History That Never Was
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
September 2010

Many years ago, Lys Fulda emphasized that gamers like alternate history. And experience has shown this to be true. But there was always something missing in the games and supplements we did; I knew this but could not quite put my finger on it. And like most such things, it was actually obvious all along had I but known where to look. When John Phythyon took over sales and marketing duties at the start of September, he quickly set me straight on this: Our alternate history games and supplements lack a story arc.

"Story arc" is the key to just about every successful game line of the past quarter-century (in the specialty game industry, at least). Other games had giant fighting robots, but BattleTech put them into context. Other games had Asian themes; Legend of the Five Rings gave gamers a story to follow and even to shape through their play. Living Greyhawk, Deadlands, Magic: The Gathering. Still others had cartoons and even movies designed solely as marketing tools for the card game and related products. All put story first, so much so that "story first" became a running joke among industry insiders. And somehow, I missed the punch line.

Our alternate history game lines, whether naval (Imperial & Royal Navy, Spice Islands, many others) or tactical (Secret Weapons, Polish Steel, many more) cry out for a unifying story arc, a context in which their battles take place. And to date we've provided pretty much nothing. Today there's a brief piece of a story arc, that would form a tiny part of a book I'm calling Phantom Fleets in my mind, giving an alternate-history look at the Second Great War through our alternative history naval supplements. Take a look and let us know what you think.

The Great War Ends

When U.S. President Woodrow Wilson made his 18 December 1916 offer to mediate an end to the Great War, Germany initially rebuffed his request for terms. Under pressure from Austria-Hungary, desperately needing peace, the Germans relented a few days later and presented a huge list of demands, ranging from the annexation of Belgium to the acquisition of Madagascar.

Austria-Hungary presented a far more modest list, needing an end to combat operations almost as much as the defeated Russians. Italy would make a handful of minor border corrections along the Alpine frontier and pay a war indemnity. Serbia would be placed under a protectorate, allowed only police forces under strict supervision, with the parts of Macedonia seized by the Serbs during the Balkan wars going to Bulgaria. Albania would receive similar treatment, but noticeably more relaxed. Romania would yield up the southern exits of the Carpathian passes to Austria-Hungary and grant 99-year leases on the Romanian oil fields to Austrian firms. Montenegro would be annexed outright.

Wilson strove mightily to craft acceptable peace accords; having made his offer just as Germany prepared to unleash unrestricted submarine warfare (which all knew would end any hope of a negotiated settlement), he had but one opportunity. An armistice went into effect on New Year's Day 1917, and by springtime, Wilson had a set of treaties to offer that left everyone vaguely dissatisfied. Grudgingly, all belligerents put their signatures to paper. The war was over.

Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey and Imperial Russia had won the right to survive. Germany had new satellites in Poland and Finland, and the formerly Russian Baltic provinces plus some fine new colonies. Politicians in Britain, France and Italy could tell their people that they hadn't really lost the war; it was the Russians' fault. The United States could resume world-wide trade, with partners who had not been bankrupted by further years of war.

Note: Wilson actually made such an offer on the date cited, but in the actual case Germany refused to even share her demands. The German government had put together a list in November, but chose to believe the Navy's assurances that unrestricted submarine warfare would bring outright victory. Wilson, taking the refusal as personal insult, became hardened toward the Central Powers and led his country into war as soon as Germany gave him a reason. Numerous historians have pointed to this moment as one of the most tragic in human history, a real chance to end the war before millions more died, even more destruction ensued and power politics became hardened into the pattern that would lead to depression, Holocaust and tens of millions more killed.

Austria-Hungary's Fleet

The Imperial and Royal Kriegsmarine ended the war with a core of four dreadnought battleships, three semi-dreadnoughts and four fast cruisers. Older warships had been reduced to training or harbor defense duties, to free up crews for the new submarines under construction and to keep the core of the battle fleet fully manned.

With the war ended, the older pre-dreadnought battleships, armored cruisers and coast defense ships all went up for sale to scrapyards. The three semi-dreadnoughts went into reserve; the Navy Ministry could not bring itself to order ships only a decade old torn apart for their steel, yet they had no place in the post-war fleet. After some discussion of sales to the Netherlands and China, all three were transferred to Turkey to quiet Turkish demands for a share of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

The sort of crushing financial burden some Allied leaders had wanted to place on the defeated Central Powers would have led to economic disaster and, potentially, an eventual massive depression. The Great War did not continue long enough to devastate the world economy, but it was damaging all the same. After the war, pent-up demand surged and the Austro-Hungarian economy enjoyed rapid growth, as did their German neighbors. With hundreds of thousands of young men returning from the war and wanting their jobs back, the Navy received a large portion of the Italian war reparation in order to stimulate shipyard work. As had been the case before the war, many of the workers so employed actually slipped over the border from Italy to build Austria's warships.

Note: The huge German reparations bill, and the Weimar government's attempts to game the system to pay it off, led to hyperinflation and severe misery, helping pave the way for Nazi rule. Did the war's outcome also help create the Great Depression? That's still debated, and all the major depressions of recent history (1873, 1931, 2008) have roots in some kind of massive fraud and corruption, which appears to be a constant in human society not solvable by a tweak here or there in the historical record. And I really do like the thought of taking an eraser to Adolf Hitler's existence.

Four dreadnoughts had been ordered two years before the war broke out, but construction had been suspended at the height of the fighting. Two ships had been launched but not completed, and the other two had been laid down on the same slipways but not yet launched. Work now resumed, with some improvements made to the design in light of wartime experience.

Note: The Austrians hoped to lay down their second group of dreadnoughts starting in 1912; the designs were ready and the shipyards eager for the orders. Political infighting over how these ships would be financed delayed the start of construction until the summer of 1914, when it was suspended due to the imminent outbreak of war. Here we give the Empire a little help and allow the fleet to order its new battleships when it first attempted to do so.

The United States had brought an end to the Great War, and when the Americans proposed a naval arms limitation treaty both Germany and Austria-Hungary showed their gratitude by participating. The powers could not agree on total tonnage limitations, with the Japanese suspecting their communications had been compromised and threatening to walk out. But the signatories did agree to limit the size and main armament of battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers, and agree to limits on how many new ships of each type could be laid down in a single calendar year.

While the treaty limited the number of new ships each power could construct, it placed few limits on the re-construction of older warships, tacitly encouraging such steps as a cost-saving measure for all concerned. In the late 1920s, the Navy also began to send its four oldest dreadnoughts back to the shipyards for the complete overhauls allowed by the Washington Treaty. These became extensive rebuildings, with the ships' internal subdivisions completely replaced, and their coal-fired boilers gave way to more powerful oil-burning machinery now that the Dual Monarchy had access to its own oil supply.

The short, somewhat squat hull form of the Viribus Unitus class limited the extra speed that could be gained even with the more powerful machinery, and they emerged from the yards in Pola, Fiume and Trieste still only able to make 23 knots at best, well below what current naval thought considered battle speed. They kept their main armament, despite proposals from the Skoda Works to replace their triple 305mm (12-inch) turrets with dual turrets housing 380mm (13.8-inch) guns.

With increased speed an impossibility, the designers made sure the ships had a powerful anti-aircraft suite as any wartime operations would take place well within range of enemy air bases. They mounted new 100mm dual-purpose guns in turrets, with their old casemate-mounted 150mm guns removed, and a large array of light anti-aircraft weapons.

The last of the four, Szent Istvan, completed rebuilding in 1930. Inspections found many structural weaknesses not present in her three sisters, probably thanks to her completion during wartime and at an inexperienced shipyard, and the engineers estimated even a single torpedo hit could have sunk her. The four ships of the Kaiser Franz Josef class followed them into the yards.

These larger ships had a better hull form, which was stretched slightly during rebuilding. With their new oil-fired machinery they could make 28 knots, a much more useful speed, and like the older battleships they kept their main armament. The added deck area over the bigger engine rooms allowed a cross-deck catapult to be fitted along with a hangar for two seaplanes. Like the older battleships, their secondary armament was replaced by lighter dual-purpose weapons mounted in turrets, and a powerful array of light anti-aircraft weapons was fitted. All of the rebuilt battleships lost their torpedo rooms as well.

The first ship, Kaiser Franz Josef, went into drydock at Austria Werft in Trieste in 1930, completing in 1934, and Danubius-Fiume finished work on the last, Hunyadi, in 1938. As rebuilt, the ships gave the Imperial and Royal Navy a quartet comparable to the rebuilt British Queen Elizabeth and superior to the reconstructed Italian battleships.

Note: That's the type of "historical" background I have in mind to start with. It goes on to talk about the rest of the fleet, its role in the Dual Monarchy's strategic plans and so forth. And then there's stuff about the Empire's political development and the crisis that will lead to renewed war in 1940. I actually think the likelihood of war a generation lower would have been sharply reduced had the Great War ended two years earlier, but players want to use these beautiful ship pieces we've provided in combat.

Each other power would get the same treatment, more or less. And then there's the war itself, of course, which we'd reveal step by step. I'd like to set up a feedback channel where players could determine the next stage of the war based on playings of scenarios from each stage of the war. I'm not sure how to do that, but we have a unique game structure that could allow players to actually write their own history through their play, and it would then become part of the Phantom Fleets "canon." That's not a unique idea — Alderac Entertainment Group did it with Legend of the Five Rings — but that doesn't make it a bad one.

Future alternate-history supplements, like the book The Kaiser's Navy I've wanted to do, or the download with the 1940 Ottoman fleet, all of which would be set against this common backdrop. And I suppose we could branch out into fiction just like the RPG and CCG game lines did, but I'm not up to writing that myself — having seen me crank out 15,000 words in a single day, Doug McNair believes I can do that every day.  I'm fast but not that fast.

Anyway, send me some feedback (mike@avalanchepress.com) about the alternate history lines. We've not been having nearly enough fun here and that's something that's going to change. Give me your ideas on what you'd like to see, alternatively speaking.

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