Good point Ossel.
I like that.
Perhaps use the French Blue or Light Blue US Supplement pieces for Union WWII units.
ossel, have you finished the alternate american-front map already?
I am curious how it looks like!
For several years, I’ve worked on design teams for political-military simulations that include alternate histories of the Civil War.
Generally speaking, the design teams have always agreed that the die is already cast by 1860 for reasons of economy and political economy: if the United States is in the hands of a skilled played, the Confederate States can have no chance of winning a general war. The idea is that they will simply be out-produced and out-governed by a much more populous, much richer, much more industrial, much more cohesive northern neighbor. We therefore tend to design the alternate history for North America with the intention of providing the South with as much an advantage as possible. Since your intent is to develop a fun wargame that leaves some possibility for a Southern victory, you may find my comments interesting. (I certainly hope that you do!)
We begin, like Turtledove, with a Southern victory at Antietam. We then followed that with Anglo-French intervention by land and sea. As in Turtledove’s narrative, the South manages to leave the Union with Kentucky, portions of what is today West Virginia, the Unorganized (later, Indian) Territory, and the Confederate Arizona Territory (south of the 34th parallel). Significant populations of southern sympathizers are presumed to remain in Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri.
Like Turtledove, we also posit that a second war sometime in the early 1880s legitimized Confederate annexation of Chihuahua and Sonora. We judged that the Confederate Army would have benefited from a more pronounced martial culture, whereas institutional military training would have languished in the North owing to the bitterness felt over the resignation from the regular army of so many West Point graduates in 1861. As a consequence of obtaining British and French intercession, the Confederacy was forced to effect manumission, although it is quickly replaced by a system of what would today be called petty apartheid and debt peonage. (In other the words, Southern society, and the black predicament, are essentially unchanged.)
Before, during, and after the Second War Between the States, the Confederacy builds substantial fixed defenses along the Ohio and Potomac Rivers. During the war, they effectively employ cavalry (and a small camelry) in the West, along with commerce raiders that prey on Northern whaling fleets.
By 1914, the Confederacy has industrialized, but only to an extent. It is held back by (A) the weakness and poverty of its federal government, (B) the high number of uneducated persons relative to the total Southern population, and © studied attempts by both the British and French to keep the Confederacy from emerging as an independent competitor, as well as to prevent intrusion of Confederate raw goods into markets reserved for trade from imperial colonies. Nonetheless, the Confederacy has a small arms industry centered around the Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond and the industrial city of Birmingham, Alabama. Additional (minor) centers of industry have been established in Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. There is mining in Confederate Arizona, oil in Confederate Texas, and helium in Confederate Arkansas. Like the U.S., the Confederacy would have built a trans-continental railroad by the turn of the century, linking Richmond and Guaymas. It is up to you whether the Confederacy would have invaded Cuba. There was certainly precedent in the form of the filibusters. For the sake of bolstering the fortunes of an imperial Castille, I did not give Cuba to the Confederacy in my game design, instead awarding Richmond a client regime in the form of a Nicaragua overrun by William Walker’s filibusters (the point-of-diverge that I used was well before the Civil War; as a point of interest, we retained both Byzantium and the Crusader States in the Near East). You might give Cuba to the South to enhance their economy, although left in Spanish (or even placed in British) hands, it could become a convenient crossroads for contraband.
Probably both the Union and Confederacy sponsor Indian raids across their mutual border. One imagines that cavalry, camelry, armored cars, armored trains, airships, and aeroplanes will be the preferred weapons of war in the West, with the occasional armored car making an appearance. In the East, expect to see trench warfare.
Fighting a mostly defensive war, the South would have an early advantage – important given a relative dearth of heavy artillery. Richmond would also expect the British to substantially reinforce the Canadian garrison as a counterweight to Northern might. Probably the Great Lakes would be teeming with pocket battleships specially designed for those waters.
The South might be expected to be a pioneer in airship and aeroplane use given its size, including, perhaps, the first to attempt to launch planes from a converted merchantman or cruiser. I imagine that they would have borrowed from the French concept of the merchant cruiser. Probably, given the cost of heavier battlewagons, their few capital ships would have be no better than battlecruisers.
A couple of comments on the naval side of things:
I’d recommend avoiding the term “pocket battleships” in a 1914 context. The ships to which this nickname applied, the Deutschland-class Panzerschiffe (armoured ships), had welded construction and diesel engines as key design features, and I don’t think either of those technologies saw much (if any) use in naval architecture prior to the late 1920s.
Battlecruisers would be beyond the semi-industrialized Confederacy’s ability to build in this alternate universe. They were extremely sophisticated machines (for their time), vastly expensive, and they required experienced and specialized workers (and factories) to manufacture and assemble the requisite components (the heavy guns, the armour plates, the turbine engines and so forth). On the other hand, the Confederacy as represented here could plausibly have procured some dreadnoughts (and other warships) through the practical (though expensive) expedient of buying them custom-built from foreign countries. That’s what Turkey tried to do (the ships were seized on the building stocks by Britain when WWI broke out), and so did the the nations involved in the Latin American “ABC” dreadnought race: Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
Given their traditional experimentation with cutting-edge naval technologies during the Civil War (e.g., ironclads, submarines, and naval mines), the Confederacy might be expected to continue that tradition in subsequent years. I could see early adoption of torpedo boats and continued interest in submarine warfare, for example. Given their relatively smaller economy and strong relationship with the British, I don’t see the Confederacy attempting to construct a battle fleet of any significance, however.
Battlecruisers, or ships of that style, fit the character of the Confederacy more than do dreadnaughts, although your point is well taken that the battlecruiser is a much later design.
Probably Confederate infantry attire would strongly resemble British or French kit, to include either the Adrian, or, even more likely, the Brodie helmet.
One imagines that the Union would take its cues from the Germans, or, even more likely, the Russians, meaning either no helmet, or else some version of the stahlhlem. It’s also possible that one might see a distinctive steel hat more akin to the M1, or even a kind of “stovepipe” or “top hat” in steel.
I’m trying hard to think up certain National Advantages. Perhaps Confederate cavalry would be able to execute a kind of blitzkrieg. Would it be likely that a nation without much native automobile production, but having to cover a long border with a relatively small standing army, would develop a heavy emphasis on motorization?
As early as Bull Run, both armies were learning the military value of railroads.
