The Widening Gyre: The Great War and the Remaking of Europe

[Curby]

This will be the last update for 1917, since I've come to the conclusion that internal politics and labor unrest in France and Italy are best covered in future posts. This one is a bit shorter than most, since the essential lineaments of the military campaigns of 1917 have already been covered in several of the previous entries. At the very bottom is a comparison of the strength of the various armies compared to OTL; this is important to setting the stage for the battles of 1918.

At this point, we are starting to leave the merely historical and enter the present - or at least, what the individuals in this timeline feel to be of palpable importance to their own lives. Of course, to some extent this applies to the entirety of the war, but it is particularly true of its last few years. Consequently, I'm going to give up the device of the omnipresent, omniscient narrator for future entries; more posts will be framed as debates between historians rather than as mere neutral retellings of events. Ideology will lay a thicker and more lustrous sheen on how the vast struggles of 1918 are retold. In a sense, I think this better approximates the actual spirit of the era; it was a time when it was difficult to be fully apolitical. Civilians and soldiers alike feel the need to take a stand, and their perception of events are indelibly linked to the positions they stake out. It was impossible to live through these events as a mere observer; it stands to reason that it is impossible to understand and narrate them as mere neutral spectators.

Thank you again to everyone who has been reading and providing feedback on the timeline. This has been a lot of fun, and I'm excited to hear what people think about the events to come! I've added a new poll at the top of the timeline to gauge what readers are most interested in hearing about; if it leans in one particular direction, it will probably structure the way that I do future updates.
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The Military History of the War, 1917​

1917 was the first year in which all of the great powers abandoned the hopes of winning the war in a decisive offensive campaign. Its principal battles occurred in peripheral theatres, with smaller numbers of troops and more limited goals. In the wake of the mammoth campaigns of Lille and Verdun, none of the principal combatants felt comfortable launching another grand attack in the west.

The British did win a number of victories in the winter. But they were incapable of winning the war alone, without the support of their exhausted allies. In truth, the decision to direct their reserves toward the Balkans rather than France was an indication that even the British believed that there could be no decisive, war-winning victory anymore. In 1917, the Entente and Central Powers targeted each other's allies, attempting to knock out the weaker members of the opposing coalition so that they could more easily concentrate their forces on the stronger ones.

Insofar as this was the strategy, none of the great powers were successful. Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey all weathered assaults from superior armies. Some of these minor powers suffered worse than others, but all were able to remain in the war. Perhaps the most crucial moment of the year came in March, when an Austro-German force defeated in detail several Greek and Romanian armies outside of Sofia, breaking the siege of the city and ensuring that Bulgaria stayed in the fight.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff believed that the "eastern problem" of Romania had to be dealt with as soon as possible; they worried that more Romanian successes might prompt Russia to launch an offensive. In this, they likely overestimated the morale of the average Russian soldier, but it ended up dictating German war policy throughout the year regardless. Germany and Austria agreed to a set of offensives in May, one to retake eastern bulgaria and split the Entente forces in Constantinople from those in Romania, and another that would drive into the Po Valley and force an Italian surrender.

The Italian offensive achieved much more immediate success than the Bulgarian one. On May 7th, twin assaults began in the Trentino and Isonzo, the former toward Asiago and the latter toward Caparetto. For three days, dug-in Italian forces stubbornly resisted the assault in Isonzo until the mass use of poison gas drove them out of the trenches. The breakthrough in the north happened on the very first day, and Asiago was seized on the 11th. News of the seemingly unstoppable advance of the Austro-German mountaineers led to panic among the Italian soldiers in the Isonzo sector, who feared encirclement from the west. Udine fell by the 11th; by the 19th, Austrian forces had crossed the Piave, threatening the cities of Vicenza, Padua, and Venice. If they broke through here, the way would be open to the rest of the industrial Po Valley. Attempts to relieve the struggling Italians were foiled by the Irish revolt and a Central Powers offensive in Bulgaria.

The Balkan offensive ran into much more trouble than the Italian one. A week into the operation, there was no decisive breakout by the Central Powers. Well-equipped Romanian and British troops repeatedly threw back waves of German and Austrian soldiers advancing toward Pleven and Pazardzhik. It was only Romanian reluctance to divert its reserves to Bulgaria and British logistical trouble which eventually forced the Entente armies in Bulgaria to retreat.

This was not a rout. The retreat of Romanian-British forces was an orderly, fighting defense which inflicted crushing casualties on the invaders, particularly the Austrians, who were still not as well-equipped as their German counterparts. British forces in the region were able to hold onto the Ottoman city of Adrianople, while Romanian forces and a British army entrenched in Dobrudja. The remainder of the Romanian army successfully retreated behind the Danube river well before any attempt to bridge it could be attempted.

The Greek Army was missing from these operations, largely because Greece proper was in a low-level civil war. Peasant revolts in the mountainous north disrupted the army's supply chain and forced it to divert divisions to its rear. The ruling government of Venizelos was wracked by assassinations of cabinet ministers, labor stoppages, and food deficits. In the event of a concerted German-Austrian assault, the nation may very well have been forced to surrender, but neither the German nor the Austrian command considered it an important enough target.

In Italy, the valiant defense of several reserve mountaineer divisions outside of Vicenza bought enough time for France to transfer eight divisions to shore up Italian morale. By June 29th, the new front stabilized along an axis that ran in the west from Verdona through Vicenza, Padua, and Venice. The eastern portion of this defensive line was the most vulnerable to assault; the Italian government feared that another Central Powers offensive would force it to surrender Venice.

Although the Austrians hoped to dedicate the next phase of the offensive to Italy, Ludendorff believed it was still imperative to deal with Romania. In mid-august came a fresh offensive. In the west, a mixed Austro-German army invaded Transylvania, targeting heavily defended mountain passes held by elite Romanian troops. Further south, the Bulgarians assaulted Dobrudja, while Austrian troops stationed in Eastern Galicia and Western Ukraine marched into Moldova.

Falkenhayn's western armies found themselves thrown back time and again from the entrenched Romanian troops in Transylvania. In the northeast, an Austrian column led by Franz Confrad von hötzendorf made its way from Galicia into Moldovia, but was plagued by supply problems and guerilla activity. On the 21st, the German high command considered calling off the assault, but Conrad assured them that his army would soon break out of the forests of Moldavia into Wallachia, rendering the position of the Romanian mountaineers in Transylvania untenable.

By the 24th, Conrad had indeed made some progress in clearing Moldavia of its British-Romanian defenders; Jassy fell on the 22nd, and Kishenev two days later. But his efforts were soon rendered futile by a mutiny in the exhausted Bulgarian Army, many of whose soldiers had been fighting for over five years. Taking advantage of the chaos, two Romanian-British armies counterattacked, decimating a Bulgarian division, capturing several more, and then heading south towards Varna.

Shortly thereafter, the OHL called off the assault, relieved Falkenhayn of his command, and placed August von Mackensen in charge of halting the counteroffensive in the south. Meanwhile, the British Army in Dobrudja swung north to confront Conrad's force; Conrad, still confident of his position, ignored the instructions of the high command and continued south toward the town of Focsani. Romanian reserves released from Transylvania cut into his northern flank, while a British assault fixed his army in place. By the time he ordered his army to retreat, Romanian soldiers occupied much of the position to his rear. The battle of Foscani led to the loss of over 100,000 Austrian troops, the vast majority of them captured. Shortly after the defeat, Conrad von Hotzendorf was dismissed from the Austrian General Staff.

The failure of the Romanian offensive led the German general staff to shift its troops over to the defensive until a peace deal with Russia could be secured. It was widely believed that the Russian government would soon collapse, which would provide another opening to begin negotiations. Increasingly, hopes were placed in the upcoming campaign of submarine warfare, which high command believed could force the western powers into a harsh peace without requiring a costly offensive in France.

In reality, Britain was aware of the possibility of unrestricted submarine warfare for some time. Suspicions were first raised when German submarine activity declined precipitously in March and April despite the imposition of the blockade, prompting British naval officers to speculate about a future campaign of more concerted submarine warfare. British intelligence later revealed a build-up in submarine manufacturing in Germany. In July, a joint franco-british offensive was planned into Flanders to seize the Atlantic Ports from which German submarines operate, though it was a mostly hypothetical operation with no set date.

Then, in October, the campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare actually began. 165 submarines operating mainly from Flemish ports began to target merchant shipping in the English Channel and Atlantic. The insurrectionary activity in Saxony and Berlin convinced the British high command to push forward the planned Flanders offensive. It was hoped that low morale among the Germans would allow for a quick breakthrough. Massing in Ypres, two french armies and six British divisions prepared for the assault. By the time they were ready on October 23rd, the October Rising in Germany had been largely suppressed. But the entente had another trick up their sleeve: the first combat use of the new Franco-British landship, a hulking behemoth of mobile armor armed with the British 6-pounder naval gun and several machine guns. While its reliability and actual combat effectiveness left a great deal to be desired, the mass deployment of the vehicles had a crushing effect on German morale. Over the next month, the bloodiest battle since Verdun unfolded on the western front as the entente seized around half of the Flanders ports, creating massive logistical problems for German submarine operations.

Note on the state of the armies by the end of 1917​

Compared to OTL...

The German Army is around the same strength, having taken around 2-3% less casualties.

The Austro-Hungarian Army is considerably stronger, having suffered around 25% less casualties. It is also somewhat better equipped.

The Bulgarian Army is incomparably weaker: years of fighting have depleted its manpower reserves.

The Turkish Army is considerably weaker. It has taken around 25% more casualties, and is by this point much worse equipped than any other army.

The French Army is somewhat weaker, having taken around 10% more casualties; they are beginning to have trouble replenishing battlefield losses. It is slightly worse equipped; the French government is in a worse fiscal situation, meaning munitions production is starting to face some financial bottlenecks.

The British Army is considerably stronger, with more enlisted men, more artillery pieces and shells available, and around 15% less casualties taken.

The Russian Army is considerably weaker, having suffered around 25% more captured, injured, and killed soldiers compared to our timeline.

The Italian Army is somewhat weaker, having taken around 10% more casualties. It is around as well-equipped as IOTL.

The Romanian Army is considerably stronger. It is around 20% larger, and much better equipped than IOTL.

 

[Curby]

In a Communist Revolution, individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but also merely to safeguard their very existence.

-Karl Marx

Neumann, Franz. 1942. "Capital's True Face: On The Ludendorff Dictatorship." The Journal of Social History.​

The Ludendorff Dictatorship arose as an emergency government of a bourgeoisie frightened by the prospect of imminent revolution. The proletarianization of German society and the quick advance of revolutionary consciousness necessitated a military government to discipline and stymie the self-activity of the working masses. With the German laborer refusing to give his consent to the war, parliament failed to be an adequate tool of class power; no longer capable of securing the ideological hegemony of the ruling class, it now fell to the military to enforce it at the end of a bayonet. Ludendorff's new government included the industrialists Hugo Stinnes and Alfred Hugenberg, as well as the reactionary catholic trade unionist Adam Stegerwald. Not content to simply control the machinery of state through finance-power, the bourgeois now seized its commanding heights; it now increasingly bore the mark of direct class rule.

Far from auguring an end to the worker's resistance, the October insurrection merely heralded its most radical phase. The arrest or exile of the leaders of the worker's movement did not halt the spread of revolutionary consciousness or the self-organization of the working class. All through 1918, strikes, slowdowns, and wrecking hampered the German war machine, even amidst increasingly draconian labor discipline. The attempt of right-wing, social-fascist elements to wrest control of the trade union apparatus failed time and again despite their seizure of the leadership.

Shortly after the October Insurrection, the social-fascist trade union leader Carl Legien used the opportunity to purge the upper heights of the trade union bureaucracy of left-wing, antiwar officials. In their place were the lackeys of Cunow, Haenisch, and Lensch. When workers made their discontent known through a series of wildcat strikes in January, they were crushed with the assistance of the freekorp brigades. A series of "reforms" were pushed through that same month which curtailed the democratic election of shop stewards and union delegates while requiring the leadership to be consulted before a strike would be considered authorized by the union.

The centralization of the trade unions and consolidation of power in the hands of the social-fascist clique forced the workers into other modes of self-organization. This was the immediate impetus of the council movement. The first councils were simply unofficial meetings of workers, typically held in factories in which a trusted shop steward had been recalled. Workers would designate a new steward (sometimes, but not always, the old one) who would be in charge of establishing contacts with other councils. The first general meeting of the revolutionary shop stewards occurred in Berlin in July 1918.

Over time, the role and purposes of the councils grew. By the middle of 1918, minutes of council-meetings indicated that they typically stretched upward of an hour and dealt with issues both mundane and political. New methods of resistance to the war were frequently discussed, as was news that was censored in the war-time press, such as the trade union reforms, battle-field losses, and events in revolutionary russia. Not infrequently, the revolutionary shop stewards were interrogated about their progress and replaced with a different member of the council if it was found unsatisfactory. A growing proportion of the councils were dedicated to the reading of Marxist theory, both in the form of the traditional Marxist mainstays of left-wing social democrats and the new pamphlets smuggled in from Russia and written predominantly by the left-communists Luxemburg and Zetkin.

Ludendorff's government had difficulty preventing the council-meetings, which often occurred outside of the workplace in the domicile of the local steward. Instead, increasing pressure was placed on Legien and the trade unions to enforce labor discipline and halt the spree of wildcat strikes that were slowing down industrial production. The trade unions were only partially successful in this task, and their efforts ended up unwittingly radicalizing many of the mid-level trade union officials. Centrist in their political orientation, many were radicalized by the mass purge of their superiors and the role they were meant to play in maintaining labor discipline. A number of links were forged in late 1918 between these officials and the revolutionary shop stewards.

We should not neglect the growing unrest spreading in the traditionally reformist and bourgeois trade unions. With the threat of social revolution still present, Adam Stegerwald, the leader of the Catholic Trade Unions, pressed for the merger of all of Germany's traditionally non-socialist unions. These were principally the nationalist-reactionary German National Clerks Union, the progressive-liberal Hirsch-Duncker Unions, and finally the largest grouping, the Catholic Association of Trade Unions. The planned merger ran into problems from its very beginning. The previous two years witnessed the National Clerks Union steadily bleed membership to the Hirsch-Duncker Unions as white-collar discontent with the war metastasized. Many of these union members were also a part of the now disbanded national-social association. They refused to affiliate with the nationalist clerks union until Stegerwald agreed to use the newly-formed union to press for the government to relax press censorship and call the Reichstag back into session. In practice, this was an impossible demand for Stegerwald to fulfill.

Although the leaders of the Catholic Trade Union movement were aligned behind Stegerwald's push for a merger, many of the rank and file were more skeptical. The key figure in coordinating opposition to the war among Catholic workers was Vitus Heller. Prior to the war, Heller worked as a secretary in the Volskweiren, an anti-socialist catholic worker's association. His service in the war and the dictatorial repression of the Ludendorff regime radicalized his politics. After being discharged in 1918, he returned to his work in the Volksweiren but began writing a secretly distributed newspaper, Das Neue Volk. By the end of the year, the paper was advocating for the formation of a united front of socialist and catholic workers to oppose the Ludendorff dictatorship; in declamatory, pugilistic articles, it denounced Stegerwald's role in oppressing the catholic worker and called for a break with the Catholic Centre Party.

In September 1918, Heller's Christian-Socialist group organized a series of strikes to protest the planned merger between the Catholic Trade Unions and National Clerks Union. The wave of strike action rapidly spread to many workers outside the group's reach; many likely did not know of the goals of the original strike, but instead viewed the agitation as a means to protest the labor mobilization bill and worsening workplace conditions. Stegerwald was forced by Ludendorff himself to meet the primary demand of the strikers and call off the planned merger of the unions.

The Trade Union Struggles of 1918 were conditioned by a government that refused to brook any compromise, however meager, between labor and capital.The tyrannical labor mobilization bill was put to its full effect in the war's final years, as military officials increasingly oversaw industrial production, trying workers who did not submit to labor discipline in military courts. All available indices demonstrate that the pace of this repression picked up considerably in 1918; more than double the number of workers were tried in military courts than in the previous year, and more than triple were given prison sentences. The previous compromises forged by the centrist social democrats were outright ignored by the dictatorship, which expelled centrist and left-wing trade unionists from the war planning boards, replacing them with Legien's compliant lackeys. Is it any wonder that many workers lost faith for good in a trade union movement that had been utterly co-opted by the bourgeois state?

Fischer, Fritz. 1961. "Consent and Coercion in the Ludendorff Dictatorship." in Reassessing the Great War.​

…Previous works of history have treated the two years of the Ludendorff dictatorship as an alien imposition upon a German society eager for revolution. This account contains a grain of truth; the Ludendorff dictatorship was certainly sustained in large measure by violent repression, but it was not and likely could not have maintained power by force alone. A close examination of the era reveals the cooperation of large sectors of the patriotic middle and working class; national liberals continued their support of the government, patriotic movements arose with rapidly growing memberships, and the parties of the progressive left had trouble raising support for measures to protest the military dictatorship.

…The question of much previous historiography has been: why did the Ludendorff regime last as long as it did if it was sustained primarily by repression? In light of the unsatisfactory answers thus far proffered, we have changed the terms of the question: If the Ludendorff regime did indeed have the support of many Germans, what precisely sustained this support? Here, we must be attentive to the growth of the Freekorps movement, the emergence of national-socialism, and the regime's efforts to pacify domestic discontent through propaganda.

1918 witnessed the proliferation of clandestine worker councils, middle-class corresponding societies, and an internal war within many of the main German trade unions over control of the labor movement. Yet concurrent with each of these developments were opposing ones: the politicization of German society was not so much a polarization against the government as it was a splitting of individuals into two opposed groups. The domestic political opposition to the antiwar movement was certainly massaged by the government, but the sentiments and loyalties it depended on would have existed without Ludendorff and Hindenburg.

These sentiments were the following: fear of social revolution, loyalty to the crown, identification with the martial heroism of Ludendurff, and a belief that the war could still be won at an acceptable cost. As the workers movement gathered steam in the final two years of the war, support for the government often did not indicate belief in the war, but instead resolute opposition to the prospect of worker's power. Of course, by the end of 1919 a growing number of even middle-class Germans had concluded that social revolution was preferable to a continuation of the war; but in the early days of the Ludendorff government, it could count on broad support among the Protestant middle-class.

The October Insurrection convinced many Germans of the need for a more stern, disciplined government to maintain order in the country. Matthias Erzberger, the leader of the progressive wing of the Catholic Centre Party, consistently failed to muster support for his movement to reopen the Reichstag. Frequent but unorganized strikes by workers calling for the reopening of the Reichstag were rarely joined by larger protests. Insofar as middle-class antiwar activity occurred, it was in the form of secret letter-writing. The "corresponding societies" which formed during 1918 did attest to a rise in antiwar feeling, but their failure to devise any political programme attest to a lack of real conviction and organization.

By any accounting, the national-socialist leagues and freekorps brigades had orders of magnitude more members throughout 1918 than any of the antiwar groupings. Booming membership in each of these organizations attest to the durability of pro-war sentiment in the German body politic. Lensch, Cunow, and Haenisch's right-wing social nationalist clique were the force behind the national-socialist leagues. Originally aimed at the blue-collar urban workers who were the core of the labor movement, they ended up having most success with patriotic clerks, secretaries, small businessmen, and farmers.The failure of the recruiting drives for the group in factories, mines, and technical institutes indicate the strength of antiwar feeling among the socialist working class and segments of the educated middle class; conversely, the phenomenal growth of the leagues among farmers and the petite-bourgeoisie demonstrates that the regime could still had a base of support among the masses.

What precisely was "National-Socialism"? The historians of the Socialist Republic have been surprisingly silent on this matter; even many Luxemburgists have been hesitant to treat National-Socialism as anything other than an aberration in the development of Social Democracy. It is true that Lensch, Cunow, and Haenisch took leadership in extraordinary circumstances; it is equally true, however, that they constituted a bloc of the party which became increasingly influential in the years leading up to the war. The emergence of corporatist social fascism was a direct consequence of adopting a policy of triangulation toward German Imperialism; it is bound up with the politics of Ebert and Scheidemann, however much they would dissociate themselves from the authoritarian nationalism of the Lensch-Cunow-Haenish Trio.

National-Socialism substituted the solidarities of the nation for those of class. It preached a doctrine of conciliation with the German bourgeoisie, and held that socialism could only be achieved in the framework of a national community. War was believed to have a purifying, unifying effect on the community. There is little daylight between national-socialism and the "Prussian Socialism" of Oswald Spengler, save that the former had a modestly more proletarian social base.

The principal purpose of the national-socialist leagues was to serve as a propaganda arm of the Ludendorff government. Their marches and donation drives served to spur flagging patriotic sentiment and mobilize resources for the war effort. They also acted not infrequently as strikebreakers, and appeared alongside the freekorps as a paramilitary arm of the government. Their activity surged throughout 1918, before beginning to decline in 1919, at first slowly and then precipitously.

The more well-known group is the freekorps brigades. Composed at first of demobilized veterans or right-wing soldiers given a temporary reprieve from the front, they recruited mostly from the upper-class youth. In contrast to the corporatist social fascism of the national-socialists, the symbolism and ideology of the freekorps expressed loyalty to the old imperial order. They were also far better organized and funded than the national-socialists, and despite their smaller numbers, they were a far more disciplined and effective paramilitary force.

The Ludendorff Government acted to shore up its legitimacy at the beginning of 1918 by creating a National Council. This body had real power to run the day-to-day affairs of the country, but its decisions had to be approved by the OHL, and it possessed no executive authority. Its first chair, Gustav Stresemann, was from the left wing of the National Liberals. By all accounts, Stresemann was an effective administrator who believed fervently in the importance of his work. His success in rationalizing food distribution and correcting the failures of the Hindenburg programme were both instrumental for the German war effort. It was also Stresemann's diplomacy that convinced the Catholic Centre Party and Progressive Liberals that Ludendorff was indeed prepared to step down from power following victory in the war.

Other appointees to the national council included the Catholic Trade Unionist Adam Stegerwald, the press baron Alfred Hugenberg, and the industrialist Hugo Stinnes. The importance of the appointment of these latter two figures should not be overestimated; each served as advisors to Ludendorff for the previous two years, and the commanding positions they already occupied in the war planning boards meant that their appointment to the governing council was more a symbolic gesture than anything else.

It is also difficult to underestimate the effects of the military successes of 1918 in boosting civilian morale. After a year of sclerotic campaigning, Ludendorff managed to knock two of Germany's adversaries out of the war in quick succession. Many were convinced that victory was finally at hand, especially when news leaked of peace talks between the Entente and Germany…

Bamgarten, Frida. 1961. "Against the New Revisionism." In Reassessing the Great War.​

A spate of recent articles argue that the Ludendorff dictatorship was maintained as much through consent as coercion. This represents an important challenge to the standard great war historiography, which contends that repression replaced propaganda as the primary means of social control in the second half of the war. Ludendorf's rise to power has long been understood as the archetypal example of this process. Arguments that the dictatorship was supported by large segments of the patriotic middle and working classes, if successful, would force historians to rethink some of their larger assumptions about the war. It therefore seems prudent to address them.

…One of the key premises of the revisionist challenge is the so-called "Middle-class panic" thesis - the notion that, in the aftermath of the failed insurrections of October 1917, the non-socialist masses rallied to the government. Despite the relative quiescence of middle-class protest throughout 1918, there is little evidence that antiwar sentiment was substantially enervated by the fear of social revolution. In fact, 1918 witnessed the quickest growth of the socialist white-collar unions on record, and a hemorrhaging in members of the nationalist clerks association. Only a few diaries and private letters indicate a genuine reversal of opinion; instead, among the anti-war middle-class, much more common throughout 1918 were feelings of revulsion for both the Ludendorff dictatorship and the Socialist movement. There was a growing fear, not entirely unfounded, that the Ludendorff government was in fact paving the way for socialist revolution.

How are we to make sense, then, of the failure of middle-class groups to engage in meaningful political activity throughout 1918? In part, this may be explained by the loss of organization: the disbanding of the national-social association closed off the primary channel for non-socialist opposition to the war. Unlike the socialist workers, they did not have the same traditions and habits of collective organization, which meant that rebuilding networks of resistance was more difficult. Many were also less certain of their convictions and more hesitant to engage in illegal activity, though this compunction began to fade by the end of 1918.

Revisionists frequently cite the freekorps brigades and national-socialist leagues as evidence of the broad support for the regime. The latter group were certainly large in number, but there is not much indication that they were anything more than the nationalist fringe of German society. Many of their members were longstanding participants in the annexationist pan-german league; there was some working-class participation, but this remained a decided minority which steadily declined throughout the organization's existence. Similar points could be made about the Freekorps, which represented a small social constituency that was already liable to support Ludendorff.

…Why has the myth of mass enthusiasm for Ludendorff's government exercised such a hold over the imagination of European historians? Firstly, because it offers a convenient explanation of the regime's improbable survival, which in truth had more to do with the failure of the socialist movement to muster coordinated resistance following the decapitation of its leadership. Secondly, because it demonstrates the reactionary proclivities of the middle classes and offers a warning about the pitfalls of social nationalism, two lessons well in-line with Orthodox Luxemburgist historiography.

Finally, the changing popular responses to the war in 1918 and 1919 might appear to give credence to the revisionist interpretation. In 1919, a more broad-based opposition to the government suddenly burst forth after a year in which resistance was expressed almost solely through wildcat strikes and industrial action. For revisionists, this is easily understood as a change from tepid support to boisterous opposition. However, it is better viewed as a shift from disengagement to active political struggle. The Ludendorff Dictatorship never had broad support, but it could count on the apathy, fear, and propriety of enough of the population to maintain its hold on power throughout 1918. In the following year, the fear of starvation and illness eclipsed the fear of repression, and the Dictatorship collapsed under the weight of a renewed proletarian assault.

 

[Curby]

Below is a summary of the main military events of 1918. There will probably be further posts exploring the details of the military operations mentioned here, and there will definitely be entries on the social and political fallout. Expect the following updates to cover domestic politics in France, Italy, and Britain with a particular focus on the socialist labor and antiwar movements. I also have a post on industrial/economic mobilization and changing conditions at the homefront(s) in the works. At some point, I will also cover the Russian Civil War, which will likely include a discussion of the Red German exiles (Luxemburg, Zetkin, Mehring) and their interactions with the leaders of the Soviet government. Cheers!
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"Blow upon Blow, until Paris Falls and the British Return to their Island": The War in 1918​

All of the Great Powers believed that 1918 must be the last year of the war. After rampant civilian unrest in Italy, Austria, Germany, and parts of France, it was thought that domestic populations could not endure another year of conflict. The Entente planned a joint offensive into Belgium and Northeastern France that would shatter the German lines and allow a favorable peace to be negotiated. Ludendorff, however, wished for nothing less than a "total victory" to vindicate the years of "total war". Underlying this was not simply German nationalism, but Germany's increasingly dire fiscal situation, which would require years of either austerity or war reparations to make good. Given the labor unrest in Germany, the former appeared a sure recipe for social revolution.

Three developments at the beginning of the year appeared to favor the Central Powers. Firstly, a peace deal was reached with Russia in early February, freeing German troops from the east. Secondly, the campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare had begun inflicting real damage on merchant shipping and reduced Britain's capacity to import food and raw materials for its industries. Finally, both Britain and France started to experience a marked uptick in anti-war pacifist protest, a development that would continue apace throughout the remainder of the year.

Fearful of a massive German offensive in the west, the British and French made secret peace overtures. In what was likely a political mistake, neither of the parties involved publicized these, fearing that the concessions they offered would harm civilian morale. In any event, the attempts to make peace were rendered pointless by Ludendorff's aversion to a negotiated settlement. Harsh conditions, impossible in practice for the Entente to fulfill, were imposed on the beginning of any formal talks. Ludendorff sensed the possibility to win the war and secure German hegemony on the continent.

In military circles, it has long been debated whether an earlier western offensive may have won the war near the beginning of 1918. Some believe that the French Army in particular could not withstand another massive, frontal assault. Others argue that Ludendorff's strategy likely was necessary to preserve Austria-Hungary's disintegrating Empire for another year.

Ludendorff's plan called for the Central Powers to marshal its forces and knock out the members of the Entente one by one with steadily growing offensives. Each victory would secure vital resources that Germany required to continue the war. This new strategy was at least in part one of plunder, but it was also intended to prop up Austria and demoralize the British public.

The first hammer would fall in the southeast, on Romania. Two to three months after the conquest of this grain-rich territory, a German offensive would break through the Italian lines, stream into the Po Valley, and seize the key industrial cities in Romagna and Lombardy, forcing a surrender. Then, a so-called "victory offensive" would assault Entente positions along the Somme river, encircling the Entente armies in Flanders and then capturing Paris. With France knocked out of the war, German soldiers would seize Constantinople before beginning a triumphant march toward British Egypt.

Such, at least, was the plan. The Entente, meanwhile, hoped to harden the Romanian and Italian fronts while marshaling their resources for a war-winning "Final offensive" into Flanders and German-held northeastern France which would end the u-boat threat, liberate Belgium, and threaten Germany proper. It was hoped that the exhaustion of the German Army would allow for the imposition of a favorable peace which would return Alsace-Lorraine, set limits on German naval production, and secure modest war reparations in exchange for a recognition of Germany's empire in the East.

In March, Ludendorff himself traveled to Galicia to take charge of the Army due to attack south into Moldova and Bessarabia. In the west, August von Mackensen prepared for a renewed assault on Transylvania, while a mixed Bulgarian, Austrian, and German force in Bulgaria led by Hans von Seeckt readied for a feinting maneuver to cross the Danube. The Central Powers had assembled around 1 million men for the invasion.

With superiority in numbers and materiel, the invasion proceeded in a steady, attritional style, careful to avoid the mistakes of 1917. Despite valiant Romanian resistance at the Danube and in Transylvania, the seemingly inevitable advance of Ludendorff's Galician army forced first a retreat of the western mountaineers and then another retreat from the troops along the southwestern Danube. Within a month and a half, Bucharest was surrounded and the British expeditionary force was desperately attempting to flee from the Black Sea port of Constanta. The debacle of the British evacuation demonstrated the strain that had been placed on the British navy by the u-boat campaign, and had important effects on British domestic politics. In all, around 45,000 of the 125,000-man British force were captured.

Romania held a great bounty of riches for the conquering German army. American agricultural equipment provided a crucial boost to German agriculture, and American artillery helped make up equipment deficits caused by rampant strike action and skirmishes in the west. Germany treated the decision of the Romanian government to flee rather than surrender as a carte blanche to loot and plunder the country, though a more formal arrangement of "reparations" may not have differed very much in its results.

In the aftermath of the success in Romania, both Bulgaria and Turkey lobbied for a German offensive toward Constantinople. Growing pressure from both countries, including threats to leave the war, finally forced the OHL's hand. Ludendorff and Hindenburg had contemplated attacks to retake the straits, especially because of the increasing British aid to White cossacks, but concluded that the dug-in British forces in the area would inflict losses too punitive to make such an offensive strategically worthwhile. The prospect of Bulgaria and Turkey leaving the war changed this calculus.

Nonetheless, the Thrace offensive was never a priority. The OHL would not allow it to divert their timetable for the assault on the Po Valley, and as a result it was the dregs of the German Army which was allocated to the operation. It was set to begin at the same time as the Italian offensive, in late June. The hope was that the concurrent offensives would paralyze the British and delay any diversion of reserves.

By June 21st, around 25% of all German heavy artillery was stationed on the narrow Italian front. The presence of mountains and rivers meant that the Entente soldiers in the area only had to defend a line of around 60 miles. The buildup of the 1.25 million man Austro-German army was impossible to ignore. Delays in troop transportation caused by railway strikes and civil unrest in Austria meant that the offensive did not begin until July. .

Facing the 900,000 German and 350,000 Austrian soldiers were around a million Italian and 250,000 British and French troops, most of them recently arrived. The Italian lines were heavily fortified, but they were also completely outgunned. Growing allied technological superiority in the West (in the form of airplanes, tanks, and artillery) was not present in the Italian front.

On July 3rd, the largest artillery salvo in human history heralded the beginning of the Italian offensive. July 1918 would go down as the deadliest month of the Great War. The momentous battles recalled the mammoth offensives of 1916, but they were now fought with planes, tanks, and even higher concentrations of heavy artillery. New tactics of infiltration and assault had been devised which made warfare more mobile and returned some degree of parity between offense and defense.

Three days after the assault on Italy began, the hard-pressed Entente decided to begin their planned offensive early to take pressure off the beleaguered Italian army. On June 9th, the largest battle of the Western Front began when 1 million French and British troops started the assault in Flanders and Lille.

The Frontlines in mid-1917 and Plan of Attack for the July Offensive​

Somewhat ironically, this operation was termed the "July Offensive" even though it was initially slated to proceed in late August. It aimed to surround the city of Lille with a British attack from the north and a French thrust in the south; further north, a joint Franco-British force would launch delaying attacks on a sizable German army concentration in Flanders. After Lille was seized, the French-British armies would march northeast to the Dutch border and pin the remaining German forces in Flanders against the sea.

Over the previous year, Entente landship and aircraft production had ramped up considerably, allowing the Franco-British forces to achieve a technological advantage along many of the sectors in the western front. The extensive use of reconnaissance planes allowed weak spots along the line to be identified, toward which the massed use of landships could be directed. The main weakness of the Entente armies in the west was the stubbornly persistent tactical superiority of the German officer, which had been exacerbated by the death of the majority of the most promising French NCO's at Verdun.

From its very beginning, the July Offensive was different from those of the past two years. The initial breakthrough of the German trenches in the south was met with vicious counterattacks from the retreating German forces rather than an attempt to simply retrench. When the Germans surrendered Lille on the 15th, they sabotaged the city's railway lines, causing logistical issues for the advancing Entente armies. As the fighting continued, it sucked in soldiers from the rest of the front; by the 18th, around 40% of all troops on the western front were situated on an axis running from Passcendaele to Lille. Despite the intransigence of the German defense and the horrifying casualties suffered by all the armies, the Entente advance, backed by superior firepower and intelligence, slowly continued toward the Belgian Border from Lille. In terms of the size of the armies, the mobility of the warfare, and the immense losses sustained by each side, the battles recalled those of the first months of the war.

On July 21st, the Italian army finally broke beneath the weight of German artillery fire, and one million Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians began to stream into the Po Valley. The exhausted Italian Army had effectively collapsed; the failure to engage in a more orderly, paced retreat meant that when the breakout came, the morale of the Italian soldier had already collapsed. In Turin, Milan, Umbria and Romagna, strikes and protests broke out; syndicalists occupied factories and wildcat strikes among workers of the main trade union, the CGdL, paralyzed Italian industry. Fearing a social revolution, the Italian government agreed to an armistice later that week.

News of the Italian surrender came as a harsh blow to morale in the west. On the 24th, a document was released showing France and Britain repeatedly turning down German offers of a status quo peace. In truth, the document was doctored by German military intelligence, though based off real telegrams that were exchanged in negotiations earlier that year. The ruse enraged French and British leaders, who quickly denounced it. But it was the final straw for the collapsing morale of the French Army, who began to mutiny on the 30th; by August 3rd, the offensive stalled along the Belgian border as over 150,000 French troops refused to advance into foreign territory. The nationalist press at home denounced the rabble at the front, while the French Socialists began to splinter as syndicalist strikes broke out across the war industries.

The French government faced a very real crisis of legitimacy. Sensing his opportunity, Ludendorff pushed for the planned Somme offensive to proceed as soon as possible. The battered German armies in the west would need reinforcements from Italy, as well as artillery pieces and shells. By the time that the offensive was ready, however, a government of national salvation had already been formed in France by George Clemenceau, the strikes quieted with a mixture of concessions and repression, and the mutineers placated by a shakeup in the high command which placed Philippe Petain as the new Chief of Staff and Robert Nivelle in control of the largest concentration of soldiers in the northeast.

On September 16th, the Second Battle of the Somme began. Ludendorff calculated that the chaos in the government and the mutineers at the front would allow him to achieve a quick victory. The presence of large numbers of troops from the colonies in the Somme sector was also thought to indicate French weakness in the area.

Ludendorff miscalculated. The new government and high command had reassured French troops and French society, and perhaps most importantly, it had been decisively established that the supposed "peace offer" was a German hoax. The ruse had prompted the French and British governments to release documents revealing the full extent of German war aims in the secret peace overtures; rather than demoralizing troops and civilians, this invigorated pro-war sentiment and stirred up anti-German feeling. Moreover, the mutinying troops had never refused to defend French territory; though German counterattacks in late August forced a retreat back toward Lille from the Belgian border, their success derived from the chaos at the front and mistrust between soldiers and officers rather than the collapse of French resistance.

Many historians believe that if Ludendorff took the time to fully marshal his forces, he may have been able to seize the city of Abbeville by the end of the Somme offensive, making the Entente position in Flanders untenable. The men that assaulted Arras, Montdidier, and Albert at the end of 1918 were many of the same that participated in the defense of Lille and the Italian offensive. They were exhausted and undersupplied. Opposite them, they faced a smaller but more determined and better-supplied enemy. The colonial troops fought with the same vigor as their colonial overlords. The initial success of the assault on Arras and Albert concealed a large disparity in casualties. A week after capturing the two initial objectives of the campaign, Ludendorff called off further attacks amidst fears of mutiny in the German Army. The capture of French territory allowed him to spin the offensive as a victory domestically despite the 145,000 German casualties.

The remainder of the year saw continued skirmishes around Lille and Passchendaele. It increasingly looked as if the entire notion of seizing the rest of the ports in Flanders was a pointless one; losses of experienced u-boat crews had crippled the German submarine campaign, and British naval production allowed the convoy system to be extended to more distant waters.

In the east, the Central Powers offensives in Anatolia and Thrace broke down after a few weeks of stubborn British resistance. Turkey appeared willing to make peace, but the conviction of their leaders that Germany would soon win the war in the west meant that they proposed terms which the British would not accept. Something similar went for Bulgaria, which was motivated to continue the war by the belief that the French Army was on its last legs.

In retrospect, the battles of 1918 were less than unambiguous victories for the Central Powers. Despite French mutinies, the July offensive seized a swathe of valuable territory in the northeast and sapped much of the offensive power of the German Army in the west. Compared to Ludendorff's attack in the Somme, it achieved more of its operational objectives with a more favorable disparity of losses. The loss of Italy deprived the Entente of another front on which to press the Central Powers, but in real terms the Italian Army was frequently a liability, and many of the troops which were tied up in Trentino and Venetia were Austrians who would never have seen action in the west.

At the time, this was not how events were processed. In Germany, the press hailed Ludendorff as the second coming of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. Many civilians in Britain and France concluded that the war could simply not be won. In America, the stock market began to cave as financiers feared that Britain would not be able to repay American loans. Hopes spiraled in Germany for an end to the war by the end of the year.

Yet the war continued. Ludendorff showed no willingness to relax his goal of establishing a German condominium over Europe, and in any event the civilian leaders of the Entente no longer believed that negotiation was possible. Clemenceau vowed "to fight on until the grisly work is finished, because there shall be, and cannot be, any compromise with the teutonic plague". Winston Churchill called for "The full mobilization of all of Britain to preserve the sacred flame of English Liberty". As 1918 faded imperceptibly into the final year of the war, none of those occupying the commanding heights of bourgeois Europe were prepared for the storm that was to come.

 

[Curby]

"The best way to honor this soldier is to do as he would have done if he was still alive: curse the barbaric conflict which killed him and remember him as a victim of the greed of our rulers."

-Anonymous Flyer found at an Italian Memorial to the Unknown Soldier in Bologna, March 1919.

"The Liberals set out to war believing that it would make Italy into a modern nation; they succeeded beyond their wildest imagination, despite the fact that the nation they created would be one in which they were no longer welcome."

-Antonio Gramsci.

"Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society."

-Karl Marx.

The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born: Italy in the Great War, 1915-1918
​

The Beginning of the War

Italy had a number of qualities that set it apart from the other principal combatants of the Great War. Compared to Britain, Germany, and even France, it was systematically underdeveloped, with a disproportionately high agricultural population and a comparatively weak national identity. Although it possessed parliamentary institutions, these were more fragile than those of France and Britain, and the state itself was considerably weaker than any of the other great powers except Tsarist Russia. In this respect, it more closely approximated a truly liberal polity, which created significant difficulties for the wartime mobilization of resources. Most importantly, there was no Union Sacree or Burgsfrieden in Italy; at no point were political elites and the laboring masses unified in their support of the war. In fact, Italy was likely the only nation in which the majority of citizens and even a sizable minority of political elites opposed the war from its very beginning.

Since Italy entered the conflict in 1915, there was little question that it was an offensive and aggressive war aimed at Austria-Hungary. The hope was that Italian entry would create a permanent strategic shift in the Entente's fortunes, but several failed offensives in the Isonzo region failed to produce the desired effect. Italian troops conducted themselves valiantly but were not able to break through the Austrian lines, even after repeated assaults with British heavy artillery; by 1917, countless defeats were beginning to take their toll on the morale of the average Italian soldier.

However, all available evidence suggests that antiwar sentiment was concentrated in the Italian homefront. Socialists and political catholics were both opposed to the war. The Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) was one of the only socialist parties to adhere to the pacifist, internationalist tenets of the Second Internationale. Both the rank-and-file and the political and trade union leaders opposed entering the conflict. The Catholic Church, led by the pacifist Pope Benedict XV, abhorred the notion of sending Italian Catholics to war with Austrian ones. Liberals were the only group who supported the war, and even then opinions were divided between a nationalistic-patriotic right and a neutralist left.

Italy was brought into the war by something of a diplomatic coup by the Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, who entered a secret deal with Britain to join the conflict without consulting parliament. In the subsequent weeks, the left-liberal Giolitti faction in parliament was consistently outmaneuvered by the pro-war forces; by the time Italy declared war, the antiwar liberals were bound by nationalistic public sentiment and their own sense of patriotism to support the government.

The war was, to quote one prominent journalist, a "litany of disasters, proceeding in quick succession and illustrating with uninhibited honesty the incompetence of the ruling liberals." Despite gaining numerical superiority at the fronts in Trentino and Isonzo, the Italian Army was consistently frustrated by Austrian defenses. Counteroffensives were only staved off with British assistance. Chronic shortages of heavy artillery meant that Italy also suffered far more casualties than Austria. Moreover, the war in the southwest was perhaps the only one that Austrian soldiers were genuinely enthused to fight; many Croatian soldiers in particular felt it to be a defensive struggle against an expansionist and imperious enemy. Over the entire course of the conflict, Italy lost around 900,000 soldiers, and advanced only around 10 miles into Austrian territory.

At the homefront, Italy instituted a series of labor and civilian controls which were rivaled in their repressiveness only by the Ludendorff dictatorship itself. Even the absolutist regime of autocracy and orthodoxy in Russia could not match the degree of social control, though this is likely due more to capacity than will. Italian industrial mobilization was organized through the Instituto della Mobilitazione Industriale, overseen by the Ministry of War. Unlike the German KRA, this was run wholly by military officials, with a general at its head. In practice, the IMI favored employers. Aside from token representation on factory boards (with their representatives themselves decided upon by employers), Labor had no real input in the mobilization process. Military officials and common soldiers were frequently present on the factory floor to enforce labor discipline, and wage arbitration rarely ruled in favor of workers.

Businesses deemed critical to the war effort were designated as "Aulixary firms". In these, a particularly draconian labor regime existed. During the early years of the war, labor became increasingly feudalized: workers had to gain permission from employer and military dominated factory boards to take on a different job, and their applications were generally denied. Striking and most union activity was made illegal, and wages were kept level even as inflation skyrocketed. Although employers lost some control over their firm if it was declared as auxilary, it was nonetheless generally welcomed because it allowed for privileged access to raw materials.

One consequence of Italy's regime of industrial mobilization was capitalist super-profits. Over the war, profits in critical industries such as metalworking and mining rose over 100 percent. The state did make an effort to extract some of this money through a new tax on war profiteering, but bureaucratic incompetence and capitalist chichanery meant that little was actually collected. In practice, because industrialists had a heavier influence than the state in setting terms for procurement contracts, any tax on profits was compensated through a raising of the prices of military goods and raw materials, with the inflationary effects passed onto consumers and workers.

Patterns of military mobilization and discipline mirrored the authoritarianism of war-time labor relations. From the very beginning of the war, the Italian state relied more on coercion than consent to secure the obedience of its vast army of peasant conscripts. Somewhat bizarrely, actual propaganda designed by pro-war civic associations was forbidden from being distributed in the military; unlike in Germany and France, no systematic effort was made to explain the reasons for and purpose of the war to the average soldier. Although it is impossible to know the full extent of desertion and mutiny in the Italian Army, it is clear that military infractions were punished much more harshly than in Germany, Austria, France, or Britain. Summary executions for indiscretions as minor as returning a week late from leave were not uncommon.

The brutality of the Italian War machine was matched by a steady degradation of Parliamentary institutions. Whereas in France Parliament managed to wrest control back from the military over matters of strategy and appointments, in Italy the cabinet steadily gained power over Parliament until the latter was a mostly symbolic institution. The changes in government which did occur were more a response to popular discontent than they were to parliamentary pressure. Importantly, there were no socialists in any of the governing coalitions, despite the offer of several reformists to join.

Unlike many of the Socialist parties of Europe, the PSI did not begin the war with reformists at the helm. Although it was founded as a revisionist party, the Italo-Turkish war of 1911-1912 radicalized its membership and led to the expulsion of its most moderate members. Despite the control of the revolutionaries over the directorate, the party as a whole was still of a reformist cast. Compared to the Social-Democratic Parties of Germany and the French SFIO, the PSI was a much more confederal organization, with de facto power as much in the hands of the parliamentary delegation and regional chapters as in the directorate itself. These were composed primarily of moderates.

At the war's outbreak, the PSI determined on a policy of "Neither support nor sabotage". The intention was to allow workers to express their displeasure with the war without binding the party to an oppositional stance that could open it up to domestic repression. In practice, the PSI lent a great deal of moral and practical support to the war, particularly in its early years. Regional chapters and socialist mayors aided in the distribution of food and welfare, while the leaders of Italy's largest trade union, the CGL, cooperated with the authorities and aided in implementing wartime labor regulations.

However, the actual membership of the PSI and CGL were overwhelmingly opposed to the war. Many industrial laborers had little sense of Italian nationalism and treated the war as a folly of the country's elites. Unlike other European socialist parties, the PSI also had a sizable base of support in more rural areas, principally among the landless day laborers in the north, who held a similar attitude to the war as their urban brethren. Discontent with the war made itself known early in a series of strikes and women's protests in the runup to Italy's entry; only a wave of violent repression and mobilization temporarily quieted this turmoil.

Following the 1916 Austrian Asiago offensive, escalating popular and labor unrest led to the resignation of Salandra's centre-right government and the creation of a new, centrist administration under Vittorio Orlando. Orlando, a somewhat more liberal figure, dismissed Luigi Cadorna, the chief of the general staff, and placed general Armando Diaz in his place. The Orlando government attempted to scale back the most repressive elements of the wartime state. The firing of the reactionary Cadorna led to internal military reforms and a new focus on propaganda. On the homefront, attempts were made to keep wages level with inflation, even if Labor was still sidelined from participation in industrial relations. The Italian soldiery shifted - it would turn out permanently - onto the defensive.

Orlando's attempt to placate labor was manifestly unsuccessful, a fact that would play a large role in the repression of the next wartime government. With the war still wildly unpopular, illegal strike action and protest continued at a high level throughout 1917, eventually reaching a fever pitch in February. A large women's protest in Rome demanding an end to the war and a return of their "missing men" was brutally suppressed by the local carabinieri, prompting a sympathy strike among the city's dockworkers. When news of these events reached the large industrial cities of the north, general strikes were called in Turin and Milan, demanding an end to the war. Shortly thereafter, loyal troops were sent in to crush the protestors; drawn largely from southern peasants, they considered the civilians they confronted to be as alien as the Austrians they fought at the front, and suppressed the strikers with relative ease.

The War after Caporetto

The May Caporetto-Asiago offensive of 1917 marked a permanent change in the war. Hitherto the main battles were fought primarily on Austrian territory; now, Italian armies were forced to retreat over 100 miles as the overwhelming majority of Venetia and Friuli fell into Austrian hands. The rout of the Italian Army was immediately blamed on lower-class, socialist sabotage behind the frontlines, though in truth it was the collapsing morale of the Italian soldier that had most to do with the catastrophic defeat. It was in large part the truly stupendous efforts of Armando Diaz, only now being recovered from the oblivion of history, that allowed Italy to stabilize the front in the coming months along a line that (temporarily) avoided the national humiliation of losing Venice to Austria.

Whatever the merits of his own generalship, Diaz was now on the chopping block along with Prime Minister Orlando. While there was a broad desire for firmer leadership, for a week and a half parliament was not able to decide upon a new government until Sidney Sonnino, a foreign minister in the nationalist wing of the Liberals aligned with Salandra, agreed to head a new government. Liuigi Capello, the commander-in-chief of the Italian First Army and ultranationalist rival of Cadorna, replaced Diaz.

One of the few military officers born to poverty, Cappello was in fact one of the most capable and ingenious of all the Italian generals; the decisive defeat inflicted on the Italian Army in 1918 arose less from a dearth of strategic acumen and much more from the increasingly dire state of the Italian Army. By its final year of war, Italy had grown increasingly incapable of supplying its own army; this was a somewhat paradoxical situation since, despite the authoritarianism of its industrial mobilization, the war had served as a tremendous engine of economic growth. The IMI acted as a pressure toward consolidation, leading to the birth of such industrial giants as FIAT (now known as CEETA, or the Central European Engine, Train, and Automobile Collective), Ansaldo, and ILVA (now a member of the Confederation of Central European Steel Producers). The net value of physical capital increased by over 2.4 billion dollars over the course of the war, and in major industries declared profits rose from 5-8% of invested capital to between 15 and 30 percent. Electricity, car, and airplane production all skyrocketed exponentially.

The major vulnerability of Italian industrial mobilization was its dependence on imports. Italy was not a net producer of any raw materiel besides sulfur and nitric acid; it had to import coal, iron, and other metals for its domestic industries. Italy's net imports (the total value of imports - exports) rose from around 2.6% to 19% of GDP at the end of 1917 as export-oriented industries were retooled for domestic war production. This created a chronic balance of payments crisis that could only be alleviated through foreign loans or a depreciation of the Lira that would compress domestic living standards. Given the already explosive situation in Italy's plantations and factories, its rulers chose to depend on increasingly stringent loans from Britain and America; even these dried up by the end of 1917, however, as Britain focused on maintaining the gold standard. The government had to resort to printing money to secure key import orders.

The resumption of German unrestricted submarine warfare rendered the foregoing discussion academic. With British merchant shipping facing catastrophic losses, Britain chose to slash its coal exports to Italy to maintain the critical channel trade with France and its own food imports from America. The result was a perpetual bottleneck of fuel throughout 1918 which caused a collapse of the already overburdened rail network in Northern Italy. Despite booming munitions production, Italy was simply not able to transport sufficient quantities of shells to the front. During the Austro-German Po River offensive of 1918, Italian troops were forced to ration artillery shells at increasingly austere rates until they were no longer capable of providing effective counter-battery fire. Most historians believe that the Italian lines would likely have held if their logistics were able to ensure a ready supply of shells.

The wave of strikes that erupted following the German breakthrough was initiated by the Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI), an antiwar syndicalist union. Many of the Italian elites and even some socialist politicians took the fact that the strike activity begun in Romagna (near the axis of Austrian advance) as evidence that it was engineered far in advance to bring down the Italian war effort; in reality, Romagna was simply one of the three provinces, along with Liguria and Marches, in which the USI had most success recruiting supporters. Despite the growing strength of the revolutionary faction within both the PSI and CGL, their inability - or simply unwillingness - to coordinate opposition to the war led many workers to turn to the syndicalist unions. Their spectacular growth was accompanied by a loss of faith of many unskilled workers in the traditionally socialist unions.

The strike soon engulfed traditional strongholds of the PSI like Turin and Milan; the war had engendered the growth of labor solidarity, and many of the workers no longer made principled distinctions between socialist and syndicalist unions. Regional PSI party chapters led by revolutionaries in Lombardy and Piedmont soon endorsed the wildcat strikes; by July 25th, the day before the Verona Armistice was signed, it appeared that a general strike was about to descend upon the entirety of Northern and Central Italy. Then, three days later, the Socialists balked. Following the armistice, it became clear that the right-wing government of Sidney Sonnino was about to collapse; the left-liberal Giolitti looked poised to come once more to power, and he offered the socialists a suite of concessions if they would bring the strike to an end. After a week of furious internal debate, on August 1st the party accepted an agreement that provided for wage increases, the shortening of the workday in most major industries, and a commitment from Giolitti to pursue tax reform and universal suffrage in return for a cessation of the strike.

The War's Aftermath

The final five months of 1918 demonstrated beyond doubt that the revolutionary attitude of the nation's workers and peasants would not be patched over by piecemeal political and social reform. When the Socialist Party and CGL instructed workers to end their strikes, a number of union locals refused and broke formally with the CGL. Most chose to affiliate with the anarchist USI as "free socialist unions". The USI was outraged by the abandonment of the PSI; the distrust the events sowed between the two organizations was to have important consequences for Italian history.

In Parliament, Giolitti's new government suffered an early failure when the Liberal Union broke apart; Sonnino, Salandra, and dozens of other sympathetic deputies left to form the "National Liberal Party", which was, as many grew fond of jesting, neither national nor liberal, drawing its support almost solely from the middle and south of the country and adhering much more closely to an authoritarian, corporatist nationalism than classical liberalism. Deprived of key parliamentary support, Giolitti could not turn to the socialists, who refused to enter into parliamentary coalitions.

Without a majority in Parliament, Giolitti struggled to pass many of his reforms. An election was scheduled for the end of the year to "clarify" the composition of the new government, but it was not yet determined if the new slate of representatives was to be elected through universal suffrage. Many of the deputies of the liberal centre and right refused to extend the vote to those who "stabbed Italy in the back". Giolitti could not muster the support to pass suffrage or electoral reforms, though he did manage to pass a war profits tax which temporarily reduced some of Italy's fiscal problems.

On September 16th, Giolitti was forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Venice, which committed Italy to a demilitarization of the entirety of Venetia, the cession of Alpine border regions to Austria, and the payment of punitive war reparations. The payment, to be made in monthly installments, theoretically may have deflated Italian wages if it was financed through tax payments, but instead the Central Bank of Italy paid for it largely through printing money; by the end of the year, new inflationary pressures finally tipped the Lira over the edge, and its value collapsed amid a 232% rate of annual inflation.

A second wave of nationalist sentiment swept the middle classes upon the signing of the humiliating peace. Effigies of Giolitti were burnt in several major cities, and the King faced pressure from patriotic societies and paramilitary associations to appoint a new cabinet. Some of this sentiment made its way into the working classes, too, as is evidenced by the growth of the interventionist USI, which favored a resumption of the war with Austria.

On August 3rd, Giolitti was assassinated by a member of a right-wing militia while addressing supporters in Turin. The king used the chaos and street-fighting in its aftermath as a pretext for appointing Antonio Salandra as the new Prime Minister. The loss of Giolitti threw the Liberal Party into disarray, and several prominent deputies agreed to support the new government and even serve as ministers within it. An unlikely figure emerged as the leader of the Liberals: Vittorio Orlando, who had previously been disgraced by the Asiago-Caparetto offensive. In scathing oratory he denounced the obstructionism of the national-liberals and demanded comprehensive land reform, universal suffrage, and a progressive labor policy. The national-liberals for their part feared that they would be crushed in any election, especially because they were bleeding support in the central agricultural heartlands to the social-clerical Italian Catholic People's Party. This party, formed by an unassuming Catholic Cleric at the instruction of the church, was attracting huge support in the middle of the country, much of it from peasants and peasant organizers disposed to rhetoric scarcely less revolutionary than the PSI and USI.

Attempts to delay national elections were met with organized strike action from the PSI, which continued to participate in parliament despite its refusal to join a government. After another month of industrial and social unrest, elections were finally scheduled for September 12th.

Italian Parliamentary Elections, 1918​

Party	Vote %	Seats
Italian Socialist Party	29.3	220
Italian Catholic People's Party	20.2	71
Liberals, Democrats, and Radicals.	24.5	172
Union of National-Liberals and Nationalists	17.1	40
Minor Parties	8.9	5
Total	100	508

The election confirmed the rise of the Italian left: combined, the clerical-socialist Italian Catholic People's Party and Italian Socialist Party nearly won 50% of the vote under a system that still disenfranchised many of their prime supporters. Ironically, the failure to reform the voting system principally benefited the socialists, who won over 40% of the seats with under 30% of the votes. Since seats were allocated on the basis of two-round majority votes in single-member constituencies, the leading party had an automatic advantage in converting votes to seats. This was particularly so for the socialists, whose supporters tended to be concentrated in the most populous parts of the country. Orlando's Liberals, Democrats, and Radicals were also beneficiaries of the electoral system - as the leading party in the south, they were able to pick up around a third of the total seats with under a quarter of the vote.

It soon became clear that no majority government would be formed. The Catholic People's Party refused to work with the Liberals, and a coalition between the Liberals and Socialists was unthinkable. There was some discussion of an alliance between the Socialists and Catholics among members of the Socialist centre, but there was no real prospect of this occurring until they moderated their traditional anticlericalism. It was clear that a decisive rebuke had been issued to the nationalist government of Salandra; after a vote of no-confidence from the new parliament, Orlando once again became prime minister, promising social and political reform.

With the help of a key bloc of reformist parliamentarians, major legislation was passed at the end of 1918 instituting collective bargaining, universal suffrage, limited land reform, and a new progressive tax system. Italy's experiment in social democracy temporarily revived hopes for a peaceful, parliamentary solution to its seemingly terminal social crisis. It was not to be. Northern industrial elites, feeling threatened by the new government, began to harden their line. Following the instruction of the church, the Catholic People's Party began a crackdown on rural activists who hewed too close to socialism.

In November, a new wave of industrial unrest prompted by the increased use of hired strikebreakers shattered the detente between the Socialist Party and Orlando's liberals; under threat of expulsion from the party, the reformist parliamentarians refused further cooperation with the new government, rendering it incapable of passing progressive legislation. By the end of the year, the PSI adopted a revolutionary program calling for the overthrow of the Italian government and the transition to a dictatorship of the proletariat. The rapid growth of the syndicalist unions, continuing apace through the period of social reform, convinced the leaders of the PSI and CGL that the party must embrace the revolutionary struggle or be consigned to the dustbin of history. But try as they might, the socialist politicians and trade union bureaucrats were incapable of matching the revolutionary ardor of Italy's workers and peasants. Time and again, Marx's dictum that it would be the workers who advanced history proved correct.

 

[Curby]

Hey there folks. Below is an update on America which also covers some of what is going on with the international socialist movement.

Here's the plan of updates before we get to 1919, the most crucial year of this entire timeline. They'll come out in roughly in the order listed.

1. A comprehensive update catching us up on France (should have it up in the next day or two.)
2. A post on Soviet Russia, with a section on domestic politics and another on the Civil War (going significantly better for the Reds then IOTL, with huge knock-on effects.) Naturally, a good portion of this post will cover Germany's empire in the east and German-Soviet relations.
3. A more general update on industrial mobilization from 1914-1918, focusing primarily but not solely on Germany and Britain.
4. An entry on the international socialist movement and trade union activity in 1918, which will go into greater detail on the effects of the Russian revolution and the leftward turn of most social-democratic parties. There will be a section here to catch us up on British Labor, but I don't intend to devote another full post to the UK until 1919.
5. A post covering what's been going on in the rest of the world, with a focus on China, India, and Japan.
6. An update on the condition of the various armies, both physical and psychological. This will cover the growth of radicalism in the armed forces, as well as how the different army hierarchies are dealing with the task of suppressing dissent and resistance.

If anyone has questions about any personages or events that they're curious about, I am very happy to answer them. Cheers!

Hofstadter, Richard. 1952. "Bryan's Final Years: A New Account." American Historical Review. ​

…The past thirty years of historiography have treated the national chaos of Bryan's final three years as a consequence of the deterioration of the President's character. In this picture, economic recession, street-violence, and diplomatic isolation emerged, as if by some conjuring trick, out of the declining mental fitness of Bryan. It is not clear what precise chain of causality links these events, and a more principled defense of this common hypothesis would have the task of clarifying these matters.

Neither Bryan nor his closest advisors ever spoke of a marked cognitive decline. The most one can glean from the firsthand evidence is that the final three years of office placed enormous strains, both intellectual and emotional, on the man. The standard historical practice has been to understand Bryan's own political trajectory as evidence of a mental break, but in truth this reveals much more about the prejudices of the American scholarly class than it does about Bryan himself.

...In his final term of office, Bryan underwent an ideological evolution from a populist Jeffersonian Democrat to an Evangelical Christian socialist. Three events appeared to have radicalized him. The first was the assassination attempt in 1917, which inured him to the notion of a great conspiracy to overthrow his Presidency. Then, there was the sudden formation of a pro-British congressional coalition willing to stymie his efforts to keep America neutral in the Great War. Most decisively, there was the Trenton Conference of 1918.

Bryan had long sought some means of negotiating a European peace. The disinterest expressed in response to most of his diplomatic overtures frustrated him. When the European powers did engage American diplomacy, it was typically as a publicity stunt to signal a willingness to make peace to their domestic populations. The notion of hosting the next anti-war conference of European socialists appeared to come to Bryan from the exiled Irish humanitarian Roger Casement, who met with him privately in December 1917. The previous three conferences had achieved little success due to the absence of the main socialist parties in the Entente, but now both the French Socialists and British Labor might be willing to participate in such a venture. Casement thought that even the antiwar British liberals could be convinced to send a delegation as observers. It looked as if the German Social Democrats would be the most difficult party to wrangle in 1918; with their most prominent pacifist leaders under house arrest, it was thought unlikely that they would be permitted to travel. But perhaps Bryan could use what little leverage and political capital he had to whisk some of the former leadership to Trenton.

At this point, Bryan did not subscribe to any form of ideological socialism. But it is clear that he felt some sympathy for the antiwar protests of the social-democratic parties, and he also earnestly believed that such a conference might force the governments to finally make peace. In a speech in February 1918, Bryan announced - largely without the consultation of the socialist parties - that the city of Trenton, New Jersey, would be open to hosting the 4th antiwar conference, so long as matters were kept strictly to a discussion of "the quickest possible path for ending the present ruination of Europe". This proviso was intended to indicate to domestic audiences that the alliance between Bryan and the socialists was one of convenience rather than principle.

The backlash that followed from this announcement was fierce and sustained. Some British historians have argued that the media frenzy which followed was a precursor of the first red panic, though in our view this is ahistorical. Unlike the red panic, the forces mobilized against Bryan in early 1918 were of a primarily elite character; it was Senators and Congressmen, not housewives and shop owners, who rallied to try to prevent the planned conference.

From the limited perspective of political gamesmanship, it is true that Bryan's decision to ride out the criticism likely cost him the opportunity to pass his landmark antitrust legislation. In the standard story, the political inflexibility of the President arose from a moralism which had unduly metastasized. Bryan either was too blinded by conviction to assess the harm which following through with the conference would have on his legislative agenda, or in such a romance with the European socialists that he prioritized the quixotic conference over his own presidency.

Neither of these explanations is borne out by the historical evidence. Bryan was aware that moving forward with the conference would lead to a scuttling of the antitrust legislation; he wrote privately that he would be "martyred for such an act", and would "find his presidency at an effective end". In the same entry, he explained his logic for proceeding with the conference: "if matters continue as they do in Europe, we shall see either the Bolshevization of the Continent or its descent into a darkness even graver and less imaginable. The violence that traumatizes Europe now shall traumatize our ancestors too if it is not halted in due haste." Bryan's talk of bolshevization here should warn us against assuming that Bryan presently saw the socialists as ideological allies in addition to practical ones.

The Trenton Conference began in the second week of July. Delegates from over a dozen socialist parties gathered to discuss the best means of ending the war. There was something undoubtedly surreal about the whole affair; one of the keynote speakers, Henry Ford, was a prominent industrialist and union-buster, while Bryan himself defied a house censure and made a brief appearance to praise the efforts of the socialists while counseling them to avoid "revolutionary activism and agitation". Also in attendance were a number of dissident British liberals from the party's most radical antiwar faction, who had made their way to the conference against the explicit instruction of their own government and party. The staid, aristocratic gentleman looked somewhat out of place at the socialist conference.

Perhaps the most important delegation came from Jean Jaures' SFIO, which had refused to participate in previous meetings. Growing tensions between Labor and the French government meant that Jaures felt bound to send representatives from the party's left to the peace conference to avoid a revolt of the ranks. Something similar went for the Social Democrats of Germany; while having no intention to make peace until final victory was achieved, Ludendorff wanted to give the appearance that the Social Democrats were operating with a degree of autonomy, and he therefore released Eduard Bernstein and a number of his sympathizers from house arrest, sending them off to America.

Several circumstances conspired to make it difficult for the conference to place real pressure on the warring governments. Firstly, Bernstein, the representative of the Social Democrats, had little real power within his party. Even while he was in the leadership he lacked a close relation with the unions or nascent council movement, which were the largest forces in Germany that could browbeat the Ludendorff regime. Secondly, the delegation from the British Labor Party was not granted permission to speak on behalf of the organization as a whole; it was sent, like the French delegation, to placate an increasingly restless left-wing, but it was given even less authority. Finally, divisions between centrists and radicals over the Russian question meant that it was difficult to devise a comprehensive plan for peace in the east.

In a highly unusual move, a half-dozen diplomats from the American state department also attended the conference, ostensibly as neutral observers but in reality as active participants who attempted to steer the results of the conference in a palatable direction. This interference perturbed several of the socialist delegates, but there was little real opportunity to eject their hosts from the closed-door meetings. In any event, the diplomats often acted more as mediators than anything else; Bryan wanted the conference to be successful.

The composition of the delegates meant that Trenton had a more centrist, parliamentary slant than the previous conferences. This was partially tempered by the fact that many of the reformist socialists were themselves now more open to radical, antiwar action, but it nonetheless remained true that the control of the conference by the moderates presented unique opportunities for Bryan. The document we now know as the "Trenton Resolution" was drafted by a committee on the postwar order which was dominated by these figures; in attendance were not only British liberals and the centrist German delegation, but also American diplomats, the educational reformer John Dewey, and the humanitarian democrat Roger Casement, who contributed to its anticolonial clauses. This resolution still had to be approved by the majority of the seated delegates, though it is likely that few could have anticipated its importance. At the time, it was but one of many documents which together composed the "plan for peace".

It was Bryan's very public promotion of the resolution which gave it a broader audience and allowed it to exert substantial influence on anticolonial politics. Self-determination and social rights would both become some of the most frequently invoked concepts of the postwar era. Their use amongst reforming liberals, anticolonial activists, and ethnic nationalists attest to their broad appeal and enduring salience. There might appear to be an irony that a document drafted and written by socialists had an enduring influence primarily in the capitalist world. Yet this is readily explained by the affinities between the moderate socialism of prewar Europe (A tradition still alive in 1918) and radical liberalism, a topic which is just now beginning to be explored.

The General Proposal for a Postwar Order, Aka, The Trenton Resolution​

• All states shall commit to the formation of an international body which will serve as a forum to adjudicate diplomatic disputes, coordinate trade and tariff policy, and ensure the general maintenance of peace. This body will be known as the Fellowship of Nations.
• The Fellowship of Nations will establish a committee that will be tasked with ensuring the freedom of navigation in times both of peace and of war; general blockade and the targeting of neutral vessels shall both be considered prohibited acts.
• All nations will commit to ending unjust and exploitative trade practices which violate the principle of equality; the terms of trade shall be determined by diplomacy and not force, and ought to tend toward a recognition of the equality of all nations.
• Citizens have an inviolable right to participation in their government. Since no citizen may be denied this right on an arbitrary basis, all participating members of the Fellowship of Nations will commit to the establishment of equal and universal suffrage.
• As the exercise of the individual's freedom necessarily includes the securing of those material and social conditions necessary for the full exercise of autonomy, the world's governments shall recognize and commit to fulfilling the social rights of education, food, housing, medical care, and the provision of aid in old age, sickness, and disability.
• All peoples have the right to self-determination; their national aspirations must be respected and fulfilled, whether through the establishment of an independent state or the vouchsafing of collective autonomy within existing ones.
• On the matter of European peace, the delegates at the Trenton Conference recommend the following specific measures, in addition to the more general outline for a postwar order enumerated above.
• In keeping with the right of self-determination, we support the creation of a Polish state. The peoples of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire ought to determine their fate through democratic means, whether that result in the creation of a confederation of Danubian nations or their continued association in a federation.
• The matter of Alsace-Lorraine shall be settled by plebiscite, to allow its peoples to themselves determine which nation they wish to be affiliated with.
• Germany shall evacuate Belgian territory and it will be restored forthwith to full sovereignty and independence. A commitment from all nations to respect the rights of neutral countries in times of war.
• A just settlement of colonial claims through international arbitration concerned principally with the interests and rights of the involved populations.
• In accord with the right to self-determination, the conversion of existing colonies into temporary mandates, to be governed over a set period until the native peoples are equipped for self-rule. The creation of representative democratic institutions in the mandates to foster this capacity and ensure a stable transition to independence.
• The settlement of the division of territories in the Balkans through plebiscites conducted by the Fellowship of Nations.
• Turkey to remain an independent state, with the territories in the Levant and the east (from Iraq to Armenia) to be granted independence.
• The territories claimed by Italy to have their fate determined through plebiscite.
• The United States of America expresses its support for the foregoing provisions, and offers its support in seeing them secured.

Click to shrink...

In contrast to the status quo peace offers proffered by the Entente, which envisioned a restoration of the prewar European order, the Trenton Resolution called for the thoroughgoing transformation of both European and Colonial affairs. Peace would be tied to a broad programme of democratization and egalitarian welfarism carried out by left-liberal and social-democratic political parties. Though it went mostly unstated, America was meant to act as a backstop to this entire system, offering the loans and consumer markets necessary to fund the expansion of state capacity that was envisioned.

The Trenton Resolution did not represent any form of nascent Bolshevism, even if Bryan was charged with colluding with the red enemy. In practice, the creation of a welfarist, democratic Europe and the gradual decolonization of Britain and France would have served the interests of American capitalism quite well. This did not prevent the opposition from attacking a perceived vulnerability. Yet all available evidence indicates that, rather than inspiring conviction or disgust, the charge that Bryan consorted with socialists initially had little effect on voters. His supporters received the Trenton Resolution rather tepidly; though many had sympathy with its objectives, there was little belief that it had any real chance of being implemented, and there was still a sizable isolationist strand of his base which was skeptical of any American involvement in European affairs. Among Bryan's opponents, who fervently believed that America ought to join the war on Britain's side, there was initially little real panic stirred up by his affiliation with the socialists - they already knew that he was in favor of peace, and the domestic reforms he had already embarked upon were indistinguishable from many of those advocated in the resolution.

Once again, the real site of discontent was in congress, where Bryan faced an outright revolt from the southern democrats, who feared that the talk of egalitarianism and self-determination represented a threat to the Jim Crow racial order. The house quickly decided to move forward with another censure measure, and some began talking of impeachment. The Vice President Woodrow Wilson began to secretly rally opposition against the President. With the southern democrats stonewalling, there was little chance for Bryan to pass legislation.

Bryan's margin for maneuver was being constrained in other ways, too. By 1918, the economic boom that began with Bryan's presidency had turned into a recession. Fears of a fiscal liquidity crisis in the event of British or French default led to a marked reduction in direct investment, as did uncertainty about international politics. The German submarine campaign also began to curtail exports to Britain and France, depressing the prices of key industrial goods and reducing corporate profitability. Financial anxieties reached a climax in July, when Bryan refused to reissue loans to Britain, putting them on course to permanently leave the gold standard; the stock market fell around 7%, before rallying in August when it became clear that Britain's transition off the gold standard would not have the dire fiscal effects predicted. Still, all across the American economy, there was a small though marked contraction of production, contributing to conflicts between labor and capital.

The massive offensives of 1918 and the potential for Chinese entry into the war as a Central Power convinced congress of the need for another army expansion. This time, Bryan himself was sanguine about the notion; he knew that earning America a larger place in global affairs would require the ability to project force. Despite the looming threat of impeachment, the congressional leaders and Bryan were able to agree on a plan to expand the army in return for the passage of an expansion to the social security scheme in the unemployment relief act. The spending in the bill also allowed for American munition plants to continue operating at full capacity even as Entente orders steadily dwindled, averting a more drastic economic slowdown.

Meanwhile, even as the impeachment effort faced continued difficulties in determining a proper pretext, the public was beginning to turn against Bryan. A wave of strike action throughout the summer slowed down industry and heightened middle-class fears of domestic bolshevism. Arbitration efforts eventually managed to return the most essential workers back to the factories in return for wage concessions, but the pervasive nature of the labor activity led many to conclude that Bryan himself was behind it. The dysfunction in DC and the legislative gridlock in Congress were also largely blamed on the president.

Yet despite all this, there were also signs that Bryan's core support amongst industrial laborers, poor farmers, and ethnic whites was holding steady. The growth of the American leagues and pacifist societies had continued following the antiwar protests of 1917, and both organizations now had closer links to the generally antiwar labor unions. The spectacular rise of John I. Lewis' Confederated Industrial Unions (CIU), de facto headed by the United Mine Workers, provided Bryan with a key ally with vast powers of mobilization. Soaring union membership acted as an important counterweight to middle-class skepticism.

The midterm elections made this picture clear. Against an energized and concerted Republican campaign, the Democrats managed to hold onto the Senate by a thread after emerging victorious in a razor-thin election in Illinois. They nonetheless lost 4 senate seats, and were reduced to a two-vote majority. The Republicans finally won the house after a decade in the minority, though here only narrowly: democratic strength in the Great Lakes area acted to offset a Republican surge in the Great Plains and Mountain West, allowing the Democrats to preserve a sizable contingent of northern progressives.

Republican capture of congress paved the way for impeachment. The following year, shortly after the new representatives were sworn in, a very real case of corruption was found involving German influence peddling in Washington. Bryan stood down the barrel of a hostile congress determined to end his political career. Neither he nor his supporters would go quietly.

 

[Curby]

The First Act of the National Tragedy: France, 1914-1918

No more pacifist campaigns, no more German intrigue, no more socialist plots and mutinous, disloyal soldiers. Neither treason nor its fascimile: war, and nothing but war, waged with the bitterness of war and waged with the entire will of the French Nation...

-George Clemenceau

The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and shameful.

-Barbusse, Le Feu​

Introduction

Of all the belligerent powers, it is France in which the broadest front of society endorsed the call to arms. Morale was not always high, but the conviction that France must be defended against German aggression induced the French people to docility and complaisance for the first three years of the war. Compared to Germany, Russia, and even Britain, it took significantly longer for robust opposition to crystallize. This might also be explained by the initial dominance of the reform faction of French socialists, the weakness of revolutionary syndicalists, and the inclusion of all of the mainstream parties in the coalition governments of the war's first half. Above all, however, it was the conviction that the war was a defensive struggle against reactionary and expansionist german autocracy that convinced the French worker to enter into a temporary social truce with the state and employer.

The Army

Politics in the period from 1914-1917 were defined by a struggle between parliament and the military to establish control over strategy. The charismatic general Joseph Joffre had built up immense political capital with the "Miracle of 1914", and it took until the disaster at Verdun for the civilian government to finally acquire the support needed to sack him. He was replaced by Ferdinand Foch, who had also distinguished himself in the battles of 1914. The immense casualties suffered by the French military over the previous three years precluded him from launching an offensive until he was certain it would succeed. Although Foch's caution came in for a great deal of scrutiny by the nationalist war press, he found broad support among the political left and in the center. Eventually, he marshaled his forces for an assault in northern Flanders at the end of 1917, one of the first clearcut victories of the French Army. This bought him the political capital necessary to weather the storms of 1918 for some time, until it was clear he had to be replaced to ensure order in the army.

The French Army was one of the largest in Europe. As a percentage of the population, the 5.4 million men mobilized at the height of the war represented the highest total of any of the belligerents. By all accounts, at the conflict's beginning this massive citizen-conscript army was loyal, tenacious, and steadfast in its defense of the Patrie. The French soldier fought to defend their land from German invasion. Desertion was frowned upon by not just the officers, but the lowest ranks of infantry. Even those who felt the traditional justifications for the war wither away nonetheless believed they were obligated to continue the fight for their comrades-in-arms. As the war progressed, this form of manly camaraderie increasingly displaced traditional patriotism in the common soldier's understanding of why they continued to fight, but it (mostly) continued to function as an effective motivator.

It is remarkable that the French Army continued to fight for a full half-decade in the face of the immense casualties it sustained and the miserable conditions at the front. The French soldier was poorly supplied with basic necessities compared to their counterparts, and the extensive trench system of the Central Powers often boasted amenities which were unheard of among the Entente. Supply issues slowly improved up to 1918 as logistics systems grew more robust, but then started to collapse again as the French state found itself increasingly unable to pay for the war. Additionally, discipline in the French Army tended to be quite harsh, even by historical standards; even before the 1918 mutinies, proportionally more soldiers were executed in court-marshals than in any of the other national forces save Italy's.

While the state of the German Army inspired envy, that of the British bred resentment. French soldiers frequently complained in letters and diaries about their material conditions. Frequently, these gripes targeted not just the government, but also the entirety of the civilian interior, whom French soldiers suspected were "living it up" at their expense. Late in the war, as lurid tales of war profiteering grew more common, French soldiers started referring to themselves as "Les Trahis" - the Betrayed ones.

The Battle of Verdun marked a permanent shift in the Army's psyche. The crushing loss at Fort Souville followed by the vain attempts to retake it cost over 500,000 casualties. It embedded in the French soldier an enduring feeling of impotence, particularly after the stunning success of the British counterattack in December. Soldiers coped with the trauma of Verdun in different ways: many displaced blame onto the government or the civilians in the rear, while others adopted an attitude of weary resignation. The new Chief of Staff, Ferdinand Foch, chose to respect the state of the army by keeping it largely on the defensive throughout 1917. His use of small, simultaneous offensives along multiple sectors of the front frequently found success in throwing the German lines into chaos, but did not have a real chance to force a strategic breakthrough. The successful Ypres - Veurne offensive at the end of the year played a crucial role in shoring up morale, which had teetered precariously since Verdun.

There was another reason Foch paused any plans for large-scale, strategic operations: The battles of 1916 had dangerously depleted French manpower, particularly in the officer corps. The classes of '15 and '16 - 18 and 19 year old boys - had been called up in 1916 and then decimated in the year's fighting. Without fresh manpower and new officers, another failed offensive operation would leave the French army liable to break if the Germans found the resources to launch another Verdun.

This was a matter that needed a political rather than a military solution. The government responded by vastly increasing its use of both colonial and female labor in munition plans. While some colonial troops were shipped to the front, at the time there was a belief that the colonial conscripts would not defend France with the same fervor as the white citizen-soldier. Instead, throughout 1917 and 1918, French industrial workers were shipped to the front. Many of these were skilled machinists and welders whose labor could only be replaced with the use of several unskilled hands.

The sudden influx of older, literate working-class socialists into the army marked another important turning point. Thus far, the discontent of the French soldier had been formulated in terms that were personal and particular rather than political. Requests went out for more supplies, for a pause from fighting, but not for a redistribution of power or an end to the war. Predominantly from rural backgrounds, the soldiery of 1914-1916 were loyal to the French state, even as they found their conditions of life increasingly unbearable. The presence of class-conscious socialist workers began to change this.

In fact, the first of the industrial workers sent to replenish French manpower were chosen precisely because of their participation in workplace agitation. In a decision that is now infamous for its shortsightedness, the government asked employers to devise lists of workers it believed were most likely to engage in labor protest, and used these as a basis for its programme to replenish manpower. Most of these individuals did not even have to be drafted, as they were already technically mobilized, having been sent home in late 1914 to ensure sufficient labor was present in the big munitions factories. The government believed that by sending these men to the front, they were eliminating the potential for future strikes and labor unrest: needless to say, they did not cure the problem in the factories, but they did exacerbate one which was beginning to brew in the army.

This being said, the receptivity of the common soldier to international socialism was still fairly low in 1917. While some of the older and more hardened infantry conscripts were attracted to their proselytizing, soldiers much more frequently wrote in condemnation of socialism than in favor of it (though this might in part be influenced by the wartime censorship regime). Matters began to change in 1918, a year that once again saw the French Army take the offensive with disastrous results. Worsening conditions at the homefront also had an effect on the soldiers, who had always imagined that they would be returning home to a life much like the one they had left. However, much more immediately tangible was the reduction in supplies. These were actually quite modest by historical standards, but declining food rations and orders to ration shells and even bullets outraged many French soldiers.

The army made great efforts to replenish its manpower, but most of the men who participated in the 1918 Lille offensive had also fought at Verdun. Considering the trauma they had endured, the grim consent they gave to the offensive is remarkable. The recapture of Lille within 10 days led a temporary wave of euphoria to wash over the army, with many soldiers intensely hoping that might be on the verge of the long-desired percee (or breakthrough) of German lines. For a week, they assaulted the German forces in Tourcoiing without requiring encouragement from the officers. By the time the Germans retreated to Belgium, it was clear that no breakthrough was to be achieved, but most of the French soldiers nonetheless concluded that they had achieved "victory" by reaching the Belgian border. The ignorance which the French officer class kept the soldiers in about broader strategic aims meant that few were aware that the intention was to push across all of Belgium. The punishing casualties already suffered and desperate supply situation meant that the army was scarcely prepared to accomplish this. Compounding matters, the news of the Italian collapse soon reached the front, further damaging French morale.

Against the advice of most junior, non-commissioned officers, the army high command chose to press forward with the offensive. Despite the growing spread of revolutionary sentiment in the army, this mutiny did not occur immediately, but only after several days of fighting. It is significant that much of this occurred in Belgium, not on French soil. Soldiers who were content to defend their own country were much more skeptical toward fighting in another.

On the whole, the mutiny was a remarkably peaceful affair. Soldiers did not kill their officers unless provoked. Typically, they took up positions at the rear of the front lines, holding demonstrations to air their concerns and setting up the so-called "Mutineers camps". In many ways, these actions resembled a peaceful strike more than an armed rebellion. The officers who were injured or killed had typically confronted the soldiers and insisted that they would be punished if they did not return to the front.

At the suggestion of socialist soldiers, the mutineers organized themselves into councils which elected delegates to represent their interests. However, the chaos at the front prevented them from meeting in any organized fashion. The demands of the soldiers did not differ much by division or regiment, though. They called for improved conditions at the front, the beginning of peace negotiations, and the end of offensive operations. One representative letter reads:

"When the time came for us all to continue the attack on German soldiers in Belgium, we decided to demand our rights and the rights of our countrymen in the following things:

1. Peace and the end of the butchery.
2. Food, which is currently shameful.
3. The end of the injustices and outrages.
4. Peace to feed our wives, children, and to be able to give bread to those that are starving.

We demand peace, peace."

Some contemplated marching on Paris if their demands were unmet, but most opposed doing so before the government had been given some time to respond. With their victory in Lille, many soldiers believed that an acceptable peace could now be achieved. Even as the influence of socialist firebrands grew, most earnestly believed that their government could still be negotiated and bargained with. The vast majority of soldiers approved of the change in high command, and hoped that Petain would represent their interests. Limited German counterattacks in August actually led many of the mutineers to temporarily disband their camps, which made the repression which was to follow easier.

Petain had loyal men from the territorial army (composed of those too old to serve at the front) head to different mutineer camps with their officers. The soldiers were presented with the option of either disbanding their camps and continuing to fight in defense of French territory or being transferred to a different portion of the front. Vast majorities of mutineers chose the former option. There were some incidents of violence between the "Fathers and Sons", but most were hesitant to fire on their countrymen.

With the camps disbanded, Petain now set about finding the "trouble-makers". This was made much easier by the existence of the councils; around 80% of those arrested in connection with the mutinies were elected delegates from the councils. 12,482 soldiers in all were tried in connection with the mutinies, 2,314 sentenced to death, and 967 actually shot. The crackdown on the mutineers was motivated by the mistaken conviction that it was set off by socialist agitators. In fact, though the agitators were important to organizing the revolt once it had already begun, there is little evidence that they planned it in advance.

The memory of the mutinies did not disappear from the army following the arrest of the council delegates. Most of the soldiers believed that they had accomplished something significant through the revolt; after all, large offensive operations were put on hold for the remainder of 1918, and the supply situation started to improve as industry ramped up the production of front essentials. Even as morale improved, soldiers internalized an important lesson about the efficacy of strike action, a development that contributed greatly to the rise of the so-called "Soldier's Syndicalism".

Economic Mobilization and Changing Conditions at the Homefront

In France, homefront conditions were determined largely by geographical location. Firstly, there were the vast swathes of Rural France which fared relatively well throughout the war. Secondly, there are the urban areas in which the standard of living stagnated during the first three years before beginning to decline in the war's second phase. Finally, there are the conquered territories in which French civilians were subject to brutal treatment by the German occupiers.

In France's rural hinterlands, the conscription of young men emptied the fields, creating worries about domestic agricultural production. The success of rural communities in both 1914 and thereafter in maintaining steady yields of crops attests to their deep resilience and self-organizing capacities. French peasants and agricultural workers would be rewarded by a steady rise in grain prices that enriched farmers and left many better off even late into 1919. They would remain the most unswervingly pro-war segment of the French population, and without their consistent support it likely would have been impossible for the nation to remain in the conflict for a full half-decade.

In urban areas, the rising price of grain was at first tempered by improved wages and welfare payments. The participation of socialist ministers in coalition governments gave skilled workers and the laboring poor an important advocate which frequently interceded on their behalf. Industrial conditions actually improved throughout the first three years of the war as the state took a more active hand in production. In the war's second phase, the fate of workers and the petite-bourgeoisie fluctuated more drastically, with the latter facing a more precipitous decline of their living standards from war-time inflation but with both groups in desperate straits by the war's final year.

In occupied northeastern France, civilians faced the harshest trials. Germans had seized some of France's wealthiest and most productive territories, which they proceeded to plunder. Domestic industries were stripped of their capital goods and French laborers were treated little differently than slaves by the occupying forces. The use of violence and repression to maintain order were pervasive, with French civilians frequently facing execution for failures to meet production quotas. Successive waves of the sick, indigent, and elderly were expelled to France proper, where citizens frequently treated their needy compatriots more as burdens than victims.

French industrial mobilization began at the end of 1914. Although the government had prepared large stocks of ammunition, artillery, and small arms, it did not anticipate a war lasting over a few months, and had no formal blueprint for creating a military economy. Chronic shortages of shells at the front compelled the state to begin organizing one at the end of the year. They quickly discovered there were severe bottlenecks of both manpower and raw materials. The former resulted from the draft, which removed millions of men from the workforce with little discrimination on an industry-by-industry basis. The only truly protected sector was transportation. Even armaments factories had only 40% of their prewar employees in December 1914, a number only slightly higher than the manufacturing-sector average of 36%.

In January, the French government released 450,000 men from the army to return to the factories. They would remain "mobilized", which meant in practice that they were prohibited from striking or joining a union. By July, most of the war-critical manufacturing industries such as chemicals and metallurgy saw their labor numbers recover to above 70% of prewar levels. By 1916, this would rise to 85%. Although the diversion of men from the army provided a temporary fix, the colossal losses suffered at Verdun and Lille ensured that manpower would remain a critical issue for the French economy throughout the war.

The shortage of raw materials resulted principally from the loss of the twelve northeastern departments to the German invasion, which were responsible jointly for over 50% of iron and coal production and over 80% of steel production. These were also some of the most agriculturally productive lands in France, and together they probably represented around 20% of French GDP. Their removal from the national economy created a supply shock as enterprises dependent on raw materials from the northeast were forced to slow down production.

Somewhat ironically, the loss of these provinces was exacerbated by the end of the trade with Germany, Austria-hungary, and Belgium, which together provided around a third of prewar imports. To secure the critical resources needed by its burgeoning armaments industry, France hoped in the long-term to increase untapped domestic production through financial incentives, but in the nearer-term it searched for new import partners and readily found them in Britain and America. The trade deficit ballooned as import orders from America more than tripled.

France's war economy was, like that of all the other belligerent powers, managed through a mixture of private market incentives and an expanding state apparatus. Compared to most of the other combatants, France placed a far greater emphasis on private initiative, with the government coordinating prices but playing no decisive role in the organization of the war economy. Some degree of cartelization occurred, but to a much lesser extent than in Germany or Italy. The leading firm in a given "group" was given power to distribute government orders among different companies under its aegis, but the groupings themselves were much more fine-grained than elsewhere, especially since they were divided into twelve different regions before being further subdivided by good type. The persistence of small industry throughout the war would have an enduring impact on French industrial structure.

Like Britain, the French state initially had solid financial credibility, particularly among its domestic population. Although they ran a deficit of over 40% of their GDP, France was not obliged to substantially raise interest rates in the war's first few years. The need to maintain the Franc's exchange rate and secure foreign currencies weighed more heavily on the government. Initially, this did not present acute problems because of the immense holdings of foreign securities among French capitalists, which the government simply purchased with gold before monetizing them for currency (typically American dollars). Until 1916, this reduced the need to rely on credit to prop up the exchange rate. Also helpful to French finances were the tens of millions in loans extended by Britain at low interest rates.

The robustness of French war finance in the conflict's first phase should not lead us to underestimate the degree to which financial mobilization reshaped the economy. Early on, the government monopolized capital markets, preventing the issuing of new stock without a license. While allowing for private initiative in industrial production, the state determined which industries would have access to capital and which would be deprived of it: enterprises which were not critical to the war effort were forced to rely on their savings, and as the war dragged on their share of the national economy plummeted. By 1918, the construction, consumer goods, and intermediate sectors all produced fewer than 50% of the goods they did in 1913.

Compared to Britain, Italy, and even Germany, French industrial mobilization placed a more severe tax on the rest of the economy. This is partially due to the tendency to convert existing plant to war production rather than invest in new capital goods, a pattern set by the emergency situation of 1914 but which was never substantially changed. More severe manpower shortages than elsewhere also meant that many highly profitable civilian industries simply did not have access to the requisite workers. The sharp contraction of France's national GDP (45% by 1918) is comparable only to Austria's in its severity. There is a case that the French economy never really recovered from the strain that war placed on it - even today, it is one of the poorest nations in Europe.

As the war dragged on, finances grew significantly tighter. Britain's growing army and its stupendous material needs drove up the prices of crucial American goods, forcing France to lean further on American loans to secure dollars, especially once most foreign securities had been monetized. Meanwhile, the battlefield defeats of 1916 led to a loss of confidence in the Entente in American capital markets, driving up the interest rates on loans and weakening the Franc. France's financial position was only salvaged by its ability to rely on patriotic domestic borrowers.

The French War economy also began facing problems. A wave of labor unrest in 1917 led to a gradual decline in productivity. The increased use of unskilled labor further reduced productivity and cut into the profitability of the armaments industries, which started demanding more money for their orders. With demand for armaments continuing to skyrocket while production stagnated, the annual rate of inflation rose from 12.5% to 26% within a single year. With this uncompensated for by a similar rise in wages, household consumption and the standard of living of workers in urban areas declined sharply.

The need to reduce inflation and keep standards of living steady led the Painleve government to institute price controls and a war profits tax in July 1917, but both proved ineffective. The state still did not have the accounting apparatus to effectively implement the latter, and rampant evasion crippled the attempt to cap the prices of housing and food. By August, domestic borrowers in France were beginning to show more tentativeness toward new bond issues, raising the prospect that without a "bailout" from Britain, France would simply be unable to afford to fight the war without resorting to more inflationary measures.

Seeing little other option, at the end of the year the government made a decision to modestly scale back war production to give itself more fiscal flexibility. In effect, France chose to prioritize dealing with domestic discontent at the homefront over ensuring its army the proper supply of munitions. This could not have come at a worse time. 1918 would be a year of mammoth campaigns, and the reduction of food rations and imposition of shell quotas had a devastating impact on troop morale.

The retrenchment in supply orders actually caused the economy to shrink further in 1918, but war austerity, in combination with a hike in welfare payments, did halt the decline in living standards and temporarily slow the growth of inflation. These policies would come under attack from the Republican minister Georges Clemenceau, who savaged the Painleve Government for abandoning the army and refusing to fully mobilize the French nation. Once in power, Clemeanceau abandoned both fiscal and industrial restraint, using all the means at his disposal to increase war production and discipline labor; he would stretch the French economy to its breaking point if it was necessary to win the war.

Politics, Protest, and the Antiwar Movement

At the war's outset, the main parties of France entered into a coalition government to ensure broad public legitimacy. There were some fears that Jean Jaures' revisionist-Marxist SFIO would refuse to support the war, especially after a right-wing nationalist made an attempt on his life. Jaures was an antimilitarist by temperament, and he tried his utmost to prevent the war. Once it began, however, he felt compelled by the national mood, his own patriotic convictions, and the pro-war stance of France's largest labor union to join the new coalition government.

The second Viviani government included all of France's main parties. These were the Republican Federation (FR), the Republican, Radical, and Radical-Socialist Party (PRRRS), the Independent Radicals (RI), the Democratic-Republican Alliance (AD), and the French Section of the Workers' Internationale (SFIO). The center of gravity in parliament, as well as the party with the most seats, was the PRRRS. This was actually not a single political party but a union of the social-liberal radicals and the social-democratic Republican Socialists. To their right were two centrist parties, the RI and AD. Both of these were distinguished by a mixture of anticlericalism, anti-socialism, and economic liberalism, with the AD somewhat more open to alliances with the right.

Finally, there was the centre-right Republican Federation, which could trace its lineage back to the progressive orleanists of the 19th century. They too, were economic liberals, but they were much less hostile to the church: many of them were opponents of Dreyfus and most opposed the 1905 law instituting a separation between church and state. Their support was overwhelmingly drawn from the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie.

Over the first six months of the war, France cycled through a number of cabinets as parliamentarians successively lost confidence in the competence of different leaders. There was grave concern about the growing influence of the military. Eventually, Aristide Briand, a Republican-Socialist, was given reins over a new government which lasted until the disaster at Lille. His resignation was followed by a short period in which the conservatives, tepidly supported by the two centrist parties, gained ascendancy. The socialist ministers quit this new government of their own accord; Ribot was something of a bete noir, and Jaures would face an outright revolt of his party's left if they participated in the coalition. Nonetheless, Jaures himself made clear that he, along with the vast majority of the party, still supported the war.

It is likely that no government could have survived Verdun, but Ribot's was particularly vulnerable because of the charge that it was acting to protect the conservative French chief of staff, Joseph Joffre. The sudden power vacuum and industrial unrest at the beginning of 1917 temporarily paralyzed the French parliament. George Clemenceau and Joseph Caillaux (of the PRRRS) both made a bid for the Prime Minister's position, advocating diametrically opposite paths forward. Clemenceau argued for a more full mobilization of the French nation, forceful repression of labor dissent, and to refuse to enter into any peace talks that would not guarantee French control of all German territory along the Rhine's west bank. To those who believed the war had been a mistake, it was Caillaux who looked to be a prophetic voice. Although the subject of countless scandals which tarnished his reputation, his advocacy for a compromise peace in which France regained Alsace-Lorraine in return for concessions elsewhere appealed to many. In the end, the feud between Clemenceau and Caillaux temporarily damaged the credibility of both politicians, and parliament turned to the mild-mannered mathematician Paul Painleve to form a new centre-left government.

The Painleve government confronted multiple crises, the most immediate of which was growing strikes in textile and armaments factories. Until 1917, French labor had been relatively quiescent. This was not too much of a surprise, given the reformist and patriotic leadership of the CGT, France's largest union. Owing to the structure of the French economy, organized labor tended to have less power in France than in Italy, Britain, or Germany. A very high percentage of skilled laborers were considered "independent workers", and the small size of many enterprises made it harder to create the networks needed for a robust union movement. At the start of the war, the CGT had under 100,000 members. This number increased exponentially over the following half-decade, but never reached comparable levels to British or German unions.

The workers in France's armaments and textiles industry can be classed into four categories. Firstly, there were those male French citizens who were either too old or too young to be mobilized. This group was frequently involved in strike action, but also moderate politically. Secondly, there were the mobilized workers who had been called back to the front, overwhelmingly left-wing socialists affiliated with the PSI. However, these same workers were tentative to initiate industrial action because they (legitimately) feared it might result in them being sent back to the front. Thirdly, there were French women, almost all unskilled, who began entering the labor force in greater numbers in 1916. Most unaffiliated with any union, the women workers were the most active group in the wartime labor struggle. Lastly, there were the workers from the colonies who began to arrive in 1917. Largely unskilled, they faced systematically worse conditions than the French working class. Their relative lack of participation in labor action can be mostly explained by pervasive French racism and workplace segregation, which undermined worker solidarity across ethnic lines.

The strikes of 1917 occurred in three waves, each of them led by women and joined by undrafted male workers, with varying degrees of support from the mobilized trade unionists. The first began in textile mills in France and the Loire valley, and eventually spread to a few armament plants in the area. There were some scattered calls for peace, but on the whole the strikes were focused on poor workplace conditions and inadequate wages. The upwards of 40,000 women who participated in the industrial action coordinated their activities mostly through word of mouth.Painleave's government chose a policy of arbitration and concessions, and by the end of the month most of the strikes had fizzled out.

A significantly larger strike wave began in July, when workers in several steel and dye plants in the Rhone valley walked out in demand for shorter hours, better wages, and the beginning of peace negotiations. These strikes featured a much larger male contingent, though they were still initiated by female laborers. This time, many of the mobilized workers also participated; they had already seen many of their comrades sent to the front, and they believed that they would likely be next regardless of what they did. Several shop stewards of the CGT, which had an anarchist faction despite its reformist leadership, led sympathy strikes in nearby French coal mines. The rapidity with which the strike spread to different industries alarmed Painleve's government, which was convinced of the need to take a harder line against the 115,000 striking workers. The CGT was ordered to close their doors to non-unionized and unrecognized labor organizations and to exert control over their own membership. Only partially successful in the latter, the government decided to employ soldiers and strikebreakers, typically colonial laborers, to bring an end to the unrest. Shortly thereafter, most of the material demands of the strikers were met, a move which was necessary to ensure continued participation of the socialists in the government.

Jaures' SFIO was, in fact, in the midst of an internal debate about whether to continue providing support for the Painleave cabinet. This debate began well before the July strikes, and it continued after them. A slim majority of the parliamentary delegation wanted the party to go back into the loyal opposition, and Jaures was himself divided on the matter. An antimilitarist by conviction, the victory of the Social Democratic left-centrists in Germany and the emergence of a pacifist worker's movement in revolutionary russia both buoyed his belief in the possibility of a peaceful solution to the war. Jaures began to place pressure on the Painleave government to investigate the possibility of a status quo peace. When the harshness of German terms became clear, Jaures own stance was temporarily hardened, as was his commitment to remain in the wartime government. Yet he retained some sympathy for his party's antiwar left.

The final wave of strike action occurred at the very end of the year. It began once again in the Loire Valley, but this time in munitions factories. It was far better organized then the action in January; although women did not join the CGT in the same numbers as men, they cultivated their own informal networks that proved remarkably effective at mobilizing for industrial action. The booming CGT, which gained upwards of 200,000 members in 1917, once again followed the lead of these women strikers. After 80,000 women walked out of munitions factories at the beginning of december, 35,000 CGT members joined them. Soon, the strikes had spread to other sectors of industry in Paris and the Loire Valley such as steel, glass, and chemicals. This time, the government acted much more swiftly to repress the strikes, fearful that they might spread to other regions. The abandonment of any pretense of arbitration led Jaures to finally quit Painleave's cabinet, after a secret internal vote which revealed the depth of discontent with the present government amongst socialist parliamentarians. With the loss of the socialists, Painleave was forced to reach out to either Ribot or Clemenceau; he was somewhat surprised when the conservatives were far more amenable to joining his government than the irascible but more ideologically akin Clemenceau.

This final wave of strikes were more politicized than the last few, and featured calls for an end to the war and a demobilization of the soldiers. However, most of those who demanded peace believed it would be on favorable terms. The protestors called for "Peace and Alsace-Lorrane", a combination that proved impossible to achieve. Most would have been horrified by the harsh German proposals that involved war reparations and the cession of French territory.

There were some groups which were organizing a more radical peace campaign. In the SFIO, a left-wing led by Ludovic-Oscar Frossard and Jean Longuet rallied early parliamentary opposition to the war. The refusal of the Socialists to send delegates to the 1915 Geneva Conference alienated many left-wing workers, anarchists, and intellectuals, who together formed the Council for International Peace. At first this organization was composed principally of syndicalist metalworkers, but it slowly attracted members from the growing teachers unions, led by the radical pacifist Fernand Loriot. Tensions between syndicalists and socialists threatened to tear apart the organization from its beginning, and in 1916 around half of the syndicalists left it to form an independent group.

The second conference of socialists, held in Zurich in May 1917, featured a delegation from the Council for International Peace, which also acted as non-official observers for the SFIO. It grew steadily throughout 1917, and was involved in the planning of the strike action in the Rhone Valley. The order for the CGT to close their doors to non-unionized organizations was directed in part at the growing collaboration of radical shop stewards with the Council.

Jaures managed to keep hold over the SFIO through carefully following the thread of majority opinion. By quitting the government at the end of 1917, he was in effect capitulating to an emerging pacifist center in the party. This center was not in favor of peace on any terms, but as the costs and length of the war steadily mounted, it grew more fervent in its denunciation of the government.

Fearing that a further deterioration of living conditions would cause a collapse of homefront morale, Painleave's government determined to make an effort to placate the working masses. Military austerity was implemented and welfare payments and other forms of income assistance gradually increased through 1918. Until the July mutiny, worker's protest was relatively mild. But the mass revolt of the army set off a political tinderbox on the home front. The Council for Peace immediately called for a strike in the construction, education, and metallurgic sectors, while the CGT found many of its workers striking without authorization from even regional authorities. "Strike until Armistice" was the slogan of the day. Women came out of their own accord. Over 84,000 of the 124,000 Parisian workers in munitions factories were on strike, and much of the Loire Valley armaments industry was paralyzed.

In the Socialist Party, an emergency meeting was called in which the party voted to endorse a manifesto calling for peace. The radicalism of this document was even more remarkable when one takes into account the fact that Frossard, Longuet, and other left-wing parliamentarians were absent, as they were participating in the Trenton conference. Jaures himself appears to have come to the conclusion that the war had to end. Without endorsing a general strike, the party offered support for the efforts of the antiwar protestors, and called on them to continue until the government signaled a willingness to make peace or until France was endangered by a German offensive. In this way, the party tried to thread the pacifist needle between revolutionary defeatism and inaction.

In Paris, there was only one man who stood as a credible alternative to the present government. Only Clemenceau had consistently refused to join the wartime coalitions, instead acting as an acerbic critic of Vivani, Briand, Ribot, and now Painleve. In late July, he gave a series of speeches which electrified parliament, rallied patriotic sentiment, and positioned himself as the sole savior of the French nation. In despair of the crisis engulfing France, the liberal parliamentarians handed over the reins of the nation to the cantankerous radical. He staffed his cabinet with politicians of such little prominence that they would be forced to rely on him, and he instructed the ministry of justice to eliminate the internal enemy.

The wave of repression that followed was severe and sustained. Charges were brought against Caillaux, Jaures, Loriot, Frossard, and Longuet. Political strikes were crushed, while a velvet glove was offered to those who would cease industrial unrest in return for wage increases and an English weekend (i.e, a Saturday rest). The leadership of the CGT was placed under pre-emptive house arrest, and a new law passed giving Clemenceau temporary enhanced powers to prosecute "Treasonous speech".

Clemenceau sacked Ferdinand Foch, who had now more than burned through the political capital he had won with the Flanders offensive of 1917, and replaced him with Philippe Petain, a popular general who advocated a defensive strategy. To placate the left, he elevated Robert Nivelle to commander of the northeast front, by now the largest concentration of French soldiers. He also instructed the war ministry to investigate what would need to be accomplished to make the French Army more like the British one - that is, equipped with more artillery pieces, shells, tanks, and grenades. A massive expansion of Renault's tank production facilities was planned, along with a new set of targeted taxes on the middle-class to incentivize domestic borrowing and fund the war effort.

In September, the Germans prepared another offensive in the Somme. The successful French resistance and counterattack seemed to vindicate Clemencau's leadership. The long awaited German assault had been stymied. In Paris, Bordeaux, and Lyon, patriotic crowds gathered to cheer the "savior of the republic". The publication of the drastic German war aims and subsequent French victory in the Somme led to a second popular mobilization. For the first time in years, the army found itself once again declining recruits, who often found their way to barracks and army bases even though there was little public information available on their location.

Clemenceau quickly put his political capital to use. A new punitive tax was levied on savings intended to direct the excess money in the economy into government bonds. With the submarine threat beginning to recede, new import orders were placed for wheat and grain. A institute of military research was created, with the goal of devising a new version of the Renault tank that would guarantee French battlefield technological supremacy for years to come. The quick and efficient implementation of these measures attest to the remarkable resilience of the French state in the face of crisis. "The Nation will be defended" became the catchphrase of the day. With France fighting for its very survival, protest and dissent were treated as threats to the continued existence of the nation. Yet the dissenters, overwhelmingly drawn from the working-class and urban petite-bourgeoisie, were also a part of the patrie. They remained steadfast in their private opposition to the continuation of the war, even as its public expression became treason. In determining to win the war at any cost, Clemenceau symbolically expelled half of France's citizens from the national community. In doing so, he had signed the death warrant of the French Nation.

 

[Curby]

This is part of a series on the Global Great War which I will have wrapped up by the end of 1919. In this post, I cover India, China, and Japan from 1914-1918 - I'll probably add shorter entries for Turkey, British South Africa, French West Africa, and Persia in another entry before we get to 1919. I also want a more dedicated discussion of the colonial soldiers, but I think that will make more sense in a forthcoming update on the state of the armies.
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The Global Great War: India, China, Japan, 1914-1918.​

Overview

When most laymen think of the great war, images are conjured up of the trenches in France, the frigid campaigns in the Alps, and the brutal fighting in East Prussia, Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus. For some time, the sheer scale of the land battles in Europe have obscured the other theaters of the war, which have been treated as secondary to the main conflict. The dominance of the European front in historical memory can be explained at least partially by the much larger numbers of men and materiel dedicated to it. Unable to project its naval power, Germany could not meaningfully challenge Britain's hold over its colonial empire.

Yet the conventional, eurocentric understanding of the war frequently obscures more than it explains. In particular, it tends to occlude the fact that the Great War was understood by most of its participants as a conflict of two imperial blocs for control of colonies and global resources. German, Italian, and British elites all conceived of the war in this way. The German drive to build an eastern empire was at least in part a reaction to their frustrated global ambitions, which were thwarted by British naval power.

However, the most crucial flaw in the standard account of the war is its failure to fully reckon with its role in transforming the politics of the global periphery. By "global periphery", we mean both nations that were subject to direct colonial rule, such as India, Madagascar, and Indochina, and nominally independent semi-colonies exploited by global imperialism, such as China, Malaysia, Turkey, and Iran. The Great War forced the imperial powers to extract more wealth, manpower, and resources from their colonies while simultaneously weakening their relative power, setting off the growth of anti-imperialist, national liberation movements of a predominantly social-patriotic character. Though few of them had the same success as the European proletarian revolts of the First Era of Revolution (1917-1924), the unprecedented political mobilization in the global periphery laid the groundwork for the more victorious campaigns of the Second Revolutionary Period.

China and Japan

As the only industrialized imperialist power of the non-white world, Japan occupied a unique position within global capitalism. In East Asia, it had long been interested in carving out its own imperial domain, and achieved some success with the conquest and incorporation of Taiwan and Korea. Besides the limited size of its military forces and relatively low levels of wealth, the primary barriers to expansion were Britain and America, which both possessed daunting superiorities of industrial power and an interest in restraining Japanese strength in the Indo-Pacific. For some time, Japan had acted as Britain's catspaw against Russia, and its attempts to carve out economic concessions in Manchuria had consequently been begrudgingly tolerated by its European financier. America took a more consistently hostile line, and treated Japanese incursion into China as a threat to its "open-door" policy. The Honolulu Accords lowered the temperature somewhat, but also stoked British fears of Japanese-American dominance in the Pacific.

Distrustful of Japanese intentions, the British rebuffed an offer by the Japanese to track down and engage Germany's East Asia Squadron at the beginning of the war. Japan hoped to use the conflict between European powers to enlarge its colonial domain, and the British refusal stung harshly. A month later, in September, Japan issued an ultimatum to Germany to turn over Qingdao and its South Pacific islands or face a declaration of war. Shortly thereafter, Japan declared war on Germany and began the siege of Qingdao(1).

Within a year, Japan occupied all of Germany's South Pacific possessions, as well as Qingdao. After seizing the German concession, Japanese troops marched far inland into Shandong, taking control of the crucial Jinan-Qingdao railway line. Seeing little other option, Britain began to tentatively cooperate with Japan as an alliance partner. Then, in March, the Japanese foreign minister Hioki Eki delivered a list of twenty demands to Chinese President Yuan Shikai. Acceptance of them would have turned China into a de facto protectorate of Japan. Britain quickly rebuked the measure, and in a rare success of Anglo-American wartime diplomacy, convinced Bryan to present a unified front to the Japanese. Japan was forced to walk back the demands in Groups 4 and 5, which in practice meant that it gained little more than it already de facto possessed. The sudden Anglo-American cooperation bitterly reminded Japanese elites of the "Triple Intervention" of 1914, in which Russia, Germany, and France forced Japan to revise the harsh terms it imposed on China at the end of the First Sino-Japanese War. Once again, Japan felt that it was subjected to a different standard than the western powers(2).

Nonetheless, the demands formalized the loss of Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria and Shandong, leading to public protests that weakened Chinese President Yuan Shikai's already fragile government. China had thus far stayed out of the war, hoping that neutrality would be sufficient to stop a Japanese incursion from Qinghao deeper into the Shandong peninsula. Although Pro-German sentiment was widespread among the Chinese literary class, most believed that fighting a land war with Russia and Japan simultaneously would be an act of national suicide.

Following the issuing of the 20 demands, Britain contemplated a scheme for China to join the war on the side of the Entente. This would give them a seat at the table at a future peace conference, restrain Japanese expansionism, and provide China a pretense to build up an army that could act as a counterweight to Japan's ambitions. These plans were opposed by Japan, which threatened to make a separate peace if China joined the war as an Entente power. Then, in August, the Bryan administration approved a new issue of low interest loans to China which helped stabilize the government and finance the creation of an army. Without providing any explicit guarantee of Chinese territory, secretary of state Andrew Carnegie privately assured Beijing that America's interest was in the stability and integrity of the Chinese state. This substantially reduced the Chinese interest in joining the war, though it did sour American-Japanese relations, ending the ambiguity about Japan's foreign policy direction and placing it more firmly in the British camp(3).

For the next few years, Anglo-Japanese relations slowly recovered. In 1916, Japan joined the Treaty of London, committing itself to not signing a separate peace. The onset of the u-boat campaign in late 1917 sharply increased British dependency on Japanese naval power; at one point, more than twenty Japanese destroyers were present in the Mediterranean on convoy escort duty. Japan used its leverage to pressure Britain into the Portsmouth Agreement, in which it agreed that Qingdao would remain under Japanese control, sparking anti-british and anti-japanese riots in China(4).

At the time, the Chinese government was beginning to recover from several years of crisis. In 1916, Yuan Shikai attempted to declare himself monarch, but soon discovered he did not have the support of many of his own generals. In a short "national protection war", the loyal Beiyang army of Duan Qirui won several victories against the rebels, concentrated overwhelmingly in the south, but then retreated after the front in Yunnan deteriorated into a stalemate. In the wake of the retreat, Sun Yatsen declared a rival nationalist government in Guangzhou. Shortly after returning to Beiyang, Qirui overthrew the government of Shikai and declared an end to the experiment in monarchy. More American loans allowed him to build up his army once again, after which he proceeded to successfully topple Sun Yat-sen's constitutional protection government in the Southern Pacification War. This time, a military governor was appointed and the KMT driven back into the mountainous terrain of Yunnan(5).

Qirui's military dictatorship soon faced renewed warlordism in the outlying provinces. Nonetheless, his control over the center of the country was sufficiently secure to contemplate joining the Great War. With Russia knocked out, anti-british sentiment running rampant, and Italy looking liable to surrender, China began weighing its options for joining a war against Britain and Japan. Japanese accession to the Treaty of London scuttled the hopes of British neutrality in a Sino-Japanese war, but it seemed unlikely that Britain could contribute significant troops with its armies tied down in France and the Balkans. In August, secret talks began between China and Germany; the latter insisted that Qingdao be returned at the end of the war, but was willing to commit to ending Japanese privileges in Shandong and Manchuria if China joined the war. Even with these tantalizing rewards on offer, China was hardly in a place to fight Japan in a conventional military conflict, and Germany had little real assistance it could offer so long as it was blockaded by Britain. Consequently, Qurui resisted calls to join the war from the nationalist "June 10th" movement (named after the day the Portsmouth agreements were signed), and China remained neutral throughout 1918 despite growing tensions with Japan.

Throughout the course of Bryan's presidency, Sino-American relations steadily warmed. Clause 3 of the Trenton Resolution, prohibiting exploitative and neo-imperial trade practices, was aimed specifically at the unequal treaties. In August 1918, Duan Qirui traveled to America for a state dinner, where Bryan announced funding for a new iron and steel works complex in Shanxi. With the domestic economy sluggish and financiers increasingly hesitant about extending further loans to Britain and France, capital began migrating to Chinese markets. The Treaty of Washington formalized this state of affairs, giving American investors de facto privileged access in return for lowered American tariffs on Chinese goods. Britain and Japan could only look on with concern and consternation at these developments(6).

In Japan, a debate was raging in military circles about the next step in the war. Fears circulated that Duan Qurui was on the verge of building a strong, centralized state in China that could resist Japanese encroachment. While this was largely a fiction disproved by his tenuous control of over half of China's provinces, the steady growth of the disciplined and loyal Beiyang Army would make it much more costly for Japan to impose further concessions on China. There were other figures, principally civilian politicians, naval officials, and domestic reformers, who opposed a preemptive war. They argued that Britain would not support Japan in such an endeavor, and that it would likely harm its international prestige. It would also make it impossible for Japan to engage in a proposed pro-white Siberian expedition, and likely weaken its position at a peace conference.

The force of these arguments steadily wilted as the war effort of the Entente faltered. By the time Italy surrendered, most military leaders in Japan concluded that Britain and France would lose the war. And yet, British naval power meant that Japan could ill afford to alienate Britain and America, something which an incursion further into China would likely accomplish. Before the army could launch any fait accompli, the Haro Takashi government came to power, which quickly acted to restrain military adventurism. Takashi sent the Foreign Minister Uchida Kosai to the United States to negotiate a solution to the "Chinese Problem". The Japanese wanted recognition of the entirety of China as an area of "Special interest" to Japan, permanent limits on Chinese troop numbers, and the right to inspect and monitor the Chinese military. Bryan was willing to concede the former two demands if Japan in turn committed to not seek any further economic concessions in China. Uchida knew that such a proposal would be unacceptable to the Japanese military, which still viewed the war as an opportunity to expand its influence on the mainland.

The failure of negotiations with the Americans led the Japanese to Britain and Bonar Law's conservatives. Britain had been nearly as concerned with the expansion of the Chinese Army as Japan, and proved surprisingly receptive to Uchida's proposals. While they would not tolerate a Chinese protectorate over all of Japan, they were amenable to the notion of troop restrictions, so long as "peacekeeping powers" were shared between the two nations. The secret agreement reached on September 1918 gave British permission to a second Sino-Japanese war, so long as future economic concessions were kept to a line north of Shanghai, in the Jiansu, Shandong, Hebei, and Shanxi provinces. The matter of the Siberian intervention was no longer of real concern for Britain, which had given up on the prospect of reopening the Eastern front after the continued failure of white offensives. Of course, Britain would not join Japan in such a war, but it would do all it could to act as a friendly neutral. The subject of what might happen in the event that China formally joined the Central Powers was never discussed.

India

The jewel of Britain's empire contributed more to the war than many independent nations. Over 1 million soldiers fought outside the subcontinent, and over one million more worked overseas in critical war industries. In all, more than 2.4 million Indians served abroad, with the number actively fighting or working overseas increasing exponentially toward the end of the war. This enormous mobilization was only possible with the consent of the native Indian elite, who sincerely believed that the war was an opportunity to win the right of home-rule. It was thought that once Indian soldiers distinguished themselves fighting for the Empire, England would reward India with greater autonomy and rectify the humiliating conditions imposed on even educated Indians, who were treated as racial inferiors and second-class citizens. The repeated frustration of these aspirations would go a long way toward creating a unified Indian nation (7).

At the beginning of the war, the Indian National Congress was the primary site of native political self-organization in India. This institution was historically dominated by educated reformers and lacked a mass support base. Like the Irish Parliamentary Party, it was disposed to work within the imperial system to secure greater autonomy. An upswing of radicalism in the 1900s led to several confrontations between the moderate majority and radical leaders, who included Bal Gagandhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, and Bipin Chandra Pal. They were not able to win control over the Congress, and each was eventually either arrested or deported to outlying provinces, weakening the radical faction.

The half-decade of war placed tremendous stresses on both ordinary Indians and the Indian bureaucracy. India was forced to pay for the entire cost of its army, which required sharp tax hikes to counteract domestic inflation. The standard of living for those who lived in the areas under most direct British control suffered the most; this is where the colonial administration was most efficient at collecting taxes, and these were also the areas where domestic populations were most dependent on European civilian goods which became unavailable during the war.

The protest movements of the war's early years originated from outside of the INC. Germany, Turkey, and the radical Indian-Nationalist Ghadar Party organized a mutiny in mid-1915 which was only foiled by the extensive British intelligence network. The harsh repression that followed contributed to the rise of Tilak's home-rule leagues. Recently returned from exile in Mandalay, Tilak began organizing a mass protest movement to press for a formal commitment to Indian home rule. After Austen Chamberlain, the archconservative secretary of state for India, made several public comments which needlessly inflamed the protests, he was replaced by the somewhat more moderate Arthur Balfour. Hoping to mollify the protestors, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, proclaiming that India would be given "The chance to exercise an increased degree of self-government befitting its status as a great civilization." The ambiguity of the statement and its lack of a clear timetable quickly came in for criticism from many in the home-league movement, but it did temporarily slow the growth of protest and reassure many wavering moderates in the INC (8).

To many Indians, the following years demonstrated the duplicity of Balfour's promise. Living standards continued to deteriorate, and returning soldiers complained of ill treatment, racism, and miserable front conditions. Following the introduction of the draft in 1916, Britain faced chronic manpower shortages which it could only make up with colonial labor and soldiers. In late 1917 and 1918, there was a sharp hike in military conscription and an increased use of coercive means of labor mobilization; the presence of "penal provisions" to enforce labor contracts was condemned forcefully in a 1917 INC memorandum. There was also the issue of preserving Indian labor for Indian economic development. Ambica Charan Mazumdar, the moderate leader of the INC, demanded that emigration controls be instituted to halt the "Evacuation of skilled Indian workers". Yet this process only accelerated as Britain's factories were emptied to feed its conscript army. The social dislocation and economic disruption caused by the loss of labor contributed greatly to the rise of the INC's radical faction (9).

In 1918, the INC moderates hoped that a liberal-labor government would come to power in England to forge a compromise peace and set India on the path to home rule. Instead, a Tory landslide occurred, and with it, a new slate of harsh wartime laws suppressing dissent. With fears brewing of a second Ghadar mutiny, the leaders of the INC's radical faction were once again arrested, sparking protests in Bengal and Punjab that were bloodily suppressed in the so-called "May Massacres". This was the final straw for the moderate faction of the INC, who called an emergency meeting in which they endorsed the principles of the Trenton Resolution and called for India to be accorded self-rule and dominion status within the next five years, with "power over finance and the maintenance of domestic order" to be devolved in the next year. Motilal Nehru, a home-rule radical but not a republican, was elected the new president. Without calling for a complete break from Britain, he demanded that India be considered a ""progressive and autonomous nation with coequal rights amongst the other peoples of the earth" (10).

Yet for all of its newfound radicalism, the INC still had only a tenuous connection to the broad masses. Only Mahatma Ghandhi, one of the newly radicalized moderates, had anything approaching the following of Tilak. He organized a movement of mass noncooperation that eventually led to his arrest and imprisonment in late 1918. His failure to coordinate with the burgeoning and well-funded Ghadar movement was one of the key missteps in the campaign for home rule.

It would soon be corrected. Unbeknownst to most of the INC, the radical Lala Lajpat Rai had recently been smuggled back into India from his self-imposed exile in America; with the assistance of the German Embassy in San Francisco, compliant American officials, and local Indian independence activists, he boarded an ocean steamer to Calcutta under a false identity and disembarked without issue with several million pounds in his briefcase. Thereafter, he established links with the most prominent militants of both the Ghadar Party and the non-cooperation movement. The events which followed in the wake of his arrival would send reverberations that echoed far beyond British India.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Footnotes​

1. This is somewhat different from the course of events IOTL, where Britain requested that Japan protect British merchant shipping; with the Honolulu Accords, Anglo-Japanese relations have frayed somewhat, which means Japan makes the initial offer of assistance and is turned down. Seeing an opportunity to seize the German colonies, Japan declares war anyways, but is not technically an "entente power" until later in the war (unlike IOTL).

2. The seizure of the Jinan-Qingdao railway parallels events IOTL, with the difference that the action appears even more brazen to international observers since its a solely Japanese operation, rather than a Japanese-British one as IOTL. The "twenty demands" mirror the "twenty one" of OTL, though the scale of Anglo-American cooperation is a bit greater here; Britain's worries about America's position and the diplomacy that consequently occurs actually means that a more united front is presented here, despite better British-American relations IOTL. As a result, Japan has to walk back Group 4 of the demands as well as Group 5, leading to more Japanese resentment. (Group 4 state that no power besides Japan is permitted to acquire any additional concessions)

3. The scheme described in this paragraph did occur, as did the Japanese opposition to it. However, the Japanese opposition is somewhat more robust, as evidenced by the threat to make a separate peace. The events described later are unique to this timeline.

4. Japan also signed the Treaty of London IOTL, but did so a year earlier. Japan sends over twice as many destroyers to the Mediterranean ITTL because Britain is in much more desparate need of support without American assistance against the u-boat threat. As a result, Britain is even more dependent on Japan, which lets the latter wring more formal concessions from it before a peace conference.

5. These events involve the same characters as OTL, but follow a very different course. Butterflies from a slightly more stable Chinese government mean that Yuan Shikai attempts to declare himself monarch somewhat later; he now has the support of the Beiyang army of Duan Qirui, which means that he has much more success in the national protection war, even if no decisive victory is secured. As IOTL, though, Qirui and Shikai soon come to blows. Because of the relative success of the Beijing government in the national protection war, Qirui is able to raise another army and depose the KMT government in Guangzhou. In practice, this means China has a significantly stronger central state than in OTL and can act as more of a counterweight to Japan. Of course, this is speaking in relative terms; warlordism is still very much a problem.

6. All of this is completely novel to this timeline, and will have big downstream effects on the global economy and geopolitics.

7. ITTL, India faces significantly more social dislocation, impoverishment, inflation, and misery from the war. This is because Britain simply runs out of available manpower somewhere in early 1918 (because of its larger army and the lack of American reinforcements), and has to lean on the colonies and dominions to try to make it up; with the latter much more capable of refusing requests for increased troop mobilization, it is India that is forced to bear the brunt of the war. IOTL, around 1.2 million Indians served overseas, with around 550,000 engaged in combat operations; here, 2.4 million do, with a slightly higher share of laborers due to the needs of wartime industries and Britain's effort to depend less on American imports.

8. Roughly similar to OTL, with the exception that the Ghadar mutiny is moderately larger due to an easier time accessing American funds and the home-rule protests a bit more vigorous because the conservatives ITTL mishandle matters more severely than OTL's liberals.

9. These were matters that many INC members were frustrated with IOTL, but they did not become as politicized as they are here.

10. Most of this did not occur IOTL, but it parallels some events that occur later, from 1919-1920.

 

[Curby]

An update on Russia below. In the interest of keeping this on the shorter side, I've skipped over a good deal of stuff that's going on in Soviet domestic politics, as well as some of the less important separatist rebellions. I do intend to cover these (especially the former), but I also would like to get the timeline to 1919, so I will likely push their coverage forward to the next year.

"To Secure this Beachhead of Worker's Power": The First Phase of the Russian Civil War​

From the Alternatehistory.com thread "PoD: Longer Russian Civil War(s)?"

I know most people on this forum don't think that the white forces had a real chance of succeeding in the Russian Civil War, but is there any way to at least get them to last into 1919? I'm interested in how a weaker Russia would effect the revolutionary period. Supply was obviously a pretty big issue for Kornilov's armies in Siberia - what if the Japanese launched the planned Vladivostok intervention and took over the Trans-Siberian railway?

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The Vladivostok intervention won't accomplish anything besides eventually putting Japan in a state of war with the Soviet Union. Unless they intend to push all the way to Central Siberia, there's no way to ensure that supplies get to the whites. There were a lot of red militias operating in the area, and they had control of most of the bigger towns east of the Urals. It's also awfully easy to sabotage a railway, particularly one as poorly constructed and with the freight limitations of the Trans-siberian one.

Honestly, the biggest thing you probably need to do is not have Kornilov suffer such a shattering defeat at Petrograd to open the war. The loss of some of the most battle-hardened white officers probably put them at a permanent strategic disadvantage. By the time he reached Moscow, he only had around half the troops he set out with, and didn't really have any means of raising more beyond conscripting peasants who would desert the army at the first chance.

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From what I've read, I think the larger issue is that the Germans were just not that interested in fighting the Reds? They managed to (barely) meet their population's food needs through the plunder of Romania and the food shipments from Ukraine, so they didn't have that much of a real interest in undermining the Soviets if it meant it would require diverting significant resources from the west. Even the white victory in the First Finnish Civil War was won much more due to the disorganization of the red militias than German aid, which was pretty meager.

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I read a pretty interesting timeline where a more successful Hetmanist coup in Ukraine leads to more German support for the summer campaign against the Ukranian Soviet republic, and the eventual rapprochement of Germany with the whites. It's definitely a bit of a Kaiserwank, but the latter bit actually seems pretty plausible to me; the British were barely funding the whites by the end of the year, so I could see them switching allegiances. I mean, they would probably have to agree to a Ukranian state, but would they really be so unwilling to bend on principle that they'd consign themselves to the rubbish-bin?

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I do think you probably need to get Britain to be more committed to the fight. Most historians actually think that Admiral Kolchak fought pretty skillfully with the resources he was given, but the British were just too focused on keeping France in the war until Germany exhausted itself and Ludendorff gave up some of his more insane war aims. Maybe if the war was going better for the entente, they'd provide more aid to the whites, but I also think there just was a pretty widespread impression that the cause was doomed? But perhaps if Kolchak and Kornilov were able to properly link up their two fronts, matters would have been different.

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Excerpt from Roger Baumann*, The Russian Civil War(s): A Non-Partisan Guide (Zurich: Axel Springer, 1981). ​

Following the proclamation of a Soviet Republic in November 1917, the Congress of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasant's Delegates was called to elect a new government. Bolshevik dominance in the large cities meant that they held a 275-seat plurality in the 680-member body. Not too far behind them were the SR's, who held a little over 200 seats, and the Mensheviks, with a bit under 150. These latter two parties were divided between a historically larger pro-war, pro-provisional government right and an anti-war, pro-soviet left. In the wake of the failed Kerensky coup, the right-wing delegates came under withering fire and were accused of aiding and abetting an attempt to impose military dictatorship upon Russia. At the behest of the Bolsheviks, a resolution was passed obligating all members of the Soviet to swear an oath to preserve the "Soviet character" of the new government and abandon cooperation with the Kadets and other bourgeois parties. A minority of right-wing Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries walked out of the Congress in protest, further emboldening the left.

The left SR's initially rejected the Bolshevik proposal for a left-wing socialist coalition, instead favoring a broad national unity government of all the socialist parties. They were outmaneuvered by Martov, who appeared on the verge of securing enough support among left-wing Mensheviks to form a government with his old rivals. Faced with the prospect of being iced out into the opposition, the left SR's chose to cooperate with Lenin, and later that week the Congress of Soviets appointed 55 Bolsheviks, 26 left SR's, 14 Mensheviks, and 5 Ukrainian socialists to the Soviet Executive Committee. This body was empowered to act as a legislature; it also chose the members of the crucial Council of People's Commissars (aka, sovnarkom) which was intended as a primarily executive body but also accumulated increasing legislative authority throughout the course of Russia's civil wars.

Officeholders of the First Council of People's Commissars

Position	Officeholder	Party
Chairman	Vladmir Lenin	Bolshevik
Head of Council-Administration	Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich	Bolshevik
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs	Maria Spiridinova	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissariat for Agriculture	Andrei Kolegaev	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissar of Military Affairs	Vladimir Karelin	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissar of Naval Affairs	Pavel Dybenko	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Labour	Julius Martov	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Trade and Industry	Leon Trotsky	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Education	Anatoloy Lunacharsky	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Food	Matvey Skobelev	Social-Democratic
People's Commisssariat for Internal Affairs	Alexei Rykov	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Justice	Prosh Proshyan	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissariat for Nationalities	Joseph Stalin	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Posts and Telegraphs	Lev Kamenev	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Railways	Victor Nogin	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Finance	Vladimir Milyutin	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Social Welfare	Alexandra Kollantai	Bolshevik
People's Commissar for Local Self Government	Isaac Steinberg	Socialist-Revolutionary
People's Commissar without Portfolio	Mark Natanson	Socialist-Revolutionary

The new government was formed shortly after Brusilov's victory in the Battle of Moscow. When news arrived of a cossack rising in the caucuses, it had to choose between directing Brusilov to pursue Kornilov's retreating army, or have him swing south to immediately confront the rebellion. Concerned about Ukraine's growing intransigence, the government decided to send the red relief army south, while Leon Trotsky was tasked with forming a new army to drive Kornilov out of Central Siberia.

Following the declaration of the Soviet epublic, the Ukranian Rada announced that it would not recognize its authority until it called a democratically elected national assembly. This demand was mostly a product of internal Ukrainian politics, which was divided between a minority of so-called "reconciliationists" and a larger grouping of centrist to left-wing nationalists. The former believed that some form of modus vivendi could be reached with the new Russian government, though there were internal disagreements concerning whether Ukraine would remain an independent socialist state in a Soviet confederacy or become an autonomous federal unit of a so-called "Soviet Union". The hardliners, more politically moderate and more closely connected with the burgeoning Ukrainian military, were unwilling to countenance any compromise and wished to push for full independence under German protection (perhaps a contradiction in terms, but not as they saw it). They hoped that the ultimatum issued to Russia would be refused, which would provide a pretext for declaring independence that the reconciliationists would accept.

Technically, advocacy for the return of the provisional assembly amounted to treason. However, a narrow majority of the Sovnarkom (mostly centrist bolsheviks and left-Mensheviks) supported placating the Ukrainians, and elections for the parliamentary body were held later that month. It was clear to everyone involved that this was a purely symbolic affair. After it met in Petrograd, red guards and left-sr politicians ramped up pressure on the institution until it dissolved itself, recognizing the Soviet as the only authority. Victor Chernov, the leader of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, denounced the extra-parliamentary maneuvering in sharp terms, leading to his temporary arrest and detainment in Petrograd.

In Ukraine, the hardliners forced a measure through the Rada declaring independence several days before the parliament met. They did so, therefore, before they could have known of the threats levied against the centrist SR parliementarians. This led Vynnchenko's reconciliationists to walk out of the government. While in the opposition, he began advocating a policy of "Neither subjugation to Moscow or Berlin". In practice, he urged a detente with the Soviet government and negotiations which would permit Ukraine to exist as an independent socialist nation in a customs and defense union with Russia. Given the Petrograd government's dependence on the national-chauvinist Socialist-Revolutionaries, this was likely a vain dream more than a concrete political possibility.

The defection of the left-socialists dealt a fatal blow to Ukraine's democratic experiment. Gradually, the army chief of staff Symon Petliura assumed control over the functions of the Ukrainian state, and began expanding the army in preparation for an offensive into Kharkiv and the Donbas. The left-socialists were first marginalized and then repressed; many of them fled east, and joined the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in Kharkiv. Early victories for the newly formed Ukranian People's Army came in January, when it crossed the Perekop Isthmus and captured Crimea from Kaledin's battered Cossacks. Later that month, it also wrested control of several cities in the Donbas region from the Ukranian Soviet Republic. Shortly thereafter, Germany formally recognized Petliura's government, though Ludendorff was concerned with the strength of the Ukrainian People's Army, and secretly plotted to depose Petliura and replace him with a more compliant leader.

Symon Petliura, the de facto military dictator of the short-lived Ukranian People's Republic​

More sanguine news came from the Caucuses. In late 1917, Brusilov bested a cossack army on the Volga, then advanced and won a series of pitched battles north of Rostov, decimating Kaledin's cossacks through the skillful use of artillery fire. The remnants of Kaledin's forces fled south into the Caucasian Mountains, where they assumed defensive positions and regrouped with the officers of the Black Sea Admiral Alexander Kolchak. In February, Brusilov's attempt to advance further was halted at the Kuban when he encountered a force several times larger than he anticipated. British warships had evacuated loyalist Russians at the Romanian front to ports in the caucuses, where they formed the nucleus of Kolchak's growing 1st Volunteer Army.

In the east, Kornilov's National Salvation Army and Trotsky's newly raised 1st Red Army fought brutal, attritional battles in Kazan and Ufa. Kornilov acquitted himself well in this struggle, managing to inflict several times more casualties than he suffered as he slowly withdrew to defensive positions in the Ural Mountains. He also solidified his rear by gaining control of several small Siberian cities, including Zlatoust, Ekeratinberg, Tyumen, Omsk, and Novosibisk. This task was eased by the rebellion of the Orenburg Cossack Host, which temporarily disrupted Trotsky's logistics. With returning troops and irregular militias loyal to the old provisional government, the cossacks occupied the key cities of Saratov and Samara, forging a tenuous link between Kolchak's Caucasian Front and Kornilov's Central Siberian one.

In March, the Warsaw Treaty was signed and ratified, formalizing the loss of Russian territories in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics. The Soviet government also pledged to withdraw its troops from Finland and Ukraine, where civil wars were being waged between pro-Soviet red militias and pro-German national independence movements. These would turn out to be rather hollow promises; though a slim majority of the socialist-revolutionaries favored signing a peace, only Spiridinova advocated for adhering to the terms of the treaty, and she only treated this as a tactical, temporary measure. Arms and volunteers continued to flow to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

​

Approximate Lines of Control Two Weeks after the Treaty of Warsaw​

Lenin suffered a torrent of criticism from the party's left for signing a "humiliating" peace. This came predominantly from the regional party newspaper in Moscow, controlled by the defencist left-communist Nikolai Bukharin. Soon, both Bolshevik and left SR comissars on Sovnarkom joined in on the criticism, most prominently Leon Trotsky and Andrei Kolegaev. The defencists pushed for the immediate deployment of Brusilov's army to Ukraine to quickly crush the pro-German Petliura government and force a fait accompli upon the Central Powers. With the assistance of the left-wing Mensheviks, centrist Bolsheviks, and a faction of antiwar, proto-anarchist SR's around Maria Spiridonova, Lenin was able to resist these calls for escalation, but they only grew more fervent as victory after victory was won against the whites. They were bolstered by the German emigre communists, who overwhelmingly joined the pro-war, left-communist faction based in Moscow. Rosa Luxemburg accused Lenin of "Betraying the German worker" by making peace with the Kaiser.

Petliura had been forced into an almost equally humiliating treaty. In return for German protection, he was obliged to host Central Powers troops at Ukraine's own expense and allow these soldiers to administer the requisitioning of grain. Unsurprisingly, he was forced to contend with the accusation that he was a German puppet, which he tried to combat with the use of incendiary nationalist oratory. This is likely what prompted Ludendorff to give the go-ahead for the disastrous Hetmanist coup in early April, which aimed to place the pro-German cossack leader Pavlo Skoropadsky at the head of the Ukrainian state.

The ataman's cossacks did manage to successfully seize Kyiv on April 3d, but loyalist soldiers aided Petliura in escaping unharmed, allowing him to flee to Zhitomir. Theoretically, Austrian and German garrison soldiers stationed nearby could have taken the large town in a matter of days if the order was given, but, in an exceedingly rare incident, Ludendorff balked. He did not want to be forced to commit to an extensive military occupation in Ukraine when troops were already sorely needed for the western offensives. In the next few days, the vast majority of soldiers in the Ukranian National Army declared their loyalty to Petliura's government. With Kyiv surrounded, the Hetman surrendered without a drop of blood being shed.

In the resulting chaos, "volunteers" diverted from Brusilov's red army captured Chernihiv, the remainder of the Donbas, and advanced to the Dnieper river at several locations, while a British-supported expedition of white cossacks landed in Sevastopol, retaking the city almost bloodlessly. The kyiv fiasco, as it came to be called, was a disaster for Germany and Petliura alike. They still had to rely on one another - Petliura for protection, Germany for grain - but now their relationship was mired in suspicion and mistrust. Moreover, Petliura now governed over a much diminished territory, and the fighting required to retake the lost lands in the east would likely decimate crop yields.

Anti-Bolshevik forces were somewhat more successful elsewhere. Armed with British artillery, the 1st volunteer army fought a bloody offensive that retook Rostov in May, while Kornilov captured the town of Ufa west of the Urals. However, the logistical isolation of his army was causing increasing problems; supplies of bullets and artillery shells were both woefully inadequate. Kornilov hoped to move south from Ufa to Orenburg, where he could link up with Kolchak with the aid of irregular cossack battalions. Instead, he was halted on his march south by Trotsky's numerically superior 1st Red Army, and a counteroffensive forced him into another retreat.

In June, a pincer offensive from Trotsky and Brusilov broke the back of the Orenburg cossack rebellion, cutting off the fragile supply corridor from Kolchak to Kornilov. The latter now began the long march east along the trans-siberian railway, hoping to eventually reach the Pacific. The 1st Red Army followed in the wake of his scorched earth retreat, taking the cities of Tyumen, Omsk, and Novosibirsk in the next few months. For the residents of these towns, this period of time was widely remembered as a nightmarish ordeal; first Kornilov's soldiers looted and razed the towns, before the Red Army arrived to take what food and goods remained and execute individuals suspected of collaborating with the whites.

Over the same period, Petliura's army fought indecisive and attritional battles with Red Ukrainian militias near the Dnieper. After Germany warned Russia to evacuate the red volunteer brigades in Ukraine or face a renewed offensive in Belarus, Petliura was able to make additional progress, and took back Melitopol and Chernihiv in August. In September, Kolchak's 1st Volunteer Army attempted to drive north toward Voronezh; while initially successful, Brusilov and the red Ukrainian militias soon launched a flanking counteroffensive before Kolchak could secure his logistics, forcing him to engage in a fighting retreat deep into the caucuses. Eventually, he would be forced to evacuate his armies to the Crimea. The defeats inflicted on the white forces were hardly sanguinary for Petliura's government; with mistrust still running high between him and his German benefactor, he would be helpless before a concerted assault from either Trotsky or Brusilov's armies unless the Central Powers sent more troops.

Germany made clear that another assault on Ukraine from regular Soviet forces would mean the resumption of war. Secretly, a group of left-communists and SR's conspired to depose Lenin as chairman and launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They were buoyed by funds dispersed by British intelligence services and the failure of Central Powers offensives in the west. The plan was to call an emergency meeting of the Soviet executive committee after a sufficient number of Bolsheviks had been won over to their line, which would elect a new Bolshevik-Left SR Sovnarkom with Bukharin or Trotsky as the chair.

They had made the fatal mistake of underestimating Lenin's political acumen, who had received news of the plot weeks in advance. In September, he called an emergency party congress of the Bolsheviks and publicized the Entente financing of the "infantile leftist" faction. After the troublemakers were demoted and denounced, the executive committee of the Soviets was called into session. With their left-communist partners marginalized, it was hoped that the left SR's would continue their support for the coalition government. Instead, in an internal meeting they narrowly voted against participating in any government with Lenin, the consequence of long-brewing discontent with harsh grain requisitions and the persecution of peasants. At this point, many expected the august Bolshevik chairman to resign in defeat. Instead, his old rival Martov saved his government by rallying the majority of the left-wing Mensheviks to join a new coalition. "The tragedy of 1903 redeemed!" read the Internationalist press. The alliance between the centrist bolsheviks and left-mensheviks was a long time coming: they concurred on the key issues of war, nationalities, and grain, and had formed a de facto bloc in the Sovnarkom against the more bellicose left-communists and SR's.

Officeholders of the Second Council of People's Commissars​

Position	Officeholder	Party
Chairman	Vladmir Lenin	Bolshevik
Head of Council-Administration.	Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich	Bolshevik
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.	Adolph Joffe	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Agriculture	Vladimir Milyutin	Bolshevik
People's Commissar of Military Affairs	Joseph Stalin	Bolshevik
People's Commissar of Naval Affairs	Pavel Dybenko	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Labour	Julius Martov	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Trade and Industry	David Riazanov	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Education	Anatoly Lunacharsky	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Food	Matvey Skobelev	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs	Alexei Rykov	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Justice	Nikolai Kylenko	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Nationalities.	Sergo Ordzhonikidze	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Posts and Telegraphs	Lev Kamenev	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Railways	Victor Nogin	Bolshevik
People's Commissariat for Finance	Yuri Lurin	Social-Democratic
People's Commissariat for Social Welfare	Alexandra Kollantai	Bolshevik
People's Commissar for Local Self Government	Lev Karakhan	Social-Democratic

The first business of the new government was to negotiate an end to the explosive situation in Ukraine and the Baltics, where red insurgencies fed calls for Soviet intervention. In German-held Riga, a delegation comprised of Julius Martov, Leonid Krasine, Joseph Stalin, Alexei Rykov, and Lev Kamenev met with Gustave Stresemann and other German diplomats to hammer out a "grand bargain". The Soviets and Germans both wanted an end to the pervasive frontier violence, the former to permit the consolidation of the new revolutionary state, and the latter so that their efforts could be focused fully on the west. For each side, there was a real interest in securing a deal. At this point, Ludendorff would have preferred full Soviet control of eastern Ukraine if it meant an end to the fighting and more regular grain shipments to Germany. The matter of Kyiv, Crimea, and the territories west of the Dnieper were considerably more vexed; the Soviet diplomats demanded all the Ukrainian territory east of Rivne, which would have put them in position to invade Galicia if full-scale war was ever restarted. Ludendorff wanted to avoid doing anything that would unduly strengthen the Soviet state or reduce its dependency on Germany.

By necessity, the deal reached was a compromise. On the matter of Ukraine, Germany agreed to recognize Soviet sovereignty over all the lands east of the Dnieper, except for a narrow strip running from Kherson to the eastern side of the Perekop Isthmus on Crimea's northern border. After Petliura's government was toppled by a German offensive, the Soviets would provide logistical assistance to help dislodge the British-supported white army from Crimea, which would remain occupied by Germany. In return, Kyiv would be ceded to the Soviets, though it would be demilitarized. Rivne, Lutsk, and Ternopil would be incorporated into a semi-independent Polish state under German suzerainty, while the remainder of the lands would form a Western Ukrainian state under joint Austro-German protection. Further north, Germany would recognize Soviet control of Minsk in return for a small indemnity.

In the Baltics, the Soviets agreed to cease arming Estonian and Lithuanian rebels, and in return, Germany would cede the city of Narva and the port of Murmansk, taken earlier in the year by Finnish nationalists. In the south, the Germans agreed to recognize Soviet sovereignty over eastern Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, on the condition that they be given rights to at least 40% of the oil in Baku. With the British having recently seized the key oil-producing city, the overriding German concern was to make sure the rich oil fields did not remain in their enemy's hands.

The Soviets also agreed to an expansive plan of reparations, to be paid for primarily with food and minerals. The cession of the grain-rich lands of Ukraine was intended to enable the Soviets to make good this payment, which would be crucial if Germany was to feed its population and continue the war effort. This was the real "blood price" the Soviets were forced to pay in return for the cession of border territories.

The treaty provoked howls of protests amongst both the left-bolsheviks and the SR's, who accused Lenin of capitulating to German Imperialism. A clique in Moscow composed of Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, Franz Mehring, Karl Radek, Andrei Bubnov, and Vladimir Smirnov issued a protest in several local newspapers, prompting several of them to be charged with breaking party discipline and threatened with expulsion. No formal censure was made against the German emigres, but in various party outlets they were accused of a lack of gratitude; there was some truth to this, given the effort the revolutionary government expended to traffic propaganda (written principally by the red emigres) into Germany.

With Russia's food supply devastated by the civil war and an ongoing refugee crisis, there seemed to be little opportunity for actually meeting the treaty conditions without placing significantly more pressure on Russian and Ukrainian peasants. The left-bolsheviks had little ability to organize opposition to the treaty; the vast majority of urban workers were still loyal to Lenin's government. There was more resistance among the peasantry, who linked the more coercive grain requisition practices to the exit of the left SR's from the coalition. In the last two months of 1918, peasant unrest spread across Central Russia, presaging the next phase of the civil war.

The new Soviet state was still far from consolidated. While much of Central and East Siberia was under Soviet control, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Russia's arctic north were all outside its sovereignty. Additionally, Kyiv and East Ukraine was run by a semi-independent Ukranian Soviet Republic, which was doggedly resisting the requests for increased grain shipments. In the west, Hetman Pavlo Skorapidskyi's Ukrainian state, intended to be a buffer between Germany and Soviet Russia, was facing a fanatical national insurgency from the remnants of Petliura's army, who took to the woods before they could be captured by the Austro-German offensive intended to topple the nationalist government.

Further south, in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, authority was divided along ethnic and religious lines. A transcaucasian unity government was formed following the revolution, intended to maintain order and guard against the Turkish and White Russian threats. Its leaders were moderate Mensheviks and socialist-revolutionaries who pointedly refused to swear allegiance to the revolutionary government, but who also resisted calls to declare independence from it. They were a lesser participant in the Treaty of Warsaw, which forced them to cede western Armenia to Turkey. In the months thereafter, the tenuous cross-ethnic alliance disintegrated as Georgia and Azerbaijan declared war on Armenia, seeking to seize border territories. A more healthy Turkish state may have taken advantage of this situation, but it had its hands full preventing a British breakout from Adana. Instead, it was the British who capitalized on the conflict, marching north and invading Azerbaijan on the pretext of defending its Armenian "ally".

Shortly thereafter, Bolsheviks and left SR's overthrew the government in Baku, prompting a panicked Georgia to conclude an armistice with Armenia. When a force of around 2,000 British soldiers reached Baku, they were initially repelled by the numerically superior Caucasian Red Army, but they would return later in August with a 5,000 man army that successfully besieged and captured the city. Yet they soon faced a relentless assault from nationalist Azerbaijani militias that made many doubt whether the city was worth holding onto even with the tremendous oil yields it reaped. More worrying signs for the British emerged when a coalition of left-SR's, left-mensheviks, and Bolsheviks came to power in Georgia and Armenia following Kolchak's decision to evacuate his army to Crimea. And then, shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Riga, German troops began streaming into Sochi. The first German-Soviet joint military of the Great War was about to begin.

In the final few months of the year, organized white opposition forces outside of Crimea gradually disintegrated. Kornilov's army, having suffered countless defeats in battle, started to dissolve in the freezing Siberian winter. The remnants of the Orenburg cossack host were crushed with a mixture of terror, propaganda, and repression. Slowly, the eastern half of Russia was incorporated into the new state, though in practice these regions had considerable local autonomy.

Even with the military successes of 1918, the new Soviet government was in an extremely vulnerable position. It was dependent on German goodwill, which was now conditional on the payment of an enormous and domestically unpopular reparations bill. The treaty had not brought an end to the conflict in Central Asia, or, for that matter, the pervasive frontier violence in Finnish Karelia. By any account, the second Sovnarkom represented a much narrower splice of the country; without any SR ministers, it could not claim to speak for the peasantry. For now, the left-SR's remained loyal to the revolutionary project, but they felt increasingly alienated by the present government. Echoing 19th century narodnik revolutionaries, a minority began to speak of "Going into the country" to help the peasants coordinate opposition to grain seizures and state repression. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, such talk could only mean one thing: insurrection.

 

[Curby]

1919: Endsieg and Revolution

To children returning from vacation, the home is new, fresh, festive. But nothing has changed in it, since they left. Only because the duties were forgotten, of which every piece of furniture, every window, every lamp is otherwise a reminder, does the Sabbath peace once more repose, and for minutes one is at home in the multiplication table of rooms, chambers and corridors, as it will appear for the rest of one's life only in lies. Not otherwise did the world appear during the first days of the Month of Roses, nearly unchanged, in the steady light of its day of celebration, when it no longer stands under the law of labor, and the duties of those returning home are as light as vacation play.

-Theodor Adorno.

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are days where decades happen.

-Vladimir Lenin.

The fatal defect of the socialist is his desire to immanentize the eschaton, to make of politics a new and secular religion.

-Eric Voegelin.

"In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face."

-Karl Mannheim

O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

-W.B. Yeats, 1919

Oh that year is a long time gone,
Oh that year is a long time gone,
But it'll be back before long…
'Till then I'll be singing this song

Say, there, did you hear the news?
The world has woken from its blues
Workers are striking in every town
They're gonna tear the bosses down

Richard was a family man
had three daughters in Birmingham
He was shipped off to France one year
Been fighting so long his mind's gone queer

Oh Richard could see some things right
That whole war was a madman's fight
He met up with some krauts that day
They resolved to make their masters pay…

Henry was a Minnesota lad
who worked the mines till his back went bad
He voted Bryan in sixteen
Just to see him shot by the machine

Oh Henry was a peaceful fellow
His friends all called him Mr. mellow
But when Wilson drafted his only son
He picked back up his old shotgun

The politicians told the men around
they'd cut all the radicals down,
bring the workers down to heel,
even if a man just wanted a meal.

I'll tell you the prosecutors' names,
Wilson, Churchill, and Petain,
For all their strutting they could never see,
The working man just wants to be free.

Oh that year is a long time gone,
Oh that year is a long time gone,
But it'll be back before long…
'Till then I'll be singing this song."

-Woody Guthrie, 1919

"Revisiting the Revolutions", European Broadcasting Collective -"The Month of Roses", November 19, 1998.
​

Optional Music:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OidIzOPERp8​

We are situated in the large, rectangular common area of one of the neo-modernist apartment buildings constructed in Naples during the 1960s, now converted into an assisted living facility for the elderly. The room is bathed in natural light from a single, continuous window pane stretching along the entirety of the upper portion of the right wall. A light-gray synthetic cotton and wool couch hugs an adjacent wall, which is decorated with the flags of the German Socialist Republic and Free Italian Council Republic. Both of these flags find contemporary use primarily on ceremonial occasions.

The camera is focused on a woman of mixed vietnamese-european heritage, who sits upright on a finely crafted wooden upholstered armchair in casual garb. She addresses the viewer in German, employing a tone which is solemn but not condescending.

"This month, we celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Amid the ongoing debate over the decommodification initiatives, it has become common to invoke its memory as a point of argument - perhaps you have done so yourself. And yet, for all we read about and discuss the revolution, there are fewer individuals than ever who have lived through it. Our EBC researchers learned that in this very apartment in Naples, there are no less than a half-dozen individuals who participated in the November Revolution. Today, we talk to them to get a sense of how it was made and experienced."

The camera slowly rotates, revealing six venerable individuals, all likely over the age of 90. They are dressed in clothes made primarily of cotton and synthetic fabrics; most of them are casual and relatively light, matching the warm climes of Naples.

"We are talking today to Anneliese, Tommaso, Bianca, Paolo, Cornelia, and Albert. Anneliese worked at a textile plant in Berlin."

*The camera zooms to Anneliese before recolored images are displayed of the worker's tenements in Neukolln.*

"Tommaso was a skilled metalworker, shop steward, and labor activist in Genoa."

A sheepish smile flashes across the face of the wiry Italian man, and then the program cuts to another recolored image, this one of a gathering of men in workmen's clothes discussing something among themselves at a factory canteen. A similar process is repeated as we are introduced to Bianca, a tenant farmer in Sicily, Albert, a Bavarian soldier serving on the western front, Paolo, an agricultural laborer in Romagna, and Cornelia, the wife of a shopkeeper in Rotterdam.

"I wanted to begin with you, Anneliese. What were you doing at the time?"

The lady adjusts her glasses, and speaks in a slow, precise tone, mixing occasional Italian words with German ones.

"Well, I was working in a small workshop, making clothes at the time…I began the war as a secretary, you see, and that…that ended in 1915, when the business was shuttered. My husband, Johanne, had just been sent off, which I truly didn't believe to be possible - you see, he worked making the shells, and for five years that had protected him from the draft, even as the other men of Neukolln were emptied out of the neighborhood."

"What do you remember of the months leading up to November?"

"Oh, it was intolerable - the whole war was, but 1919…" She pauses to think for a moment, her face frozen. "With the flu, and the street-goons, and the lack of bread, with the news of what was going on at the front…it appeared that the whole world was on the verge of collapsing."

"How about November? Did you get any hint of what was to occur?"

"No, not truly. There was always a plan for some strike or some action, but these never really came to anything at all. It's why, well-".

She pauses for a moment, now chuckling softly. The host urges her to continue on.

"Oh, I was unsure if you wanted me to speak of what happened in November yet."

"Please do."

"Well, as I was saying - it seemed to me, certainly at the time, and even moreso now - it seemed to me that there was something miraculous about these events. Now, I know what you are thinking - I am not a religious person, but I have found no other way to account for what happened."

"Can you expand on this?"

"Oh, well, perhaps I am being sentimental. You know, it is just that for five years, we had been living under a kind of terror, and then in a few days, in what felt like an instant, it was all gone. Not truly, but in that month, that is how it felt.

The whole city was draped in the red flags, the overseer was gone from the workshop, the police had laid down their arms, but what was most striking, really, was that it seemed that all of Berlin was in the middle of some sort of celebration…music blaring, men locking arms and singing, young women in the street with boys…it all seemed out of a dream, but then, when we heard of what was happening in Italy, in France,, and even in America and England, well…you must understand, even then nobody really understood what we were living through."

"Well, we've come to refer to the period as the November Revolution." A chorus of chuckles from the other participants, who have thus far been silent. "But you say you didn't understand it - do you think we do so better now?"

Anneliese frowns and gives a slight shake of her head. "No…if anything, I feel as if we understand it less. Now it is all about, well, the worker's struggle, the achievement of socialism, and I don't mean to gainsay these things, but that month, well, to me it felt more like a shedding of the past than a leap into the future. That came later, that was a different matter."

That verdict seems to hang over the gathered conversationalists for a moment, until Tommaso speaks up.

"I felt the same way at the time. I was involved in the walkout of a few dozen men, but the whole revolution, it did appear at first as something almost miraculous…there weren't many of us who thought we could win, you see, who really could imagine us workers taking power, but there were enough. I think, well, I think that one can't today really understand the revolution in the sense Anneliese wants us to, but it's not any failing of the young, really, they haven't lived through what we did, and they couldn't know what it was like when the spell of the war, really, of the whole past, was finally broken.

We had an expression for the time - the month of roses - you see, it really was just a month, in which we all felt that we could forget the war, the past, when it seemed as if something new was about to be born, and we just had to wait for it to emerge. That would take a good while longer, of course, and maybe we are…" The man glances to Anneliese for a moment. "Maybe we are simply being sentimental, but I do think there is something in that month which should be preserved, beyond the fighting and the struggle. There was a sense, I suppose, that things once closed had been opened, that for a time all things were possible, that we had at last come to an unexplored and undiscovered country which had been simply awaiting our arrival."

History as Apocalypse: Eschatological Experiences of the Great War, Karl Mannheim​

…In the final year of the great war, people began to understand their experience in overtly eschatological terms. The shift into a more religious register of discourse is present not only for nationalists and catholics, but also among socialists, secular liberals and revolutionaries of all stripes. Ravaged by plague, food shortages, and the depredations of state-funded paramilitaries, individuals started to conceive of the war's final year as a prelude to the apocalypse. Parallel visions also proliferated of a new age of abundance, to be ushered in by nationalist victory, the end of the nation-state, socialist revolution, the second coming of christ, or even American intervention in the war.

The widening of the conflict and the acceleration of fighting on the western front fed this eschatological understanding; the war was "meant" to wind down at this point, it was only "natural" for civilization to return to its normal order, and yet it appeared to only grow larger and more deadly as Netherlands and China entered the fray. Many started to predict that the conflict would soon consume the entire world, that the last five years were merely an introduction to the real conflict which was now beginning…

For the socialists, the call became "Either Socialism or Barbarism", either a clean break with the past or the continuation of the war until it transformed European states into massive, all-seeing military dictatorships and their populations into little more than slaves. For the nationalists, the slogan was either victory or degeneration, either a valiant campaign of national defense or a defeat in which the nation would inevitably disintegrate into the anarchy and lawlessness of social revolution. For liberal pacifists, only a peace followed by the creation of a unified democratic confederacy of nations could save Europe from the horror of both social revolution and permanent military dictatorship. The players had revealed their cards, and few would brook any compromise with the enemy…

Incompetence or Historical Destiny: International Socialism in the Great War, Wilhelm Pieck​

…The standard line, adopted by the Luxemburgists and eagerly parroted by the successors of the Social-Democrats and Italian syndicalists, has been that the European revolution of 1919 was by necessity a movement from the masses upwards, in which the spontaneous action of the proletariat burst asunder the old regimes of Europe. This neatly absolves responsibility (and perhaps blame) from the international socialist movement, which met on no less than four occasions and, by the time of the Trenton Conference, at least signaled they were willing to use strike action to end the conflict and force a status quo peace.

Given the manifestly revolutionary situation that already existed in early 1919, it is a small wonder that the socialist movement in both its centrist and left-wing varieties did so little to coordinate organized resistance. If there were not a November Revolution, we socialists would be astounded at the timidity of even the most radical factions, and their consistent inability to work in tandem with worker's movements. We might even call it a historic mistake, a missed opportunity - but alas, the November Revolution has diverted attention from such questions.

Here, I will try to call us back to them. Why was the spread of socialism in both the factory and the trench not matched by an effort of socialist parties to wield their expanding social base for revolutionary ends? Was a popular revolt inevitable and the chaos of the revolutionary period inevitable, or might a trained and disciplined socialist party on the Bolshevik model been capable of carrying out a revolution by January, 1919, thus saving millions of lives from the lunacy of the decaying European bourgeoisie?

"Endsieg" and the War in 1919, Arthur Schlesinger Jr​

The key question of 1919 is not how revolution occurred, but why the combatants continued to wage war even when the danger of revolution was so palpable. For the entente powers, the answer had a great deal to do with the punitive German war goals; whatever the threat of social revolution, it was felt by French military officers and politicians that surrendering the eastern territories and consenting to harsh German reparations would constitute a national humiliation that France could not recover from. In Britain, pacifist sentiment among elites was significantly more widespread, but the realignment of politics in East Asia and the fear of an American-German alliance in the postwar era meant that most felt they had to keep fighting to contain the potential German hegemon before confronting the burgeoning North American one.

In many respects, Entente prospects improved in 1919. After a year in which their advantage in raw troop numbers deteriorated, the infusion of colonial troops allowed them to once again achieve a favorable correlation of forces. In conjunction with the technological superiority of the allied forces, most British generals believed that they could prevent a German breakout to Paris and bleed the Central Powers until Ludendorff was forced to come to the table. Few envisioned that the Germans would so quickly make up their military-technological deficit.

As for Germany and Austria-Hungary, matters were somewhat more clear. Even if we backet the idiosyncrasies of Ludendorff, most of the OHL and members of the cabinet privately expressed that the only way to avert revolution was to win the war. In fact, this was a sentiment also shared in France, Bulgaria, Greece, and Austria. Leaders broadly felt that the years of hardship must be compensated for with a decisive victory that would reconcile the people to the state. A defeat, or perhaps even worse - a negotiated, status quo peace - would call into question the entire purpose of the war, and thereby delegitimize the political elites who brought the nation into the conflict.

The decision to continue the war was a gamble made by desperate men fighting for their own survival. It was also a decision made with full knowledge of the deteriorating morale in the army. German and French soldiers were both close to their breaking point. A man can only fight in such miserable conditions for so long. As German Tanks began rolling onto the front in February, the fighting took on an entirely new character. The widespread dispersal of more effective offensive weaponry meant that the trenches no longer offered the same protection from assault. Simultaneously, the exhaustion of the soldiers precluded large-scale offensives. Consequently, the fighting devolved into small-scale, often extraordinarily brutal skirmishes. Even though the number of soldiers on the frontlines were around 20% smaller than in 1916 and 1918, casualties were 10% higher.

In a recent text, Enzo Traverso contends that from 1917-1919, the war shifted from a consensual "war of peoples" to a coercive "war of states". In 1919, this tendency reached its culmination with the introduction of manifold new forms of repression. At the front, three new forms of personnel were introduced in 1919. Though some of these were present in part in previous years, only in the final year of the war did they form an interlocking system of social control.

Firstly, there were the so-called "military police". These were not soldiers tasked with policing occupied areas, but loyalist, politically reliable personnel, typically junior officers, who had the task of ensuring discipline and quashing dissent. They frequently acted as conduits between the state and two other institutions: the frontline reservists and the office of internal military intelligence. The latter was typically, though not universally, a formally established institution within the military, which had the task of monitoring and tracking troop discontent and socialist agitation; in contrast, the presence of "frontline reservists" was rarely officially recognized, but they were employed pervasively throughout 1919. "Frontline reservists" was itself something of a euphemism, as the soldiers who composed these brigades were neither reservists nor truly on the frontline. Instead, they were situated several hundred yards behind the front, with the task of detaining or simply shooting soldiers who attempted to desert or flee.

The different nations employed these institutions differently, and frequently leaned on some more heavily than others. In Britain, the frontline reservists rarely shot soldiers, most often detaining them for a future court-martial. While there were an informal class of "military police", in practice they tended to be enlisted in the intelligence services. The relative lack of coercion can likely be accounted for by the British Army's superior morale, which was bolstered by generous leave times and (comparatively) luxurious supplies.

In France, Germany, and Austria, much more weight was placed on coercion. Germany created an expansive and efficient military police system, built on the solid bedrock of its stellar junior officer class. These officers frequently had some level of camaraderie with their soldiers, and, unlike in the French system, they were not designated officially as military police. More overt forms of coercion were farmed out to the troops at the rear and the military intelligence units, who frequently visited the front to arrest soldiers suspected of disloyalty. In France, the military police were much more reviled, but they also were smaller and only composed a fraction of the total officer class. Much more common was the use of loyal common soldiers as informants and spies.

The growth of the surveillance and disciplinary apparatus drained resources from the actual task of war. States started to conceive of the war as a battle on "two fronts": against the external enemy, and against internal military and domestic agitators. This new war, between the state and the domestic population, constituted the final culmination of the tendency toward the accumulation of state power identified by Traverso. Among the primary combatants, a whole slate of new government offices were created, tasked with the explicit purpose of repressing domestic and military disobedience. Only in England was there a sufficiently active liberal civil society to offer meaningful resistance to the state's assault on civil liberties; everywhere, the entire tradition of Liberal individualism was under relentless siege by totalizing military-bureaucratic states.

The metastasis and deformation of the state was a logical consequence of the miserable conditions which were imposed on domestic populations and the corresponding surge of social unrest. In part, so long as states continued to participate in the war, they had little control over this: the skyrocketing inflation in nearly every belligerent power could only be avoided by fiscal retrenchment, something which was politically and militarily impossible in this final and most deadly phase of the war. There were efforts made by these states to pacify domestic populations - more, in fact, than were made at almost any other point in the war. The war against the internal agitator had to be paired with a war of pacification which would improve living conditions and exterminate the poverty and want which fed discontent. In France, Germany, and Austria, real efforts were made to placate labor unions and improve factory conditions. Harsh new laws were passed against war profiteering. By the time the revolution broke out, it is likely that the burden of the war was more equally distributed than at any other point.

Yet by this point, this was more an equality of want than anything else. The growth of the state apparatus did not allow it to conjure forth the resources and wealth that had been decimated by the war. The decline in living standards - in the ability of the vast majority of individuals to reliably procure the most basic necessities - fell inescapably in every nation, and effected an ever-wider proportion of the population. By this point, it was the extensive policing apparatus of the state, not its meager attempts to rectify wartime shortages, which held back the tides of revolution. And it was not equipped to do so indefinitely.

 

[Curby]

Hey all! Smaller update, catching us up on what's going on in the Ottoman Empire, Spain, and South America. Mostly focused on political economy with the latter two - I will cover politics and labor in more detail when there are more significant divergences from OTL.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Global Great War​

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire fought a long war, longer perhaps than any of the other combatants. Since the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, the nation had been at arms; full demobilization would only occur well into the 1920s. Fighting devastated not only the borderlands of Iraq and Palestine, but also the heartlands of Turkish Anatolia. The urban population would not recover until the early 1960s.

Many in the ruling Committee of Union and Progress had some sense that the Empire was at grave risk, and there was broad support in the party for a project of national revitalization. The difficulties came, as always, in the specifics: a pacific majority looked to England and France for protection and hoped for integration into the British-led global market, while a more radical minority faction led by the Ottoman general Enver Pasha sought to imitate Germany's militarized, heavy-industrial pattern of modernization. The bold and frequently secretive maneuvering of the military faction forced the party majority into a purely reactive stance; the popular acclamation of the successful Albanian gamble led the pro-entente majority to endorse the provocative coup against their better instincts. However, it is likely that the greatest weakness of the anti-German faction was England's persistent indifference to Ottoman diplomatic entreaties, which delegitimized their attempt to chart a different course for the declining Empire.

Although the Committee of Union and Progress had rapidly turned Turkey into a one-party state, power was still broadly dispersed. In addition to the Central Committee, there was a general assembly of party-members and a government cabinet; the leaders of the party were forced to vie with each other for the support of CUP representatives, introducing some elements of internal democracy. With the onset of war, Russian and Serbian bellicosity helped rally the general assembly to the radical faction, and general mobilization began weeks in advance of the other powers, in response to the threat of a Russian invasion of Western Armenia.

Turkey's war has frequently been compared to Italy's: marked at its beginning by disastrous military failures which would only worsen over time, delegitimizing the national leadership and paving the way for revolutionary upheaval. By the end of 1915, Enver and Djemal Pasha, two of the most important figures in the CUP, had been humiliated by crushing defeats in Armenia and Sinai (respectively). The loss of Lebanon, Palestine, and much of Syria in the war's first year led to the dismissal of Djemal from army command, while Enver was demoted and cast out from party leadership. The one remaining member of the so-called "triumvirate", Talaat Pasha, steadily accumulated power as his rivals were exiled. Russia's weakened position following the Polish offensive allowed the Ottomans to retake a good deal of Western Armenia in 1916, which bolstered Talaat's position. Increasingly, he surrounded himself with hardline Turkish nationalists; the Armenian massacres and death-marches carried out in the wake of the reconquest of Western Armenia killed at least 1.1 million people, and in 1955 was officially recognized as an ethnocide by the League of Nations.

The Dardanelle Campaign soon presented Tasha with a new crisis. The German commander in the area, Lyman von Sanders, had repeatedly urged the Turks to expand the local defensive fortifications, but Talaat and his military advisors believed that there was little chance of Britain launching a concerted assault after they had already committed such sizable troop contingents to Syria and Iraq. Additionally, most thought - here, perhaps, more justifiably - that Britain would not risk its battle-fleet in a suicidal operation in the Dardanelle Staits.

The British attack, particularly the bold and daring maneuvers of the Navy, achieved strategic surprise. The horrific losses incurred - over ten ships sunk in total, with many more damaged - did not stop the bulk of the fleet from breaking through into the Sea of Marmara, where it could act as mobile artillery. Even more devastating was the blow to Ottoman Morale following the shelling of Constantinople, which spread panic in the city, hampering the resupply of Ottoman defenders. When British soldiers finally approached the city, threatening to encircle what remained of Turkey's European armies, many predicted that Talaat would sue for peace. An additional blow came just days later when the city of Smyrna fell to a revolt of the Ottoman Garrison, which declared loyalty to Mehmeht Sabahaddin, an exiled member of the pro-entente Liberal party.

While the Ottoman government began entering negotiations for an armistice, Mustafa Kemal, a corps-level commander, made the decision to evacuate the entirety of the 3rd Army in Constantinople, requisitioning a small fleet of sailing boats and dinghies to cross the Bosphorus in the middle of night, in some cases mere dozens of yards from British patrol boats. The success of this operation greatly enhanced Kemal's prestige, who was shortly thereafter given command of the entire 3rd Army. His reputation only grew when he marched this force to Smyrna, crushing the rebellious garrison and capturing Sabahaddin, who would be executed for treason shortly thereafter.

Emboldened by Kemal's heroics and outraged by British armistice terms, the Turks resolved to go on fighting. Talaat Pasha remained as the de facto head of the CUP, but faced increased challenges from an ultra-nationalist, ultra-secularist segment of the party aligned with Mustafa Kemal and the Ziya Gokalp. Simultaneously, a minority faction associated with the previous Grand Vizier, Said Halim Pasha, pushed for an end to the war and the acceptance of British terms.

The next two years seemed to validate the decision to continue the war. Germany looked to be on the cusp of victory, and the chaos following the October revolution allowed the Turks to regain additional territories in the caucuses and eastern anatolia. Army reforms improved the effectiveness of the military, which prevented several attempts by British forces to break out from Aleppo. The larger problem was the inability to procure weapons and ammunition from Germany; efforts were made at creating a domestic arms manufacturing sector, but these could only supply a fraction of the weapons that the army needed. The state had to turn to smuggling operations to supply its troops, which were frequently forced to ration artillery rounds and small arms ammunition. The hope was that the British would launch no major offensive, and that the nation could remain in the war and survive until Germany victory in the west forced British capitulation. In 1919, these assumptions would be cruelly disappointed.

Spain

Unlike the Nordic neutrals and the Netherlands, Spain's decision to adopt a policy of neutrality was informed less by its lack of war goals and territorial ambitions than the fragility of the state, the weakness of its army, and Spanish economic reliance on various belligerents. The Spanish constitutional system was in large part meant to empower landowning elites, with protectionist conservative interests and free trade, liberal ones alternating power in a corrupt system known as El Turno Pacifico. The exclusion of both the laboring masses and industrial bourgeoisie from political participation created political tensions that rendered the state weak and reliant on the military to prop up its rule. Uneven industrial development had also begun to exacerbate preexisting regionalist sentiments in Catalonia, the center of Spain's small but growing domestic industry.

Even though Spain did not fight in the Great War, the pressures it unleashed ushered in a transformation of the Spanish economic order with long consequences. In just over a half-decade, wealth and power shifted decisively from the old landowning elite to the Northern bourgeoisie and well-organized labor movements. The inability of the state to reconcile itself to the emerging class of industrial capitalists gave rise to regionalist movements and eventually created an improbable (and temporary) cross-crass alliance between the military and bourgeoisie which threatened the foundations of the Spanish social order.

In the near-term, the outbreak of the war led to a sharp decline in imports as Spain's traditional trading partners, Britain and France, scaled down their civilian industries and dedicated the produce of those which remained to domestic consumption. This led to a sharp rise in the price of every-day commodities, particularly foodstuffs and coal, which was followed by a more general inflation. For the millions of Spaniards who lived at a subsistence level, this rise in prices was an intolerable assault on their livelihood, and protests from the laboring poor brought down the conservative Dato government in early 1916. Even for workers who lived above subsistence level, the decline in standard of living was comparable to that of workers in the belligerent powers.

Equally important to Spain's wartime development was the surge of exports, caused by the demand of the warring powers for raw materials to feed their war machines. In the short-term, this led to a tremendous growth in corporate profitability and domestic capital, which was employed to expand the extractive sector, and in the medium-term, civilian-goods production. By late 1915, it appeared that the chronic import crisis and the attendant social unrest would act as a bottleneck of sorts on Spain's industrial expansion, but then the decline in trade between Britain and America allowed Spanish markets to absorb the difference. Not only did American imports spike during this period, bringing down inflation and gradually improving the standard of living for the working class, but exports to Britain increased once again as it sought iron and textiles which did not have to be purchased in dollars.

The wealth this brought to Spain bolstered the government of the Prime Minister Alvaro de Figueroa, also known as the 1st Count of Romanones. One of the most liberal figures in the political establishment, he was unable to solve the social problems that plagued the country, though the temporary rise in living standards did buy his government time and allow it to pass a budget through Parliament for the first time in many years. More consequential was his dalliance with the Entente, which led many of the Pro-German conservatives to suspect he was preparing to bring Spain into the war. In early 1917, a vicious, German-funded press campaign was initiated to bring down Romanones' government; it succeeded in sullying his reputation, but not in toppling him from power.

The next challenge to the government came from the "defense juntas". These were organizations of peninsular soldiers displeased with the system of army promotion, which was based on merit rather than seniority. In practice, this meant that soldiers stationed in the Army of Morocco received much better pay and were, on average, of higher rank. The count was dismissive of these juntas, and he issued an order for them to be disbanded in June; they refused, and the soldiers sent to arrest them were soon inconspicuously absent. Romanones government fell shortly thereafter. Dato came back to power, and issued a series of pay raises to the juntas that eventually convinced most of the soldiers to disband.

Dato's government would soon confront its own challenges, collectively called the "Crisis of 1918". Most date its beginning to the resumption of German unrestricted submarine warfare, which wrecked the Spanish merchant marine. Within 6 months, nearly 35% of ships had been lost, and merchants were refusing to send out more unless their safety could be guaranteed. The blow to Spanish imports was also severe, causing living standards to begin declining once again, though this took some time. In the near-term, the submarine warfare inflamed anti-German sentiment, contributed to the radicalization of the northern middle-class, and nearly led Spain into war with Germany.

In March, the regionalist league of Catalonia, an interest group for the Catalonian bourgeoisie, demanded that the government convene a regional Catalonian parliament to discuss foreign policy and the best means of revitalizing trade; when this was denied by Dato's government, the elected deputies met illegally and demanded the recognition of Catalonian regional autonomy. In response, the government sent the military to crack down on the meetings, which it did successfully in mid-April. Yet this proved to be only a temporary salve, for as soon as most military units had left, the meetings began again, prompting the Dato government to dedicate a division to "occupy" Catalonia. The socialist UGT narrowly voted to strike against the repressive military occupation, creating the bizarre spectacle of workers leaving their factories to protest in defense of a body constituted primarily by representatives of their employers.

Tensions eased somewhat with the fall of the Dato government and its replacement with a liberal one led by Manuel Prieto, who promised to negotiate with the Catalonian autonomists. Yet these attempts at diplomacy proved manifestly unsuccessful, and as 1919 neared, the two major Spanish trade unions prepared for a general strike, a prospect that put both the Catalonian bourgeois and Spanish government on edge.

South America

While the different nations of South America had varying cultures and patterns of immigration, they occupied a sufficiently similar place in the international economy to warrant speaking of them as a group. As a whole, these nations organized their economies around the export of agricultural goods and raw materials to overseas markets. By the turn of the century, Argentina had been the clearest beneficiary of this developmental pattern, becoming one of the wealthiest societies in the world off the back of its lucrative meat and grain trade with Britain. The relative lack of domestic capital and the weakness of the state (which lacked sophisticated means for raising revenue) meant that South American countries were dependent on wealthier, more developed ones to fund infrastructure and capital goods expansion, particularly Britain, Germany, France and America. On the political plane, they excluded most of the population from active participation in politics, despite having nominally democratic constitutions.

The onset of the war brought drastic inflation as imports shriveled and exports soared. The relative lack of domestic capital also meant that the expansion of export-oriented industries was slower than in other places. This was exacerbated by an evacuation of European investment capital from the entire continent, a process that began in the Second Balkan War as the outbreak of international conflict looked increasingly likely. In 1916, this process gained further steam after Britain overhauled its war financing; the new, high-yield bonds on offer led to another selloff of South American assets, which the nascent national bourgeois were now in a better position to buy. American capital did make some inroads, particularly in Brazil and the Northern countries, but following the crisis of confidence in the Entente foreign investment shifted to China rather than South America.

On the whole, these nations conducted most of their wartime trade with Britain and France, though with American neutrality and the leakiness of the British blockade, there continued to be significant trade with Germany and Austria until 1917. The contraction of trade with the Central Powers following the failure of Britain and America to renew the Alexandria Accords only led to a fall of total exports in Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia; the giant of the continent, Brazil, had already been strong-armed by British bankers into winding down its trade with Germany.

Overwhelming British naval superiority, economic ties to the Entente, and traditional francophilia precluded any of the South American nations from joining the Central Powers. In early 1918, during the high tide of German submarine warfare, several nations grew close to declaring a war on Germany, but balked once William Jennings Bryan made clear that such a move would incur American sanctions. Even Bryan's warnings were not enough to stop Argentina from declaring war on Germany at the end of 1918; the loss of over a dozen merchant vessels had fed a sense of nationalist aggrievement, and elites believed that they could slow the meteoric growth of the anarchist-influenced trade union movement through the mobilization of an army. In this, they were to be gravely mistaken.

In almost all South American countries, the war strengthened labor and political radicals. Social catholicism, indeginism, and Hispanism flourished in both the cultural and political spheres. Increasingly, Spanish societies were turning away from European models of state-building and development, which were discredited by the horror of the trenches. While some looked to the social-democratic model of Bryan's America, more turned to a form of rural-communalist romanticism, which shared some affinities with the anarcho-syndicalism of the trade unions. Art and literature concerned with the local and particular flourished; South America was imagined as a "Golden Land", unperturbed by the conflicts in Europe. While some have viewed this tendency as a form of romanticist retreat, it also contributed to the emergence of modern states and unified national identities.

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Summary of Divergences from OTL​

Spain

In Spain, the largest difference is that there is an even larger industrial expansion, with somewhat less social strife due to a higher standard of living for the working class. Compared to OTL, there is more growth in the socialist CGT rather than the anarchist CNT, but on the whole, both unions are around 20-35% bigger. Consequently, the labor movement is moderately more powerful, and slightly less radical.

The differences in Spain's development mean that there's no general strike in 1917. This leads to a pretty important change - without a big strike to scare the regional bourgeois into the hands of the state, the secessionist movement in Catalonia refuses to compromise with the government, causing an escalating spiral of repression and radicalization. Expect a lot of divergences from here on out.

South America

In South America, the largest change is the emergence of a much larger national bourgeois due to the more thorough evacuation of European capital. Industrial development is about the same; slightly faster in the south (Argentina and Chile), and slightly slower in the north (Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia). However, this development is also much more uneven than IOTL, occurring more tepidly before 1916, and more rapidly thereafter. The consequence is increased labor radicalization and the consolidation of anarchism in the Brazlian, Chilean, and Argentinian trade unions. All of this (plus Argentina's participation in the war without American assistance) is going to lead to some big downstream effects, but we won't begin to see them until the next few years. Stay tuned!