War Plan Gold:
The War No One Wanted
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2025

Great War at Sea: War Plan Gold is based on an extremely unlikely naval conflict, between the United States and France in the early 1920’s. Here’s a look at how such a war might have broken out in the years after the Great War’s conclusion. It’s a standalone story, not meant to be part of any of our other alternative histories.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson arrived at the Paris Peace Conference on 13 December 1918, and very quickly developed a deep, personal, and quite mutual dislike for French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. That spread to the rest of the U.S. and French delegations, as their leaders clashed repeatedly over French demands for reparations (in terms of both cash and territory) and such severe punishment of Germany that France would never be threatened again. Wilson deflected the most extreme French demands, including the dismemberment of Germany, the annexation of all German territory west of the Rhone River, and acquisition of the High Seas Fleet. That only fueled French resentment of the Versailles Peace Treaty in general and the United States as its architect.

Thwarted in their desires for greater territorial gains beyond the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, the French ultra-nationalist faction sought other outlets for their imperial ambitions. The former French colony of Haiti had paid off its debts to France in 1883, but still owed crippling payments to the banks that had financed the loan payoff. Most of those banks resided in New York, and when Haitian debt service faltered, they flexed their political muscles. U.S. Marines occupied Haiti in 1915, dissolved Haiti’s parliament at gunpoint, and looted the desperately poor country’s gold reserves as payment for some of these loans by American banks. National City Bank, precursor of the modern Citigroup, ended up with the gold.

“The African race,” Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote, “are devoid of any capacity for political organization.”

Note: The above actually happened. For the next two decades, one-quarter of Haiti’s total revenue went straight to National City Bank while its people starved.

During the peace conference, Wilson’s demands for self-determination among colonized peoples irritated Clemenceau. “The Tiger” had spent four years in exile in the United States in the late 1860’s, teaching French and horseback riding and marrying one of his riding students. He’d come to admire the American sacrifices made to end slavery, and now tweaked Wilson, a staunch racist, by bringing up the occupation of Haiti. Did the Haitians not also deserve self-determination? Or did their black skin make them lesser people?

Soon enough, a political talking point began to acquire a life in reality. French commercial firms, egged on by their government, looked to increase their already-extensive presence there. Investments in infrastructure grew, and in coffee and sugar production. German-made arms began to flow to Haitians resisting the American occupation; no one doubted that these came from stocks captured by the French during or after the Great War. French expansion, thwarted on the Rhine, would find an outlet in the Caribbean, returning French culture to its lost outpost. That France had lost this outpost only after committing unspeakable atrocities there, went unspoken.

U.S. Marines pose with their 5-inch naval cannon outside Port-au-Prince, 1918.

The United States reacted to these French moves by reinforcing its occupation of Haiti, and moving more warships to its nearby naval base at Guantanamo Bay. In Washington, the Harding Administration cited the Monroe Doctrine in demanding that the French cease their commercial and clandestine efforts in Haiti. Aristide Briand’s government in Paris fell in January 1922, after the prime minister’s awkward performance in a golf game so humiliated Briand that he was forced to resign.

Note: This actually happened. Briand’s willingness to lower German reparations enraged large segments of the French government and public, and his nerdy golf outing provided the excuse to drive him from office.

The new prime minister, veteran wartime politician Raymond Poincaré, already carried deep resentment of the Americans over the reparations issue: unlike his predecessor, Poincaré desired greater payments from the Germans, and sought a British alliance to confront the United States over this issue. He ordered the newest elements of the French fleet deployed to Martinique to counter the American move to Guantanamo Bay, and re-iterated French demands for the withdrawal of American forces from Haiti. The British declined to join Poincaré in his demands, instead pressing for a softening of the punitive conditions impressed on the Germans. Meanwhile, an effective Communist-led propaganda campaign within France portrayed the outbreak of the Great War not as the fault of the German government, but of Poincaré, who had been President of France during the fateful days when the war broke out.

Note: Poincaré did seek, and fail to obtain, a British alliance to pressure the United States on the reparations issue. He did not deploy the fleet to back his demands.

The failure of the Washington naval limitations talks to achieve a treaty further irritated many in the French establishment beyond Poincaré. They pointed their fingers at the Americans, for refusing to compromise with the Japanese on their desired battleship ratio. The French naval program continued to consume funds needed elsewhere, as the end of the Great War had not brought the security France desired and the refusal of the British to enter a formal alliance made successive French governments unwilling to trust the security of their overseas colonies to London’s whims.

Note: In our actual history, the Japanese caved to American demands, as the Americans (who had been reading their secret diplomatic cables) knew they would. In this alternative history, the Japanese delegation is led by Navy Minister Kato Tomosaburo rather than the more accommodating Prince Iesato Tokugawa, and the Japanese hold firm resulting in the collapse of the treaty talks. Construction continues on the big ships that our world saw discarded under the treaty’s terms.

American President Warren G. Harding inherited an incomplete peace settlement from Wilson. Harding had campaigned on reducing naval expenses, and the failure of the Washington talks to yield a settlement cast a shadow of failure on his administration. For the United States to prosper, Harding felt, Germany needed to return to the world economy as a major trading partner, something that could not happen were she crippled by reparations payments. Harding looked to reduce the German debt assigned by the Treaty of Versailles and ease the payment schedule for both reparations and the war debts accrued by Britain, France and other Allied powers. French intransigence on all of these issues (except reduction of French debts to American banks and government) and provocations over Haiti irritated the president and his Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes. With the 1922 mid-term elections looming, Harding saw his Republican Party’s huge majority in danger: unemployment stood at 11 percent, and his massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations had become widely unpopular. Harding, a former newspaper editor himself, knew very well that confronting the French would knock those inconvenient issues off the front pages. Haiti stood within the American sphere of influence, and Washington would not be moved.

The French fleet departs for the New World.

Poincaré’s government refused to acknowledge the American position on Haiti. Haiti formed part of the French cultural sphere, and if France wished to make amends with her long-estranged daughter and bring her fully into the mother country’s embrace, that was no business of the Americans. Instead, Poincaré issued a counter-demand, that American Marines leave Haiti immediately.

In June 1922, a small French cruiser squadron docked at Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. They landed a small team of diplomats who insisted on investigating the allegations of the Black American civil rights activist and author, James Weldon Johnson. Johnson had produced a scathing report in 1920 detailing widespread corruption by American officials, forced labor, indiscriminate murder and violence, press censorship, and racial segregation. American Marines refused to allow them to disembark, and ordered the French ships to leave Haitian waters.

A month later, the American destroyer Herndon fired warning shots across the bow of the new French destroyer Lynx, which returned fire in the same manner. No casualties resulted, but the Poincaré government described the incident as an act of war and declared to the new League of Nations that such insults to the French tricolor would not be tolerated.

In Washington, Harding’s Secretary of the Navy, Edwin Denby, declared Haitian waters off-limits to all French ships, civilian or naval. American ships heightened their patrols and reinforced their garrison, while further French reinforcements set out from Toulon for Martinique. Navy Minister Flaminius Raiberti retained the older French dreadnoughts at home in case the Italians took advantage of the conflict, and dispatched the fleet’s newest super-dreadnoughts and battle cruisers in hopes of over-aweing the Americans. The Americans were not over-awed.

On 19 August, the French cruiser Triomphante again approached Port-au-Prince, to be intercepted by the American scout cruiser Knoxville. A five-minute exchange of fire left both ships damaged, with the French cruiser taking the worst of the encounter, and each cruiser suffering killed and wounded. That became the basis for Harding’s request for a declaration of war, approved on the morning of Sunday, 20 August 1922. France responded in kind that evening. The old alliance had been broken, with the United States and France committed to an unlikely naval war in the Caribbean.

Order War Plan Gold Here.
Please allow an extra six weeks for delivery.

Order War Plan Gold (Anarchy) Here.
No rules! You’ll need the Second Edition rules from another Great War at Sea game. Earlier edition rules will not work with this game. Please allow an extra six weeks for delivery.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children.

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