AWAAP: The Story Thread - A Wing And A Prayer mod for Homeworld 2

Death of the Union: 1911
In May 1911 a Texan student broke into the Whitehouse and shot the then President William Taft five times in the chest. This proved the catalyst for a second civil war, as the southern states again attempted to break from the union. Their secession was largely successful, (federal troops only managing to retain control of Alabama and parts of California) but ultimately rash. Within two months war had broken out between Texas and New Mexico, and the southern confederacy also began to disintegrate.

By winter of 1911 a further sixteen states had declared themselves independent, nine were at war and the Federal government had almost entirely abandoned its attempts to reinstitute the union, instead focusing on protecting the few states that had remained as part of the increasingly disunited States of America. Over the next forty years America would continue to be torn apart by internal strife and division. What little trade continued between states traveled through the air in huge transport airships, and with this came air bandits and mercenaries, and ultimately the growth of the American aircraft industry.

Glory, Loss and Truce: 1914-1918
Across the Atlantic the stormy clouds of war had been gathering for some time, and finally the storm broke with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and general mobilisation across Germany, Austria and Hungary. World War 1 was not the war to end all wars, but none the less succeeded in ending millions of lives across the continent. The struggle was enduring, bitter and as the war dragged on into its third year increasingly desperate. With American consumed by its own internal wars it was clear that no support would come from across the Atlantic, yet it was equally evident that neither side would surrender. Given time perhaps either Germany or Britain would find the strain of war too much and simply collapse, but by then even the victor would have suffered so much and for so long it would hardly have qualified as a victory.

Finally in 1918 after the disastrous Vimy offensive that killed two hundred thousand in three bloody days, the two sides met to discuss a temporary armistice, a brief halt to the unsustainable carnage that had engulfed the region. Eventually it developed into a formal peace treaty, as both sides began to recognise they could not afford a return to war. It was not however to be the capitulation that Germany and France had hoped for from the other. Germany retained her young empire and military, Britain being too weak to insist otherwise. France, devastated by the war was outraged at how lightly the aggressor Germany had been let off and withdrew from the newly formed League of Nations in protest.

Uneasy Peace: 1918-1929
The years that followed the Armistice were a peace of sorts. The German army withdrew from France and borders returned to pre-1914. Normal politics returned, one could no longer hear the thunder of the guns in Flanders. Some things however remained the same, the anger on both sides for example was as intense as ever. Northern France, torn apart by war resembled a moonscape, millions lay dead, countless unexploded shells lay buried across the region hampering reconstruction efforts and intermittently killing more innocents. In Germany the anger was that the nation had been denied victory, that it had faltered so close to the final proof of Germany’s superiority on the continent. On both sides of the Rheine the populations seethed.

The French government under Georges Clemenceau felt compelled to offer the people some comfort, some insurance against another German attack. On that basis construction began in 1921 on the Maginot line, a massive network of border defenses stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, a mile deep wall of concrete, steel and wire at its widest point. The line was impenetrable. Hardened concrete protected the men manning its defenses from artillery and bombs, while special airlocks sealed the entire network in the event of gas attacks. Trenches thirty feet deep and forty feet wide were designed to halt tanks in their tracks, minefields stretched from horizon to horizon. Vast sealed artillery guns in the rear of the line devastated would be attackers, while machine and anti-tank guns in the frontline defenses offered only death to anyone foolish enough to storm the line. All in all around four fifths of the annual French defense budget was poured into its construction, with the consequence that by the time of the lines completion in 1927 the French military had practically ceased to exist.

The consequence of the Maginot Line across the Rheine was not to discourage the Germans from an attack, but simply to respond with their own network of defenses. Despite protests from the League of Nations at the “remilitarization of western Europe” the Kaiser formally approved the construction of the equally formidable Hindenburg line in 1923. Europe was now once again carved into two camps, and while the truce between the two sides continued to hold the tension was unmistakable. Ranks of French and German soldiers sat in bunkers along the border with guns trained on one another, waiting for the inevitable order to fire.

Burg, Fabian and the Krieg: 1922
In 1922 the renowned German mathematician Max Burg revealed the project he had been working on obsessively for the last nine years. The Burg Calculating Index was a massive mechanical computer, supposedly so advanced as to show actual intelligence and reasoned responses to its environment and stimuli. Despite promising demonstrations to the German Academies of science Burg was largely derided as a madman by his peers, his Index rejected as a carnival side show. He withdrew from public life and killed himself by blowing up his laboratory, supposedly destroying all trace of the Calculating Index in the process.

Supposedly at least, but in actual fact much of his machine remained. Burg’s work had been funded largely by the German military’s Advanced Projects Department (HPA), and copies of all Burg’s notes and a fully functional prototype also remained in the bunker network underneath Berlin maintained by the HPA to store its more precious acquisitions. After Burg’s death interest in the Calculating Index weaned for several years until in 1925 when a young engineer Erich Fabian patented a design for a self maintaining engine which with a suitable supply of fuel could supposedly could run for thirty years without servicing.

As with the Calculating Index, the HPA fell upon Fabian’s design and quickly hired him to work on a top secret military project, intended to wed the self-maintaining engine with the self-aware computer. The project was code named Krieg, and a large base was constructed under the ice in the German controlled region of the artic to facilitate research and development. Finally in 1931, after six years of tireless work by around four thousand people the prototype designs for the Krieg Ultranought was completed. On inspecting the designs and witnessing a scale model test the Kaiser reportedly murmured “If we had had such a beast in 1914”. Within a year construction began on the first operational Krieg.

The Half War: 1930-1931
In May 1930 a formation of German scout planes flying a routine patrol over the Hindenburg Line became lost in heavy fog, re-emerging on the other side of the French lines out of range of the Maginot line’s formidable air defenses. A nearby fighter squadron was scrambled to intercept them, led by Claude Heurtaux a minor hero of the last war. The two forces engaged in a deadly battle over Flanders, and despite being out numbered and underarmed the Germans fought with skill, shooting down five French planes before they were themselves destroyed. Amongst the French casualties was Heurtaux, whose plane had been sheared in half by a German plane as it went down, the pilot determined to take as many Frenchmen to the grave with him as possible.

The French public were in uproar over what they saw as an outrageous attack by the German Imperial Airforce, the German public were outraged by the brutish way the French had responded to the lost airmen. General mobilization was announced in Germany, more to provide an outlet for public anger and patriotism than out of any real intention to declare war. In response to this the skeleton French forces that had remained after the construction of the Maginot Line were ordered to attack. By June 1930 the vast majority of the small French army were dead, having attempted to storm the impregnable Hindenburg line and been met by a hail of bullets and artillery.

The Germans counter-attacked and met with much the same fate, the two bunker networks so impenetrable that neither side could force a break in the enemies lines and take what had been dubbed the ‘half war’ out of stalemate. By the end of 1930 both sides were exhausted by the strain this intensive war had put of them. The German army had been superseded in strength by its airforce. Always a powerful institution and the Kaisers pet project, the Imperial Airforce (IAF) was now the premier military force, yet even it could not break the French lines for the army to surge through. By late 1931, frustrated and anticipating that the French would call on the British to support them against Germany, the Kaiser ordered the IAF to bomb key British airfields, harbours and industrial areas in a pre-emptive strike.

The End of the Illusion: 1932
Fortunately for the British a sizeable part of the fledgling Royal Flying Corps (RFC) had been on maneuvers over the North Sea when the attack came, and were spared the devastation. A number of airfields and factories were shrouded by a dense fog on the day of the attack, causing the Germans to bomb blindly. None the less the sheer act of ordering eight hundred German zeppelins to attack the British mainland shattered all illusions about the state of Europe. The war to end all wars continued.

Edited by: DrZais