Part #143: Naval Gazing
“What really brings a tear to my eye when I look back on those days, those supposed days of glory, our new ‘Moment of Hope’ as Wilhelm put it...is that I see that for all our claims of turning around on the chessboard, deposing our king and queen and knights and bishops and seizing our castles for ourselves...as far as the crowned heads in Dresden and Hanover were concerned, we never ceased to be anything more than those pawns. We should have listened to Pascal more closely: we had fallen into the same trap of provincialism he warned us against. For the chessboard was larger than we had guessed...”
– Manfred Landau, “The Exilic Epistles of a Bitter Schmidtist”,
written in exile in the UPSA, 1869
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From: “A History of Naval Warfare, Volume 3: From the Wars of Supremacy to the Democratic Experiment” by Gordon Yates and Thierry Guizot (1970)—
Naval warfare played a very important role in the beginning of the Popular Wars, with the naval clashes between Portugal, the Netherlands, Castile, New Spain and the UPSA ultimately being the ignition of the broader European war (see Chapter 14).[1] However in the latter part of the conflict, navies generally took a back seat to armies, unsurprising given the nature of the wars. Populism did not translate well to naval warfare: one cannot run a ship without a hierarchy, and while one can conceivably kill off one’s aristocratic officers and replace them with commoners, in practice the level of education and training needed for running a ship is rather greater than that needed to command a land force.[2] Of the naval clashes in the latter part of the wars, most were inconclusive skirmishes. Two stand out however: the conflicts at sea between Russia and Denmark in the Baltic as part of the Swedish Civil War, and that between France and Italy in the Mediterranean. Let us consider these in turn.
In 1833 the Stockholm Conspiracy, which had sought to restore Sweden’s full independence under a separate monarch to Denmark, looked on the verge of collapse.[3] The Conspirators had badly miscalculated, failing to recognise that the period of union with Denmark had been relatively popular with Swedish commoners, many of whom indeed wanted the union to go further so that they could benefit from the better legal condition their Danish counterparts enjoyed. The Conspirators were widely seen as a group of aristocratic fools demanding the commoners die in a futile struggle to massage their own egos. From this point of view, while the Conspiracy is often lumped in with the Populist movements, it was their opponents in Sweden that truly represented Populist views. The Swedish Civil War therefore is also a textbook counter-example to disprove Sanchezist historical theory.
After a series of Danish victories culminating in the fall of Stockholm in 1833, it seemed as though the war was virtually over. Yet in Helsingfors the Conspirators had been in frantic negotiations with Russia, now under the new rule of Emperor Theodore IV. Although the Russians were still engaged with crushing rebellions in Crimea and Moldavia, Theodore was keen to provide a war to help unite the country, still fractious after their brief and farcical war of succession. Intervention in the Swedish Civil War was ideal from that perspective: Theodore’s nephew Grand Duke Constantine had warned him that Lithuania would no longer automatically cooperate with Russian foreign policy, including support in the Baltic, and this was a means to restore Russian supremacy by acquiring a new vassal. The Stockholm Conspirators for their part were both desperate and overcome by what Philip Bulkeley called “Henry Frederick Syndrome”, so furious at their lack of support from their own peasantry that they were willing to sell their country into slavery, against the specific aims they had originally rebelled against, purely to stop the peasants and their Danish allies from enjoying a complete victory.
The naval struggle was noted as particularly interesting at the time because of how unpredictable it was. In the earlier part of the Swedish Civil War, the majority of the Swedish Navy had remained loyal to their King in Copenhagen. Only a small portion had defected to the Conspirators. However, thanks to their ‘Rasmussen Doctrine’ of not sending men from one nation to face others from that same nation, the Danes mostly used the loyalist Swedes as reserve forces while fighting the small Conspirator force with Danish and Norwegian ships. The Conspirators had rapidly been sunk and the Danes gained control of the sea, using their ships to land troops behind enemy lines. However in the process the Danes and Norwegians had been somewhat bloodied. Now they faced a numerically slightly inferior but fresh Russian force. Most pre-war estimates had considered that Russia and Lithuania together posed a significant threat to Denmark-Sweden as far as a Baltic naval war was concerned, but now the assumptions those estimates were based on had been thrown out of the window. Denmark-Sweden lacked a portion of her pre-war fleet due to the civil war clashes, while Constantine of Lithuania proclaimed neutrality in order to assert Lithuania’s new independent foreign policy. However, in practice it was pro-Russian neutrality, with a wink and a grin towards sheltering Russian ships fleeing Danish pursuit and not vice versa. Most considered that the Danes still had the advantage.
Indeed for the most part the Danes enjoyed minor victories over the Russians at sea, propelled chiefly by numbers. However, this was rendered irrelevant by the only battle anyone remembers, the Battle of Bornholm in February 1834. For the first time the Russians, augmented by some Conspirator volunteers and the small Courland fleet, amassed their entire force under the brilliant Admiral Nikolai Senyavin. The Danes were unable to quite concentrate all their ships in such a manner, but the Dano-Swedo-Norwegian force that faced Senyavin under Admiral Vilhelm Polder was still slightly superior in numbers. The outcome of the battle was a shock decisive Russian victory, ultimately stemming from a combination of lack of coherent communication between the different parts of the Danish fleet and Senyavin’s keen appreciation of how new tactics were required thanks to the injection of new technologies into the conflict. Both sides were using steam-galleys, but only Senyavin truly appreciated how to use them in new ways rather than simply adopting the well-worn tactics of the old Baltic oar galleys. The Danes used rocket ships, but Senyavin had drilled his men in rocket drills that allowed them to stand firm under the hail of shrieking fire, terrifying to the untrained but largely ineffective. Indeed it was actually some ships on the Danish side that panicked due to the rockets, along with some of the Russians’ Courland allies. Senyavin’s force was also one of the first to use rifled cannon, nicknamed
skalpel (scalpel) guns by the Russian sailors for their use—hammering a cannonball at four times the usual speed through the hull of an enemy ship and puncturing its steam boiler, leaving it dead in the water and often killing a sizeable part of its crew through scalding from the escaping steam.[4] The scalpel guns had many disadvantages—chiefly that being muzzle-loaded, the rifle lands meant they could take ten minutes to reload. But Russian ships usually carried just one or two, reserving them for that moment when they could strike at short range and effectively take an enemy ship out of the battle.
The Russian victory has been held up as emblematic of Theodore’s policy of marrying Slavic romanticism to an embrace of new technological innovations, although this is somewhat absurd considering Theodore had only been on the throne a matter of months, and all the key naval decisions had been taken under his father. Nonetheless the Battle of Bornholm was a shocking triumph and the Russians were swift to capitalise by sending troops to occupy the island—using transports ‘bought’ suspiciously easily from ‘neutral’ Lithuania.
The Battle of Bornholm did not decide the Swedish Civil War but it was a decisive shift. The Danes still had a working navy—about a third of their Bornholm force had escaped, and there were ships that had not been able to join it in time—but it was now all they could do to defend Zealand from Russian naval attack. This allowed the Russians effective control of the Baltic, meaning the Russians could now surround those troops that the Danes had landed behind enemy lines and force them to surrender. Russian winter soldiers (consisting largely of penal battalions made up of men who had supported Constantine in the late succession war) also moved into the far north of Norway, occupying Finnmark. An attempted attack on Trondheim from Conspirator-held Sweden was repulsed, however, in part by Norwegian militiamen. The Battle of Trondheim would play an important role in the development of Norwegian nationalism.[5] However the Danes still held out hope of a turnaround until the Battles of Gävle and Karlstad in August and September 1834 (respectively) when a new Danish northern offensive was hurled back by the Conspirators and their new Russian reinforcements. With winter setting in the Danes were driven southwards. Finally Copenhagen sued for peace in December. The Danes’ decision to end the war were in part driven by the continued Schmidtist depredations in Danish Germany, and though they had been able to spare enough troops (mostly Norwegians, who were somewhat alarmed to hear of the encroachments on their homeland) to put down most of the uprisings, the fact that the Saxons and Hanoverians were moving into other lands convinced the Danes they had to give Germany their full attention. Furthermore the peace was relatively good for Denmark: the Russians evacuated Bornholm and most (but not all) of their Norwegian conquests, and after all Denmark’s loyalists still retained the vast majority of the part of Sweden worth having. The new border was drawn between the Mälaren and Vänern lakes, leaving Stockholm under the control of the loyalist Sweden. The Conspirators ostensibly claimed that Upsala was their capital, but being within artillery range of the loyalists, in practice Helsingfors remained the centre of power in the ‘new Sweden’: an appendage of Russian power with more Finns than Swedes among its population.[6] Theodore had achieved his aims: he had a new vassal more pliant than Lithuania had been, and just as useful for basing Baltic naval supremacy off of...
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...second of these clashes was between the French and Italians. France had of course been the first country, in its Jacobin incarnation, to use steam-galleys in the Mediterranean. The French retained a powerful Mediterranean fleet, but were faced with one that equalled or surpassed it from Hapsburg Italy. The Hapsburgs benefited from the control of both Genoa and Venice, giving them enormous naval bases from which they could dominate both the Ligurian and Adriatic Seas. Greece was also aligned with Italy, although King Joseph both lacked much in the way of resources to help and was also growing troubled over the split between his brother Leopold in Italy and the rest of the Hapsburgs in Austria. As in the Baltic with the Russians, what the French lacked in numbers they possessed in superior seamanship to the Italians, being naturally the most experienced of all the nations in this kind of warfare. They also benefited from a gamble by Dictateur Bonaparte, which was viewed as near-madness by some of his colleagues (in particular Bleu triumvir Claude Devigny) but was based on the deeper understanding of British affairs that only the man once called Leo Bone could possess. Bonaparte knew just how precarious Joshua Churchill’s position was and the lack of loyalty the man possessed from the Royal Navy, knowing that Churchill was paranoid about the idea that as soon as he sent a ship out of his sight, it would defect to the Americans (although this was not an
irrational fear, as indeed it happened more than once). To that end, Bonaparte chose to take advantage of the Burgundy Canal, the great waterway that Lisieux had built under the name
Canal de l’Épurateur.[7] Whereas Lisieux had used it to bring his Mediterranean fleet through France into the Atlantic in order to face the British with more ships than they thought possible, Bonaparte did the reverse, gambling that Churchill was incapable of using his ships against France and she could therefore afford to leave her Atlantic face bare. The gamble paid off, and indeed the Popular Wars was one of the few Anglo-French conflicts bereft of naval clashes. The only significant dampeners on Bonaparte’s plan was the occasional raid by Flemish ships on the Norman coast.
Having amassed most of the French Navy in the Mediterranean, Bonaparte now had the upper hand. There were no really decisive naval battles like that of Bornholm in the Baltic, merely a gruelling, bloody slog that mirrored the Franco-Italian conflict on land, which veterans dubbed the ‘
Guerre des cauchemars’ (“Nightmare War”). The French ultimately benefited from the impairment of the Hapsburgs’ naval bases: Venice was wrecked by the Venetian Commune uprising in 1830, while Genoa was briefly taken by the French in 1831, even as the Hapsburgs pushed them out of Turin. The French had no intention of trying to hold Genoa, but held the port long enough to burn some of the dockside facilities and sank a ship in the Porto Antico to block it off to Italian ships. While the Hapsburgs retook the city in 1832, the damage was done and the Italian ships were forced to operate on a longer supply line, often based out of more distant ports.[8] While the French never achieved a really crushing naval victory over the Italians, by early 1833 their position was secure enough that Bonaparte felt it safe to bring part of his fleet back into the Atlantic again through the canal. He was irked both by the Flemish raids on Normandy and the fact that the failure to help Liége and the Route des Larmes in Wallonia had been a propaganda disaster for everyone in the French government except Malraux and the Rouges. Bonaparte had reacted by guaranteeing an independent Dutch Republic as a means to attack Flanders. The decision had been made in the heat of the moment and would have far-flung repercussions long after everyone involved in the Popular Wars was dead.[9] Ultimately even in the short term it was unwise, as it involved dignifying Oren Scherman’s regime with the recognition of France as a legitimate government...
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From: “The Last Man Standing: Germany and the Popular Wars” by Pavel Vygotsky, 1979—
After Pascal Schmidt’s suicide in 1832, his
Volksrepublik Deutschland fragmented over disagreements about who should take his place, with the three main leaders—Wilhelm Brüning, Albert Dornberger and Manfred Landau—each both accusing the other two for driving Schmidt to suicide. Landau had little support beyond his immediate circle of allies: he was not native to the Mittelbund, having joined Schmidt during his and Brüning’s tour of the German lands, and lacked the kind of personal loyalty that Brüning enjoyed. Dornberger, to the surprise of the other two, also commanded great loyalty. This was mainly due to his former role as the ‘Voice of Schmidt’. His position meant that he could claim to have been closer to Schmidt and his thoughts than even Schmidt’s old friend Brüning, which the latter found profoundly frustrating: Dornberger was also able to point to the fact that Schmidt and Brüning had often publicly disagreed, whereas he claimed to know Schmidt’s mind on all things and to do what Schmidt would do. “The people are fools,” Brüning commented bitterly at the time. “If they truly read Pascal’s book, if they knew Pascal like I do, they would know that nothing would incense him more than someone claiming to blindly follow him. He thrived on dissent, on argument, on debate.” At one point Brüning even accused the common folk of the VRD of believing that Dornberger
was Schmidt due to confusion over the fact that Dornberger had read out Schmidt’s speeches for him thanks to the torture-inflicted damage to his throat. Ultimately this period, which Landau in exile later sarcastically called Brüning’s ‘Damascene conversion’, was one in which Brüning became increasingly disconcerted and cynical about Populist notions of the people ruling themselves. Whereas Landau had always viewed Populism as more important than German unification, Brüning now found himself with the reverse opinion. (Dornberger, like Schmidt, ultimately viewed them as a single indivisible cause—killing the aristocrats was necessary to sweep away German divisions).
Manfred Landau was many things but he was not stupid. Recognising he enjoyed little support in the VRD, and canny enough to realise that the infighting revolutionaries would soon fall prey to attack from outside, he called together his supporters and formed them together in what was effectively a mercenary company. “We will strike out for the sea,” he said, “and go into exile in the UPSA. The war here is already lost, they just don’t know it yet. At least we can keep the dream alive in friendly climes and bring it back to Germany when the time is ripe.” Despite his pessimistic message at a time before the VRD’s doom was obvious, Landau was charismatic enough to bring several thousand fighters and their families with him. He struck out north and west, hoping to find a port with some ships he could hire.
Landau was right, of course: as he left the VRD behind, the Saxons and Hanoverians signed the Treaty of Osnabrück, and now Hanoverian and Brunswicker troops would be backed with Young German militiamen as they sought to crush the infighting Populists in the Mittelbund. In 1834 the Saxons even handed Henry Frederick back to a relieved Wilhelm von der Trenck in Hanover: Henry Frederick had publicly abdicated all claims to the throne of Prussia and had given over those claims to Augustus II of Saxony. “Let Berlin be yours; do what you please with that Godforsaken nest of rats. It is you, Your Majesty, who has given a gift to me by taking it off my hands”. Henry Frederick’s emotive language went a long way towards convincing people that his move was genuine and not the result of torture or cutting a deal. Indeed it seems entirely in keeping with his depression of the period. Henry Frederick also told the remaining soldiers in Prussia to either join him in Hanover or serve the Saxons. Most did one or the other, only a few defecting to the Schmidtist (now rather deviationist) Brandenburg Republic. On his return to Hanover, Henry Frederick commanded his Prussians in the field against the VRD, paradoxically more furious that they had driven his friend Pascal Schmidt to suicide than from any anti-Schmidtist position. In September 1834 Brüning’s “Damascene conversion” became complete when, partly through realism and partly through genuine hatred of Dornberger and his supporters among commoners in the VRD, he went over to the Hanoverian-Saxon force and offered to serve them in exchange for a guarantee of various political liberties in whatever state they carved out of the VRD. This guarantee was accepted—while Brüning’s force was smaller than Dornberger’s by this point, the Saxons and Hanoverians recognised that getting him on side would be a massive propaganda victory across the whole of Germany. The map would not be completely redrawn until the Congress of Brussels in 1836, but Dornberger’s death in February 1835—impaled on a Saxon bayonet, a symbolic image that would live forever as a symbol of neo-Schmidtist movements—ended the existence of the VRD as anything more than an abstract concept.
Landau’s quest brought he and his men to the remnant of the Dutch Republic, which had become the personal tyranny of Oren Scherman. Just as before in the Eighty Years’ War, the Dutch use of water defences meant that even overwhelming force on the Flemings’ part meant any attempt to conquer the whole of the United Provinces was slow and gruelling. The Fleming invasion had been ongoing since 1829, though Maximilian II had often been forced to scale back operations in order to redirect troops to oppose the French invasion to the south and put down Schmidtist and Walloon rebels. Even in the face of all these distractions for his enemy, it is still remarkable that Scherman had managed to survive as long as he did. Often compared to Joshua Churchill, his rule was maintained as long as it was by fear alone. Unlike Churchill, however, who had a strict and uncompromising sense of morality (even though that code often meant ‘everyone who opposes me should be hanged’) Scherman revelled in amorality. A disciple of the Marquis de Sade,[10] he viewed ruling a nation as merely a means to an end through which he could enjoy ‘delights’ which would have made Caligula blench. 1833 saw Scherman aided by both a French force deployed from the north and Landau’s former Schmidtist mercenaries, who agreed to fight for him in exchange for ships with which to escape. The French force was commanded by Admiral Raoul Moreau, who had been a lieutenant under Admiral Villeneuve when Lisieux had launched the ‘Le Grand Crabe’ attack on the Netherlands thirty years before, and knew the terrain well. Its land counterpart was commanded by the disgraced Marshal Forgues, a cunning way in which Bonaparte killed two birds with one stone by removing the marshal from his command in the south while giving him a chance to redeem himself against Flanders in another theatre.
Forgues was a noted eccentric and Landau was a man of the world. Nonetheless both of them were sickened by Scherman, and entered the odd position of becoming somewhat friendly with one another through their shared disgust: the Schmidtist and the French aristocrat that Schmidtists blamed for Germany’s woes. But then from what Landau wrote about Scherman’s...proclivities, one can understand it. “Sometimes it was a sheep, sometimes it was a goat, sometimes it was a little girl or boy,” Landau said in his memoir. “I don’t know if he was always so blatant about it, or if it was just because the Republic was living on borrowed time and he just wanted to...enjoy himself before the end. But we would walk in for a scheduled meeting and...find him there on his chaise-longue stroking the hair of a child, the glint in his eye reflecting the terror in the child’s...I do not wish to dwell on this repulsive matter. All I will say is that none of the...individuals we ever saw him with, we ever saw more than once. And that little bones kept treacherously washing ashore in the mud around the IJ lake...”
Given this grotesque position, the French and Schmidtists can be forgiven for not fighting the Flemings as enthusiastically as they might, and by 1834 the Flemings had overrun the bulk of the country and were closing on Amsterdam. On learning that Scherman planned to betray him, Landau took great pleasure in (with the aid of some of his friends and some of Forgues’ elite soldiers) accosting him in the night and garrotting him. “Far better than he deserves, but I doubt a means of death exists in the world suitable for what
he deserves,” Forgues commented.
Some ships remained available. Landau feared Forgues would want them to evacuate his own troops, but Forgues told his unlikely friend to take them. “We will be given parole by the Flemings and we have a government to negotiate our release. You have neither. May God be with you,
allemand, and may we meet again in happier times.”
Landau’s men therefore escaped in the ships for the UPSA, but only a part of the French force could be evacuated in time. Forgues remained with his men and surrendered to the Flemings. However, prior to the Flemings’ arrival, Forgues was able to rescue Stadtholder William VII from where Scherman had long held him under house arrest. Though the Stadtholder had had a fine apartment rather than a dungeon cell, eyewitness accounts say he was never the same again after his imprisonment, alienistically crippled[11] and, though there is no direct evidence, a common supposition is that he too met with abuse at the hands of Scherman. Needless to say, Scherman became the definition of evil in Dutch society for generations afterwards, and Dutch depictions of Satan or of Sinterklaas’ devilish servant at Christmas were often based on portraits of Scherman.[12]
The capture of Forgues’ men was another embarrassment for the French government. Fortunately in August 1834 peace was made with the Italians: the French regained their pre-1794 borders plus Savoy, while Nice (also held at the time by French forces) was traded back to the Italians. The French also agreed to refute any claims by Victor Felix of Sardinia to Piedmont and to expel him from their country—though in practice they sent the fuming king to the new Bernese Republic so they could still call on him if necessary.[13] The Peace of Cuneo ended the Franco-Italian war on these terms, allowing both nations to focus on other matters—the Italians were alarmed at the Saxon victories over Austria, despite their current disagreement, and were also suspicious of Corsican and Neapolitan activities in the south, in particular the Neapolitan annexation of Tuscany. The French on the other hand were able to throw more of their forces at the Flemings.
In theory this should have worked well: Flanders was now facing the juggernaut of France alone. However, Bonaparte had miscalculated. The terrible meat grinder of the ‘Nightmare War’ against Italy, where the two evenly matched sides had used all the modern wonders of steam-assisted warfare and had met with constant artillery bombardment as troops tried to maneouvre, had forever changed the men who had survived it.[14] Many had lost valued friends and colleagues, and the alienistic effect on them was still poorly understood. What really sealed the issue though was when men who had made it through those years of hell were now killed in ill-advised offensives aimed at Liége, especially when French troops blundered into the Walloon refugees still being expelled from the region by the Flemings, and more than one French troops ended up killing sympathetic civilians by accident. This was enough to alienistically break more than one soldier and drive them to suicide. Ultimately the offensive did capture some more territory, but not enough to take the French to the gates of Brussels as Bonaparte had hoped. And now France was back in the position of looking like the aggressor, the position Bonaparte had hoped to avoid—though now most of her potential enemies were too exhausted to start up another war.
Bonaparte, who had conducted most of the war from a desk with the aid of Optel semaphore, visited a military hospital at this point (on the advice of his daughter and secretary Horatie) and was shocked by the horrors of modern warfare upon the wounded troops: amputated limbs he recognised from his own fighting days, but (he wrote) “Many of these glass-eyed heroes seem to have had parts of their
souls amputated as well as those of their bodies”. To the surprise of the Bleu and Blanc triumvirs, but the approval of Malraux, Bonaparte therefore decided enough blood had been spilt, France had earned her honour and her survival, and swallowed his pride to seek peace with the Flemings.
Horatie came into her father’s office on February 18th 1835 to inform him that they had heard back from Brussels, and Maximilian II was willing to negotiate. But the scribbled Optel decode fell from her hands as she stared at her father slumped over his desk. At the last hurdle of his last war, at the age of seventy, the man who had borne three names was dead. Not by the bullet on the battlefield, nor by the assassin in the street, but slain by his own failing heart.
A chapter in France’s history had ended, and it remained to be seen who would write the next.
[1] Or for readers of this timeline, see Parts #118-122.
[2] As the revolutionary French discovered in OTL.
[3] See Part #131.
[4] This sort of tactic was never really an issue in OTL as rifled cannon came in around the same time as ironclads anyway, and steam-only ships were not used much in warfare at the time.
[5] Norwegian nationalism is far less developed than OTL at this stage, as there has not been the incident in OTL where the King of Denmark was forced to yield Norway to Sweden in 1814, at which point the Norwegians attempted (unsuccessfully) to proclaim themselves an independent state.
[6] Although the Finnish language at this point was rather obscure even among Finns, being chiefly used for religious texts. In OTL it took the period of Russian control to inspire Finnish linguistic nationalism to the point that Finnish became the chief language of the Finns.
[7] See Part #55.
[8] And 'ports' is probably giving them too much credit.
[9] See Part #133.
[10] Who had a similar career in TTL to OTL, but died a few years earlier from phlogistication under Robespierre’s regime.
[11] Psychologically damaged.
[12] In OTL the idea that Sinterklaas (Father Christmas, Santa Claus) triumphed over evil and enslaved a devil to assist him (common both in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe) was altered in the 19th century to form the modern Dutch mythological figure of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete), who is instead presented as a black human and less of a negative presence. However the versions of the stories that led to this change only date from the 1840s and have been butterflied away in TTL.
[13] The author is being anachronistic here, it wasn’t called the Bernese Republic until much later on.
[14] Comparisons to World War One trench warfare are decidedly anachronistic, but it could reasonably be compared to the bloodier battles of the American Civil War from OTL.
) Or are they federally-administered territories?
