Very American Civil War

[mysteriousbill]

Having finally picked up a copy of VBCW, I thought I'd try my hand at an American Version.

A VERY AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

FEBRUARY  15, 1933
PRESIDENT-ELECT FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT CRITICALLY WOUNDED BY ASSASSIN

MARCH 4, 1933
ROOSEVELT STILL IN A COMA
WHO IS THE PRESIDENT?

MARCH 8, 1933
HEBERT HOOVER RESIGNS AS PRESIDENT, CITES THE ENDING OF HIS TERM AS REASON

MARCH 10, 1933
VICE-PRESIDENT CHARLES CURTIS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT
QUOTE "THIS COUNTRY MUST HAVE A PRESIDENT TO COMBAT AN ANARCHIST AND COMMUNIST COUP"

MARCH 11, 1933
PRESIDENT CURTIS APPOINTS GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR AS SUPREME HEAD OF ALL THE UNITED STATES MILITARY

MARCH 12, 1933
VICE-PRESIDENT ELECT CATCUS JACK GARNER SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT IN SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

MARCH 15, 1933
PRESIDENT-ELECT ROOSEVELT BRIEFLY AWAKENS IN NEW YORK CITY AND IS SWORN IN AS PRESIDENT

MARCH 20, 1933
ROOSEVELT SLIPS BACK INTO COMA, ROOSEVELT ADVISORS MEET WITH NAVY ADMIRALS

MARCH 26
NAVY BACKS ROOSEVELT AS LEGITIMATE PRESIDENT, NATION IN TURMOIL

APRIL 1, 1933
AMERICAN ARMY TROOPS BATTLE US MARINES FOR CONTROL OF WHITE HOUSE
CONGRESS FLEES WASHINGTON
MARINE MAJOR GENERAL SMEDLEY BUTLER CLAIMS THAT A GROUP OF BUSINESSMEN APPROACHED HIM BEFORE THE ELECTION TO LEAD A COUP AFTER THE ELECTION

IS THE COUNTRY IN A CIVIL WAR?

THE REAL WORLD
On February 15th, 1933 Giuseppe Zangara attempted assassinate FDR. He instead fatally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. If he had shot FDR (especially if he had badly wounded him) there would have been a constitutional crisis. The U.S. Constitution did not cover what to do when a President, let alone a President-Elect, was unable to perform the duties of the office, but wasn't dead (that change did not happen until the 25th Amendment in 1967).
In 1933 the President wasn't sworn in until March 4th.
FDR had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913-1920 and was well thought of by the Navy during his period in office (FDR was a died in the wool Navy buff and collected many items of US Navy memorabilia such as 2 log books from the USS Constituion from 1815). While Assistant Secretary he was supported having a bigger navy.
In 1934, Major General Smedley Butler became involved in a controversy known as the Business Plot, when he told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialists were planning a military coup to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt. The purported plotters wanted Butler to lead a mass of armed veterans in a march on Washington and then become a dictator.
The Head of the Supreme Court does not have to be the person who swears in the president. It doesn't even have to be a Judge. In 1923, President Coolidge was sworn in as President of the United States, by his father a Notary Public.
The competition between the Navy and Army for funds and priority is well known. There wasn't a joint chief of staff for the entire United States Military until 1942 (there had been a Joint Board since the Civil War but it had little legal authority).
As far as the actions of Vice-Presidents Curtis and Garner, that's just fiction (I've got to have somebody causing problems, though Garner once said that being vice-president  wasn't worth a "Bucket of Warm Piss").
Yes, I am not a big fan of MacArthur, so expect him and probably Henry Ford to me the chief bad guys in this little exercise.

[Cory]

Looks good. Interesting in how MacArthur turns up on everyone's bad guy list.

You might check out the http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/acw2/ACW2 yahoo group as well searching acw2 here - there have been plenty of inpirational threads.

[commissarmoody]

Looks good. Interesting in how MacArthur turns up on everyone's bad guy list.

You might check out the http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/acw2/ACW2 yahoo group as well searching acw2 here - there have been plenty of inpirational threads.

Yep give it a look. Maybe we can put some life back into this project.

[mysteriousbill]

Its a start for me. I'll be centering my campaign in Illinois, but I will do a few "history" lessons on the rest of the country.

[fastolfrus]

Looks good.
Also worth checking out "War Plan Red" - the US plan to attack Canada (including gas-bombing Nova Scotia), and possibly British Caribbean bases.
The plan was devised in the 1920s, revised a few times, and finalised/approved in 1930. In 1935 the USAAF started building military airfields near the Canadian border to make invasion easier.
The USN had less aircraft carriers than the RN in the 1920s, and early US carriers had unarmoured decks compared to RN ones.
I have some documentation on the plan somewhere.
(Along with the other plans, Orange, Black, Green etc)

[fastolfrus]

Macarthur, and Patton, featured prominently in the Bonus Army actions in 1932 that may have helped FDR get the landslide election win.
Butler was also involved, but not as violently as Macarthur and Patton.

[mysteriousbill]

Plan Red is a bit too organized for me. I am aiming more at a skrimish/small unit action level game. I already have one friend signed up to run the leftwingers, I'll do the right if I have to.

[Bubbles]

Good stuff, I don't know much about american history during that period of time but it looks interesting.

[FramFramson]

Smedley D. Butler is basically my all-time hero.

I have a fair number of pictures of him (not THAT many - it's not like there are very many pictures of the man) and used to have a lot of information that wasn't online. If you have questions about him I may well be able to answer them.

Butler openly supported the Bonus marchers, but it wasn't formally, it was more like verbal and moral support. He was approached specifically because the troops would have followed him.

MacArthur and Patton make very easy villains. Let me share one of my favourite pictures on the subject:



This is from the punitive expedition to Mexico in 1916-1917. In the front row, we have Obregon, Villa, and Pershing. Obregon and Villa are both alert and keen. Obregon is icy while Villa is wary and calculating, like coiled snakes trying not to look coiled. Pershing looks like a damned goofball - not so much a villain as a loud, brassy, and sadly guileless dope (reminds me of those pictures of Bush Jr and Putin).

Behind Pershing, to the far right, we see none other than Patton. And goddamned if that face doesn't scream nutcase sociopath. I wouldn't trust a face like that with his own mother.

Whenever Americans want to lionize Patton or MacArthur, they always face the problem of having to explain away their massive character flaws. This always seems absurd to me, because the Americans have a hero from the same era who was triple the general and ten times the man of either of those two, a man nobody ever has to make excuses for: Smedley D. Butler. But he's almost forgotten.

Well, not by everybody

[leadfool]

I am trying to revive the period locally.  We did a campaign, that you can follow through skrapwelders or my postings. 

Yesterday I sorted my figures and vehicles for the period.  It is officail.  I have too many.

The other thing to look at in the period are the labor/management disputes.  Lots of strikes that turned deadly.  The battle of blair mountain comes to mind. 
There was the motor-bandit sprees (Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, etc.), the organized gangsters, ie Al Capone,the 5 families of New York, the Detroit purple gang, etc.   The whole bootlegging industry, where law breaking was accepted, because the laws were seen as stupid.

Throw in some class struggle, some racial tension and some foreign intervention....BOOM.  Looking back on the history, it is amazing the country did not blow-up.

[Lord of Jerwood]

not something am into to busy with the british one but nice to see the start laid out clearly 

good luck with the project 

[SBRPearce]

I got interested in this the last time it came around, and started writing up some "local color" (assisted by a friend who's a military historian and a professor at a local college:

The White Motor Riots
Cleveland, Ohio

The government crisis that rocked the country was mirrored on a smaller scale in Cleveland, Ohio. The failure of the stock market in 1929 had wiped out many local companies and weakened the rest. The Depression idled thousands of workers from the city’s factories and steel mills, increasing pressure on relief organizations as it did so. Cleveland’s population was largely composed of first-generation Americans and immigrants, while the areas surrounding the city harbored serious Nativist sentiments.  The White Legion, with its anti-foreigner, anti-black, anti-Catholic and anti-communist message, attracted adherents from the (minority) White Protestant Americans of Cleveland, and their (majority) fellows in the areas surrounding the city. In response, ethnic, trade and political organizations within the city radicalized sharply through the early years of the Depression. Major employers in the city, worried about labor unrest and “disloyal elements”, created company police forces that bordered on the paramilitary. The railroads that ran through Cleveland were at the forefront of this trend. Involved with all of these factions to some degree or another were various organized crime groups, all flush and confident from years of running illegal liquor across Lake Erie and enjoying deep ties to local government, unions and law enforcement.

The White Motor Company, a major manufacturer of commercial trucks, recalled laid-off workers for construction of a large order of new vehicles. Based on the chassis of a White 7.5-ton truck but mounting plate steel protection and rough-terrain treads (provided by another White family company, the Cleveland Tractor Company), these armored cars would provide work for hundreds of idled hands. The company announced that they had been ordered by the British government for use in the Middle East, and a bowler-hatted envoy  sporting a plummy English accent actually visited the production line that November.

The vehicles, furnished with weapons brought from Connecticut, were finished in February despite the intermittent labor unrest that had interrupted supplies of steel over the winter. Some people were puzzled by the customer’s decision to carry the armored cars over the Canadian border by rail rather than simply loading them aboard a freighter at the Port of Cleveland, but it was explained as a matter involving arcane British import laws – if the vehicles were shipped from Canada, then they entered England as a product of the Commonwealth, not as foreign imports.

100 White “Rupert” Armored Cars  were placed on flatbed railcars, bound for Windsor, Ontario. The workers of White (and Cleveland) were shocked, therefore, when news reel footage of Nationalist troops besieging the Anaconda copper mines showed a phalanx of White Ruperts machine-gunning “rebels” in Missoula, Montana. The armored cars that White management had promised were being built for Britain had been shipped west from Windsor, offloaded at Lethbridge, Alberta and driven south across the US-Canada border to attack the striking miners of Butte from behind.  As a result of the Missoula Strike, Cleveland burned...

[commissarmoody]

Another pretty good start to a 2nd ACW project right there.

[fastolfrus]

Plan Red is a bit too organized for me. I am aiming more at a skrimish/small unit action level game. I already have one friend signed up to run the leftwingers, I'll do the right if I have to.

I was thinking more on the lines of "since these were actual policies, it would be quite easy for someone (such as Macarthur) to start off something that adds foreign intervention"

[FramFramson]

Pershing always strikes me as one of those "Goldurnit! I can tell he's honest from his handshake!" types. Almost a living stereotype of an "American General".