1922: The Year of Blood and Lead

Future Entries (Before 1923)

_The Social War in Iberia and South America

The Italian Revolution: Politics and Society in the New Italy

India: The Tragic Revolution

Proletarian Enlightenment: German Art and Architecture in the 1920s_

1922: The Year of Blood and Lead​

What can be expected of the Anglo-American menace, but that it will attempt to crush and to strangle all the fresh, healthy, collective life of the European peoples? Theirs is not a desire to contain social radicalism, or any such nonsense, but to establish a new imperium over the earth. One need not be red or white to say: no, we Europeans shall not consign ourselves to be the obedient underlings of a English Imperialism, we shall order our own affairs.

-Werner Sombart

The pustules of the red disease have embedded themselves in many peoples once thought to be mostly immune to this sickness, such that even now, men we previously considered reasonable, upright, and morally healthy are being gripped by a strange and overweening barbarism. It falls to the English-speaking peoples, whom have shown themselves to possess sufficient will to resist this pathology, to quarantine this sickness in its place, to declare: no further! And then we must hope that one day the rudiments of civilization will return to Europe.

-Oswald Spengler

And so Americans and Germans kill one another in the skies of France, and yet we continue to eat American wheat and American meat, and diplomats continue to exchange niceties in Berlin. Are we at war, or at peace? It does bear all the marks of war, though perhaps we would prefer not to say so. What a contrast from just a few years ago, when the enemies all had to be labelled and caricatured! Now German men bloody the fields of France and we studiously pretend to know nothing of it! Strange new world…

-Siegfried Kracauer

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One could be forgiven for imagining that human civilization, having tired of its ordeal of bloodletting, had at last begun disembarking from its long nightmare to commence the hard task of reconstruction. The optimists found an abundance of pleasing portents in 1921: what was the sustained quiet across the Pacific, India, and France except so many signs that those embroiled in war had at last started to shirk from their ruinous vocation? The division of the world into competing blocs may be hardly sanguinary, but perhaps it would offer the basis for a diplomatic settlement between responsible powers.

Such were the hopes which floated like twilight smoke, intangible and powerless, above the iron laws and faultless logic stoking the world inferno. 1921 was not the denouement of the First Revolutionary Era but an intermission, a moment of temporary relief for the main players, who having gathered their strength and fixed their composure, readied themselves to make a final settlement. In Mindanao and Lucknow, in Vilnius and in Dijon, the guns of war thundered once again. Whole nations were put to the sword, and the forces of proletarian internationalism, having achieved stunning victories over the past two years, were forced to witness the frightful expansion in the destructive powers of the Anglo-American behemoth. The British Empire inexorably swelled, adding new territories and protectorates even while it battled for its existence in the Deccan plains. American industrial might, hampered by the depression, sprung back phoenix-like, buoyed by a rapidly metastasizing military complex. Spurred on by American diplomacy and American arms, a reactionary Balkan bloc began to coalesce. Predictions now abounded of a “second” Great War, a fresh cataclysm that would outdo the horrors of the last one…

Eastern Europe

The flow of American weapons and military advisors into Croatia and Romania fundamentally changed the nature of the Hungarian War. For some time, the leaders of the Council of Revolutionary States had been averse to supporting Karolyi, considering his regime nothing more than a relic of bourgeois social-chauvinism. Despite the support of the left-wing social democrats for the Hungarian government, the Revolutionary Council of State stuck firmly to its position of non-intervention throughout the winter of 1922. The German Revolutionary Social-Democrats were more sympathetic, and there is evidence that the Hungarian government was able to procure older weaponry at discounted costs from RSD-dominated Austria as early as January.

Growing indications of American involvement prompted another meeting of the Council of Revolutionary States in April. By this point, Czech forces had broken into Hungarian Slovakia, and Croatia was on the verge of swallowing what remained of Serbia. This imperiled the position of the Bulgarian revolutionaries, who had recently launched successful offensives into white territory in the east. The Bolshevik faction came around to arming the Hungarians, and over the summer increasing aid from IntRevMar flowed through Austria to Budapest. Unfortunately, it was far too little to salvage the Hungarian position. Following the capture of Belgrade in June and the beginning of the Serbian ethnocide, the Romanian army, the second-largest in the war, broke through several Carpathian mountain passes and streamed into Transylvania. A large Croatian offensive began shortly afterwards, recapturing Vojvodina and linking up with Romanian advance units around between Pecs and Szeged.

Ironically, the main victim of Hungary’s imminent death (besides Hungary itself) was Poland. Pilsudski had long been suspected of harboring sympathies for the reactionary Croatian-Czech-Romanian bloc, and in June of 1922, German intelligence unveiled that a swathe of Czech Silesia had been ceded to Poland in 1921 in exchange for grain and weapons shipments. Thus far, the Polish Federation had permitted trade and soldiers to move between Germany and the Soviet Union free of charge, but if it ever became a hostile state, the land-link between the two main socialist powers would be cut off, creating a strategic vulnerability. In August, increasing economic and political pressure was placed on Pilsudski to bring Radek’s socialists back into government, a prospect which Pilsudski feared would reduce Poland to a mere vassal of the larger socialist powers.

On the 16th of August, Pilsudski mobilized the Polish Army and marched it into the German province of Posen. He had little prospect of winning a long war against the socialist bloc, especially while his potential allies to the south were preparing to besiege Budapest. Yet a window of opportunity had emerged to cement Poland’s independence: Germany was in the midst of a military reform process, transforming its professional army to a revolutionary militia, and the Soviets were currently engaged in a standoff with Japan over Sakhalin. A quick march to Berlin, he speculated, might shock the Germans into agreeing to a peace on reasonable terms.

At first, his gambit appeared to pay off. Assisted by Polish partisans in Posen, a stubborn white insurgency in East Prussia, and the disorganization of the German armed forces, Pilsudski seized a vast swathe of territory in the first week and a half of the war, including the cities of Danzig and Posen. Silesia proved a tougher net to crack; here, the red militias rallied quickly to the defense of the socialist republic, and the hoped-for Polish uprising did not materialize. The majority of the proletarian miners of Upper Silesia opted to fight against their ethnic brethren. Nonetheless, not just Kattowitz but Breslau as well fell by the end of the month, opening up the road to Berlin.

This was to be the kulminationspunkt of the Polish assault. Pilsudski had woefully underestimated the speed at which the Soviet Red Army could mobilize. Trotsky and Brusilov had implemented a series of ambitious military reforms following the lackluster performance of the Red Army in the Finnish Winter War, intended to give it a preponderance of power in any conflict in Eastern Europe. Almost immediately following the invasion of Posen, the Ukrainian and Northwestern theaters began mobilizing; after Poland ignored a Soviet ultimatum, the invasion of Lithuania and Polish Ukraine began. Numerically inferior and frequently poorly-trained Polish Confederation forces had little option but to retreat before the Soviet advance. Lithuanian nationals put up a valiant defense of Vilnius, which fell on the 30th; the “Ruthenian army” of the Polish Federation was a good deal less enthusiastic in the defense of Rivne and Lviv, with many mutinying to join the Ukrainian Red Army in its march into Galicia.

Facing an invasion of inner Poland, Pilsudski was forced to divert a sizable portion of his elite guard to the east. His offensive toward Berlin was halted well short of the city in mid-September, and with a massed German counterattack threatening to break what remained of his western army, he hastily sued for an armistice. There was some dispute in the socialist camp about whether this ought to be accepted. Most of the left-wing ministers in both Berlin and Moscow favored marching straight into Warsaw and installing a socialist government, but Lenin and some of the Revolutionary Social Democrats were skeptical about whether Poland was ready for a fully socialist administration. Pilsudski still undoubtedly commanded the allegiance of most Poles, and at this point, he appeared fully amenable to being made a puppet of the new International. He was therefore sent back with Radek to a much-reduced Poland stripped of Lithuania, much of East Galicia, and its Ukrainian and Belarusian territories. There are more than a few theories that this decision was informed by the distrust which both Lenin and Luxemburg had for the leader of the Polish left-socialists, Karl Radek, though there is no evidence that their attitudes toward the man figured into their calculations.

While the Polish imbroglio was sorted out through diplomacy, the nation of Hungary faced a far less ambiguous fate. Despite the pleas of Karolyi, there was no peace deal or armistice, but only a demand for unconditional surrender. Budapest was captured on September 12th, and Karolyi himself forced to sign a humiliating treaty that reduced Hungary to a diminished rump state. Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians living in Vojvodina, Slovakia, and Romania were expelled by the new occupying powers. Karolyi was deposed, and a government of national salvation led by Miklos Horthy took his place. Horthy, an ultraconservative Navy Admiral, was widely seen as a puppet of Hungary’s hated adversaries, and his government was sustained primarily by military force and repression.

Colonial Conflict and British Colonial Expansion

The basic tendencies of the First Revolutionary Era bore a complicated relationship to those of the Great War. From 1914-1919, European weakness became increasingly evident; each year, the Japanese and American economies grew as a proportion of the global total, and the Imperial Metropoles of London and Paris became dependent upon their backwards peripheries. British claims on American assets evaporated, and the center of world finance migrated over the Atlantic to New York following the abandonment of the gold standard. The Japanese intervention in China was only imaginable in a situation of extraordinary British weakness and imperial overstretch.

Yet while the First Revolutionary Era shattered the old empires of Europe, it did not bring about the end of European centrality in the world-system. In relative terms, Russian, British, and German power grew from 1920 to 1924. British economic might not only successfully reconstituted itself on a new industrial basis, but also adopted a fresh territorialist logic that won it control of the largest empire in human history, which at its height in 1928 encompassed more than a third of the world’s total population. America, which may have otherwise used its immense financial-industrial power to discipline Britain, was initially dependent on British military might to ensure a proper cordon sanitaire was built around the Red Menace. Britain knew that this American dependency was not to last forever, and operating on a standard window-logic, engaged in a campaign of territorial aggrandizement while it still held a blank check. This only heightened American suspicions that Britain would soon form a Sterling bloc to protect its own manufacturing interests, thereby precipitating a renewed competition for the world’s remaining markets.

British power, which had been damaged in absolute terms by the Great War, could only expand with such effortless ease because the French, Italian, Dutch and German Empires had been shattered by the revolutionary wave. Most of the German imperial territories had already been seized by the Entente during the war’s first few years, and it was simple enough for British colonial administrators to step in and assume a benevolent guardianship over these lands. Italy, meanwhile, already struggled to administer Libya and defeat a partisan movement of rebels before the Great War; confined to the impoverished island of Sardinia, the weak Italian legitimist government had no hope of providing the reactionary Italian colonials sufficient arms and support to hold onto their bastions in the northern cities. Behind the back of their own government, the colonial governors of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania petitioned for British assistance - from there, it was a short road into being made a protectorate.

The Dutch East Indies shared a similar fate. The East Indies were dependent on British naval power even before the war, and the royal government-in-exile soon required more overt forms of British assistance to police labor unrest and a growing native insurgency. The installment of a British commissioner in 1922 was met with great alarm in America, but the foreign minister insisted that they did not intend to win any “special economic rights” in the East Indies. Nonetheless, the area had become a protectorate in all-but-name by the end of the First Revolutionary Era, and was increasingly integrated into British markets.

Perhaps the most explosive transformation of the existing colonial order occurred in the vast and unevenly developed French territories of North Africa, the Congo, Madagascar, and Indochina. The vast majority of colonial officials were loyal to Clemenceau’s legitimists, but frequently found their administration understaffed. The Toulouse government simply did not have the fiscal capacity to maintain the colonies, and many of the underpaid colonial administrators left to either fight the reds or settle down in greener pastures, typically in either America or booming French Algeria. Some of the Central African territories, particularly those in the Sahel region, were so bereft of trained personnel that British expeditions were positively welcomed. As it became clear that ultrareactionary elements held the real power in Toulouse, some of the more liberal colonial officials, such as Abraham Schrameck in Madagascar, drifted into the British sphere voluntarily, while others looked to the Americans for support.

The situation of French Indochina was undoubtedly the most vexed and troubled. Seeing an opportunity to wrest back territories coerced from it at gunpoint by European diplomats, the Kingdom of Siam invaded the provinces of Laos and Cambodia in July. The governor at the time, Albert Sarraut, was no friend of Clemenceau’s, and the Prime Minister’s refusal to send soldiers from the home country to defend against the invasion enraged him; Sarraut speculated that this had to do with Clemeanceau’s own previous criticism of French Imperialism, though it is more likely that the leader of Legitimist France simply felt as if he could not spare the resources to defend the distant colony. He suggested instead entering into negotiations with Siam over the territories. This Sarraut would not do; the threat of invasion had already rallied portions of the Vietnamese nation to the French flag, and Sarraut formed a conscript army to fight off the Thais. His major bottleneck was a lack of arms and artillery. Without a merchant marine necessary to procure them, he was forced to call for British assistance, which soon came with not only arms, but military advisors as well. This prompted accusations of treason by the reactionary catholics, but Sarraut, disdaining these types even more than Clemenceau, denounced their government as “illegitimate”, even while continuing to pay them a portion of the colony’s revenues, as was customary.

Sarraut was successful in stymying the Siamese invasion. Intended to be a fast, bloodless affair that would force a fait accompli on the colonial administration, it devolved into a protracted jungle war. While most Laotians and Cambodians felt no especial loyalty to French Indochina, the behavior of the Siamese troops spurred local peasant opposition and helped provide the first building-blocks of an Indochinese identity. The Siamese Army was frustrated by guerilla resistance and the fanatical defense of a largely Vietnamese conscript army in Cambodia, though they had greater success to the north, in Laos. By the end of 1922, the Thai government decided to enter into negotiations, though Sarraut’s demands, which included the cession of additional Thai territories, prevented any peace from being made in the immediate future.

Ethiopia engaged in a more successful campaign of military adventurism. Under pressure from a modernizing, progressive faction behind the Regent Lij Tafari (eventually Haile Selassie I), the conservative Empress Zewditu ordered the Ethiopian Army into Italian Eritrea. This was a border region of countless previous Ethiopian Empires, and was felt by most of the ruling elite to be rightfully Ethiopian. With little Italian presence left by 1922, it turned out to be a relatively simple matter to occupy the territory, but sectarian religious tensions were never far away. Later in the year the British Somaliland protectorate was unceremoniously extended over its Italian and French counterparts; the anxious officials were sufficiently worried about the prospect of an Ethiopian invasion to sign away their sovereignty.

America looked on this silent expansion of British imperial power with great wariness, and sought assurances that in the post-revolutionary era, there would be a return to a free trade regime and that colonies would be yielded back to their original masters or to new, native-led governments. Not without a certain logic, the British replied that this latter matter was not entirely up to them, as these colonies possessed leadership that was typically not “british” in character. As for the matter of trade, Churchill insisted that any such negotiations be put off until the French conflict was settled (and thus until it could be guaranteed that the British loans to France could be repaid). America had little option but to reluctantly assent.

The Pacific War and the Lucknow Offensive

The final ten months of 1921 were some of the quietest in a war between two major powers. No major naval battles, no storming of the Japanese positions, no rumored Japanese assault on Hawaii took place during this long interlude. This is not to say that nothing happened. The Japanese did seize Wake Island in April, an event that was not much reported on in the press. They did not, however, advance any further into the Pacific; Midway was too distant a prize, and Hawaii far too ambitious a goal while the Americans still possessed such a crushing disparity of naval force.

Perhaps most importantly, each side spent time building up fortifications and naval bases. The rudimentary naval station in Pearl Harbor was expanded at breakneck speed, and America nationalized the Merchant Marine with an eye to conscripting a portion of the fleet to serve on logistics duty. New cruisers were laid down at existing dockyards, and when these reached their limits, fresh dockyards were built. Heavy industry began recovering.

The Japanese were not sitting idly by. Mindful of America’s desire to intervene in Europe, a strategy of defense and attrition was settled upon by the military command. Coastal fortifications were built up in Manila, Iwo Jima, and the Marianas Islands. Efforts were made to consolidate control over the more rural regions of the Philippines, a task never fully completed owing to the fierce resistance of guerillas.

By 1922, the American public had begun to voice doubts about the direction of the war, especially after Japan publicized several peace offers which included the return of the Philippine Islands. Britain still refused to offer assistance until the planned Lucknow Offensive in August, which rendered any attempt to retake the Philippines before then impractical. Hoping for some positive propaganda, it was decided to begin an “island hopping campaign” across Micronesia a few months ahead of schedule. In February and March, marines recaptured Wake Island and several of the Japanese Marshall Islands after brief but bloody battles against small local garrisons.

Japan had no means to reliably resupply soldiers this far out from the mainland without putting their own naval forces at undue risk, and they constructed their primary line of defense from Luzon through Formosa to Okinawa, with an outer ring in Iwo Jima and Saipan. The decision to not fully garrison the newly-acquired Marshall and Caroline Islands has been criticized by certain Japanese military historians, who believe that much greater losses could have been inflicted on American soldiers if more stout resistance was offered here, but the Navy refused to risk the battlefleet on resupply missions.

Hence over the summer, America successfully seized not just the Marshall, but also most of the Caroline Islands, as well as the strategically situated Palau, which was the site of the most brutal battle of the war so far. American losses steadily mounted in this campaign, but still numbered no more than 10,000 casualties, prompting some to speculate about whether Japan may have left most of its army in China. In reality, the islands won were of no great strategic value, as they lacked naval or logistics facilities which could aid in the planned invasion of the Phillippines. Building them up would require at least another half-year. The naval command therefore hoped fervently for British victory in the coming Lucknow Offensive, which the government did their best to secure through the generous provision of excess airplanes and landships to Britain.

William Birdwood was placed in charge of this operation, which was the largest and most ambitious of the entire Anglo-Indian war. 250,000 British infantrymen supplemented by an additional 200,000 Indian auxiliaries gathered in the loyal princely states of Central India. They were to fan out in two formations to seize the cities of Kanpur and Allahabad, and then converge on Lucknow, the heart of the United Provinces. In contrast to Bengal, Punjab, and Bombay, the various zamindars and local elites of the United Provinces had shown little enthusiasm for the INC government; the military forces billeted there, largely of Bengali origin, aroused frequent ire from the local population. Despite this, control of the U.P. was crucial for the Republic, as it linked together the two real heartlands of rebellion, Bengal and Punjab.

The British aimed to sever this lifeline and cut the territory of Republican India in two; this would also starve the Bengalis of Soviet supplies, which had swelled worryingly over the past year. Opposing the British force was an army of around 280,000 Republican soldiers under the command of several great war veterans. Growing factionalism within the INC government and peasant discontent made conscription more difficult, a problem that could not be redressed through the importation of additional Russian rifles. To the west, the sizable Army of Punjab was occupied with the invading Afghan army of Amunullah Khan, who had finally agreed to attack the INC government following border clashes with the Soviets, while a massive but poorly-trained conscript army was stationed to the east, in Bihar.

The British attacking forces were bolstered by the presence of American-supplied landships and aircraft. Having achieved both numerical and technological superiority along the front, Indian lines were broken through with relative ease. Markedly less partisan and guerilla resistance was encountered than in previous offensives. Allahabad and Kanpur were captured within operational deadlines, and the reeling Indian Army struggled to halt the British strategic initiative. British landships converging on Lucknow shattered the exhausted defenders of the city, encircling 45,000 soldiers in the process. They soon drove up to Nepal, cutting the remaining Republican territory in two and isolating Bengal, Bihar, and Assam. An attempt to drive east met with less success when units from the Army of Bihar met advancing Indian auxiliaries outside the Republican stronghold of Benares; they inflicted enough casualties on the soldiers to force them into a headlong retreat.

As a whole, the offensive was a resounding success for British Indian forces, and likely sealed the death warrant of the fledgling Republic, which did not have the means to eject their adversary from the United Provinces. Confident that the crown jewel of the Empire would be reconquered in full, the British now gave the go-ahead for American troops to begin disembarking in Singapore, North Borneo, and French Indochina. British diplomats prevaricated for as long as possible, but it was impossible to hide the arrival of entire American divisions on British territories. Britain’s decision shocked and enraged the Japanese government; they had known for some time that Britain would not take their side in a conflict with the Americans, but they did not imagine that they would ever have to count them as an enemy. Perfidious Albion had struck again. The leading Japanese newspapers excoriated the British for placing white racial solidarity before the accumulated diplomatic handiwork of decades.

Yet amidst the diatribes of nationalistic outrage, there was an undercurrent of trembling unease. How could Japan find itself in this situation? In 1919, near the end of the Great War, the nation had stood astride the world, its manufacturing industries booming, its exports the envy of all peoples, its navy an indispensable aid to the British in the mediterranean, and its sphere of influence set to steadily expand in China. Japan had entered the conflict as a custodian of peace and civilization, seeking to secure for itself a place among the world’s great powers; now these same powers were arrayed against it. Japanese industries, which had eked out a precarious existence over the past two years, now stood at risk of collapse as its trading partners evaporated.

Some looked back to the ministership of Hara Takashi. He had been made Prime Minister after nationwide riots, and proferred inflated promises for democracy and reform. Food prices were brought down, but universal manhood suffrage was never implemented. Takashi had been unable to contain the Japanese military in its bellicose drive into China, and incapable of devising a means to avert a war with a far larger and more powerful nation. Takashi’s cabinet fell shortly after the invasion of the Philippines; he was followed by a succession of ministers from his own Seiyukai party, who were each unceremoniously sacked after showing insufficient obeisance to the military-navy-industrial complex. Eventually, a purely aristocratic-military cabinet was formed, with Tanaka Giichi, a Japanese general, at its head. This was enormously unpopular at a time when Japanese mass party politics had finally begun clawing some power from the insular, oligarchic elite.

The national emergency of war provided the cabinet with some cover from newspaper accusations that it represented a “sliding back of Japan’s journey to democracy”. So long as this war was being conducted successfully, the military government could present itself as the saviors of Japan. On September 14th, they proclaimed the Anglo-Japanese alliance dissolved and declared war on the United Kingdom. Determined to exact revenge, an expedition was sent to seize the port of Hong Kong on the 22nd. Anticipating such a move, the British had already reinforced the island. Around 4,500 Japanese troops were able to land on the island, but the rest were turned back after an American cruiser squadron operating out of Singapore ambushed several poorly defended troop transports. The 4,000 Japanese troops were outnumbered by the British defenders, and also found themselves fighting against a Chinese Army stationed in the area; many of the same soldiers who initially participated in the invasion of Hong Kong now found themselves fighting to defend it from the Japanese. No attempt was made to salvage the situation of the stranded Japanese marines, and most were either captured or killed by the end of the month. More murmurs of discontent spread among the Japanese press. The mayor of Tokyo and “Father of Japanese Constitutional politics” Yukio Ozaki spoke before the Japanese Diet and reproached the incompetent Giichi ministry for its monumental military and diplomatic blunders. He received applause from both the minority Kensekai faction and many Seikuyai parliamentarians who had soured on the government. Shortly thereafter, nearly half of the conservative Seikuyai delegation split from the party to form a new political club, the Seiyuhonto.

The war, of course, went on. In October, the invasion of the Philippines began as American troops operating out of bases in Micronesia, Singapore, and French Indochina landed on Mindanao and the Visayan Islands. Here, the Japanese had much more success; British entry into the war did not change the calculus of forces in this theater, and over a year had been spent preparing for an American invasion. The Japanese fleet was still intact, and in fact growing; the outgunned navy refused to engage in the desired “decisive battle”, instead dispersing itself to engage in ambushes. This strategy now bore fruit. Despite the best efforts of American planners to secure sufficient escorts for the American troop and resupply convoys, several were attacked by superior Japanese forces, throwing the invasion logistics into disarray. Japanese defenders in well-entrenched positions used their fortifications and interior lines of communication to devastating effect. More American soldiers were killed within the first week of the Second Battle of the Philippines than in the entirety of the Pacific War thus far. This created a public relations disaster for the Root administration.

American casualties only mounted over the next few months. The planned invasion of Luzon had to be delayed until 1923. American officers were aghast to discover that the famed Phillippine Guerilla movement was just as hostile to American as it was to Japanese soldiers; the countryside quickly turned into a no-man’s land, forcing the American government to commit more soldiers to counterinsurgency, garrison, and police work. Nonetheless, some progress was made by the end of the year. Three of the Visayan Islands fell under American control. Despite the fierce resistance of the Muslim Moro peoples, all of the major towns in Mindanao were secured. The Japanese, in fact, were rebuffed somewhat more easily; after being ousted from their defensive positions and forced into the rural backwoods, few of the soldiers were heard or seen from again. They too, succumbed to the Philippine Guerillas.

The French Civil War

In 1922, renewed fighting erupted in the French Civil War after a year of relative quiet. Each of the combatants had grown increasingly dependent on their benefactors, and political leaders on both sides felt pressure from their allies to resume the offensive. In Revolutionary France, it was only Soviet-German food shipments that prevented a famine in 1921, while the Legitimists, who controlled only a small fraction of France’s manufacturing base, required a continuous flow of American arms and ammunition to stay in the fight.

The benefactors anxiously waited for a return on their investment. The International Union of Revolutionary Marxists worried over the expanding presence of American pilots and landships in Legitimist France; one had to strike before the American behemoth recovered fully, and it was too late. The Americans adopted a similar logic, urging the legitimists to take the offensive before the revolutionaries could convert their demographic advantage into a military one.

The whites struck first. Rather than march into the heavily fortified Loire Valley, the white army proceeded east toward Dijon. Taking the city would cut the main artery between Paris and Lyon. Despite extensive planning for the operation, it failed to achieve the element of surprise; Soviet intelligence was already embedded deep within Legitimist France. American firepower provided the means to achieve an initial breakthrough, but it could not be sustained indefinitely. Legitimist air superiority was challenged by volunteer pilots from Germany and Italy. For the first time in the war, most aerial engagements were not between Frenchmen but between Germans and Americans. The conflict was being internationalized.

The resounding failure of the Dijon offensive marked the end of Petain’s generalship. Clemenceau’s right-wing opponents went on the attack, and the embattled Prime Minister was forced to concede to the opposition. General Del Castelnau, a right-wing Catholic who was also the unofficial leader of a paramilitary movement, was placed in charge of the Army. His nomination was bolstered by the favor he won from the American diplomatic corps, who admired him for his simplicity and directness. Castelnau was clearly a man of the right, and his fervent catholicism had likely prevented him from being promoted in the Great War, despite his distinguished service. Now, his religiosity became an asset, especially when paired with his refusal to become involved in the factional disputes between individual right-wing factions. He was a man almost everyone - or at least, almost everyone besides Clemenceau and his loyalists - could approve of.

At the urging of their anarchist and syndicalist allies, the Reds began their offensive out of the Rhone Valley. The main goal was to retake Marseille. If successful, this would be a great symbolic victory for revolutionary france, avenging the white massacre of 1920. It would also cut off a major point of entry for American aid. Normally, the mountainous terrain in the region would have made a frontal assault difficult, but over the summer, the Italian government massed the majority of its militia army in the western alps, prompting fears of an intervention. Legitimist France was forced to transfer troops to the border, while a new model of German landship provided the French advance out of Lyon with a heavily-armored spearhead. The attack toward Grenoble achieved a level of operational surprise, while another toward Valence plodded on slowly. Grenoble fell on August 15th, encircling 8,000 legitimists. The fall of Valence three days later stirred hopes that Marseille was still within reach, but the quick arrival of several American “volunteer” divisions sufficed to halt the armored spearhead toward Avignon. Italy retaliated for this overt intervention by ordering its army to occupy the cities of Nice and Cannes.

The failure of both major offensives led some to think about an armistice. Clemenceau, an exhausted and beaten man, mooted the prospect of peace to his cabinet. Soldier’s councils in Paris endorsed a resolution calling for negotiations. However, few could imagine what peace might look like. While some thought that the division of France into two separate states had become an inevitability, most believed this was an unacceptable solution. Yet the internationalization of the conflict would make any post-war “national unity” government exceedingly unstable. America had already soured on Clemenceau after learning of his peace proposal, and plans were afoot to replace the increasingly powerless prime minister. In the north, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard had to deal with the spiralling demands of the soldier’s councils, which requested an ever-growing share of the national income. Utterly reliant on the army for the tasks of both war and domestic peacekeeping, he had little option but to meet their requests, though this made it more difficult to feed and clothe the home front. Tensions between the worker’s and soldier’s of the French worker and soldier’s republic were soon to balloon out of control.