First Euro-American War

The First Euro-American War, called the Atlantic War in the United States, was a war fought from 1940 to 1947 between the United States, under the government of the Columbia League, and the European states, which federated in 1942 as the European Federation. It began on 2 April 1940 with an American attack on Canada and the European colonies in the Caribbean, and ended on 4 March 1947 with a cessation of hostilities declared by both governments. No peace treaty was signed.

The United States took western Canada and the Caribbean in 1940, won command of the Atlantic in 1941, and in 1942 invaded western Europe from Spain, then an American client state. Its armies took Paris, Brussels, Luxembourg, The Hague and Amsterdam, and the governments of the occupied states withdrew to Prague, where on 19 September 1942 they founded the European Federation by the Treaty of Prague. The American advance was halted on the Beroun line, 25 km west of Prague, in 1943. In 1944 Federation submarines and aircraft cut the American supply lines across the Atlantic, and by the end of 1946 the American armies had withdrawn from France to Spain and Portugal. The Federation tested a nuclear weapon in August 1946, and on 11 September dropped one on Norfolk, Virginia, the base of the American Atlantic Fleet, killing about 100,000 people.

About 20 million people died in the war. The lines held in 1947, including the division of Canada, remained in place through the Kaltkrieg that followed, and the two powers went to war again in 2022 (see Second World War).

Names

In the 1940s Europeans called the war "the American war". The name First Euro-American War was fixed by the Federal Historical Commission in its school curriculum of 1958, and has been the usual name in the Federation since. In the United States the war is called the Atlantic War. "World War" remained the name of the war of 1914–1918 until 2022, when the Federal Council named the war that began that year the Second World War.

Background

The United States

By 1932 the Great Depression had cut American industrial production by about 45% and left about 24% of the workforce unemployed. The Democratic convention of July 1932 nominated a compromise candidate, Lyman Teague, who won the presidency; under his administration about 5,300 banks failed in 1933, and unemployment was still about 20% in 1936. The Columbia League, founded in Tulsa in November 1932 by Wesley Pruitt, won a plurality of the electoral vote in the three-way election of 1936, and on 6 January 1937 the House of Representatives elected Pruitt president. The National Emergency Act of April 1937 made his government a dictatorship that kept the forms of the Constitution.

The new government invaded Mexico in April 1938, after the expropriation of the American oil companies, and governed it as a protectorate from November. It sent aircraft, instructors and 40,000 volunteers to the Nationalists in the Spanish civil war, and the Spanish State proclaimed on 1 April 1939 gave the United States the ports of Cádiz, Ferrol and Cartagena and four airfields. In the Debt Proclamation of 11 November 1938 Pruitt demanded the European war debts of 1917–1918, about $14 billion with interest, and offered to take the European colonies in the Americas in settlement. The Hemisphere Proclamation of 4 July 1939 declared that European sovereignty in the Americas would end on 1 January 1940.

Europe

The western European states had kept parliamentary government through the Depression. A Basel credit pool of July 1931 had stopped the failure of the German banks, and in 1938 Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands founded the European Coal and Steel Union in Brussels. The Atlantic Guarantee of 18 May 1939, signed by Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Canada and joined in June by Germany, Italy and Luxembourg, bound each signatory to treat an attack on any signatory's territory in the Americas as an attack on all. Norway acceded in February 1941.

Canada mobilised from July 1939. Between November 1939 and March 1940 Britain sent three divisions and France two to Halifax and Saint John, and British and Danish garrisons landed in Iceland and at the cryolite mine at Ivittuut in Greenland with the consent of their governments. The United States began inspecting shipping bound for Bermuda on 1 January 1940, and on 28 March delivered an ultimatum to Canada.

Forces in 1940

The European states had no common command until 1942.

Course of the war

1940: Canada and the Caribbean

The United States opened the war at 05:00 Eastern time on 2 April 1940 under War Plan Red, a plan for war with the British Empire first drawn up in 1930. Britain and Canada declared war the same day and the other Guarantee powers by 10 April.

The main American effort was against eastern Canada. On the Niagara frontier (2–9 April) Canadian engineers blew the bridges in the first hour, and the American assault crossings at Queenston and Fort Erie were destroyed on the river. In the Champlain corridor the American II Corps was held at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu by Quebec regiments and a French colonial division in the Battle of the Richelieu (4 April – 20 May), 40 km south of Montreal. American forces took Windsor on 12 April, the Eastern Townships of Quebec with Sherbrooke on 22 April, and the upper Saint John valley in New Brunswick. Canada's plans had not provided for holding the west: Winnipeg fell on 19 April and Vancouver on 3 May, and about 38,000 Canadian troops in the west surrendered at Kamloops on 9 June. American columns took Sudbury on 2 August and North Bay on 21 September, and were stopped in October and November on the old canoe route of the voyageurs, along the French River, Lake Nipissing and the Mattawa. That line became the line of 1947.

Between 2 April and May the United States took Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, the Windward and Leeward Islands, British Honduras, Curaçao and Aruba, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and British Guiana and Suriname. French Guiana was blockaded and never occupied. On 17–18 May 1940, 300 km south-east of Newfoundland, aircraft from four American carriers sank three battleships, three cruisers and six destroyers of the Anglo-French Western Squadron in the Battle of Cape Race, the first fleet sunk by aircraft in the open ocean.

The United States Congress annexed the western provinces and the northern territories by the Northern Territories Act of 2 July 1940, and Northern Ontario by the Superior Act of December 1940.

1941: the Atlantic

American marines seized the Azores on 8–10 January 1941. A combined British, French and Italian fleet of eight battleships and three carriers sailed from Brest and Gibraltar to retake the islands, and in the Battle of the Azores (11–13 March) lost five battleships, two carriers and seven cruisers to the aircraft of nine American fleet carriers. Its commander, Admiral Sir Rodney Kerr, was killed. The United States held the central Atlantic until 1944. On 14 April 1941 the Portuguese government accepted American occupation of Lisbon's port, the Atlantic coast and the islands without fighting, and the American build-up in Spain and Portugal began, reaching 1.1 million men by March 1942.

American forces took Newfoundland in June 1941; St John's surrendered on 21 June. With the Cabot Strait and the Strait of Belle Isle closed, eastern Canada was cut off from Europe by sea until May 1944, and was supplied by an air bridge from Iceland and Greenland to Goose Bay in Labrador, which carried about 40 flights a day by 1943. Eastern Canada lived on its own farms, its steel works at Hamilton and Sydney and its coal, and went without imported oil: its army moved by rail and on horses. Congress annexed Newfoundland and the whole of Quebec by two acts of August and September 1941, which were never repealed.

A landing by two American marine divisions on the bay of Reykjavík, the Faxaflói landings of 8–12 August 1941, failed against the British garrison and aircraft from Iceland and Scotland. Half of the landing force was evacuated and about 9,000 men were taken prisoner. Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland remained European for the rest of the war, and with Labrador formed the northern route between Europe and Canada.

Gibraltar was besieged by Spanish artillery and American aircraft from 3 October and surrendered on 9 November 1941, after its water distillation plant was destroyed. The Strait was closed to European shipping. The central and eastern Mediterranean, ringed by European airfields on Sardinia, Sicily, Malta and Tunisia, remained open to European shipping, and was joined through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean: oil from the Gulf, food and troops from India, and Katanga's uranium reached Europe by this route for the rest of the war.

1942: the invasion of western Europe

The American Expeditionary Force under General Thaddeus Kemper, 38 divisions supported by 2,400 aircraft and eight carriers, crossed the western Pyrenees at the Bidassoa on 14–20 April 1942 and landed on the Landes coast and at the mouth of the Gironde. Bordeaux fell on 2 May. The French Atlantic armies were broken at Saumur in the Battle of the Loire (3–18 June), and the French government left Paris for Lyon and declared the capital an open city. American troops entered Paris on 26 June 1942.

The Anglo-French line north of Paris broke at Compiègne in July. Brussels fell on 22 July, Antwerp on 25 July and Luxembourg on 30 July. The American 5th Army broke the Dutch and German line on the Waal at Nijmegen on 29 July, crossed the Lek at Vianen on 2–3 August before the inundations of the Water Line were complete, and entered The Hague and Amsterdam on 4 August. A second thrust from Bordeaux took Toulouse, Montpellier and Marseille; the French Mediterranean squadron left Toulon for Bizerte on 28 August, and Lyon fell on 14 September. The Alpine passes held. The Americans crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim in October and took Frankfurt on 11 November; north of Cologne the Rhine remained the front, and the Ruhr was never taken.

Founding of the European Federation

By August 1942 the governments of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg had lost their capitals. On 9 August the President of Czechoslovakia, Karel Hrubý, invited the European governments to Prague. The conference opened on 24 August in the Spanish Hall of Prague Castle, with eleven governments and observers from Britain and Canada, and on 19 September 1942 eleven states signed the Treaty of Prague: Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland. The treaty created the Federal Council, the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the European Defence Force under General Stefan Konarski, and a Federal War Production Directorate formed from the authority of the Coal and Steel Union. Prague was the Federation's capital for the rest of the war.

1943: Britain joins

With the Channel coast in American hands and the Atlantic closed, Britain's imports fell to a third of their pre-war tonnage. Bread and potatoes were rationed from October 1942, and in the Hunger Winter of December 1942 to March 1943 the calorie ration fell to about 1,500 a day; excess deaths were about 250,000. The Federation's Supply Directorate ran grain, fat and fish to Britain across the North Sea from January 1943. The House of Commons voted to join the Federation on 2 March 1943, and Britain acceded on 3 March. Romania joined in May.

1943–1944: the West Country

On 3 July 1943, the eve of Independence Day, the United States landed three divisions from Brittany at Falmouth, in St Austell Bay and at Slapton Sands in Operation Lexington, which American propaganda called "the Second Revolutionary War". Plymouth and the Devonport dockyard fell on 26 July after a three-week siege. The American advance was held in August and September on the river Exe, with Exeter on its eastern bank in British hands, and Cornwall and western Devon remained under American occupation for fifteen months. With its supply across the Channel cut by Federation submarines and aircraft in 1944, the American force in the West Country was driven back from the Exe in September 1944. Plymouth was retaken on 14 October, and the last American troops were evacuated from Falmouth on 2 November 1944. London was never reached.

1943: the Beroun line

In the spring of 1943 the Expeditionary Force advanced on Prague. Stuttgart fell on 12 March, Munich on 2 May and Nuremberg on 24 May. The American 3rd Army forced the pass of the Bohemian Forest at Domažlice on 27 June, and Pilsen fell on 14 July. From 6 August to 21 October the American 1st and 3rd Armies attacked the 1st Federal Army on the line of the Berounka valley and the Brdy hills, 25 km west of Prague. They reached the western edge of Beroun and were held. About 11,000 civilians in Prague were killed by shelling and bombing in August. The battle cost the Americans about 190,000 casualties and the Federation about 240,000.

1944: the Atlantic turns

The Federation had begun building fast electric submarines in June 1942, and in July 1943 its war cabinet gave submarines and maritime aircraft priority for steel. The first boats entered service in November 1943. With radar-equipped aircraft from Iceland, Scotland and Norway, glide bombs, and the American convoy cipher, broken in December 1943, they sank about 1,500 American ships in 1944, the year Americans call the Grey Year. Nineteen boats sank 34 of the 62 ships of convoy NB-114 on 28–31 March, after which the Expeditionary Force was supplied through Lisbon and Cádiz. On 22 May aircraft from Scotland sank the carriers Saratoga and Bunker Hill and the battleship Iowa west of Rockall.

Canadian, British and Norwegian forces retook Newfoundland on 10–27 May 1944, reopening eastern Canada's sea route after three years. In Franconia the 1st and 2nd Federal Armies cut off the American 3rd Army, short of fuel since April, in the Ansbach pocket (6 June – 11 July); about 160,000 Americans surrendered, the largest American surrender of the war. Pilsen and Nuremberg were retaken in July, and the Expeditionary Force withdrew to the Rhine by December.

1945: western Europe retaken

The Federation's armies crossed the Rhine at Cologne and Mainz in February 1945 and retook Luxembourg on 21 February, Brussels on 8 March and Antwerp on 12 March. The fall of Antwerp cut off the American 5th Army in the Netherlands; Amsterdam was retaken on 14 April, and the Holland pocket surrendered at The Hague on 16 April, about 112,000 men. The Seine front was broken at Meaux on 2 June. Pruitt ordered the bridges and power stations of Paris destroyed; General John Stedman, commanding the Expeditionary Force, withdrew south-west without doing so, and Paris was retaken on 12 June 1945. Canadian forces retook Sherbrooke the same month. By December the Americans held only Brittany, the coast from Bordeaux to La Rochelle, and Iberia.

1946–1947: the bomb and the Cessation

The Americans evacuated Brittany in September and October 1946 and the Biscay coast in November. Canadian forces retook Windsor and the upper Saint John valley in May 1946.

The Federation's Federal Atomic Directorate tested a uranium device of about 14 kilotons at Reggane in the French Sahara at 05:30 on 11 August 1946, and sent a film of the test to Washington through Bern with a demand for a cessation of hostilities. Pruitt did not reply. On 19 August the Federal Council voted by seven to four to use the bomb.

The strike was planned for 16 September. When air reconnaissance reported most of the American Atlantic Fleet in harbour until about the 13th, the commander-in-chief of the European Defence Force, General Friedrich Lehner, had it brought forward. At 07:40 on 11 September 1946, a month to the day after the test, a European Defence Force bomber from Gander, Newfoundland, dropped a second device on Norfolk, Virginia, the home port of the American Atlantic Fleet and the port from which most convoys to Europe had sailed. The explosion destroyed the naval base and much of the city and sank or burned 23 ships in Hampton Roads. About 100,000 people were killed, about 30,000 of them sailors and dockyard workers. Through Bern the Federation informed the American government that a third device would be ready in December. Pruitt died on 2 November 1946, and the Vice President, Everett Crane, succeeded him.

American and Federation envoys met eleven times in a hotel in Bern in January and February 1947. At 12:00 GMT on 4 March 1947 Crane in Washington and the President of the Council of Ministers, Pieter Roosmalen, in Prague read identical declarations: the forces of both powers would stop firing and hold their positions, and the United States would withdraw its forces from the Iberian peninsula and the Portuguese and Spanish islands by the end of 1947. Nothing was signed. Notes exchanged through Bern provided for the exchange of prisoners and the marking of the lines.

Occupation of western Europe

The American Military Government in Europe governed France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and western Germany from Paris between 1942 and 1945, and Cornwall and western Devon in 1943 and 1944. It registered Jews and "subversives" and excluded Jews from public posts, interned about 180,000 people at Saint-Médard near Bordeaux and seven other camps, conscripted about 1.2 million workers for American ports and airfields, and shot hostages after attacks on American troops; about 90,000 civilians were executed, and about 410,000 died in the camps and the labour levies. Industrial plants were run for the United States by the Alien Property Custodian, including the H&A works at Amsterdam-Noord and Rotterdam. In the winter of 1944–1945 the military government cut civilian rations to feed its troops, and the resulting famine killed about a million people in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. About 1.5 million civilians died under the occupation.

Home fronts

United States

The United States had 9.6 million people in uniform at its peak in 1944. Between 1940 and 1946 it built about 240,000 aircraft, 31 fleet carriers and about 3,100 standard cargo ships, and its economic output rose by about 70% from 1939 to 1944. Meat, sugar, petrol and tyres were rationed from 1942. Strikes at Kansas aircraft plants in 1944 were broken by the National Guard. Losses in the Atlantic in 1944 were reported to the public a year late, and the withdrawal from France was announced as a consolidation on the Atlantic line. Pruitt was re-elected unopposed in 1944.

Europe

The Federal War Production Directorate under Konrad Ehlers ran the Federation's war economy from Prague and later from Brno, drawing on Silesia, Bohemia and Moravia, Saxony, the Ruhr, northern Italy, Poland, Scandinavia and, from 1943, Britain. Federation steel output was 41 million tonnes in 1944, against about 80 million in the United States. The member states' currencies were held at fixed exchange rates for the duration. Industry in Bohemia and Moravia, including the Škoda works, was moved east by rail ahead of the American advance in 1943.

Canada

Eastern Canada fought the war behind its rivers, under the command of Lieutenant General Hugh Calder, and was cut off by sea from 1941 to 1944. About 300,000 Canadian soldiers and 150,000 Canadian civilians died.

Nuclear weapons

The Federation's atomic programme was run by the Federal Atomic Directorate from February 1943 under the physicist Anton Velíšek, with uranium ore from Jáchymov and Katanga. Its uranium was separated at a works at Žilina in the Váh valley, built from June 1943. The Reggane test of 11 August 1946 was the first nuclear explosion, and the bombing of Norfolk on 11 September 1946 the first use of a nuclear weapon in war. The Federation had a third device by December 1946. The American programme, which produced plutonium in reactors on the Columbia River built with forced labour, did not test a weapon until October 1949.

Casualties

The war killed about 20 million people. Of the European civilian dead, about 2.6 million were killed by American bombing, 1.6 million in ground fighting and shelling, 1.5 million under the occupation and 250,000 in Britain's Hunger Winter; about 3 million died of epidemics, hunger and exposure, many of them refugees. Of the American military dead, about 1.7 million died in France, the Low Countries, Germany and Bohemia, 500,000 on the Canadian front, 500,000 at sea, 380,000 in the air war, and 220,000 in Iceland, Newfoundland, Iberia and the Caribbean or of disease and accidents. The Federation's official figure of "fifteen million European dead" counts its own military and civilian dead.

About 510,000 Americans were held prisoner by the Federation and about 610,000 Europeans and Canadians by the United States. They were exchanged through Reykjavík and Lisbon between 1947 and 1949; about 41,000 died in captivity after the Cessation.

Aftermath

The Cessation left the lines where they stood, except in Iberia. The last American troops left Lisbon in December 1947; without them the Spanish State fell in 1948, Gibraltar was returned to Britain, and Spain and Portugal joined the Federation in 1951. In the Atlantic the Federation held Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, Newfoundland and St Pierre and Miquelon, and the United States held Bermuda and the Caribbean. Canada was divided along the line of the voyageurs' canoe route from Georgian Bay to the Ottawa River and north to James Bay. The line was surveyed jointly in 1947–1949 and marked with concrete pillars every kilometre, and a timber hall built for prisoner exchanges at the confluence of the Mattawa and the Ottawa, the Mattawa Line House, became the meeting place of the two powers in Canada. The eastern Dominion of Canada signed the Treaty of Ottawa with the Federation in 1948, and the American-held western provinces became states of the Union in 1959. The United States never repealed its annexation acts of 1941, and Quebec and Newfoundland remained in dispute.

The Federation's institutions moved from Prague to Amsterdam between 1947 and 1949. India, which had sent about 400,000 soldiers to Europe, became independent in 1947 under the Simla Undertaking of 1943.

Historiography

In the Federation the war is taught as the Federation's founding war and as a war against fascism, and the bombing of Norfolk as the act that ended it, and the anniversary of the Treaty of Prague, 19 September, has been a public holiday since 1943. In American schools the Atlantic War is taught as a victory, in which the United States kept its gains in the Americas and ended the war when it chose. The government that fought it, the Columbia League's, governed the United States under emergency powers until 1979.

See also

• European Federation
• Treaty of Prague
• Kaltkrieg
• Second World War
• United States
• Columbia League