Old World Blues - Dieu Et Mon Droit
"Since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine." - Stanley Baldwin
The year of 1935 marked perhaps the worst that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had endured in more than a century. Amidst cascading economic failures brought on by the Wall Street Collapse of 1929 and made even more severe by the outbreak of the Second American Civil War, Britain now watched as France, its other closest ally, was consumed by the radical fascism that had taken Germany, Italy, and most of America.
Winston Churchill, who had been appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty as part of Stanley Baldwin’s cabinet shuffle after the outbreak of the Second American Civil War, said the following only a handful of months prior to France’s partition:
“There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective strength. There is a nation which, with all its strength and virtue, is in the grip of a group of ruthless men, preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by parliament, or by public opinion.”
After their ally was left gouged between Free France and the French State, Churchill could only be described as despairing. He made no secret of his intentions, telling the Prime Minister that he unequivocally supported a British invasion of France to depose Maxime Weygand to restore Lebrun to power. This, of course, was as politically challenging as it was militarily. France's government had signed its power away already. The Triumvirate and Free French were the outlaws for all intents and purposes. Churchill initially offered to resign, but Baldwin would have none of it. Both men broadly agreed, once invasion was off the table, that pragmatism was the better part of honor. The Germans moving on Austria only vindicated this course of action, leaving the Baldwin government with the unenviable job of keeping relations with Paris good enough for further cooperation.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin with First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill
Churchill’s immediate superior, Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Third National Union Government, as history has christened his third tenure as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was an experienced and respected leader general perceived as being capable of rising to the dangers threatening the British Empire. He had been brought in with the beginning of the Second American Civil War and the economic turmoil that the conflict dealt to the Britain, and since then had charted a cautious course in handling relations with the United States.
Baldwin, a lifelong Conservative, lived up to his party’s name, but was also a particularly wily man in his dealings with the two rival governments in the early days of the war. The British Ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay, was ordered to remain at his station in Washington and report back to London on the disposition of MacArthur and the new National-Corporate government.
There were those in the British government had seen Al Smith as a potentially unreliable partner, and, like the Natcorps themselves, had wondered if his Catholic faith would lead to him making decisions that aligned more with Catholic nations than Protestant ones such as the United Kingdom. This was a minority. More common, however, was the sentiment that fairly or not MacArthur was for all intents and purposes the ruler of America, something reinforced by MacArthur's control over Washington and Smith’s total inability to project power beyond the boundaries of the northeastern states.
That said, throwing their full support behind a government established by coup d’état in the world’s oldest democracy was not something that the Baldwin government was willing to do without assurances that MacArthur would prove a reasonable and even-handed leader for the United States. So, as a backup, Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, was dispatched to Albany to very quietly represent British interests with Smith’s rump government there. And when the American Republic fought on and held its ground, and when the true nature of MacArthur's regime became evident to the world, the British government's gamble paid off.
The decision to keep the official Embassy of the United Kingdom in Washington, D.C. constituted one of the first major cracks between the British and their Commonwealth subjects in Canada in the realm of foreign policy. Under the order of Prime Minister Richard Bennett, the Canadians were the first to relocate their embassy to Albany in reflection of Canada’s outright refusal to treat with the MacArthur regime.
This move was criticized as rash at the time, but as the conflict progressed and the scale of Natcorp-inflicted horror became clear, Bennett was praised for his foresight. By the time the first reports of Hoover’s death camps had reached international papers, Britain had followed already suit and recalled Lindsay from Washington while officially naming Halifax as Ambassador to the United States in a scathing denunciation of MacArthur personally which reportedly rattled the man so badly that he ordered the vacant British embassy razed to the ground in a fit of pique. To this day, eighteen nations, the United Kingdom and Canada among them, maintain consulates in Albany out of nostalgia, and the city remains a popular site for diplomatic events such as summits and treaty signings.
Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, Ambassador to the United States
The situation within Canada as the fighting in the United States unfolded was incredibly complex. At the time, Canadian politics were deeply divided, and ethnic tensions between English-speaking Canadians and the Québécois were at an all time high. The economic blowback from the United States’ descent into civil war was felt most acutely in its northern neighbor, as the war-torn America constituted the overwhelming majority of its international trade.
Surprisingly, refugees were not nearly as large an issue as many had anticipated. This was mostly for geographic reasons, as the Great Lakes and Mississippi River constituted enormous barriers to the flow of refugees, often tragically. Many times throughout the course of the war, the Canadian Navy in the Great Lakes responded to ramshackle boats being torn apart by the often tempestuous waters of North America’s inland seas. It is estimated than no less than fifteen thousand people drowned attempting to cross into Canada by water. Meanwhile, the refugees who managed to make it across the Mississippi often went west, resulting in a population boom across the sparsely-populated Great Plains, while those able to make it to the Republican core of New York and New England were resettled deeper into safe territory there rather than being exported abroad.
The economic instability due to the war, along with domestic sentiments that Bennett was not taking the potential threat to Canada should MacArthur triumph seriously led to a devastating rout for the Conservatives in the 1935 elections, ejecting Bennett from the Prime Minister’s post and re-empowering Liberal leader Mackenzie King. The other party to significantly benefit from this was the newly-formed Co-operative Commonwealth, a social democratic party which entered into coalition with the Liberals.
King began a two-fold approach to handling the crisis to the south. First was aggressively stepping up arms production to export to Smith’s government, to the point that New York State Route 9, which runs from Manhattan through Albany all the way to the Canadian border, became jokingly known as “Remington Road” in reference to the Remington bolt-action rifle, a staple of the Republic’s arsenal.
Secondly, and more controversially, he began a limited conscription program and laid down heavy border defenses, even on the border with the Republic. This came as an about face to King, who had been strongly opposed to conscription during the Great War.The British Royal Navy lent two destroyers which were sent into the Great Lakes in anticipation of a potential incursion by the Natcorps via water.
Canadian Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie inspecting recruits during the Second American Civil War
King also implored the people of Canada to provide whatever humanitarian support they were able to. As the blisteringly cold winter of 1934-1935 raged, coats and heavy underwear were being sent to the Republic by the truckload, while Canada also acted as a middle man to allowed food grown in the neutral western states to be sent across the 49th Parallel and back east to the Republic.
In return for the enormity of Canada’s support, the Smith government slashed tariffs with Canada to near-zero, and gave Canadian shipping companies and the Canadian Royal Navy automatic docking rights in all Republic-controlled ports. This was done rather quietly, as domestic opinion in the United States still strongly favored tariffs and protectionism, but the gesture’s intent was received well in Ottawa.
Support for Albany was not unanimous in Canada. A small but extremely vocal faction of far-right ideologues and outright fascists expressed admiration for MacArthur, and some even became part of the legions of foreign volunteers aiding the Natcorps in their battle in the Midwest. Of these, the most prominent was the National Unity Party of Canada, a National Socialist movement lead by the Québécois fascist Adrien Arcand.
The NUPC gained significant prominence by preying on the fears of Canadians who were wary about the level of cooperation their government was showing with Smith given his apparent precariousness. Even the most vocal advocates for aid to Albany privately admitted that the odds seemed long and that MacArthur would waste little time in exacting vengeance on Canada should he win out. Events to be addressed later, however, would see the NUPC decimated as part of the closest that Canada has ever come to a true political purge.
National Unity Party of Canada Leader Adrien Arcand
A similar vein of response to the events in the United States in Canada was seen in Australia, where the convulsing global economy resulted in Prime Minister Joseph Lyons’ conservative United Australia party lose the September 1934 elections to the Labor Party. Longtime Labor leader James Scullin had presided over a split in Labor between its more conventional majority and the state Labor Party of New South Wales, under John Thomas Lang, which advocated for much more direct and controversial action in response to the economic crisis.
When the economy worsened with the fall of the United States into chaos, Lang’s radical plans, which included Australia willingly defaulting on its foreign debts and abolishing the gold standard in favor of a currency standard based on the amount of goods produced within Australia, seemed more attractive. Ultimately, Lang’s “goods standard” did not come to pass, but many of his proposals did, marking a serious leftward shift for Labor, which is credited with carrying them to victory.
The New South Wales Labor Party, known colloquially as Lang Labor, ultimately reached accord with mainline Labor, whereby Scullin would return to the backbench. Labor’s new leader, John Curtin, was not expected to win the election to replace Scullin as he was a much more left-leaning figure, but he ended up with a comfortable victory and was able to form a government. Curtin would serve as the Australian Prime Minister until his death in 1945.
His tenure as Prime Minister would see extensive military cooperation between Australia and the American Pacific Fleet, as Curtin was just as concerned about the potential for Japanese expansionism in the Pacific as the
de facto leader of the neutral west, Admiral Joseph Reeves. Curtin would follow Reeves’ example by expanding the Australian fleet and, with British permission, establishing multiple bases across the United Kingdom’s island possessions in the South Pacific.
John Curtin, Prime Minister of Australia
The leftward shift seen in Canada and Australia, was not replicated in South Africa, however. Here, the rise of the National-Corporate regime in the United States saw Afrikaner nationalists, particularly the Dutch-descended Boers, grow emboldened.
James Barry Munnik Hertzog, a former Boer rebel who had managed to rise to the station of the Prime Minister of South Africa, particularly was known as having strong sympathies with Nazi Germany, considering the Soviet Union to be the greater threat. Hertzog and the South African National Party began laying down the foundation stones for what would become the brutal racial segregation system known as
apartheid.
As Hertzog attempted to establish a basis for South African neutrality in the event of Great Britain going to war with Germany, Boer nationalists began a campaign of terror and violence against non-whites in South Africa, and even whites who were perceived as being too sympathetic to non-whites. The Hertzog government officially condemned these acts, but otherwise did little to actually stop them.
Meanwhile, in the British Raj of India, the Second American Civil War saw little in the way of actual repercussions beyond a strengthening of the nationalist movement, as Britain’s distraction with the debacle in France gave the nationalists more breathing room. The overwhelmingly agrarian Indian economy was relatively insulated from the shockwaves which echoed throughout the industrialized world, however a downturn
did occur, which saw the province of Bengal pushed to the brink of famine in 1935. This, however, would be only a precursor to the devastating Famine of 1943.
By late 1935, Prime Minister Baldwin reached out to his counterpart in the Republic of Spain, Joaquín Chapaprieta, quietly urging him to
“…gut the right. Your government has ignored the Carlists and the fascist sympathizers for far too long, and there are those who would happily play the part of the Spanish Weygand.”
In reality, a purge of the far right had already been under way since March of 1934, albeit a very quiet and slow-moving one. The Sanjurada, a 1932 coup attempt by General José Sanjurjo, had been a devastating failure for the Carlists who sought to restore the Spanish monarchy, and its ringleader had been sentenced to death for his part. The government of Alejandro Lerroux had been contemplating amnesty for Sanjurjo, but ultimate proceeded with the execution in April when public opinion swung against the right, particularly the monarchists and Falangists, as a result of the March on Washington.
Although Sanjurjo was the only execution carried out to this point, other prominent rightists in the military saw themselves sidelined and demoted. Chapaprieta, and his successors throughout the turbulent political crisis which saw multiple leaders throughout 1935, especially focused on the Spanish colonies in Africa, which saw massive reshuffles in the military leadership there, as they were seen as hotbeds of Falangist support.
In particular, Emilio Mola, widely seen as a figurehead for the Spanish far right, saw himself stripped of his position as Director-General of Security and sent to head the military garrison on the Canary Islands, effectively exiling him from the mainland. Mola, however, would not be counted out, nor would another prominent conservative in the military, Francisco Franco.
Emilio Mola (third from right) and Francisco Franco (center)
Franco had successfully suppressed a socialist insurrection in Asturias in 1934 by the use of brutal tactics which embittered the Spanish left to him and left Franco himself a hardened warrior prepared to “use troops against Spanish civilians as if they were a foreign enemy” and with a deep suspicion of even moderate leftists. He had expected that the right-wing government would reward him with a significant promotion. Instead, shortly after Mola was exiled to the Canaries, Franco was also exiled, this time to the minor Catalan city of Girona.
Catalonia, at the time, was a hotbed of the radical left, particularly the anarcho-socialist movement known as the CNT-FAI. There, Franco had virtually no political allies and was under the extremely careful watch of the CNT-FAI, who reportedly had no less than five men tailing one of the so-called “Butchers of Asturias” at any given moment. Despite this, amid growing discontent with a worsening economic situation and anxiety over the sudden rise of military rule in France, Mola and Franco began a correspondence in the utmost secrecy following President Niceto-Acalá Zamora’s announcement of the dissolution of the Cortes Generales and elections to come in February of 1936.
en.wikipedia.org
