Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
The Reich at War
"...retirement of Beseler in early 1917 and his replacement with Falkenhayn was considered even at the time an excellent set of circumstances; Beseler, like his compatriots Karl von Bulow and Alexander von Kluck, were all in their late 60s (or older) and many of them had served in the Unification Wars, which made them heroes of Germany, but also much to old to sufficiently understand the vagaries of modern war.
Falkenhayn was young - only 55 at the time, thus the youngest man ever to earn the appointment - and was a favorite of the Kaiser and other retired luminaries like Hindenburg specifically because he had direct combat experience in the field in China. He had also served as the department head of the Supply Bureau on the General Staff before his appointment as Prussian Minister of War in 1913; between the two and his "freshness" in the eyes of the Kaiser and Chancellor Furstenburg, he was the ideal choice for a role that was by the late 1910s seen as needing something of an overhaul after Hindenburg's late reign and Beseler being long in the tooth along with his inner cadre.
The timing to overhaul the General Staff wound up being opportune as well, even if some worried that the men surrounding Falkenhayn lacked experience and the perspective that comes with age. As 1917 marched on, tensions in Europe reached their highest point, and it also marked the conclusion of the Great American War, from which European general staffs were gobbling up as much information as they could on the use of modern tools of death such as airplanes, landships, landmines, grenades, and concentrated artillery fire. The tighter, denser fronts of a potential European war meant that the incorporation of these stratagems into German war planning was essential; the experiences of American soldiers in the tight confines of, say, northern Virginia's woods and riverbeds would be more relevant to German operations in eastern France than cavalry battles on the wide open plains of Texas.
As it were, major overhauls of the War Plan I, as Hindenburg and Beseler had titled it, were going to be necessary anyways, and not necessarily in terms of doctrine. Hurried messages from Brussels in July of 1918 suggested, with good reason, that coming out of the Congo Crisis in Africa the month before Belgium had elected to forego its longstanding policy of neutrality and was sealing an alliance with France and Austria. This told the Generalstab in Berlin two things: one, that the Iron Triangle was still active, an open question after Austrian Emperor-King Ferdinand II&IV had made his famed "charm offensive" in Berlin the previous year, and two, that War Plan I now needed to be revised to account for Belgian participation in the war.
Such a revision was no small thing. War Plan I had been devised by Hindenburg in the early 1900s based on his work with Caprivi the previous decade and incorporating lessons learned from the Boxer War (and later reinforced by the brief, failed Norwegian War of Independence in 1905), where less numerous, less well-armed defenders had kept superior attackers at bay for days and weeks on end through the careful use of hardened defensive positions, especially reserve trenches to fall back upon, and had inflicted disproportionate casualties at will. Though Hindenburg, like most Prussian officers of his generation, had been reared on the "cult of the offensive," he was no fool, and the lessons of these two wars had made a tremendous impression on him and other planners such as Eric Ludendorff, who had helped him develop War Plan I. A future conflict, Hindenburg surmised, would pit Germany against France and Austria, and it was an open question whether Italy would make good on their treaty obligations depending on the contours of how the war broke out. In both cases (where Italy joined, and where they did not), Austria was still the more important target to take out first. One, the cohesiveness of its state and the quality of its Army were both thought to be lesser than that of France, and secondly, if Italy were to join in the war, then the terrain suggested a better pathway for Italy to participate, both in the Isonzo Valley and in pushing towards Trento and Tyrol to physically link up with Germany rather than rely on Swiss transport.
War Plan I, then, had always allocated the vast majority of German divisions, across four Armies, towards Austria, with one Army attacking across the Inn towards Salzburg and Linz, and two Armies attacking across the Sudetes aimed at Ostrau and the Moravian highlands, the backbone of the Austrian iron and coal industries and which would thereafter cut off much of central Austria from its oilfields in Galicia, which the additional fourth Army would then sweep up to secure the petroleum supplies and, critically, deny them to Austria and limit potential supply routes from neutral Russia. These axes of advance - from Munich, Breslau and two from Kattowitz - were aimed to interdict Austrian transport networks and put more pressure on Vienna initially, while screening forces would defend passes in the Bohemian Mountains while they waited for Prague to be cut off from the east.
This left four more Armies, one which was to be deployed towards Denmark - for which a force of that size was unlikely to be required - with a schedule to seize the entirety of Jutland within a week while the Kaiserliche Marine cleared the capable but plainly outgunned Danish Navy from the Kattegat, and the Sixth Army and Seventh Armies, which were to reinforce Luxemburg and the Saarland while the Eighth was held in reserve for a planned counteroffensive, as the French were expected to attempt to punch into the "Hindenburg lattice" of fortresses in the central and eastern Moselland, a region dubbed the Trier Triangle for the city in its center. This enormous defensive advantage enjoyed by Germany in this area would bleed the French offensive dry and then attack it with an offensive on the right wing with the Eighth, breaking it from the side and allowing a German march on Metz, Nancy and, beyond that, Verdun and Paris in due time. This immediate push of four primary armies into Austria and a fifth into Denmark depended on the French offensive being aimed exactly where Germany expected it would be, and Hindenburg had correctly noted that France's avenues of offensive into Germany were limited, especially due to the possession of Luxemburg. Belgium potentially entering the Iron Triangle dramatically changed that equation.
For one, while Belgium was a small country, it was a densely industrialized one with considerable government revenues, and though the obscene debts to patch together the Congo Free State were held primarily by the King personally, the state of Belgium was spendthrift and no stranger to taking on debt when it came to arming its military. Belgium, guarded long by its Treaty of London with France and Britain, the world's preeminent naval powers, had never constructed anything naval and thus was able to commit all its spending to the Belgian Army and building up a considerable fortress network inside the country as part of its policy, a la Sweden, of armed neutrality being the best guarantor of safety. There was an excellent professional core of eight divisions and then all Belgian men served as conscripts for a period of one year upon their seventeenth birthday; the Garde Civique, Belgium's national gendarmerie, was also trained and equipped at a level well above most such forces and would serve as an excellent auxiliary paramilitary force in any conflict. Belgians took a dozen military trainings annually, and men as old as fifty-five were obligated to such reservist duties. With the ample support of neighboring France, the Belgian Army and the Garde enjoyed cutting-edge equipment, especially in defensive artillery, and was able to mobilize a massive force within months if necessary.
Whether they would have months, then, was the open question to Falkenhayn. The inclusion of Belgium as a potential combatant opened up a number of problems, most prominently providing France a new axis of advance in the north rather than through the center of the Franco-German frontier. A Belgian alliance provided the high grounds of the densely-forested Ardennes, in particular the strategic crossroads of Bastogne, from which to thrust south, southeast, or east at will, and while the Eifel in northern Germany was poor grounds for an offensive, its early seizure could provide screening for enemy forces moving on Aachen and its railhead. This also meant that Luxemburg's immediate value would be somewhat neutralized with enemies on two directions, and fighting would be contained not to the rural areas around the critical Saar, but much closer to Cologne and the existentially important Ruhrgebiet to its north; all that limited such an offensive was the Aachen railhead, which was where the rail system of Belgium came together at the border rather than fanning out. [1]
Falkenhayn was also leery of an alternative presented to him by Ludendorff, one of the original War Plan I's drafters. The best way to eliminate the threat of a Belgian attack opening up a new flank of the front in the Ardennes and Meuse Valley was to attack Belgium first, punching through defenses near Aachen and Eupen to march on Liege and Antwerp thereafter, fanning across the Belgian rail network and forcing France to detach from Luxemburg to prevent a push towards the industrial heartland of the Nord-Est and the Somme River beyond it. While spreading the enemy thin through this method was strategically sound, provided that strategic goals in Austria were delayed to pursue it, it also meant that Germany would be violating Belgian neutrality directly, thus handing a geopolitical and diplomatic coup to the enemy and potentially inviting British intervention, which otherwise was extremely unlikely. Germany had an enormous trump card in being vaguely aware, albeit without hard evidence, that Belgium had foregone its own neutrality; this would be utterly wasted in such a preemptive strike.
As such, Falkenhayn reluctantly reported to the Kaiser, Furstenburg and War Cabinet the revisions to War Plan I he had made, now retitled as Fall Ost and Fall West - Case East and Case West. The Fourth Army would be pulled from attacking into Galicia and instead moved to the much-less fortified proximity of Aachen to hold against a Franco-Belgian attack in that sector, while the rest of War Plan I would proceed as otherwise planned. Nobody was particularly happy with this, even when war-gamed and suggesting a successful hold at Aachen and the Trier fortresses and a devastating counter launched across the plateau at Forbach. The risk of a Belgian breakthrough in northern Luxemburg out of the Ardennes, and the fall of Aachen, was a huge risk, and men would need to be diverted from the Second and Third Armies to prevent an attack from Galicia into Upper Silesia. Belgium had badly scrambled German war planning, and now Berlin needed to hope against hope, even after Cases East and West were separately approved as individual war plans rather than a comprehensive one, that Italy would rise to the occasion when called upon..."
- The Reich at War
[1] I forget where exactly I read this, but as I understand this one of the major limitations on a "France attacks through Belgium to get to Germany" alt-WW1 scenario, and a major reason why the Schlieffen Plan really needed to go through Belgium to work.
Falkenhayn was young - only 55 at the time, thus the youngest man ever to earn the appointment - and was a favorite of the Kaiser and other retired luminaries like Hindenburg specifically because he had direct combat experience in the field in China. He had also served as the department head of the Supply Bureau on the General Staff before his appointment as Prussian Minister of War in 1913; between the two and his "freshness" in the eyes of the Kaiser and Chancellor Furstenburg, he was the ideal choice for a role that was by the late 1910s seen as needing something of an overhaul after Hindenburg's late reign and Beseler being long in the tooth along with his inner cadre.
The timing to overhaul the General Staff wound up being opportune as well, even if some worried that the men surrounding Falkenhayn lacked experience and the perspective that comes with age. As 1917 marched on, tensions in Europe reached their highest point, and it also marked the conclusion of the Great American War, from which European general staffs were gobbling up as much information as they could on the use of modern tools of death such as airplanes, landships, landmines, grenades, and concentrated artillery fire. The tighter, denser fronts of a potential European war meant that the incorporation of these stratagems into German war planning was essential; the experiences of American soldiers in the tight confines of, say, northern Virginia's woods and riverbeds would be more relevant to German operations in eastern France than cavalry battles on the wide open plains of Texas.
As it were, major overhauls of the War Plan I, as Hindenburg and Beseler had titled it, were going to be necessary anyways, and not necessarily in terms of doctrine. Hurried messages from Brussels in July of 1918 suggested, with good reason, that coming out of the Congo Crisis in Africa the month before Belgium had elected to forego its longstanding policy of neutrality and was sealing an alliance with France and Austria. This told the Generalstab in Berlin two things: one, that the Iron Triangle was still active, an open question after Austrian Emperor-King Ferdinand II&IV had made his famed "charm offensive" in Berlin the previous year, and two, that War Plan I now needed to be revised to account for Belgian participation in the war.
Such a revision was no small thing. War Plan I had been devised by Hindenburg in the early 1900s based on his work with Caprivi the previous decade and incorporating lessons learned from the Boxer War (and later reinforced by the brief, failed Norwegian War of Independence in 1905), where less numerous, less well-armed defenders had kept superior attackers at bay for days and weeks on end through the careful use of hardened defensive positions, especially reserve trenches to fall back upon, and had inflicted disproportionate casualties at will. Though Hindenburg, like most Prussian officers of his generation, had been reared on the "cult of the offensive," he was no fool, and the lessons of these two wars had made a tremendous impression on him and other planners such as Eric Ludendorff, who had helped him develop War Plan I. A future conflict, Hindenburg surmised, would pit Germany against France and Austria, and it was an open question whether Italy would make good on their treaty obligations depending on the contours of how the war broke out. In both cases (where Italy joined, and where they did not), Austria was still the more important target to take out first. One, the cohesiveness of its state and the quality of its Army were both thought to be lesser than that of France, and secondly, if Italy were to join in the war, then the terrain suggested a better pathway for Italy to participate, both in the Isonzo Valley and in pushing towards Trento and Tyrol to physically link up with Germany rather than rely on Swiss transport.
War Plan I, then, had always allocated the vast majority of German divisions, across four Armies, towards Austria, with one Army attacking across the Inn towards Salzburg and Linz, and two Armies attacking across the Sudetes aimed at Ostrau and the Moravian highlands, the backbone of the Austrian iron and coal industries and which would thereafter cut off much of central Austria from its oilfields in Galicia, which the additional fourth Army would then sweep up to secure the petroleum supplies and, critically, deny them to Austria and limit potential supply routes from neutral Russia. These axes of advance - from Munich, Breslau and two from Kattowitz - were aimed to interdict Austrian transport networks and put more pressure on Vienna initially, while screening forces would defend passes in the Bohemian Mountains while they waited for Prague to be cut off from the east.
This left four more Armies, one which was to be deployed towards Denmark - for which a force of that size was unlikely to be required - with a schedule to seize the entirety of Jutland within a week while the Kaiserliche Marine cleared the capable but plainly outgunned Danish Navy from the Kattegat, and the Sixth Army and Seventh Armies, which were to reinforce Luxemburg and the Saarland while the Eighth was held in reserve for a planned counteroffensive, as the French were expected to attempt to punch into the "Hindenburg lattice" of fortresses in the central and eastern Moselland, a region dubbed the Trier Triangle for the city in its center. This enormous defensive advantage enjoyed by Germany in this area would bleed the French offensive dry and then attack it with an offensive on the right wing with the Eighth, breaking it from the side and allowing a German march on Metz, Nancy and, beyond that, Verdun and Paris in due time. This immediate push of four primary armies into Austria and a fifth into Denmark depended on the French offensive being aimed exactly where Germany expected it would be, and Hindenburg had correctly noted that France's avenues of offensive into Germany were limited, especially due to the possession of Luxemburg. Belgium potentially entering the Iron Triangle dramatically changed that equation.
For one, while Belgium was a small country, it was a densely industrialized one with considerable government revenues, and though the obscene debts to patch together the Congo Free State were held primarily by the King personally, the state of Belgium was spendthrift and no stranger to taking on debt when it came to arming its military. Belgium, guarded long by its Treaty of London with France and Britain, the world's preeminent naval powers, had never constructed anything naval and thus was able to commit all its spending to the Belgian Army and building up a considerable fortress network inside the country as part of its policy, a la Sweden, of armed neutrality being the best guarantor of safety. There was an excellent professional core of eight divisions and then all Belgian men served as conscripts for a period of one year upon their seventeenth birthday; the Garde Civique, Belgium's national gendarmerie, was also trained and equipped at a level well above most such forces and would serve as an excellent auxiliary paramilitary force in any conflict. Belgians took a dozen military trainings annually, and men as old as fifty-five were obligated to such reservist duties. With the ample support of neighboring France, the Belgian Army and the Garde enjoyed cutting-edge equipment, especially in defensive artillery, and was able to mobilize a massive force within months if necessary.
Whether they would have months, then, was the open question to Falkenhayn. The inclusion of Belgium as a potential combatant opened up a number of problems, most prominently providing France a new axis of advance in the north rather than through the center of the Franco-German frontier. A Belgian alliance provided the high grounds of the densely-forested Ardennes, in particular the strategic crossroads of Bastogne, from which to thrust south, southeast, or east at will, and while the Eifel in northern Germany was poor grounds for an offensive, its early seizure could provide screening for enemy forces moving on Aachen and its railhead. This also meant that Luxemburg's immediate value would be somewhat neutralized with enemies on two directions, and fighting would be contained not to the rural areas around the critical Saar, but much closer to Cologne and the existentially important Ruhrgebiet to its north; all that limited such an offensive was the Aachen railhead, which was where the rail system of Belgium came together at the border rather than fanning out. [1]
Falkenhayn was also leery of an alternative presented to him by Ludendorff, one of the original War Plan I's drafters. The best way to eliminate the threat of a Belgian attack opening up a new flank of the front in the Ardennes and Meuse Valley was to attack Belgium first, punching through defenses near Aachen and Eupen to march on Liege and Antwerp thereafter, fanning across the Belgian rail network and forcing France to detach from Luxemburg to prevent a push towards the industrial heartland of the Nord-Est and the Somme River beyond it. While spreading the enemy thin through this method was strategically sound, provided that strategic goals in Austria were delayed to pursue it, it also meant that Germany would be violating Belgian neutrality directly, thus handing a geopolitical and diplomatic coup to the enemy and potentially inviting British intervention, which otherwise was extremely unlikely. Germany had an enormous trump card in being vaguely aware, albeit without hard evidence, that Belgium had foregone its own neutrality; this would be utterly wasted in such a preemptive strike.
As such, Falkenhayn reluctantly reported to the Kaiser, Furstenburg and War Cabinet the revisions to War Plan I he had made, now retitled as Fall Ost and Fall West - Case East and Case West. The Fourth Army would be pulled from attacking into Galicia and instead moved to the much-less fortified proximity of Aachen to hold against a Franco-Belgian attack in that sector, while the rest of War Plan I would proceed as otherwise planned. Nobody was particularly happy with this, even when war-gamed and suggesting a successful hold at Aachen and the Trier fortresses and a devastating counter launched across the plateau at Forbach. The risk of a Belgian breakthrough in northern Luxemburg out of the Ardennes, and the fall of Aachen, was a huge risk, and men would need to be diverted from the Second and Third Armies to prevent an attack from Galicia into Upper Silesia. Belgium had badly scrambled German war planning, and now Berlin needed to hope against hope, even after Cases East and West were separately approved as individual war plans rather than a comprehensive one, that Italy would rise to the occasion when called upon..."
- The Reich at War
[1] I forget where exactly I read this, but as I understand this one of the major limitations on a "France attacks through Belgium to get to Germany" alt-WW1 scenario, and a major reason why the Schlieffen Plan really needed to go through Belgium to work.
It seems to me that a German victory depends on the Italian willingness to honor its agreements.
IMO even without Italy Germany has the advantage with full access to foreign trade
more that the Hungary part of Austria-Hungary will be virtually an enemy power
Honestly this seems like a really risky idea.
One, both of the main routes depend on an extremely narrow offensive corridor. The Linz offensive essentially has one major supply line it can rely, on that being the Regensburg-Linz railway line. As lat as the 1930's IOTL, the attacks on this road were viewed as extremely dangerous by german commanders during plans for potential invasion of Czechoslovakia. Here, a well executed counter-offensive from Budweis direction could cut the Germans from supplies long before they could reach Vienna. And while the southern flank does at least have somewhat large plain to advance on, the northern offensive essentially has some 50 km of whats called the Moravian Gate to advance through if it wants to push into central Moravia and onto Vienna later on. Actually no, considering the level of forestation in those years, make it around 25 km. Which is just about the ideal possition that Austria can deffend.
Two, ignoring Bohemia is a bit insane. Bohemia is not only an essential part of the empire due to the industrial and manpower support it can provide, but also the place where essentially all the previous Austro-Prussian wars took place. The Armeeoberkommando is quite likely to plan for a newest version of: "Prussia goes through central Bohemia". So leaving just screening forces to guard the border with Bohemia is quite a risk. Right next to Bohemia is heavily industrialized Saxony as well as Silesia. Returning to the first point, a push from Pilsen towards Regensburg would suddenly large part of the southern army without a proper supply route and likely needing to withdraw back for the deffense of Munich. And in Silesia, the fourth army would at least defend Breslau, but after its merry march towards Galicia, it would leave the northern sector open to an attack from Könnigratz.
Now, that is not saying that this isn't a workable plan, but it really seems to be a bit too hopeful. You would need either an utter suprise so that AH can't mobilize, which would be hard to achieve unless Germany leaves its own forces at only a partiall strength or that the AOK in Vienna will full on panic, withdraw forces from Bohemia and focus on deffense of Vienna while ignoring a well presented opportunity to strike German forces where it truly hurts. Attacking through mountains. You can say a lot about Hötzendorf and other minds of Vienna's high command, but they were always up for an ambitious offensive. That usually proved disatrous, but it might actually be the right move to pull here. And while it is quite possible to make this work in combination with a revolt in Hungary or something to that effect, Hindenburg of 1905 is unlikely to be aware or reliant on such a possibility.
Perhaps a part of the arny mentioned as assigned to Denmark could be used to deffend against attacks from Bohemia? If initiall counter-assaults met with dogged deffense, it would make more sense for Vienna to demand a shift towards deffending the capital while only leaving deffensive formations in Bohemia.
With this I agree - Italy is a major benefit, not a necessity.
I wouldn’t say useless; their performance in OTL was better than it gets credit for. That said, it’s hard to say how much the rebel Honved would be a problem that requires frequent solving.
My big takeaway from this is that the Moravian Gate probably doesn’t need two armies, and that one of those probably should be committed to thrusting into Bohemia a full sector west instead
Italy in this situation if don't do that, will remain alone in facing France and A-H in case of German defeat...not a scenario that anybody in Rome will be keen to live through, regardless of political inclination...so yes Italy will honor the alliance, expecially with the build up of the french rearmament and the increased tension with Wien.
Said that, while Italy is in a better position regarding equipment than OTL, it still will be a very hard effort due to the terrain in both front
Just keep everyone's favorite Luigi Cadorna far far away from northeast Italy and there's no way they'll be worse than they were OTL.
it's 1919, the idea that without a war Cadorna has not been dismissed by the role of chief of staff due to the is basically ASB...yep the man was that abrasive and had that level of political incapacity plus he and Giolitti really and i mean really hated each other.
Not considering that without the war in Libya he will probably not get the job as it was the only real candidate not touched by the failures of the campaign due to him not partecipating at that idiocy
Lord.
If they have any sense at all they’re going to use the Italians to fix as much of the Austrian Army as possible while the Germans go on a merry adventure to overrun Prague and Linz, eventually crippling Austrian logistics so much that the Italians are able to move on Innsbruck without casualties akin to OTL’s Italian offensives.
Once they link up they can move the Italian armies around by rail to prosecute the offensive against the Austrians and free German forces to move to the Western Front, or move Italian forces directly to the west.
They won’t have that much sense, but perhaps more than IOTL?
Faultlines: The Complicated History of Canada's Ethnic Tensions
"...that in many ways, the Tories were victims of their own success. The Canadian economy had, after all, boomed on their watch, and ethnic and sectarian tensions had quieted markedly even despite brief dustups such as the Ishii Maru affair in Vancouver in 1914 and the anti-Prohibition riot in Vancouver in 1917; immigration from Britain, Scotland and increasingly Ulster was continuing at a strong clip and many other Europeans, especially with the unemployment crisis gripping the great neighbor to the south, were choosing to find work in Canada's burgeoning, and tariff-protected, industries instead.
So why did the Tories elect to enter into what can best be described as internecine bloodletting in the autumn of 1918, all the way into the following spring? There were a variety of reasons, beginning and ending largely with increasing discontent among the rank-and-file with McCarthy's closely-held, personalist control of the Cabinet, and the ambitions of a cadre of rising figures who found the perfect catspaw for their hopes to topple McCarthy - Howard Ferguson, the former Minister of Finance who had resurrected his career in the relatively minor Cabinet post of the Minister of Mines, brought back into the fold by McCarthy in an effort to counterbalance the various factions in the party, and who in May of 1918 was appointed the Minister of Customs and Inland Revenue when those ministries were merged together for the first time in a wide-ranging Cabinet reshuffle.
The reshuffle had been necessary, in part due to a number of sudden retirements as several officials - nearly Ferguson among them until McCarthy, again in a stroke of irony, persuaded him not to - resigned from "His Majesty's Loyal Government" in protest of the looming passage of the New Year's Day Agreement, the compromise hashed out at the Irish Convention in Dublin to settle the question of government in Ireland once and for all and which would leave Ireland as a constituent Kingdom, but with powers more akin to a Dominion, such as Canada, Australia, or South Africa. In theory, Ireland was co-equal with the other Dominions; symbolically, however, its retention of the name "Kingdom of Ireland" suggested an order of precedence that ranked Dublin ahead of Ottawa, and while the Government of Ireland Act had not been passed yet, the symbolic resignations of a third of Canada's Cabinet was meant to send a message to conservative lawmakers at Westminster precisely what they thought of the looming vote that was regarded as a fait accompli.
As this book has mentioned frequently, it was a joke that Canada was "more British than Britain, and more Orange than Ulster" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and this manifested itself in several ways. Canada went to great lengths to resist American economic and, later, cultural influence; [1] they were also enormously proud of their identity, influenced in great part by American proximity, as the outpost of Britishness on the North American continent in a way that South Africans and Australians were not in their part of the world. Through the dominant political position of the Orange Lodges, this meant that Canada also paid a great deal more attention to the question of Ireland, and the passage of the Government of Ireland Act was of grievous offense to the Order as it went down. "Ulster has been betrayed," Ferguson thundered from the floor of the Commons, "and Canada with it!"
This opened up a question in the Tory ranks, one that McCarthy had kept the lid since taking over for Whitney five years earlier: what, exactly, was the aim of the Order - a defense of Protestantism, a defense of Canada's Britishness, or both? And was there a difference, or were they one and the same? For McCarthy, the answer had been rather simple - the Order's primary mission was to maintain an English Canada that enjoyed economic and cultural primacy over the backwards and Catholic French Canada, and that by defending the English language in Ontario, the Maritimes, and critically in the virgin West, Canada's Britishness was thus guaranteed. Though he was no student of Dutch politics, the Canada he envisioned was similar to the concept of pillarization in that country; English and French Canadians would enjoy their own institutions, newspapers, schools, even organs of government when one took the provinces into account, and in return for French Canadian acceptance of these terms outside of Quebec, English Canada would keep its interference in the culturally unique and sensitive Quebec to a minimum. The flaws in this line of thinking were apparent, as they disregarded Quebec as little more than an internal colony beyond the Island of Montreal, but this policy of co-noninterference had basically been accepted for the previous decade by figures such as Bourassa and was essentially an extension of Whitney's stance.
To make this work, of course, McCarthy needed more than merely Orangemen, and that was where his problems arose - his focus had been on siloing Canada into English and French segments, and forcing immigrants to choose between the two. Considering the cultural peculiarities of Quebecois insularity and suspicion of outsiders that typify her even today, it was an easy bet which way many of them would go, especially Irishmen who chafed at the control of Catholic parishes and other diocesal organs by the French, and thus served McCarthy as a useful wedge and a key pillar for his English chauvinism. It was in this context that many Irish in Quebec leaned Tory, whereas they generally leaned Liberal (and, soon, Progressive) in Ontario or Nova Scotia.
The question had a different answer if one asked many rank-and-file Orangemen, however, who saw little distinction between a defense of Protestant faith and a defense of the British Empire. The Anglican Church to them was Britain, and thus was Canada, and steeping for decades in a potent stew of anti-Irish contempt that considered British history essentially a long story of war against an evil, autocratic Roman Catholicism hellbent on world domination, the nuanced triangulation and anti-French polarization that McCarthy pursued was not just nonsense, but a betrayal. This boiling sense of frustration finally tipped over with the Irish Convention and its conclusion, which was the result that the Orange Order had feared for decades on both sides of the Atlantic and had even staged a soft putsch in Ireland to head off - the subornation of Ulster under an Irish government in Dublin dominated by Catholics, and the policy of Home Rule being a precursor to 'Rome Rule.'
The extent to which this belief was held to the point of being near religious dogma as the 1920s approached is hard to emphasize in a modern context, especially once the Order started its rapid secular decline in the 1950s and afterwards. It mattered little that Ireland quickly, though often fractiously and with unstable governments, established a working though imperfect democracy that quickly pillarized into separate but largely peaceful sectarian communities living side-by-side with little issue; the most vehement of Orangemen from Ulster decamped to Britain and Canada with lurid tales of oppression that only reinforced the views of Toronto's powerful Old Lodge political machine. As such, the Conservative Party in Canada was not merely a political party but an extension of a social movement, a movement that saw Catholic conspiracies behind every corner, and adopted a siege mentality within months, convinced that if London would betray her own subjects in Ireland, then Canada was truly the last line of defense of democratic self-government against Rome. [2]
As such, the first enemy that the "Ultras," as they came to be called, identified were Catholic Tories, demanding with no evidence and no reason other than their resentment over the Government of Ireland Act that they be purged from the halls of power, especially the Cabinet. Several former Cabinet ministers who had resigned in May began circulating in September an open letter, published in the Mail and Empire - the preeminent Tory paper, with the triple the circulation of the more liberal Globe and Star combined and thus regarded as the public mouthpiece of the Old Lodge - targeting in particular the Minister of Justice, Charles Doherty, and demanding his resignation. His crime? Being born to Irish parents, having attended a Jesuit college in Montreal, and most crucially, having fifteen years earlier served a yearlong term as the president of the St. Patrick's Society, a fraternal organization for Montreal's Irishmen.
Doherty was a strange target for a variety of reasons; he was as true blue a Tory as any, being firmly in favor of the National Policy, having criticized the United States' overzealous destruction in several Confederate States during the Great American War, and as Minister of Justice giving a speech in Winnipeg just a year earlier where he praised the end of official bilingualism in Manitoba schools, citing the "schools compromise" of the late 1890s that had brought about a Liberal government as "the twenty-year mistake foisted upon us by Laurier and his ilk." Doherty had even once gone so far as to refer to the provincial language policies as being a "preemptive campaign of containment against the Frenchification of Canada" and he had said at the annual St. Patrick's Luncheon in 1916 that the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society - French Canada's answer to the Orange Order, at least in theory - was a greater enemy to Irishmen in Montreal than the Orange Order, defending this fairly extreme point of view by suggesting that the Order, "for its faults, and they are many" did not deny Irishmen "advancement and enhancement within their own faith, and seek to dominate the institutions upon which Irishmen rely." It is plain to see why the more populist McCarthy, eager to find ways to appeal to a broader audience, would find a man like Doherty an outstanding ally.
Alas, to the Old Lodge, Doherty had to go, because he was a Catholic, and to them Catholics - regardless of tongue or ethnic origin - were part of a greater mob that threatened world Englishness and had infected, like a virus, even the liberal and once-Anglophone Protestant United States. Doherty was also an enemy of powerful Anglo-Quebecker interests who saw the Irish Convention as being the first step in a likely attempt by French Canada to flex its muscles, and afraid of the looming predicted oppression that was to occur in Ireland, wanted an all-hands-on-deck effort in Quebec, too.
McCarthy defended Doherty, publicly and before the Cabinet, which Doherty never ceased to thank him for, but the gauntlet was thrown down when a second letter was circulated, this one attacking Doherty in the Montreal press for his lenient stance on immigration to Canada and "undesirables streaming to our shores" (even though the Immigration portfolio was not his); this time, Ferguson added his name to the letter, as did a number of riding association chairs in Montreal, firing an even bigger shot across the bow. If McCarthy was to defend Doherty, it was to come at considerable political cost - and McCarthy's enemies not only had time and patience, they also had amongst them men who had no qualms of doing what they could to topple the Prime Minister and seize the ring for themselves..."
-Faultlines: The Complicated History of Canada's Ethnic Tensions
[1] In my head canon, Canadians are thus much more serious "aboot" trying to maintain a more distinctive accent from Americans and other various Anglophilic tics to make themselves distinctive. (I couldn't throw an "eh" in there anywhere, "so-aw-rry").
[2] If this sounds batshit to you, well, this is what the Orange Order in Ulster genuinely (and as far as I'm aware to this day) believes.
So why did the Tories elect to enter into what can best be described as internecine bloodletting in the autumn of 1918, all the way into the following spring? There were a variety of reasons, beginning and ending largely with increasing discontent among the rank-and-file with McCarthy's closely-held, personalist control of the Cabinet, and the ambitions of a cadre of rising figures who found the perfect catspaw for their hopes to topple McCarthy - Howard Ferguson, the former Minister of Finance who had resurrected his career in the relatively minor Cabinet post of the Minister of Mines, brought back into the fold by McCarthy in an effort to counterbalance the various factions in the party, and who in May of 1918 was appointed the Minister of Customs and Inland Revenue when those ministries were merged together for the first time in a wide-ranging Cabinet reshuffle.
The reshuffle had been necessary, in part due to a number of sudden retirements as several officials - nearly Ferguson among them until McCarthy, again in a stroke of irony, persuaded him not to - resigned from "His Majesty's Loyal Government" in protest of the looming passage of the New Year's Day Agreement, the compromise hashed out at the Irish Convention in Dublin to settle the question of government in Ireland once and for all and which would leave Ireland as a constituent Kingdom, but with powers more akin to a Dominion, such as Canada, Australia, or South Africa. In theory, Ireland was co-equal with the other Dominions; symbolically, however, its retention of the name "Kingdom of Ireland" suggested an order of precedence that ranked Dublin ahead of Ottawa, and while the Government of Ireland Act had not been passed yet, the symbolic resignations of a third of Canada's Cabinet was meant to send a message to conservative lawmakers at Westminster precisely what they thought of the looming vote that was regarded as a fait accompli.
As this book has mentioned frequently, it was a joke that Canada was "more British than Britain, and more Orange than Ulster" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and this manifested itself in several ways. Canada went to great lengths to resist American economic and, later, cultural influence; [1] they were also enormously proud of their identity, influenced in great part by American proximity, as the outpost of Britishness on the North American continent in a way that South Africans and Australians were not in their part of the world. Through the dominant political position of the Orange Lodges, this meant that Canada also paid a great deal more attention to the question of Ireland, and the passage of the Government of Ireland Act was of grievous offense to the Order as it went down. "Ulster has been betrayed," Ferguson thundered from the floor of the Commons, "and Canada with it!"
This opened up a question in the Tory ranks, one that McCarthy had kept the lid since taking over for Whitney five years earlier: what, exactly, was the aim of the Order - a defense of Protestantism, a defense of Canada's Britishness, or both? And was there a difference, or were they one and the same? For McCarthy, the answer had been rather simple - the Order's primary mission was to maintain an English Canada that enjoyed economic and cultural primacy over the backwards and Catholic French Canada, and that by defending the English language in Ontario, the Maritimes, and critically in the virgin West, Canada's Britishness was thus guaranteed. Though he was no student of Dutch politics, the Canada he envisioned was similar to the concept of pillarization in that country; English and French Canadians would enjoy their own institutions, newspapers, schools, even organs of government when one took the provinces into account, and in return for French Canadian acceptance of these terms outside of Quebec, English Canada would keep its interference in the culturally unique and sensitive Quebec to a minimum. The flaws in this line of thinking were apparent, as they disregarded Quebec as little more than an internal colony beyond the Island of Montreal, but this policy of co-noninterference had basically been accepted for the previous decade by figures such as Bourassa and was essentially an extension of Whitney's stance.
To make this work, of course, McCarthy needed more than merely Orangemen, and that was where his problems arose - his focus had been on siloing Canada into English and French segments, and forcing immigrants to choose between the two. Considering the cultural peculiarities of Quebecois insularity and suspicion of outsiders that typify her even today, it was an easy bet which way many of them would go, especially Irishmen who chafed at the control of Catholic parishes and other diocesal organs by the French, and thus served McCarthy as a useful wedge and a key pillar for his English chauvinism. It was in this context that many Irish in Quebec leaned Tory, whereas they generally leaned Liberal (and, soon, Progressive) in Ontario or Nova Scotia.
The question had a different answer if one asked many rank-and-file Orangemen, however, who saw little distinction between a defense of Protestant faith and a defense of the British Empire. The Anglican Church to them was Britain, and thus was Canada, and steeping for decades in a potent stew of anti-Irish contempt that considered British history essentially a long story of war against an evil, autocratic Roman Catholicism hellbent on world domination, the nuanced triangulation and anti-French polarization that McCarthy pursued was not just nonsense, but a betrayal. This boiling sense of frustration finally tipped over with the Irish Convention and its conclusion, which was the result that the Orange Order had feared for decades on both sides of the Atlantic and had even staged a soft putsch in Ireland to head off - the subornation of Ulster under an Irish government in Dublin dominated by Catholics, and the policy of Home Rule being a precursor to 'Rome Rule.'
The extent to which this belief was held to the point of being near religious dogma as the 1920s approached is hard to emphasize in a modern context, especially once the Order started its rapid secular decline in the 1950s and afterwards. It mattered little that Ireland quickly, though often fractiously and with unstable governments, established a working though imperfect democracy that quickly pillarized into separate but largely peaceful sectarian communities living side-by-side with little issue; the most vehement of Orangemen from Ulster decamped to Britain and Canada with lurid tales of oppression that only reinforced the views of Toronto's powerful Old Lodge political machine. As such, the Conservative Party in Canada was not merely a political party but an extension of a social movement, a movement that saw Catholic conspiracies behind every corner, and adopted a siege mentality within months, convinced that if London would betray her own subjects in Ireland, then Canada was truly the last line of defense of democratic self-government against Rome. [2]
As such, the first enemy that the "Ultras," as they came to be called, identified were Catholic Tories, demanding with no evidence and no reason other than their resentment over the Government of Ireland Act that they be purged from the halls of power, especially the Cabinet. Several former Cabinet ministers who had resigned in May began circulating in September an open letter, published in the Mail and Empire - the preeminent Tory paper, with the triple the circulation of the more liberal Globe and Star combined and thus regarded as the public mouthpiece of the Old Lodge - targeting in particular the Minister of Justice, Charles Doherty, and demanding his resignation. His crime? Being born to Irish parents, having attended a Jesuit college in Montreal, and most crucially, having fifteen years earlier served a yearlong term as the president of the St. Patrick's Society, a fraternal organization for Montreal's Irishmen.
Doherty was a strange target for a variety of reasons; he was as true blue a Tory as any, being firmly in favor of the National Policy, having criticized the United States' overzealous destruction in several Confederate States during the Great American War, and as Minister of Justice giving a speech in Winnipeg just a year earlier where he praised the end of official bilingualism in Manitoba schools, citing the "schools compromise" of the late 1890s that had brought about a Liberal government as "the twenty-year mistake foisted upon us by Laurier and his ilk." Doherty had even once gone so far as to refer to the provincial language policies as being a "preemptive campaign of containment against the Frenchification of Canada" and he had said at the annual St. Patrick's Luncheon in 1916 that the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society - French Canada's answer to the Orange Order, at least in theory - was a greater enemy to Irishmen in Montreal than the Orange Order, defending this fairly extreme point of view by suggesting that the Order, "for its faults, and they are many" did not deny Irishmen "advancement and enhancement within their own faith, and seek to dominate the institutions upon which Irishmen rely." It is plain to see why the more populist McCarthy, eager to find ways to appeal to a broader audience, would find a man like Doherty an outstanding ally.
Alas, to the Old Lodge, Doherty had to go, because he was a Catholic, and to them Catholics - regardless of tongue or ethnic origin - were part of a greater mob that threatened world Englishness and had infected, like a virus, even the liberal and once-Anglophone Protestant United States. Doherty was also an enemy of powerful Anglo-Quebecker interests who saw the Irish Convention as being the first step in a likely attempt by French Canada to flex its muscles, and afraid of the looming predicted oppression that was to occur in Ireland, wanted an all-hands-on-deck effort in Quebec, too.
McCarthy defended Doherty, publicly and before the Cabinet, which Doherty never ceased to thank him for, but the gauntlet was thrown down when a second letter was circulated, this one attacking Doherty in the Montreal press for his lenient stance on immigration to Canada and "undesirables streaming to our shores" (even though the Immigration portfolio was not his); this time, Ferguson added his name to the letter, as did a number of riding association chairs in Montreal, firing an even bigger shot across the bow. If McCarthy was to defend Doherty, it was to come at considerable political cost - and McCarthy's enemies not only had time and patience, they also had amongst them men who had no qualms of doing what they could to topple the Prime Minister and seize the ring for themselves..."
-Faultlines: The Complicated History of Canada's Ethnic Tensions
[1] In my head canon, Canadians are thus much more serious "aboot" trying to maintain a more distinctive accent from Americans and other various Anglophilic tics to make themselves distinctive. (I couldn't throw an "eh" in there anywhere, "so-aw-rry").
[2] If this sounds batshit to you, well, this is what the Orange Order in Ulster genuinely (and as far as I'm aware to this day) believes.
@KingSweden24 a stop in the great white north is always welcomed! You're the best!