Supervolcano things fall.., p.1
New England 06 - Imperial Crisis, page 1
James Philip
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IMPERIAL CRISIS
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The New England Series – Book 6
Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2020.
All rights reserved.
Cover concept by James Philip
Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design
THE NEW ENGLAND SERIES
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BOOK 1: EMPIRE DAY
BOOK 2: TWO HUNDRED LOST YEARS
BOOK 3: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WIND
Book 4: Remember Brave Achilles
BOOK 5: GEORGE WASHINGTON’S GHOST
BOOK 6: THE IMPERIAL CRISIS
FUTURE TITLES
In 2021
BOOK 7: THE LINES OF LAREDO
BOOK 8: THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA
In 2022
BOOK 9: ISLANDS IN THE STREAM
BOOK 10: THE GATHERING PLACE
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Details of all my books and future release dates will appear first on my web site
www.jamesphilip.co.uk
Contents
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
EPILOGUE
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Author’s Endnote
Other Books by James Philip
IMPERIAL CRISIS
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The New England Series – Book 6
A.D. 1978
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PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
When, three days after the event, the news broke in Mexico City that the spearhead patrols of the 6th Chapultepec Rangers had watered their horses in the waters of the Rio de Sabinas on the first day of June, 1978, it was later claimed – probably with some justification – that practically the entire population of the capital, some four million people, had spontaneously poured onto the streets in ecstatic jubilation.
The party had gone on for days.
However, the Chief of Staff of the Mexican Army, General Santa Anna had reportedly had the officer who had leaked the news to the media, summarily cashiered because at the time most of the Mexican 1st and 3rd Armies were still slogging across the hostile terrain of southern Texas, with their over-stretched, disintegrating supply trains lagging far behind their spearhead units due to exhaustion and the chronic shortage of petrol.
In fact, the first lightly-armoured machine-gun armed Mexican land destroyer did not reach the Sabine River for another ten days and even by the end of June, only the exhausted remnants of half-a-dozen divisions – perhaps, some thirty thousand men in total, few of them in anything remotely like good fighting order – were encamped along the western bank of the fabled Rio de Sabinas, the twisting, meandering scribble on ancient Spanish maps of the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries delineating the Louisiana Territory and the lands of the Empire of New Spain.
Old Spain had finally surrendered the ‘Louisiana Country’ to the British at the Second Treaty of London in 1836; the price of peace to save what was left of Spanish suzerainty around the globe.
New Granada, latterly New Spain and since its first tentative steps towards democracy in the 1960s, Mexico, had always regarded the line of the Rio de Sabinas and all the territories west of the river south of the 32nd Parallel as its rightful historic eastern border with New England. However, none of the wars of the tyrants and or of the procession of corrupt military juntas which had ruled Mexico for the best part of a hundred-and-forty years since the signing of the Treaty of London, had ‘held that line’. Rather, in war after war, the English had driven every Mexican army farther and farther back until the border had settled, after the war of 1952, along the line of the Rio Grande, the last natural demarcation line in the South West.
Mexican columns had penetrated fifty miles into New England in the war of 1967, but otherwise most of the fighting since then had been in the air, or involved small scale raiding and occasional artillery duels across the Rio Grande with Matamoros, Laredo and El Paso becoming fortified Mexican garrisons and the banks of the great river, in places becoming the first of several lines of defence on the Mexican side. The assumption had been, that after the so-called Veracruz Spring – where a naval mutiny had prompted a largely peaceful overthrow of the ruling Junta by the garrison of Mexico City under Santa Anna’s leadership – the Mexicans had put aside their old territorial claims in the New England South West, a thing reinforced by the gradual cessation of the aerial jousting over West Texas of the previous decade. The events of the spring of 1978 had, therefore, come as a rude shock to most New Englanders.
By the end of June Mexican troops occupied the banks of the Rio de Sabinas from San Augustine in the north to the Gulf of Mexico, where the river disappeared into the great lakes and swamps of its estuary south of the Neches Settlement, where in the previous decade a veritable forest of oil wells had been sunk into a vast, and seemingly inexhaustible underground sea of oil.
In total, the Mexican Army had reclaimed somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand square miles of ‘sacred ground’ in fifty tumultuous days which had, in conjunction with events in Europe, quite literally, shaken the foundations of the British Empire and prompted the Governor General of the Commonwealth of New England to tender his resignation to the new radically-inclined Whig-Libertarian coalition administration in Whitehall.
That contrary administration under the titular leadership of the charmingly eccentric, notoriously indecisive Sir Selwyn Brooke, not surprisingly teetered from blunder towards catastrophe in the fallout from the ongoing Berlin Crisis and the succession of jaw-dropping revelations about the serial mendacity of successive British Governments whom it was now evident, had knowingly driven a coaches and horses through the supposedly solemnly agreed tenets of the now defunct and thoroughly discredited 1966 Submarine Treaty.
In the late spring and summer of 1978 all eyes were turned to the developing crisis in Europe, fixated on the German Empire’s lurched towards a seemingly inevitable clash of arms between the north – effectively most of the Electorates including the one that really matter, Prussia – and the Bavarian-led Catholic League in the south. Initially, at least, it was understandable that the British Empire was so pre-occupied with this horribly dangerous dance on the doorstep of the Mother country, that at first it attempted to manage the little local difficulty in the New England South West – which in faraway London originally seemed like just the latest border skirmish with the Mexicans – as if it was just another colonial ‘spat’ that sooner or later, a gunboat or a couple of regiments of Hussars could be sent to resolve.
Had it not been for the setbacks the Royal Navy had suffered in the early engagements, and the horror stories which had emerged from Jamaica, New England’s war might have garnered no more column inches, or prime time TV coverage than riots in India, or tensions in the Cape, or campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience in Sydney and Melbourne demanding greater ‘Home Rule’ for the Antipodes.
Bizarrely, in hindsight, the day before the news of the loss of HMS Indomitable was released by a tight-lipped Admiralty, the headline of The London Times and the majority of the other papers in the British Isles had been about the King and the Queen travelling to Germany ahead of the forthcoming funeral of the old Kaiser. In retrospect, up until the moment the Indomitable had partially capsized in the shallow waters of Mobile Bay, where her shattered hulk now lay broken off Galliard Island, nobody in England had paid a great deal of attention to ‘that little border war’ in New England.
The Royal Navy had played only an incidental role in previous ‘Border Wars’ with New Granada, apart, that is, from its decisive intervention in the 1952-53 conflict, when it had bombarded Mexican coastal towns and supported the landings at San Francisco Bay which had forced the then Mexican Junta to the peace table only a fortnight into the imbroglio.
Much as ‘Remember Brave Achilles’ became the war cry throughout New England, elsewhere in the Empire the old cruiser’s last gallant fight was less trumpeted until some months later when the propaganda war began to fill the uneasy ceasefire.
Nonetheless, it is a myth to claim that the Empire sleep-walked into the war with the Triple Alliance. It had long been the policy of the British Government to create the conditions under which a lasting peace might be established with the newly democratised Mexicans. That said, the geopolitical calculus was undoubtedly perturbed by the Catholic theocracies in Cuba, and the islands of Hispaniola and Santo Domingo, and with the
Previous ‘Border Wars’ had come and gone but the conflict of 1978 was different; it had resulted in a rout of Colonial forces on land, and brave-hearted defeats against overwhelming odds on the waves. In a well-planned and courageously conducted campaign General Santa Anna’s troops had conquered the former Spanish provinces of Coahuila (then known as East Texas in New England) y Tejas (broadly speaking the area east of San Antonio between the Gulf of Spain and the 31st Parallel stretching to the Red River boundary with the Louisiana-Mississippi Delta Protectorate) at a cost of less than five thousand casualties. The three colonial brigade groups guarding the region, (on paper, some fourteen thousand men) and an understrength CAF Wing (nominally seven scout and three bomber-reconnaissance squadrons with about a hundred aircraft of all types) had been over run, suffering some three thousand dead and wounded, with the advancing Mexican Army taking nearly nine thousand men prisoners of war.
When the news of the scale of the disaster broke in England, shortly after the King and Queen had been unceremoniously ejected from Germany and the first cataclysmic revelations about the Submarine Treaty were reverberating, like the aftershocks of some great world-shaking seismic event, it was hardly to be wondered that in the Old Country and in many foreign outposts of Empire, a lot of people asked what was going on?
Had those nincompoops in London completely lost the plot?
It was probably that sense of disbelief that made the ceasefire seem half-palatable as the Mexican Army moved up to the line of the Rio de Sabinas, there to dig in and consolidate its gains unopposed by Colonial forces which by that stage, gave every impression of being in a state of hapless impotence.
That the offer of an unconditional ceasefire – some in Whitehall used the term ‘armistice’ throughout June and July, and well into August of that year – was not roundly condemned in New England’s East Coast colonies, or in some quarters in the Old Country, is another strange aspect of this dissonant period.
In the wake of Operation East Wind, the devastating attack by the combined strike forces of two of the Royal Navy’s revolutionary brand new ‘super carriers’, the Hermes and the Pegasus, on the capital and main naval base of the Catholic Republic of Santo Domingo, San Juan, other equally salutary follow-up blows, had been planned but these were peremptorily put on hold and then cancelled by the new, ‘peace at any cost’ coalition administration formed by Sir Selwyn Brooke.
At the time the Navy bore this uncomplainingly.
Not least because the success of the attack against a peripheral member of the Triple Alliance, not requiring a deep penetration into the Caribbean or the waters between the Florida and Cuba, and therefore minimising the risk of a major fleet action or a concerted response from shore-based aircraft, had never been intended to be anything other than an unambiguous demonstration of strength. One which its planners had always planned to allow the enemy a few weeks to absorb, rue and generally contemplate as they asked themselves: Who is next?
The problem was that the subsequent orders to put all offensive operations indefinitely on hold, when made public, sent entirely the wrong message to the broader Empire, and the rest of the World, made worse because following the fall of Sir Hector Hamilton’s administration there was an unmistakable suspicion of if not panic, then stasis, in Whitehall.
Nobody noticed at first: following the ‘escape’ of the Royal Party from Germany the outcry drowned out reasoned debate. To put it mildly, even the most ardent republican in the British Isles was incandescently incensed by the actions of the new ‘self-appointed usurper Berlin Kaiser’ the former Kronprinz, the rightful King, Wilhelm VI only of Prussia, who had arrested most of the Electors – among the twenty-two aristocrats responsible for ‘electing’ the German Emperor – who had voted for his unlikely rival, the King of Bavaria, and backed by the Army, and declared himself Kaiser.
The King and Queen, in the German capital for the funeral of the old Kaiser, had been unceremoniously thrown out of the country with Wilhelm’s threats and recriminations ringing in their ears. The Royal couple and their ministers, had had to endure a torrid twelve-hour train journey across Saxony and the Rhineland to France, most of the time crouched or lying on the floor of their train as sporadic bullets pinged off the carriages in which they were travelling, with the occasional round whizzing just over their heads through cracked and splintering windows. The photographs of the broken glass and the bullet holes in the carriages when the Royal train reached Reims, prompted demonstrations and several near riots in English and French cities targeting readily-identified and in some case, well-established ex-patriot German communities. A large stone-throwing mob had assembled outside the German, and the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian missions along ‘Embassy Row’ in Kensington and had had to be dispersed by hastily mobilised units of the Grenadier Guards and the Blues and Royals, barracked nearby in West London, who had been expected to be on purely ceremonial duties that summer.
Furthermore, the news that imperial business and franchises were to be seized by the new Kaiser, and that the Kaiserliche Marine might be ordered to obstruct the navigation of British ships on the high seas, inevitably inflamed the mood in the country, the Empire and in Parliament where it took nearly a week of angry debate, to send a new Prime Minister to St James’s Palace to kiss King George V’s hand.
To say that the incoming minority Whig-Libertine coalition found itself in an unenviable position, would be a monumental understatement. Without a mandate to do anything – in the improbable event its constituent parts could actually have agreed about a unified policy - the caretaker Prime Minister, Sir Selwyn Brooke, then in his seventy-fourth year, a man who had spent nearly all of his four decades in the House of Commons in relaxed insouciance, making pronouncements to an often empty chamber, and ignored by governments down the years with polite disdain, appeared to be a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Sir Selwyn Brooke’s PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) and gregarious, heavy-drinking raconteur and well-known London clubman, had let it slip that the new Prime Minister had mentioned his dream of converting the Empire into a Commonwealth of independent democracies, and reducing the size of the Navy by three-quarters to fund a raft of great infrastructure projects in the British Isles,’ and been mortally taken aback when the King and Queen had laughed genteelly, thinking he was pulling their legs.
As early as mid-June this was not the only apocryphally damning anecdote which had found its way into the media. Sadly, Brooke was hardly the least indiscreet man in his unlikely coalition of xenophobic little Englanders, Workers’ Representatives, Ecological zealots, Women’s Rights campaigners, academic Whigs like Sir Selwyn himself – a man who had inherited private means which meant he had never done an honest day’s work in his whole life – Liberals of every stripe from centre-right disaffected Conservatives to Libertines whose manifesto might have been an anarcho-syndicalist treatise.
The coalition had begun to splinter within days of taking office and it was not long before prima donnas and divas, of whom there was no shortage in its loudly disparate ranks, began to resign and flounce out of government.
In the meantime, Sir Hector Hamilton had attempted to stand down as the leader of the National Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Ireland; but nobody of substance was prepared to stand against him because, broadly speaking, his party was too busy applauding him – and his long-time Foreign and Colonial Secretary – for so successfully, and for so many years ‘putting one over on the Germans!’
