Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)

[Belka DNW]

I imagine Germany is going to take a slightly larger Alsace-Lorraine than OTL, to include the Longwy-Briey iron basin that was right on the border and had not been discovered in 1871.

The current Kaiserreich Germany borders are the more likely outcome, push Alsace-Lorraine to the Vosges and get a bit more of Belgium.

 

[Reisen Storm]

His solution, then, was a preliminary mobilization by France and Belgium to prevent a German invasion. Castelnau also predicted that, as the nations of Europe turned one-by-one against Germany, that Britain would join in the fighting to safeguard Belgian neutrality, and Russia may be persuaded to join the fray, too, while Italy remained out.

We had a hell of a run with Germany lads, but its time we say our goodbyes to them. With the combine might of Austria, Britain, Belgium, Denmark, France and Russia, Germany has no chance to win. If KingSweden is a benevolent and just God, he will at least make Belgium burn to the ground before Germany.

 

[KingSweden24]

Great American War lasted three years and two months. I'm thinking this war lasts longer than that but not by much. This war also feels far less existential than the GAW. Not saying there won't be millions of casualties, just saying that France circa 1923 won't be nearly as bad off as the CSA circa 1918.

That's a correct assumption

This was the character that popped into my head every time she came up! I am glad it was intentional. Does that make Stephane Clement Jijibo? He is less crazy but certainly as vicious.

Hey another MS&T enjoyer! There are dozens of us, dozens! (Working through "Into the Narrowdark" right now)

Heh. Steffie as Jijibo makes a certain sort of sense. That, or one of Elias' goons from the original (and superior) trilogy

Is it even possible for Germany and Italy to treat France post-war the way that the USA treated the CSA? Germany and Italy can only take so much "border" areas. Germany isn't taking Paris, probably Alsace and the most that would be wanted riverwise is to push France off the Rhine which functionally equals taking Strassbourg. (Which as far as I can tell had been French since 1681) Italy grabs the pre Plombières Agreement borders including Nice/Nizza and (possibly) Corsica. Post war boundaries with what is now AH are going be *far* more fluid and will largely depend if an independent Hungary is at the table.

In terms of the various fronts of the CEW compared to the GAW. No state is as unprepared as the USA was. FG, FI & IA will look a lot like the war east of the Appalachians, but if the USA had 5 Divisions in Maryland on alert on day 1.

GA will be sort of a cross between the Midlands front, the mountainous edge of the Eastern Front and the Ozarks. There will be nothing equivalent to the Western Front, Mesopotamia (Brazilian/Argentine) or Chile's fighting. The equivalent to Nashville is *probably* Prague. (Possibly also Bratislava) The equivalent to Chile is Denmark is with less war stupidity. The equivalent to Britain is... Britain. The most likely powers outside of Europe to be courted are Japan, Mexico and Brazil, but with only Japan greater than a 25% chance, I think. *Lots* of efforts to recruit experienced troops from the GAW to the CEW, with the *most* recruited being Pilots and *anyone* involved with the breakthrough at Nashville or any of the advances in the East. I don't remember where the Colonel(?) in charge of Section R ended up, could make the US lean the other way.

Navywise, you'll have Naval fighting away from Europe including the Southern Caribbean and Asia. Japan joining one side or another will make far more difference than it did in Our WWI.

I'd say that's a fine summation

In some sense Russia could also be argued to be playing the role of UK/Canada in the GAW as a large non-aligne power. Other than that only other ones who care could maybe be Netherlands, Romania, or Spain (all of which I imagine are varying levels of cheering on Berlin but not wanting to join).

We have touched on Europe and Asia but what about any fighting in Africa? I am trying to remembe where (other than between German Greater Angola and the Belgian/French Congos) the belligerent powers have colonies next to each other...are French Djibouti and Italian SOmalia still a thing here?

Djibouti and Italian Eritrea are definitely both still things.

Also Togo and Dahomey are right next to each other but, all things considered, fairly secondary as concerns, and Togo would probably get overrun very quickly with French West Africa right there. Kamerun is beside the Congo and controls access to the disputed Ubangi-Shari territory, as well.

I imagine Germany is going to take a slightly larger Alsace-Lorraine than OTL, to include the Longwy-Briey iron basin that was right on the border and had not been discovered in 1871.

Yes indeed. Briey-Longwy seems an obvious attachment to, say, Luxembourg, which already had substantial steel assets (and which the Hohenzollerns already govern as Grand Dukes, in personal union).

 

[theINQUISITOR]

Since the festivities are about to kick off, I went back through some of the old updates detailing the war's build-up, and found this nearly 2 year old (!!!) update detailing French war plans from the OG thread, which I believe was also the very first installment we ever saw from The Central European War:

The games helped the French General Staff developed what became known as War Plan III, or the Joffre Plan, and here Joffre's impact on the actual conflict when it did "inevitably" break out are plain. It is remarkable, with hindsight, how much the contours of the Joffre Plan resemble what actually occurred when the Central European War in fact did occur less than a decade after its design. Variant III-B and all others presumed a French transit of Belgium as one of its three offensive prongs into western Germany; Variant III-D presumed Denmark honoring its treaty commitments to the "Iron Triangle" (a name long since disused, but whose basic alignment remained) and being overrun in four days, but tying down enough German divisions to allow the French offensives to work. The plan called for the total mobilization of France's entire 110 divisions at once - the largest land army in Europe and probably the world - and to launch three offensives into Germany and one into Italy's Piedmont. The biggest offensive was to be through Belgium, which France's assumption in III-B and III-D treated as a neutral and in III-C as a co-combatant, with a full fifty divisions marching through the "Limburg salient" south of Maastricht to strike at Aachen and then breakthrough into the Rhineland; fifteen divisions apiece were to launch an attack against the Trier Triangle (but primarily Saarbrucken, regarded as the weak link and to draw German forces south from the "Northern Gibraltar" of Luxemburg) and from Alsace toward Karlsruhe and the Upper Rhine Valley, thus seizing the initiative on both sides of the Vosges. The remaining thirty divisions of French forces would attack from bases in Grenoble through the high pass of Valloire into Italy. Germany and Italy would be unable to maintain full strength on both of these fronts thanks to the Austrian threat, with Joffre presuming at least sixty German divisions forced to deploy to the Inn River and two dozen more sent to Silesia and the Bohemian mountain passes, the majority of the Italian Army dispatched to the Gorizia Hills and Trentino, and both enemies struggling to fight a two-front war against two advanced opponents.

Aachen was the key to the Joffre Plan, though. The Ardennes made for a difficult territory to attack across but was certainly easier than the neighboring Eifel Plateau, and thrusting through the lowlands that opened up to the Rhine-Ruhr and the North German Plain was key. It was here that a number of officers expressed skepticism at some of Joffre's estimates, particularly those regarding an Alpine offensive to seize the Piedmont; a number of them, once Joffre was more ensconced in his position, were infamously dismissed for "defeatism." The Hindenburg Line that defended the Luxemburg-Saarbrucken salient to Joffre may as well not have existed, nor the smaller but still formidable border fortifications near Alsace; the logistics of Alpine warfare and breaking through such difficult terrain was a matter merely for elan to solve. Joffre's most optimistic Variant III-C, in which the Belgian Army struck into Aachen and northern Luxemburg from their bases in Liege and the critical crossroads of Bastogne, suggested French armies would occupy most of the Piedmont, including Turin, within 28 days and that Cologne would fall with French armies "on the Rhine" within 35. These estimates were, to say the least, wildly optimistic, even with more modest assumptions about Austria's "defensive front" in the east, and also assumed that once French armies had taken Cologne and thus threatened the Ruhr and Germany's ability to resupply Luxemburg, Berlin would sue for peace.

So this should give us a decent idea of what the first few weeks of the war will look like in the west, at least until things start to go wrong

 

[KingSweden24]

"...and just like that, four of Europe's great powers were at war. A British offer to mediate was rejected on March 8th by Paris, which published a note outlining a number of German sins. While the incursions into the Belgian Congo were listed amongst other grievances, the most immediate one was "a history of interventions in her near-abroad in the affairs and politics of other states." This "policy of unilateral intervention" left France no choice but to declare war on Germany immediately "in an effort to force the suspension of this bellicose course."

Germany, on March 10th, responded with its own note, denouncing the French for their own interventions going back decades, in not just Europe (Monaco and Serbia featuring prominently) but in Asia as well, and concluded its note with the accusation that France had conspired to violate Belgian neutrality rather than "pursue a face-saving solution for all parties involved in the Congo" and then had further put enormous pressure on Austria, mutually alliance-bound, to acquit Stephane Clement in an effort to preserve Belgian honor. The conclusions drawn in Germany's declaration of war and the subsequent evacuation of diplomatic personnel (to say nothing of businessmen and others who had stayed in France and Austria up to the last moments) essentially placed the entirety of blame for the triggering of the war in France, accusing them of manufacturing a crisis in which they used Emperor Ferdinand - a man famously skeptical of general war - as their catspaw, a fundamental understanding of the conflict that would have tremendous impact on the treatment of Austria-Hungary in the postwar compared to France and Belgium...

...Germany was mobilizing rapidly, but poor weather in the evening of March 11th led them to continue to delay their opening offensives until the 13th rather than the next day as planned; France was undeterred, and the first skirmishes of the war occurred near Dudelange in Luxembourg as French cavalry crossed the border and attacked a German border garrison, early in the morning of March 12th. This opening action was matched to the west by a Franco-Belgian attack from the direction of Arlon, seizing Steinfurt in a matter of hours as Germany declined to reinforce its border patrols and instead concentrate its mass of forces inside the Luxembourg Fortress network just beyond.

On March 13th, however, the mobilized Imperial German Army was ready to strike. Army groups were formed, with important nobles such as Bavaria's Crown Prince Rupprecht (and brother of the slain Franz) or Prussia's second prince Friedrich (selected as his elder brother, the Crown Prince Wilhelm, suffered from hemophilia) theoretically tasked in leading them by Falkenhayn. The German strategy was straightforward on paper - holding against the Franco-Belgian assault in the west, while attacking with massive force across the Bohemian and Sudetes Mountains in the East to punch into Bohemia and disrupt the Austrian industrial heartland, while also attempting to cut it off from eastern Galicia's considerable oilfields.

The third week of March saw close to a million German soldiers attack across a vast front stretching from Eger in the west to Teschen in the east. The assault was meant to seize major passes between Germany and Bohemia in order to allow a second wave of assaults through, covered by combined aerial attacks launched from rudimentary airstrips across Saxony and Silesia. The nature of the terrain into which Germany was attacking limited their ability to move motorized vehicles through, particularly landships, but it was otherwise generally thought that Germany would quickly overwhelm Austrian defenders and soon therafter engage in battles of maneuver throughout Bohemia, particularly after the Austrian offensive into Italy on March 17th convinced the Germans, wrongly, that Vienna had manpower problems.

While Eger fell late on the 14th, Germany had less luck attacking into their other sectors. While they were able to quickly seize the highlands above the Elbe near Tetschen, an attack towards Reichenberg was quickly bogged down by Austrian machine gun nests, pillboxes and other fortifications scattered around the city on both sides of the Neisse. Sixteen divisions attacked down the most natural path to cut Bohemia in half - the valley of the Morava, from the base in Glatz - but found themselves trying to invest Mahrish Schonberg as the other routes were held by Austrian troops able to rain fire down upon them from above. This "Battle of the Valleys" came to quickly and instantly show the hard limits that German offensive plans were to run up against.

Nowhere was that more obvious than in the most crucial sector of the theater, however, which was the area at Ostrau - one of the most important coal mining and steelmaking regions of Bohemia - and at Teschen, the crossroads through which Galicia could be reached from the rest of Austria without transversing the Carpathian Mountains. Ostrau lay at a point known as the Moravian Gate, a critical cauldron which Austria had correctly identified decades earlier in previous conflicts with Prussia as the most logical axis of attack in a future war, especially as industry made Ostrau ever-more critical. On March 13th, one of the great artillery and air raids against a city began, and German soldiers settled in for what would prove to be a long haul as divisions were rushed from both sides to a place soon to be synonymous with great bloodshed.

The greatest failure of the early German strike, however, was at Teschen. Time and time again, German soldiers with artillery and air support attempted to attack to seize the roads and rail that critically linked Galician defenders and oil to Ostrau, and time and time again, they were repulsed over the course of several bloody weeks. The rapid advance into Bohemia planned by German war planners had not occurred, and it was clear before long that other than the route through the mountains at Eger, the reduction of Austrian defenses along their front would take weeks, if not months, to fully penetrate to force the campaign of maneuver Falkenhayn and his general staff desired..."

- The Guns of March

 

[Dragonboy]

"...and just like that, four of Europe's great powers were at war. A British offer to mediate was rejected on March 8th by Paris, which published a note outlining a number of German sins. While the incursions into the Belgian Congo were listed amongst other grievances, the most immediate one was "a history of interventions in her near-abroad in the affairs and politics of other states." This "policy of unilateral intervention" left France no choice but to declare war on Germany immediately "in an effort to force the suspension of this bellicose course."

Germany, on March 10th, responded with its own note, denouncing the French for their own interventions going back decades, in not just Europe (Monaco and Serbia featuring prominently) but in Asia as well, and concluded its note with the accusation that France had conspired to violate Belgian neutrality rather than "pursue a face-saving solution for all parties involved in the Congo" and then had further put enormous pressure on Austria, mutually alliance-bound, to acquit Stephane Clement in an effort to preserve Belgian honor. The conclusions drawn in Germany's declaration of war and the subsequent evacuation of diplomatic personnel (to say nothing of businessmen and others who had stayed in France and Austria up to the last moments) essentially placed the entirety of blame for the triggering of the war in France, accusing them of manufacturing a crisis in which they used Emperor Ferdinand - a man famously skeptical of general war - as their catspaw, a fundamental understanding of the conflict that would have tremendous impact on the treatment of Austria-Hungary in the postwar compared to France and Belgium...

...Germany was mobilizing rapidly, but poor weather in the evening of March 11th led them to continue to delay their opening offensives until the 13th rather than the next day as planned; France was undeterred, and the first skirmishes of the war occurred near Dudelange in Luxembourg as French cavalry crossed the border and attacked a German border garrison, early in the morning of March 12th. This opening action was matched to the west by a Franco-Belgian attack from the direction of Arlon, seizing Steinfurt in a matter of hours as Germany declined to reinforce its border patrols and instead concentrate its mass of forces inside the Luxembourg Fortress network just beyond.

On March 13th, however, the mobilized Imperial German Army was ready to strike. Army groups were formed, with important nobles such as Bavaria's Crown Prince Rupprecht (and brother of the slain Franz) or Prussia's second prince Friedrich (selected as his elder brother, the Crown Prince Wilhelm, suffered from hemophilia) theoretically tasked in leading them by Falkenhayn. The German strategy was straightforward on paper - holding against the Franco-Belgian assault in the west, while attacking with massive force across the Bohemian and Sudetes Mountains in the East to punch into Bohemia and disrupt the Austrian industrial heartland, while also attempting to cut it off from eastern Galicia's considerable oilfields.

The third week of March saw close to a million German soldiers attack across a vast front stretching from Eger in the west to Teschen in the east. The assault was meant to seize major passes between Germany and Bohemia in order to allow a second wave of assaults through, covered by combined aerial attacks launched from rudimentary airstrips across Saxony and Silesia. The nature of the terrain into which Germany was attacking limited their ability to move motorized vehicles through, particularly landships, but it was otherwise generally thought that Germany would quickly overwhelm Austrian defenders and soon therafter engage in battles of maneuver throughout Bohemia, particularly after the Austrian offensive into Italy on March 17th convinced the Germans, wrongly, that Vienna had manpower problems.

While Eger fell late on the 14th, Germany had less luck attacking into their other sectors. While they were able to quickly seize the highlands above the Elbe near Tetschen, an attack towards Reichenberg was quickly bogged down by Austrian machine gun nests, pillboxes and other fortifications scattered around the city on both sides of the Neisse. Sixteen divisions attacked down the most natural path to cut Bohemia in half - the valley of the Morava, from the base in Glatz - but found themselves trying to invest Mahrish Schonberg as the other routes were held by Austrian troops able to rain fire down upon them from above. This "Battle of the Valleys" came to quickly and instantly show the hard limits that German offensive plans were to run up against.

Nowhere was that more obvious than in the most crucial sector of the theater, however, which was the area at Ostrau - one of the most important coal mining and steelmaking regions of Bohemia - and at Teschen, the crossroads through which Galicia could be reached from the rest of Austria without transversing the Carpathian Mountains. Ostrau lay at a point known as the Moravian Gate, a critical cauldron which Austria had correctly identified decades earlier in previous conflicts with Prussia as the most logical axis of attack in a future war, especially as industry made Ostrau ever-more critical. On March 13th, one of the great artillery and air raids against a city began, and German soldiers settled in for what would prove to be a long haul as divisions were rushed from both sides to a place soon to be synonymous with great bloodshed.

The greatest failure of the early German strike, however, was at Teschen. Time and time again, German soldiers with artillery and air support attempted to attack to seize the roads and rail that critically linked Galician defenders and oil to Ostrau, and time and time again, they were repulsed over the course of several bloody weeks. The rapid advance into Bohemia planned by German war planners had not occurred, and it was clear before long that other than the route through the mountains at Eger, the reduction of Austrian defenses along their front would take weeks, if not months, to fully penetrate to force the campaign of maneuver Falkenhayn and his general staff desired..."

- The Guns of March

Amazing work as always!

 

[username5243]

A British offer to mediate was rejected on March 8th by Paris, which published a note outlining a number of German sins.

Hey, Britain! Remember when you tried to do this in the leadup to the GAW not that many years ago?

Do you remember how that ended and how everyone in the Western Hemisphere reacted to that?

What makes you think that this will be more effective this time?

 

[Belka DNW]

The nature of the terrain into which Germany was attacking limited their ability to move motorized vehicles through, particularly landships

Does that mean motorized infantry or just supply being transported by trucks instead of horses? Also, can we get some description on the German landships (dimensions, armament, armor)?

 

[Reisen Storm]

Hey, Britain! Remember when you tried to do this in the leadup to the GAW not that many years ago?

Do you remember how that ended and how everyone in the Western Hemisphere reacted to that?

What makes you think that this will be more effective this time?

I know right, Britain still thinks its the top dog. Someone should really take them behind the barn and just end them already.

 

[Curtain Jerker]

- The Guns of March

Same author as The Guns of September about the early GAW?

 

[Nalph Nado]

I think someone actually wrote Charles de Gaulle x Helmtrud erotica in the last thread,

Guilty as charged. The mods made it abundantly clear that this is the wrong website for that

 

[GrimmJow007]

Guilty as charged. The mods made it abundantly clear that this is the wrong website for that