangle was, after all, not just a reflection of military strategy but one of culture as well. Germany and Italy were formally secular, rising nationalist powers and France and Austria were devotedly Catholic monarchies still at odds with Italy over the treatment of the Church in Rome, and the latter was vehemently anti-nationalist in outlook. Little liberal and Lutheran Denmark, then, was an odd fit with the two of them, an attachment born only of tradition from 1875 and fading nationalist anger over the loss of Danish irredenta in Schleswig. This dichotomy did not go unnoticed in Danish politics, either.
The renewal of the treaty had been controversial as early as its first time in 1885; though the assassination of conservative Prime Minister Jacob Hagerup that year is not thought to have been related to it, that cannot be ruled out. By 1915, it was an open question if the renewal would occur, even if the debate was held largely behind closed doors. The Danish public, while reserved and somewhat socially conservative, were like their Norwegian "cousins" a fairly Anglophile people, enamored with the half-Danish George V who had a soft spot for Copenhagen and visited his cousin Christian X often, and by 1915 the longstanding rift between London and Paris had begun to widen both over colonial policy in Africa and the Far East as well as British frustrations with French support for the conservative "Bloc Sud" alliance in the Great American War. While Russophilia was not a particularly publicly held point of view either, it was the case that Russia's government tended to be favorable towards Denmark - the Tsar, Michael II, was himself partly of Danish descent through his grandmother - and their relations with both France and Austria were in decline over matters not only in the Balkans but in the Orient as well. Culturally, Danes were most similar to Germans, who shared their faith and their attachment to the North and Baltic Seas, and trade between Denmark and Germany had quadrupled in the decade since the last renewal of the Iron Triangle, and the hegemonic rise of the German economy in Central Europe augured a new age of cosmopolitan wealth and partnership.
That was, at least, the position of Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius, of the Radikale Venstre Party that at that time dominated Danish politics as a liberalizing force, and Scavenius was very influential as the head of a growing - numerically and vocally - Germanophile party in the Folketing. The circumstances had thus never seemed riper for a dramatic change in Danish strategic thinking: Germany desired a closer relationship, Denmark was economically more reliant upon Germany as well as the British and the Russians, and the likelihood of Schleswig ever being Danish again was extremely low. But logic did not always carry in the thought processes attached to European power politics of the 1910s.
The mid-1910s were an extraordinarily emotional hour for Danish nationalists, who were overrepresented in elite intellectual circles that carried influence with the leadership of all the major parties from Hoyre on the right to Radikale on the left, at least in comparison to their share of the otherwise apathetic mass electorate. 1915 marked a century since the Congress of Vienna and end of the Napoleonic Wars, which was widely commemorated and discussed across Europe, leaning heavily on a thematic focus on how defeating and defanging Napoleonic France - and her allies, including Denmark - had ushered in an unprecedented century of peace in Europe save for the brief 1864-67 interregnum of wars that unified Germany and Italy. This is of course a remarkably oversimplified version of European history in the Concert era, ignoring pointedly the upheavals of 1830 and 1848 as well as wars in the East, but it was the narrative that European academics and politicians congratulated themselves with at the centennial.
Of course, Danish memories of Vienna were considerably cooler, as they were held responsible for their alliance with Napoleon’s France and stripped of Norway, an integral part of the realm for centuries. The remarkable burst of pro-Congress of Vienna sentiment in elite European circles in 1915 was thus deeply offensive to Danish intellectuals, especially on the heels of the previous autumn having to note that it had been a half century since the loss of Schleswig. This emotive hour thus worked at crosswinds with the otherwise considerable incentives for Denmark’s revised approach to its security; an emotional attachment to France as a fellow “victim” of the Congress of Vienna made cold logical revisionism around the Iron Triangle a tougher sell.
It was also the case that, as the Iron Triangle was formally a secret (albeit an open one), this was a debate exclusively conducted behind closed doors in Danish elite circles of governance. King Christian X was authoritarian (though not autocratic) and like many in Radikale placed high value on traditional models of authority and social hierarchies, and thus his opinion held great sway despite his declining formal power - and despite being a firm Anglophile who was at best ambivalent about France and its muscular political Catholicism, Christian X was a devoted Germanophobe and shared in the sentiment of Danish nationalist thought that the First Unification War (Second Schleswig War in Danish historiography) was a national trauma for which the Prussian government could not be forgiven. An alliance with Germany was thus, for the Danish royalty, out of the question.
The unlikely ally of the King on this question was Prime Minister Kurt Zahle, who was a pacifist who had come to power on a platform of reduced military spending (which he was unable to achieve, but nonetheless remained committed to). Zahle’s pacifism was, ironically, contingent on a security umbrella underwritten by another, bigger power. Denmark had learned in the trauma of 1864 that war was no longer a viable political tool and that it was a European minnow, and needed strength in friends; Danes also felt considerable resentment at Sweden, which it felt had abandoned Scandinavism in the 1860s out of cowardice and then had crushed Norwegian nationalism. It became an article of faith in Danish strategic thinking that Sweden’s long-standing formal neutrality could be assured only if Denmark stood between them and Germany as part of an alliance network; the flaws in this thinking are apparent just from looking at a map, but again, the question of Danish security was grounded more in emotion and the nationalist project than logic. As Denmark’s closest trade partners Britain and Russia were unlikely to sign a formal alliance with Copenhagen (in no small part because as traditional rivals, one of Britain or Russia would take grievous offense if the other entered alliance with Denmark), that left France as guarantor of Danish safety.
And so, despite the incentives - indeed imperatives - for Denmark having dramatically changed since 1875, emotional nationalism and elite inertia, along with a King welcoming French diplomatic courting, saw the Iron Triangle renewed once again. The impacts of this on Denmark were profound, and indeed Scavenius being one of the few voices against it (he had to be sacked as Foreign Minister in protest for the treaty to be renewed) set him up well for a postwar career of dominating Danish politics…”
- The Central European War
(So this update is inspired in part by @Zulfurium and his wonderful ADiJ, which has great detail on contemporary Denmark around this time. What were really trying to cover here is the strategic context of Denmark as war creeps closer…)
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"Hey, remember when I said handcuffing ourselves to the French was a bad idea? Also, remember when our army got shattered by the Prussians and the King had to flee Copenhagen because southern/central Denmark is extremely easy to invade from Germany, as any schoolkid with a halfway decent map can tell you?
So...you didn't listen to me then and we were occupied by the Germans for [X] years. That's ok, you didn't listen to me then...but you sure as shit can make up for that past mistake and listen to me now, as opposed to listening to the dumbasses in charge who shackled us to a corpse in France for no better reason than "hey, vibes."
More comprehensible than in the original Danish (zing!) but, yes, basically haha
The highest praise I can receive! One should always be reading A Day in July again.
Denmark, I must admit I'm a bit sympathetic to them national malaise's are never easy to confront, Scandinavism failed, Danish keeping Schleswig Holstein failed, the year everyone celebrating the Congress that signed away any chance of Denmark ever being a decent power well I can understand why they choose to spit than swallow the bitter pill.
That being said their move was well besides foolish is well one of those unironically conservative choices to choose to kinda half hope of a chance to get their land back plus stay with traditional ally that ironically being radical and say investing far more into improving their military situation may have helped how things turned out. Sleep walking into war is a good way to describe it.
That being said their move was well besides foolish is well one of those unironically conservative choices to choose to kinda half hope of a chance to get their land back plus stay with traditional ally that ironically being radical and say investing far more into improving their military situation may have helped how things turned out. Sleep walking into war is a good way to describe it.
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Yeah; agreed. What struck me as I was planning and writing this update was how much the word “inertia” could be used to describe Denmark’s position and process here, and not in a good way
So Denmark stays in its Triangle...
What about Spain in the other triangle.
Somewhere recently, I indicated that given the choice Germany should "hold on the French border and attack on the Austrian one". I revise this to "hold on the French Border *and* hold on the Austrian border for the week necessary to drive Denmark out of the War (and then attack on the Austrian one).
What about Spain in the other triangle.
Somewhere recently, I indicated that given the choice Germany should "hold on the French border and attack on the Austrian one". I revise this to "hold on the French Border *and* hold on the Austrian border for the week necessary to drive Denmark out of the War (and then attack on the Austrian one).
Also, I'm curious as to when Norway does get free, I believe they have been listed as an independent country in some of the late 20th/early 21st century sports posts over on the infobox thread...
Though it does look like we are heading to a Europe that loses the large empires like OTL (where *most* areas with a languge of their own end up independent). What that says about the Flemish and the Walloons, don't know.
Though it does look like we are heading to a Europe that loses the large empires like OTL (where *most* areas with a languge of their own end up independent). What that says about the Flemish and the Walloons, don't know.