Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Well, Corinth has been taken, but everything south of that line not as much (in part thanks to Vicksburg being intact)
You're as amazing as always man! Loving the chapters and Long's return!
March to the Sea
"...for a war often defined in the public consciousness by grim trench warfare, blasted gray battlefields and brutal house-to-house urban fighting under the shadows of artillery sieges, the Great American War nonetheless has several dramatic moments, occurring roughly once per year, that strike a more unique scope, such as the Sack of Washington, the heroic stand upon the Susquehanna and the total annihilation of the Confederate fleet at Hilton Head. But perhaps nothing is in the end associated as mythologically with the conclusion of the war as John Pershing's March to the Sea through Georgia, a campaign that effectively defined the concept of "total war" for decades to come and revealed the capabilities of industrialized warfare..."
- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100
"...preparations. By July of 1916, the wrinkles in training that had plagued the United States for much of the first year were gone and, to his credit, War Secretary Stimson had devised a veritable machine that was cranking out cohorts of roughly thirty thousand fresh recruits every two weeks as regularly as artillery shells were flying off the shelves and integrating them carefully with veteran cadres across both major fronts. Following the seizure of Atlanta, Pershing spent the next several weeks allowing his men rest, bringing in new fresh recruits totaling close to four divisions as well as reserves held back in Tennessee for the previous campaign, and getting every landship, airship and airplane available brought to staging grounds north, east, and south of Atlanta. As mid-August arrived, the preparations were complete, and the moment was nigh - it was time for the March to the Sea to begin.
At its outset, Pershing knew that the campaign he was embarking on would be absolutely critical, for two distinct reasons. The first was purely geographic - the supply lines via Kentucky and Tennessee tied down tens of thousands of troops to maintain and protect even with a noticeable decline in partisan activity by the Confederate Irregular Division, and as part of the final push into the Carolinas, he wanted another port available to him through which to bring in materiel - namely, the excellent deepwater port at Savannah, which while heavily damaged by frequent Naval raids nonetheless could support such seaborne support. That seizing Savannah and everything in between would also have the side effect of cutting the Confederacy in two logistically was purely a bonus. The second reason was something else - Pershing at Long Branch the previous year had declared that the Confederates, whom he knew to view the war in entirely existential terms, would not cease making war until it was impossible for them to do so any longer, and now was the chance to make good on his proposition that the war could only end when the Confederates no longer saw a distinction between a surrender of choice and a surrender of necessity. As such, the Georgia Campaign needed to do more than simply press on from the burnt remnants of Atlanta - it needed to destroy Georgia and her citizens, not just on the battlefield but economically and psychologically as well.
Pershing grouped his forces into three separate cadres, with his main force departing Atlanta on August 15th under cover of light breeze and close to a hundred airplanes in the sky overhead with the support of two full landship divisions and traditional cavalry deployed as scouting pickets on the far flanks. Two smaller groups, totaling about a hundred and fifty thousand men apiece, under Menoher and Wittenmyer, made their way out in other directions, with Menoher's army aimed at Columbus on the Chattahoochee River and Albany and Valdosta beyond it, with the aim to drive all the way to Florida by the end of October, and Wittenmyer's columns curving out eastwards to take Augusta and to screen against any counterattack towards Pershing's larger but more vulnerable force from the Carolinas, as Pershing drew his supply lines down to an absolute minimum in order to move more effectively. In total, close to six hundred thousand men departed Atlanta, facing forces that at best equaled about half that number scattered across Georgia but in defensive positions..."
- Pershing
"...no quarter given; Patrick, a talented general but no match for the manpower and machine disadvantages, made every day a fighting retreat across the entirety of the theater, but there was little he could do other that send his artillery further back and make Pershing's advances increasingly difficult while send irregulars further and further north to harass and disrupt Pershing's movements.
But in the end, Pershing was fighting not just Patrick's men but the Confederate psyche. Women and children fled as landship squadrons rolled over hills felling trees and launching incendiary shells into barns. Horses were confiscated while pigs and cows slaughtered to feed the marching army; as the campaign occurred late in summer well before harvest was to begin, unripe crop were pulled from the earth and fields left fallow behind them. Railroad spurs that were of no use to Pershing's force were torn up, sometimes wrapped around trees in "Pershing ties" and sometimes their steel shipped north to where they could be of more use to the invaders, while depots were burned to the ground, grain silos plundered and houses confiscated for use of Yankee soldiery. As all this occurred, high in the sky planes circled, shooting down everything that the Confederacy had left to send up and using new, rudimentary "bombers" to destroy bridges that Pershing's army had not identified a need for in their crossings. A large, wandering slave mob followed behind Pershing's forces, unsure of what came next but threatened with the same destitution as the White citizenry of my native Georgia if they did not stick close to the marching Yankees.
Pershing took Macon on August 28th and then spent much of September slowly working his way through what is known as the Onion Belt, fanning his forces out in a wide arc of artillery and landships to spread Patrick thin and, one must assume, find more Georgian towns to destroy. The sky glowed red across the state every night as fires burned in groves, towns and farmsteads, and every morning those thrust from their homes looked out at dawns marked black and gray..."
- The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916
"...industrial center and also one of the more diversified agricultural economies of the Confederacy, all of which was destroyed between Pershing setting out from Atlanta on August 15th until his capture of Savannah after an eight-day battle with naval support across flooded rice fields on October 1st, barely a month before the end of the war.
Nothing that was carried out in Georgia compares remotely to the behavior of the Confederate Army in occupied Maryland, but nonetheless it bears saying that were it to occur today, Pershing's treatment of Georgia - and South Carolina the month after - would constitute war crimes. Anywhere between two to three thousand men were summarily executed by Pershing's forces according to Confederate records, a charge that the United States continues to vociferously deny; Confederate records also conclude that a similar number of women and older girls were raped. While such atrocities were not institutional in the way that Company R's terror campaign in Maryland were, and Confederate historiography is hyper-focused on the idea that the war was a campaign of gang rape of pure Dixie white women by Yankee and freedmen, one must nonetheless presume that a frustrated but confident force in the field certainly may have committed depraved behaviors as they burned a massive arc through the Confederacy's heartland.
Towns like Macon, Columbus and Albany were absolutely destroyed; Augusta survived purely thanks to its necessity for crossing into South Carolina, and Valdosta escaped fairly unscathed thanks in part to the paucity of its defenses. Entire villages were wiped clean from the map, their populations scattered across south-central Georgia in refugee trains fleeing south, west, and sometimes north behind Yankee lines where at least there was the possibility of food. Some industrial centers in Georgia still have not recovered to this day; many farming towns did not have full harvests again until the early 1920s, and thanks to the March to the Sea an estimated hundred thousand Georgians starved to death, most of them women and young children, in the winter of 1916-17..."
- A Time of Atrocity: An Accounting of Crimes Committed in the Great American War
",,,congratulatory telegrams upon Pershing's seizure of Savannah on October 1st and Patrick's surrender along with what remained of his men in the city's ruins before an honor guard of Marines who had seized it from the sea; five days later, Menoher signaled that his men had, after three days of fighting, seized Tallahassee and several cavalry pickets had spied the Gulf of Mexico. Both symbolically and physically, the Confederacy in early October had been slashed in half, its heartland utterly gutted of industry and a crucial harvest for feeding its troops, and American forces now capable of feeding an invasion of the Carolinas from both Atlanta and her long supply tails as well as Savannah's battered but intact docks. The enemy was utterly broken, with telegraph lines cut to prevent communication from Charlotte to western strongholds like Birmingham, Vicksburg and New Orleans - though there was another five weeks of fighting ahead, with his aggressive push and the unstoppable machinery of American industrial war, Pershing had effectively ended the war..."
- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100
- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100
"...preparations. By July of 1916, the wrinkles in training that had plagued the United States for much of the first year were gone and, to his credit, War Secretary Stimson had devised a veritable machine that was cranking out cohorts of roughly thirty thousand fresh recruits every two weeks as regularly as artillery shells were flying off the shelves and integrating them carefully with veteran cadres across both major fronts. Following the seizure of Atlanta, Pershing spent the next several weeks allowing his men rest, bringing in new fresh recruits totaling close to four divisions as well as reserves held back in Tennessee for the previous campaign, and getting every landship, airship and airplane available brought to staging grounds north, east, and south of Atlanta. As mid-August arrived, the preparations were complete, and the moment was nigh - it was time for the March to the Sea to begin.
At its outset, Pershing knew that the campaign he was embarking on would be absolutely critical, for two distinct reasons. The first was purely geographic - the supply lines via Kentucky and Tennessee tied down tens of thousands of troops to maintain and protect even with a noticeable decline in partisan activity by the Confederate Irregular Division, and as part of the final push into the Carolinas, he wanted another port available to him through which to bring in materiel - namely, the excellent deepwater port at Savannah, which while heavily damaged by frequent Naval raids nonetheless could support such seaborne support. That seizing Savannah and everything in between would also have the side effect of cutting the Confederacy in two logistically was purely a bonus. The second reason was something else - Pershing at Long Branch the previous year had declared that the Confederates, whom he knew to view the war in entirely existential terms, would not cease making war until it was impossible for them to do so any longer, and now was the chance to make good on his proposition that the war could only end when the Confederates no longer saw a distinction between a surrender of choice and a surrender of necessity. As such, the Georgia Campaign needed to do more than simply press on from the burnt remnants of Atlanta - it needed to destroy Georgia and her citizens, not just on the battlefield but economically and psychologically as well.
Pershing grouped his forces into three separate cadres, with his main force departing Atlanta on August 15th under cover of light breeze and close to a hundred airplanes in the sky overhead with the support of two full landship divisions and traditional cavalry deployed as scouting pickets on the far flanks. Two smaller groups, totaling about a hundred and fifty thousand men apiece, under Menoher and Wittenmyer, made their way out in other directions, with Menoher's army aimed at Columbus on the Chattahoochee River and Albany and Valdosta beyond it, with the aim to drive all the way to Florida by the end of October, and Wittenmyer's columns curving out eastwards to take Augusta and to screen against any counterattack towards Pershing's larger but more vulnerable force from the Carolinas, as Pershing drew his supply lines down to an absolute minimum in order to move more effectively. In total, close to six hundred thousand men departed Atlanta, facing forces that at best equaled about half that number scattered across Georgia but in defensive positions..."
- Pershing
"...no quarter given; Patrick, a talented general but no match for the manpower and machine disadvantages, made every day a fighting retreat across the entirety of the theater, but there was little he could do other that send his artillery further back and make Pershing's advances increasingly difficult while send irregulars further and further north to harass and disrupt Pershing's movements.
But in the end, Pershing was fighting not just Patrick's men but the Confederate psyche. Women and children fled as landship squadrons rolled over hills felling trees and launching incendiary shells into barns. Horses were confiscated while pigs and cows slaughtered to feed the marching army; as the campaign occurred late in summer well before harvest was to begin, unripe crop were pulled from the earth and fields left fallow behind them. Railroad spurs that were of no use to Pershing's force were torn up, sometimes wrapped around trees in "Pershing ties" and sometimes their steel shipped north to where they could be of more use to the invaders, while depots were burned to the ground, grain silos plundered and houses confiscated for use of Yankee soldiery. As all this occurred, high in the sky planes circled, shooting down everything that the Confederacy had left to send up and using new, rudimentary "bombers" to destroy bridges that Pershing's army had not identified a need for in their crossings. A large, wandering slave mob followed behind Pershing's forces, unsure of what came next but threatened with the same destitution as the White citizenry of my native Georgia if they did not stick close to the marching Yankees.
Pershing took Macon on August 28th and then spent much of September slowly working his way through what is known as the Onion Belt, fanning his forces out in a wide arc of artillery and landships to spread Patrick thin and, one must assume, find more Georgian towns to destroy. The sky glowed red across the state every night as fires burned in groves, towns and farmsteads, and every morning those thrust from their homes looked out at dawns marked black and gray..."
- The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916
"...industrial center and also one of the more diversified agricultural economies of the Confederacy, all of which was destroyed between Pershing setting out from Atlanta on August 15th until his capture of Savannah after an eight-day battle with naval support across flooded rice fields on October 1st, barely a month before the end of the war.
Nothing that was carried out in Georgia compares remotely to the behavior of the Confederate Army in occupied Maryland, but nonetheless it bears saying that were it to occur today, Pershing's treatment of Georgia - and South Carolina the month after - would constitute war crimes. Anywhere between two to three thousand men were summarily executed by Pershing's forces according to Confederate records, a charge that the United States continues to vociferously deny; Confederate records also conclude that a similar number of women and older girls were raped. While such atrocities were not institutional in the way that Company R's terror campaign in Maryland were, and Confederate historiography is hyper-focused on the idea that the war was a campaign of gang rape of pure Dixie white women by Yankee and freedmen, one must nonetheless presume that a frustrated but confident force in the field certainly may have committed depraved behaviors as they burned a massive arc through the Confederacy's heartland.
Towns like Macon, Columbus and Albany were absolutely destroyed; Augusta survived purely thanks to its necessity for crossing into South Carolina, and Valdosta escaped fairly unscathed thanks in part to the paucity of its defenses. Entire villages were wiped clean from the map, their populations scattered across south-central Georgia in refugee trains fleeing south, west, and sometimes north behind Yankee lines where at least there was the possibility of food. Some industrial centers in Georgia still have not recovered to this day; many farming towns did not have full harvests again until the early 1920s, and thanks to the March to the Sea an estimated hundred thousand Georgians starved to death, most of them women and young children, in the winter of 1916-17..."
- A Time of Atrocity: An Accounting of Crimes Committed in the Great American War
",,,congratulatory telegrams upon Pershing's seizure of Savannah on October 1st and Patrick's surrender along with what remained of his men in the city's ruins before an honor guard of Marines who had seized it from the sea; five days later, Menoher signaled that his men had, after three days of fighting, seized Tallahassee and several cavalry pickets had spied the Gulf of Mexico. Both symbolically and physically, the Confederacy in early October had been slashed in half, its heartland utterly gutted of industry and a crucial harvest for feeding its troops, and American forces now capable of feeding an invasion of the Carolinas from both Atlanta and her long supply tails as well as Savannah's battered but intact docks. The enemy was utterly broken, with telegraph lines cut to prevent communication from Charlotte to western strongholds like Birmingham, Vicksburg and New Orleans - though there was another five weeks of fighting ahead, with his aggressive push and the unstoppable machinery of American industrial war, Pershing had effectively ended the war..."
- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100
Win the war, of course! Pershing has foolishly left himself open to an attack from both the Carolinas AND Florida. He's between a Hammer and an anvil. Savannah was a sad loss but a neccesiry to lull Pershing into a false sense of security.
Soon, Vardaman will have that the upstart Yankee begging for mercy!!!!
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“Steiner’s assault will bring it under control.”
“President Vardaman… Steiner…”
Question: Regarding the behaviour of the Confederate Army in occupied Maryland and now the actions of Pershings armies, how many European journalists, gentry, officers, politicians, etc in Europe are currently pontificating about how that kind of thing would never happen in their much more civilised continent?
Will Vardaman get captured? I wonder what will happen now that all of the CSA troops in MS, AL, FL, and LA are cut off from the government in southern Virginia and the Carolinas. I'm assuming like after WW1 some parts of the Confederacy will be temporarily occupied or demilitarized, like maybe the entire state of Virginia.
Knowing how they roll, probably tons. May be worth an update on that subject specifically, since 1917 is looking thin on content as it is. Thank you for the idea!
🤐🤐🤐 more to come
Perhaps!
Please tell me a Confederate version of Downfall exists in this universe...
Can picture Leo playing Vardaman and breaking out that ridiculously fun/terrible accent he used for Django.
Hey, I've been reading both this and Bicentennial Man for quite some time and have been really enjoying them. Just curious, do you have any future plans for J. Williams Fulbright? I ask because he's been very prominent in an offsite roleplay I've been a part of and he's, in general, a very interesting figure.
My guess of what the Confederacy would like at this moment or like a month later and perhaps could be the lines when a general surrender takes place (I added in a march up to Charleston accidentally, this was made in 5 minutes in Gimp). Pink is what the Union already occupies, blue is still-held CSA territory, light blue is Indian territory, purple is 2RoT land, and magenta is Union held land in Texas that may or may not share authority with the 2Rot.
They've already cut to the Gulf in Northern Florida as well, so they've sliced the Confederacy in three. Plus no longer Confederate TX and OK. So five, really.
My guess of what the Confederacy would like at this moment or like a month later and perhaps could be the lines when a general surrender takes place (I added in a march up to Charleston accidentally, this was made in 5 minutes in Gimp). Pink is what the Union already occupies, blue is still-held CSA territory, light blue is Indian territory, purple is 2RoT land, and magenta is Union held land in Texas that may or may not share authority with the 2Rot.
That’s broadly accurate as of the end of Pershing’s March, though the thrust extends to Tally
My guess of what the Confederacy would like at this moment or like a month later and perhaps could be the lines when a general surrender takes place (I added in a march up to Charleston accidentally, this was made in 5 minutes in Gimp). Pink is what the Union already occupies, blue is still-held CSA territory, light blue is Indian territory, purple is 2RoT land, and magenta is Union held land in Texas that may or may not share authority with the 2Rot.
Welcome aboard!
Fulbright is indeed a fascinating figure. Much of what made him interesting is of course predicated on his views on post-WW2 US hegemony and perpetuation thereof; how that’d fit into a CSA that’s a regional rather than world power, I’m not sure.
A SecState in a Longist admin at some point would seem to suit him, though
Honestly wouldn't be surprised if when the Confederacy surrenders, some US soldiers or ex-slaves just go 'no' and keep up what they're doing.