That was a wonderful AH.Commiversary present!
So we've mopped up Carolina, California, Louisiana and Iberia - on to Germany and Italy next?
Thanks. As you can probably tell, I've rather foolishly decided to try to sum up the European front of the GAW before we reach part #200, hence the rather long updates.
But I've read some of the less event-based bits of the updates, and I particularly liked that fairly recent update on the submarine warfare in Charleston harbour.
So, Thande, you aren't calling them "Highfish" anymore, calqued from
Eisenhaifisch ? I mean, the "ironshark" is still there, but you seem to have changed it around a bit.
I can do retcons like that because you're the only other person who actually reads the alternate terminology wiki page
Another great update, though I'm not quite clear on the referendum in Carolina -- was it just a symbolic thing, with no land being given over, or since (say) South Province as a whole voted for Kingdom, were the parts actually held by Confederation handed over, or did they continue to be part of Confederation as a rump South Province?
They weren't actually handed over, it "currently" remains a purely military occupation dividing line which
de facto is indeed treated as a rump South Province (
de jure, of course, all of South Province and indeed all of Carolina is considered still part of the ENA by the ENA itself).
Love how Spain had to throw off the yolk of its former colonies. Other than Mal
ê Rising's Portugal, it's something seldom seen. I would like to see the often discussed Britain being apart of an Indian Empire played out just once, but anyways
.
Couldn't happen in TTL because Britain never got far enough in India in the first place...
I can also really see how the UPSA is growing into a US equivalent of a steadily rising power that's dominating its hemisphere. They might not have officially gained swaths of territory, but they've clearly emerged the overall winner of the war with their dominance over Brazil and Carolina (and more or less much of Louisiana too), and knocked their competition down a peg. I wonder how soon New Spain and the ENA are going to start warming up to each other (assuming this is going to happen).
Well, New Spain and the ENA aren't going to see each other as strategic allies for quite a while seeing how sore New Spain is of losing all that territory (especially as it was the result of collapses at the last minute after fighting successfully for the vast majority of the war - see Germany in 1918). Which of course only helps the UPSA.
Trying to update the map, and have a couple of questions:
1) Wouldn't the 37th Meridian be in eastern Brazil?
Thanks for spotting that! I wanted the OTL Utah-Nevada border and I was reading off an American source without stopping to think that it meant the 37th Meridian
west of Washington DC, not Greenwich
(I feel like Captain Haddock in
Red Rackham's Treasure). That would actually be something like the 114th Meridian west of Greenwich. In any case, however, this point is obsoleted by the second one you make:
2) This map:
It shows the interior of New California split off as a separate thing. Was that just a sub-provincial division?
I had forgotten I'd done that. What I had planned was to set up this division from the start so the ENA could use that as the basis for its claims later-- so rather than this based on a Meridian at all, it should be that the whole of this interior Territory of Timpanogos goes to the ENA and everything west of it (i.e. New California) goes to the IAR of California. I will edit the post now.
EDIT: Have fixed now. Thanks for doing the map, by the way.
Finally! A resolve to California. Never being a fan of long and detailed descriptions of wars, I really enjoyed both the Californian and Iberian theatres- I wonder, where there any territorial exchanges in Iberia? I presume that Navarre and Catalonia were left unchanged, but what about southern part of Galicia and the city of Corunna which have belonged to Portugal so far?
It seems to be a running gag that I never find a good place to discuss Navarre... anyway, I'll cover territorial changes in detail in a later update, but the only major one was that Spain got back its pre-1794 border with Portugal.
All right, that was brilliant.
I particularly like how you utilised the carpenter bit of the backstory to make a Biblical reference. Funny.
Also, based on that biography my counterpart seems like a "Bob Denard of the 19th century".
Ah yes, I should have mentioned that Molnár is a cameo for Petike.
Very cheeky change of pace in the Iberia segments (multiple decades in just a few paragraphs coming right after the detailed coverage of the Great American War). I was about to ask who you were and what you had done to Thande, until I saw how cleverly you managed to show in a single update just how dramatically the UPSA's influence has grown. (And is that yet another cameo I see there?)
That was partly just because I wanted to push the pace on some more, but also because I wanted to use it to Subtly Emphasise(tm) the way that Europe is becoming less important in the global balance of power from the POV of people writing in the 20th century.
