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

[KingSweden24]

"...the judge in charge of the investigation and proceedings [1] was regarded in Austrian legal circles as generally fair and talented - Thomas Schreiber, a sixty-two year old native of Pilsen who spoke three languages fluently, enjoyed the opera, and was known to be a devout Catholic with a rigidly legalistic view of the world and, with it, right and wrong. Though Germans were unfamiliar with Austrian legal ins-and-outs, they were quickly assured by diplomatic personnel in Vienna that Schreiber would get to the facts of the case and mete out genuine justice. It was, perhaps, Schreiber's reputation for honesty and as a great judge that set everyone up so for disappointment just a month later.

Schreiber, who died of a brain hemorrhage in 1922 [2], would maintain for the three years until his death that he conducted a fair trial and that there was no pressure upon him from the government to acquit Stephane Clement on any charges. Nonetheless, it cannot be said that the circumstances in Austria were those conducive to a straightforward trial. Newspapers across Europe declared that the Black Prince of Belgium was the most famous defendant since Martin Luther and before him Jesus Christ; it was anointed as the "Trial of the Century" well before it began. The delayed start of the trial - commencing on January 26th, 1919, rather than its planned beginning nearly three weeks earlier - stemmed from new witnesses coming out of the woodwork with wild claims that overwhelmed Schreiber and his judicial investigators, and it was suggested that a great deal of evidence was poorly collected and documentation lost as they struggled to keep up with it.

In the end, however, Schreiber set his first day of the trial as January 26th, and that was that. Stephane Clement would go on trial for a whole host of charges - murder, first and foremost, but also the stealing of a weapon from a Hofburg guard and the illegal discharge of a weapon upon the Hofburg grounds. (Notably absent in 1919 was any kind of charge of sexual assault, attempted or otherwise). The Trial of the Century had begun...

- The Central European War

"...Stephane Clement, for the first time in his life, presented well in public. To reporters from all over the world crammed in Schreiber's cold, dimly-lit courtroom, the Black Prince was not the degenerate id of the late Belle Epoque but rather a tall, square-jawed young man of only thirty, clean-shaven with thin, combed-over brown hair and intelligent eyes. When he answered questions, he did so politely but without hesitation or any sign of fluster; he looked the judge and prosecutors in the eye, and he never seemed to be playing to the crowd. This, ironically, worked to his benefit - could this be the monster so many had heard rumors of for years? This handsome, kind, well-spoken young prince was the infamous Stephane Clement?

European scholars have fiercely debated the fairness of "Steffie's" trial for close to a century, and little true consensus remains. Most agree that Schreiber, an old-fashioned and no-nonsense judge, had little sympathy or particular regard for Stephane Clement as a man, but that his age and conservative worldview also cut in the Prince's favor. He was quick to doubt accusations of sexual impropriety and severely cabined the ability of Isabella of Croy to testify, demanding that she provide more "evidence" that her encounter with Stephane Clement was indeed forced and unwanted. This instinctive dismissal of a woman's point of view, even a noblewoman like the widow of the Bavarian prince whose slaying lay at the heart of the case, punched a huge hole through the case against the Prince.

Further compounding the issue was the testimony of Ernst Sachs, which once again inspired a thousand conspiracy theories in that he testified that he could not get a good view of Prince Franz from the ground, and that he stumbled onto the fight having already started. That Prince Franz was unarmed seemed to matter little, only that the brawl had been ongoing. Had Stephane Clement stolen the gun off of Sachs' belt? Perhaps, Sachs acknowledged, though there was a chance that the Prince merely knocked the pistol loose from its holster when they fell to the floor together and came away with it; he could not possibly recall, or deign to suggest, that the Belgian defendant had intentionally stripped him of his weapon.

A dozen or so witnesses were brought in to testify to Stephane Clement's character, including various functionaries, minor Austrian nobility, and the charges d'affaires of the Belgian embassy. Police investigators testified as to the Prince's answers in interrogation and his "apparent state of mind" when he had been apprehended at his apartment; the testimony seemed to elide that he had been frantically packing his bags to flee the city when he had been caught, and no follow-up on this question was asked. Doubts were raised as to whether Stephane Clement had been drunk at the time of the shooting; Sachs recalled "the scent of brandy," as did Isabella, but the police report stated that he was "sober as a priest."

The huge gaggle of reporters forced Schrieber to, after ten days of testimony, impose a closed court. This, in combination with the tone of the reporting in how it cast the testimony, only further fueled German impressions that the fix was in. This was not the trial of an accused rapist who had gunned down a fellow prince in cold blood anymore but an exploration of a poor, frightened, put-upon man who apparently stood wrongfully and dishonorably accused. It was becoming increasingly clear which direction the wind was blowing, and the mounting anger in German government circles was now nigh-unstoppable..."

- The Black Prince of Belgium: The Dark and Turbulent Life of Stephane Clement

"...the Hofburg was further offended by a diplomatic memorandum circulated to the Foreign Office by Jagow on February 5th which strongly implied two things: one, that Germany expected a "pre-determined" verdict, as Berchtold put it, and second, that this expectation carried with it a Germany "right of unilateralism," in which Germany was permitted, at times of her choosing, to unilaterally interfere in the judicial and perhaps even political proceedings of member states as a form of diplomatic liberum veto. Comments made by Jagow in late December had already suggested German sympathy for Hungarian nationalists in Swiss exile, and put together it was not hard for Ferdinand to draw a line between Germany's increasing support for the Green Magyar cause and their expectation of demanding a guilty verdict in the trial of Stephane Clement. Essentially how the Hofburg understood Jagow's memorandum was an unprecedented demand of interference in Austrian internal affairs that, on its own, served as an effective declaration of war.

Ironically, this was not exactly how Jagow or Berlin had intended for it to be perceived, but it had been sloppily drafted and made overlong rather than concise, and thus the stage was set for the fateful verdict read out on February 25th, 1919, four months and one day after the Hofburg killing. To the surprise of nobody who had followed the trial the past several weeks, Stephane Clement was acquitted on the counts of murder and of the theft of a weapon, while he was found guilty of illegally discharging a weapon inside the Hofburg; he had never been charged with attempted rape or battery upon Isabella to begin with. For the one guilty verdict he did receive, Stephane Clement was banned from Austrian territory permanently after paying a small indemnity, but otherwise was free to go.

Ferdinand's reaction was, essentially, one of "good riddance" - he had already disliked Stephane Clement enormously and detested him after the Hofburg Affair, and to "see the back of him" was a conclusion to the matter he could support. However, with Schreiber's verdict, events were now out of Ferdinand's hands. German newspapers openly and angrily declared that the case had been rigged to acquit the Belgian and there was even a small riot in Munich over the news. Making matters worse, and playing directly into the conspiratorial thinking of Germans, the French and Belgians openly celebrated the acquittal, with church bells ringing all over both countries and Prime Minister Poincare going so far as to make a speech "in honor of this day" to the Corps Legislatif on February 27th. On the 28th, Stephane Clement was released from prison, upon the receipt of his indemnity by the Austrian court, paid on his behalf by his father from Brussels. He was quickly ferried to the train station with all haste and put on a train to Switzerland; the sight of Austrian soldiers hurrying the acquitted through the city was perceived, perhaps not incorrectly, as helping him flee. Germany could now not be sated - and critically for the function of the Iron Triangle, the Jagow Memorandum's demands and Germany's outrage over the outcome of the Trial of the Century could reasonably be perceived as German aggression towards Austria..."

- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor

[1] Austria, like almost all continental Europe, is not a common law system and thus does not have an adversarial justice system where the judge serves as a referee between defense and prosecution. Very crucially, civil law systems do not have juries, and case law is generally not as important as statutory law.
[2] Suspicious timing, to say the least

 

[KingSweden24]

"...as late as the evening of February 28th, 1919, it still seemed unlikely that Germany would attack Austria and Belgium over the "acquittal heard around the world." Nonetheless, there was an escalating sense that something was about to go very wrong, and British Foreign Secretary the Marquess of Crewe sent a note to both Berlin and Austria on the morning of March 1st with an offer to "mediate." This was rebuffed later that afternoon by his Viennese counterpart; what was there to mediate, asked Count Berchtold? Austria had brought a case, tried Stephane Clement, and found the evidence insufficient to charge a European royal with murder, and had exiled him after his acquittal to make a point. "No one sympathizes with the man," Berchtold assured Crewe, "but that does not make him guilty."

Events were moving rapidly in Germany, where called to Berlin were the Kings of Bavaria and Saxony, men who typically dealt with Heinrich via envoy, a sort of internal ambassador to the Prussian, for that matter Imperial, court. [1] Heinrich gathered a group of German - and, critically, foreign - journalists in a room of the Stadtschloss and, flanked by Ludwig III and Friedrich Augustus, denounced the "release of the criminal Stephane Clement of Belgium," and, in an unusually unguarded moment, stated, "There will have to be consequences for what has occurred." What those consequences were, exactly, was unclear; on March 2nd, the German ambassador to Vienna was recalled to Berlin, though the embassy itself remained open.

The moment of tension worsened as Stephane Clement's train passed through Vorarlberg en route to Switzerland, very close to the German border, and was suddenly set upon by sporadic gunfire from the forests. Nobody was harmed even though several bullets managed to break train windows, but once in Switzerland, the Belgian prince drew the understandable conclusion that there had been an assassination attempt against him by German agents trying to avenge Prince Franz before he could escape into neutral Switzerland, which meant, also, that Austrian sovereignty had been directly violated in those moments. There is no record of German agents having passed into Vorarlberg to carry out the hit, but their placement, and the near-death of Karolyi in Zurich just a year earlier, certainly opened the question..."

- 1919: How Europe Went to War

"...the crisis stemming from Stephane Clement's acquittal could well have passed had France not deliberately escalated it, and indeed the actions of the Poincaré government in those days of early March were held up for decades to come as clearly carrying responsibility for the bloodshed to come.

On March 2nd, the Poincaré Cabinet had a good deal of information before them. They knew that Stephane Clement's acquittal had offended Germany enough that Berlin's minister to Vienna had been withdrawn (as had Bavaria's envoys); they knew that three German monarchs had gathered in Berlin at the same time as the Kaiser's private war cabinet, and that symbolically that gathering was meant to draw a hard line on defining a Germany that excluded Austria; and they knew that Stephane Clement's train had been shot at in the Alps as it approached the Swiss frontier. A conclusion Poincaré and Paleologue could have drawn from this was that the hour was tense and hot words were flying, but that it was highly unlikely that Germany would go to war over the outcome of a criminal trial.

Castelnau drew a different conclusion - that Germany was retrenching, and preparing for conflict. He predicted that what would follow would be a demand from Germany for Stephane Clement to be turned over by Belgium to face justice, and when this did not occur, would declare war. 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.

Poincaré proposed that the Cabinet take a vote on March 2nd, and they did, voting nearly unanimously in favor of war. However, Emperor Napoleon, when confronted with this sequence of events, refused to sign the mobilization order, asking that the Cabinet "pray on the matter" for a night and then reconvene in the late morning of the 3rd. The Emperor was not a pacifist, necessarily, but to his credit was highly skeptical of the Hofburg Affair as a cassus belli and if he was being honest did not really want to go to war with Germany over it. He had supported Belgium to the hilt throughout the fall at the cost of his already near-failed marriage, and he wanted to give the Cabinet one last chance to take a deep breath and ponder whether to actually step into the brink.

Several Cabinet ministers appeared to be wavering in the hours thereafter, but Poincaré, Paleologue, and several other ministers dined that night with several members of the General Staff who spoke enthusiastically of their ability to quickly prosecute a war against Germany and "race to the Rhine;" also in attendance that evening was the Dowager Empress Eugenie, who according to Paleologue's postwar memoir "put steel in our spines and the fear of God in our hearts." While those at that dinner were not the fence-sitters, it nonetheless gave them the confidence to grind down those who were.

On March 3rd, then, the French General Staff received signed orders from Emperor Napoleon V to mobilize the Army; they had already suspended leave for French soldiers two days earlier. Later that same day, the Belgian General Staff did the same, and began shifting their Reserve Army into the Liege fortification system while the bulk of their army was assembled and equipped to be moved towards Eupen and Aachen..."

- La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers

"...news of the French mobilization on March 3-4 stunned the Hofburg; Ferdinand had been alarmed at the evacuation of the chief German diplomats from Vienna, and now this seemed to confirm what he already feared - that war was on the horizon. Austria had an excellent domestic security service but a mediocre foreign intelligence network, but the French Deuxieme Bureau was widely regarded as the best spy bureau in the world (albeit at a time when intelligence services were in their infancy). Thus, his Cabinet concluded in a meeting late in the evening of March 4, if the French believed there was a reason to mobilize, it had to be a good one, and Andrassy argued for his part that this was the evidence Austria had always needed that France would, indeed, be there when it counted most. Dankl concurred and urged Ferdinand to mobilize the entire Common Army while leaving the Honved and Heimwehr in reserve for the time being; if Austria did not meet the moment when France mobilized to defend her preemptively, then the alliance network which protected Austria would collapse. Ferdinand admitted later in his diaries that he mulled waiting for confirmation of German mobilization before countersigning the drafted order, but then thought better of it and ordered Austrian mobilization shortly before eight o' clock at night. The Iron Triangle had, officially, been activated..."

- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor

"...Germany caught word of French preliminary mobilization on March 4, and Heinrich was stunned. Germany had been mulling their options but had, at least in those early days, intended to keep the crisis primarily diplomatic, likely by imposing punitive tariffs on Austrian goods and cutting trade ties to Belgium, all in an effort to find a negotiation settlement down the line. The German General Staff took a vote on March 4 to mobilize in turn out of an abundance of caution, with Falkenhayn informing Heinrich that once the "machine was turned on" it meant war. The German stance, however, was that France had engaged in a preemptive mobilization to attack Germany, and news of Austrian soldiers and reservists being called in meant the Iron Triangle was now fully active. German war plans were dusted off, and the 12th of March was identified as the day to initiate hostilities, which wound up slipping by a day in the end.

While popular historiography often read into the events of March 2-5 a sort of ebullience about the prospect of war, cheered on by nationalist press, there was a great deal of apprehensiveness across Europe. Nonetheless, war was about to happen - France needed a war when it could still be sure of certain advantages against Germany, and Austria needed a war to hold Hungarian fervor at bay. For a brief moment on March 6, German policymakers began to wonder what they had done as men were called to their armies throughout Saxony, Bavaria and Silesia ahead of offensive moves; they were sated by news that Italy was mobilizing as well, with Rome viewing the Franco-Austrian move as being deliberately hostile. Both alliance blocs were triggered by movements they considered to be acts of offense by their enemies, and the lines were drawn.

The war had begun."

- The Central European War

[1] The German Empire was an inefficient mess, part 1017

 

[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

 

[KingSweden24]

"...at the outset of the crisis, France was, unequivocally, the primary naval power of the four major combatants. Germany had sixteen dreadnoughts on the eve of March 13, 1919, with another two having begun construction, and Italy had twelve in service with an additional laid down in 1917 and with construction anticipated to be complete in early 1920. France, on the other hand, had nearly as much as double the dreadnoughts as each, with twenty-five in service as the war began and another two in construction, and having also deployed their first "battlecruisers" earlier in 1918, the Marseille and the Nantes, and having laid down three more battlecruisers as a complement. When taken together with Austria-Hungary's eleven dreadnoughts, the Iron Triangle enjoyed a daunting advantage in pure tonnage over their opponents, especially when cruisers, destroyers, and pre-dreadnoughts were taken into account.

The issue for France and Austria, however, was one of geography. Austria's ports were entirely bottled up in the Adriatic, which could theoretically be closed by Italy, a state that had perhaps underinvested in cruisers but had a sophisticated submarine program inspired by Spain as well as a cutting-edge fleet of fast-attack torpedo boats known as the MAS craft; the idea was that in war, Italy could make the Strait of Otranto a living hell for the Austrians to try to navigate through with light naval vessels, submarines (referred to as U-boats in German and Austrian planning documents), well-placed minefields and even requisitioned fishing vessels strung in a line and laden with small explosives. This would, in theory, tie up the Austrians for some time and allow Italy to deploy her vessels into the heart of the Mediterranean, though for the first year of the war the Regia Marina served primarily as a fleet-in-being.

Nonetheless, this fleet-in-being was a huge strategic problem for France, which had to keep ample naval assets deployed not only out of Brest to guard against Germany but also out of Toulon, aimed towards Italy, and Mers el-Kebir in Algeria or Port Said in Egypt to guard her southern Mediterranean holdings. In addition, the Marine Imperiale as a matter of policy always kept at least two dreadnoughts deployed to the Oriental Fleet, which though primarily destroyer-based maintained harbors sufficient for dreadnoughts at Cam Ranh in Indochina and Takau in Formosa, with additional, smaller bases in Hainan's Port-Napoleon, the French concession of Busan in Korea, and the small Chinese port of Chefou in Shandong. Trying to cover this vast territory on both ends of the Formosa Straits was an exceedingly difficult task, and in the weeks before the war, the French Admiralty elected to deploy an additional three dreadnoughts to Asia along with substantive cruiser and destroyer escorts, in order to safeguard the region from potential opportunistic Japanese aggression and to better position themselves to quickly annihilate German forces in the theater, which paled in comparison to what France could put in the field or to sea.

Thus, at the start of the war, fourteen of Germany's sixteen dreadnoughts were in their North and Baltic Sea ports of Cuxhaven and Kiel; all of Italy's dreadnought fleet sat at anchover at La Spezia in Liguria or Taranto in Apulia; the Austrians were sitting in Pula, Fiume and Split with their fleet; and France had five dreadnoughts collecting in the East, thirteen at the ready in the Mediterranean between their various bases, and a further nine whose mission was to prevent any German operations "west of Calais" as the parlance became, an endeavor in which France expected to enjoy tacit British support for a demilitarized English Channel..." [1]

- Battleship: The First Arms Race

(I want to thank @Lascaris for his thoughts on realistic naval figures for all four of these powers.)
[1] You'll notice I don't mention Denmark here; that's by design, and we'll get to them, mostly when their small navy is at the bottom of the Baltic.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the most forgotten theater of the Central European War remains, perhaps unsurprisingly, the brief moment of the conflict that included Denmark, which in the long run became much more of a diplomatic problem for Germany than a military one. It is notable that in Denmark, the war is referred to not by the moniker it enjoys in the rest of the world but rather is referred to as Ti Dages Krig - the Ten Days War.

That Denmark even found itself involved in the war is something of a quirk of history. In 1915, the Danish Cabinet had secretly elected to renew the Iron Triangle compact with France and Austria despite the loud protestations of the Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius, a lifelong civil servant from a noble family that in the tradition of certain elite families throughout Europe saw it as their duty to serve in the diplomatic corps. [1] Scavenius opposed the Iron Triangle and argued for Danish neutrality; considering his firmly Germanophilic line in the postwar years in which he became Denmark's powerful, long-serving Prime Minister, it has frequently been argued that his opposition was in part due to his preference for a Denmark aligned more with Germany than with France. While he was technically a nonpartisan figure, he associated with the governing Social Liberal Party, known in Danish as Radikale Venstre, more directly translated as the Radical Left; they were of the traditional liberal-progressive opposition to Danish conservatism (at one point in the 19th century among the continent's most rigidly absolutist) that had broken from the old Venstre liberal party that had shifted to the classically liberal soft-right position and pursued an ambitious, progressive platform in Denmark that had included labor reforms, the expansion of the franchise to include all women older than 22 regardless of property or marriage status, and had begun a process of "rationalization" of the Danish armed forces.

The core tension of Danish decision-making, even within Radikale Venstre, was that of elite nationalism which sought the return of the Danish-majority territories of Schleswig which had been lost in 1864 versus the soft anti-militarism of much of the party faithful. It was ironic that Scavenius, one of the leading figures of the progressive learned elite, was also one of the most fierce proponents of Danish neutrality, arguing that liberal, free-trading and Protestant Denmark had little in common with conservative, protectionist and Catholic France and Austria-Hungary. But the skew went to Carl Theodor Zahle, the long-serving Prime Minister who had effectively successfully implemented parliamentarianism in Denmark where fellow progressives had failed elsewhere in Scandinavia, who viewed the best guarantee of Danish neutrality to be its insurance by Paris and Vienna. This was a naive view, as ten days in March 1919 would quickly reveal.

The Danish government, upon learning of French mobilization on March 7th, was thus split against itself. Zahle was a pacifist through and through but it was he who had lobbied for the renewal of the Triangle four years prior and driven Scavenius out of Cabinet and back to the civil service, where the influential ex-Foreign Minister now served as Denmark's ambassador to Sweden and Norway. Now, at the moment of truth, he blinked. It had always been the assumption in Danish elite circles that they would be joining a coalition to check some German outrage, but unlike in Belgium and France, the behavior of Stephane Clement that had triggered the chain reaction culminating in the mobilization of Europe's armies and a declaration of war hanging over the continent seemed so clearly beyond the pale that a great many found themselves sympathizing with Germany and being highly reluctant to follow France into the abyss "for the honor of a rapist and murderer." The Cabinet spent two days in debate over the matter, deep into the night on March 8th, and Zahle was fairly convinced he had persuaded his colleagues to pursue an "armed neutrality" and was prepared to communicate as much to Germany.

On the morning of the 9th, however, came a critical intervention - that of King Christian X, who still jealously guarded his royal prerogatives as sovereign and was, as King, the exclusive voice in the choice to mobilize or not mobilize. While parliament was superior by custom, it was only custom because Christian X, despite his autocratic instincts, had never actually forced a constitutional crisis. [2] The King looked to North Schleswig, the so-called "lost province," and also did the math on Germany facing a two-front war against two powerful, industrialized enemies, and drew the conclusion that Germany was going to be defeated within nine months of war and that Denmark needed to be "at the table" to make sure it could absorb the lost territories when the time came. He suspected that Germany would be heavily distracted and that Denmark could make small, probing maneuvers on the frontier to tie down German forces and, hopefully, invite the intervention of third powers, ideally Britain or Russia with their half-Danish monarchs, to mediate or join an anti-German coalition to defend Denmark's honor.

Zahle was at an impasse. Several Danish papers had, on the 9th, already begun calling for war and a "march on Flensburg." The revelation of the King's desire to order mobilization in Denmark caught the Prime Minister by surprise, and he went to Amalienborg Palace to tell Christian that the "sense of Cabinet" was against a declaration of war. Christian suggested that Zahle "reassess the sentiments" with the information that "the King and Danish people support this conflict." Zahle understood that Christian, who had never particularly cared for his progressive government, would not hesitate to dismiss him and install a caretaker Cabinet that did as he wished, but also understood that Germany was in every way militarily superior to Denmark and would likely overrun the country quickly. What unfollowed is now known in Denmark as the Mobilization Crisis; Zahle was caught between his principles of pragmatic governance as the Danish establishment and a good portion of the Danish bourgeoisie cried out for war, but also his personal pacifism and his reluctance to bend the knee to the King and allow him to override the will of the Cabinet.

He was not forced to make a choice; upon learning of the King's opinion, several crucial Cabinet ministers flipped and voted to mobilize that evening. King Christian countersigned the mobilization order on March 10th, and a massive demonstration occurred in Copenhagen's Nytorv to celebrate what was assumed to be an imminent declaration of war. One hundred thousand Danish soldiers were mobilized with an additional twenty thousand reservists alerted, and the Danish Navy's war plan was activated with immediate effect. Denmark was, for the first time in fifty-five years, going to war.

The only problem for them, of course, was that Germany was well-aware what the Nytorv demonstrations meant, and their war plans included Denmark, too..." [3]

- 1919: How Europe Went to War

[1] The Wallenberg and Hammarskjold families are good and more famous examples of this in neighboring Sweden; essentially, there were major Scandinavian aristocratic families where you went into diplomacy or the civil service as the family trade.
[2] Nothing equivalent to the Easter Crisis of 1920 has occurred ITTL. Worth reading about if you're unfamiliar
[3] I was only going to expend one post on Denmark but decided to split the Danish political situation off into its own before covering the Ten Days War separately

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Denmark was, by European standards, a military minnow. It had a professional army that was modestly well equipped and with reserves could get close to two hundred thousand men in the field within twelve days; her land defenses were primarily a ring of forts defending western approaches across the island of Zealand towards Copenhagen, and a sturdy but aging defensive line running from Kolding to Esbjerg. As a country that was a combination of a long peninsula and an archipelago that controlled the entrance to the Baltic Sea, it naturally had much invested in the Royal Danish Navy, but the traumatic experience of the two Battles of Copenhagen a century earlier had dissuaded Denmark from building a grand fleet in being, especially in a time where her access to resources was highly controlled by foreign powers. Instead, Denmark had invested herself entirely in a flexible light vessel strategy that was meant to be able to close the Danish Straits; Denmark had not dreadnoughts and cruisers but rather a series of coastal defense ships with guns of excellent range, a large fleet of minelayers, and dozens of submarines modelled after the defensive Spanish Peral series of vessels. She was a popular recipient of outdated boats from France and Britain, and as the war kicked off, Denmark had the means and intention to close the Danish Straits entirely to German vessels.

German planning around Denmark, in the Prussian tradition, allowed for a tremendous amount of initiative and improvisation. Diplomats and generals in Berlin alike were skeptical as to whether Denmark actually would mobilize, and if they did whether it would be to defend their neutrality or with hostile intent. Jagow, perhaps more than anybody else, was entirely convinced that Denmark's liberal, pacifist Prime Minister Carl Theodor Zahle would not even mobilize; Falkenhayn, ever the skeptic, rather advised the Kaiser and Furstenburg that Germany was better off assuming that Denmark would bow to pressure and likely start mining the Danish Straits if nothing else. That this prediction turned out to be true with news of Danish mobilization on March 10th tilted the conversation in Falkenhayn's direction; when Danish mobilization was not just filling the forts at Copenhagen but also the Jutland Line, Germany included Denmark in her declaration of war.

However, German planners viewed Denmark as an obstacle rather than an enemy, and it ranked below Austria and certainly France and Belgium in the German hierarchy of hostility. The plan was to quickly overrun Danish defenses and cut off Zealand from the rest of occupied Denmark in order to force a negotiated peace. Germany allocated 12 divisions to this operation, ten of which were to cross via Jutland and another two that were to cross the Little Belt to Bojden on the island of Funen to rapidly march on Odense, the country's third-largest city. The main thrust of the German Jutland offensive, meanwhile, was meant to capture the small industrial triangle of Kolding, Fredericia and Vejle via overwhelming concentrated force at the eastern end of the Jutland Line and then continue pressing north, with the weight of German attackers ending their march at Aarhus while mop-up cavalry operations ended in Randers and Viborg. This would leave Germany in control of all of eastern Jutland's major towns and cities and, critically, its roads and railroads, and control of Odense would cut off Copenhagen from Jutland; the offensive ending where it did would also isolate Aalborg in the north. Due to the relatively low population of Denmark's west coast - flat, sandy, and marshy - this operation, known as Case D, would break the country in two by land and ferry.

Secondary to this operation, but no less important, was the Kaiserliche Marine rapidly seizing control of the Danish Straits, known as the Belts. The idea was to quickly establish supremacy at sea on both sides of Funen and thus be able to cut off Zealand entirely, ending the ability of Copenhagen to resupply Aalborg, and vice versa. Ideally, this would force Denmark's hand into surrender, because Falkenhayn was highly confident that Denmark would fold rather than see a German force attacking across Zealand..."

- The Reich at War

"...Germany attacked Denmark a whole day later than Austria, in part due to skepticism up until the last second that Denmark indeed wanted to poke the bear. But with the arrival of a Danish declaration of war alongside the French one, Case D was triggered, and the 3rd Army under Ludwig von Estorff launched their attack across the full seventy kilometer frontier, with seven divisions attacking the Kolding end of the Jutland Line and three divisions tying down the rest with mobile artillery and sporadic probing attacks.

On the 14th, Denmark was still only halfway into their mobilization and defenses around Vamdrup and Kolding were still undermanned; German troops quickly overwhelmed not just border checkpoints and fortified positions such as pillboxes and small open-aired forts but essentially marched into Kolding in force. A day later, the German Army had similarly seized Fredericia just twelve kilometers away, succeeding in quick fashion in achieving all of their second-day objectives. By the 16th, most Danish soldiers had regrouped and rallied towards the north, but the quick failure of the Jutland Line had essentially sealed their fate.

Key to the rapid German advance of March 14-20 across Jutland was, of course, their deployment of motorized personnel carrier and armored vehicles. Germany had been a skeptic of landship development due to the mountainous terrain they would face in a war with Austria or France, but Denmark's wide, open and flat land proved to be an important testing ground for motorized offensive theory that Prussian generals were eager to study, and some concepts of what would within a few decades be known as "combined arms" were deployed across Denmark. German light bombers and strafing craft attacked Danish positions in combination with artillery while German infantry could be moved rapidly in short distances by truck or armored personnel vehicle; the rudimentary but effective A7V and B9 landships were able to scatter Danish defenders and force frequent retreats. Every few hours, German soldiers would stop, regroup, and then attack again with artillery and aerial barrages timed well together and designed more to harrass and concern the enemy than pulverize them. Late in the evening of March 20, the German Army had driven into Aarhus, one day earlier than their offensive timetable demanded.

Military strategists have debated for decades the reasons for Jutland's quick fall. The Danes were a low spender on their army compared to other combatants but were clearly overwhelmed at Kolding with the speed, ferocity and innovation of Germany's offensive. Danish historians have faulted the Zahle government for a lack of preparation; German scholars, meanwhile, have been more complimentary, pointing out that Danish men fought bravely and doggedly all the way to Aalborg, but that the problem was that Danish military planning deployed over half of the standing army to defend the defensive lines towards Copenhagen and almost treated Jutland as a fait accompli in the case of a land war. This was not, on its own, an unreasonable strategy; even after the surrender of Denmark on March 24, Zealand remained untaken even if she lay blockaded, and the expense and effort it would have taken Germany to stage an amphibious invasion of the island and march on Copenhagen would have dramatically increased the damage and casualties for both parties, firmly against the political preferences of Berlin to execute a quick, relatively bloodless war on Denmark and knock them out of the conflict and into a pro-German camp once the war was over.

Of course, the quick march to Aarhus is just part of the story, and Case D was a tale of two offensives: the smashing success of a proto-combined arms strategy across Jutland harrying Danish defenders much more quickly than the Danish (or their French and Austrian allies) had anticipated was offset by the dramatic failure of the German attempts to land on Funen for the first four days of the campaign. The Royal Danish Navy was small but enjoyed clever planners and an arsenal that was designed to defend the archipelago; minelaying had begun on March 10th, the day of mobilization, and the minefields in the Langelands Belt, the Great Belt, and the Fehmarn Belt were not entirely at their full capacity the morning of March 14th, but within two days they would be close to eighty percent of their planned coverage, in addition to minefields laid out on the southern approaches to Copenhagen on the Ostersund passage. Additionally, the Royal Danish Navy had twenty submarines deployed "below the Belts," designed with defensive purposes in mind; short-range, quiet, and heavily-armed due to the low diesel needs thanks to close-in submarine bases. As news arrived that the German Army was punching into the Kolding defenses early on the morning of March 14, a preemptive strike was ordered, with seven Danish subs attacking Apenrade's harbor facilities as an additional six slipped into the Flensburg fjord and fired their torpedoes at the gathered fishing and sailboats that were meant to serve as the primary troop transports to attack Funen; the Danish operation against Apenrade and Flensburg did not destroy all German capabilities, but badly limited them, badly delaying the ability to launch an attack across the Little Belt towards Odense on the first day of the war. German U-boats were deployed through the Kiel Canal ahead of the main battle group intended to clear the Great Belt, with the threat of Danish submarines clearly having been underestimated; the stage, thus, was set for the first major naval engagement of the conflict, and in Germany and Denmark the most famous - the Beltschlact, or the Battle of the Belts..."

- The Central European War

 

[KingSweden24]

"...offensives of mid-March were the culmination of well over a decade of French Army planning. There was only one path forward, and that was into the heart of German defenses in the "Trier Triangle" but with the Belgian forces fully on their side and launching a well-equipped attack of their own, the French were convinced that the stars had fully aligned for their grand offensive and leaned into it fully.

The French were, at the outset of the war, able to mobilize one hundred and ten divisions of men before raising any reserves, and the Belgians had raised two armies of their own even while filling their fortress network at Liege for what was considered an inevitable counterattack. France had the world's second-largest standing army, behind only Russia (and only narrowly behind), the world's largest contingent of landships, and its largest, most modern and best-trained army air force. While none of this was particularly sustainable for the French treasury, 1919 saw France near the peak of her modern martial powers, and as the columns of French troops were transported through Belgium past cheering crowds as biplane bombers zoomed overhead, it was considered highly likely that the Franco-Austrian alliance would prevail, probably within a year. "It is the advantage we did not enjoy in 1867," remarked French Chief of Staff Joseph Joffre, "the advantage of an ally."

Key to this, however, was the French desire to execute a knockout blow against Germany, not unlike what Berlin was doing in Denmark in the first weeks of the war, and that was termed the "Race to the Rhine." Joffre had in the weeks prior to the war adjusted his deployment timetables and plans minutely, drawing down the number of divisions to be deployed against Italy on an Alpine front and abandoning his hopes of taking Turin within a month; news of the rapid Austrian advance through Veneto from Istria quickly persuaded him that this was the right choice, and that the smaller forces he sent into the Alps against Italy were perfect as a screening force. Rather, he focused the weight of his army towards the narrow "Maastricht Gap," the space east of Liege between the Dutch border and the Ardennes Plateau, a natural chokepoint at the border town of Eupen and beyond, Aachen, one of the most symbolic cities to the French country due to its siting as Charlemagne's capital. However, the easily-defended ground around Eupen did not lend itself to simply cramming a huge army through, and thus the offensive also called for trying to punch through northern Luxemburg towards the city of Bitburg.

Bitburg was a strategic goal for one main reason - it lay essentially "behind" the Trier Triangle, the network of defenses arranged in a rough triangle throughout the Moselle Valley, anchored by the "Gibraltar of the North" in Luxemburg and the city's surroundings and then a latticework of fortresses, pillboxes, pre-built defense in depth trenches and even two or three suspected fields of new, innovative and difficult-to-spot landmines, with a focus on the border town of Saarbrucken and then Trier itself. While dozens of divisions were to be deployed into the maw of this defensive network, it would involve huge bloodshed to break through (and Luxemburg herself was regarded as unseizable) and so Bitburg became a way to get behind that network, collapse some of its logistic support lines, and potentially scramble German forces. The only problem? Separating Bitburg from the Belgian frontier was a wooded, hilly country known as the Eifel, split roughly equally between Luxemburg and Belgium and sluiced through in the south by the river canyon of the Sauer, which France would need to control to make this offensive work.

The first week of March, then, saw French and Belgian soldiers plunge headfirst into German defenses. Artillery roared, bombers danced overhead to try to break defenders from the sky, hundreds if not thousands were ripped up by machine gun fire as they pressed ever-closer to Luxemburg and the outskirts of Aachen, and Saarlouis fell on March 16th, abandoned as German soldiers withdrew into safer ground. But during that first week, French elite forestry corps were pushing through the Eifel north of the Sauer, until March 20, 1919 - the First Battle of the Sauer, and the first major French defeat.

The engagement occurred near the bridge over the river at Dasburg, a strategic point that the French simply could not cross. The German defenders held doggedly on the river's east bank, their machine guns so hot that they melted, and after ten hours of brutal fighting, they took down the bridge with artillery so that the French could not attempt to break through during the night, thus cutting off one of the most important routes across the Sauer. The strategy to push on Bitburg rapidly to cut into the German rear had failed; France would need to grind their way through in the sector to the north, the hard way..."

- 1919: How Europe Went to War