1928-1933

Thanksgiving is next week and everyone should be in a celebratory mood after the results of the election weeks earlier. However, eight days after the election all celebrations and feelings of jubilation came to a very quick and sudden stop. The Senate and House majority leaders, of the Democratic Party, had successfully overturned the results of the election with an argument based around the natural-born citizen part of the requirements for President. In their statement they had concluded that any person(s) born in the "free states" were not considered natural born. By their very nature, concluding the civil war, these states had simply became territories of the United States and forfeit the right to natural-born citizenship. The Supreme Court held an emergency meeting that Thursday, nine days after the election, and concurred with the two leaders of the House and Senate. This effectively ended the dream that Mathew Brodus fought for and Dwayne Palmer carried on with. Since that time Palmer had his team of lawyers working on appealing or delaying any concrete decisions. Unfortunately Palmer knew the likely outcome of said appeals and had more serious matters on his mind at the present moment.

"How credible is this information?" asks William Clark, Dwayne Palmer's interim Chief of Staff.

"We are nearly one hundred percent at this time." Roger responds.

"I can't believe this, how can they prepare to do such a thing to so many people?"

"Sir? How do you want to proceed?" Roger asks Palmer.

"Operation Black Christmas is a go." Dwayne Palmer answers after a few long seconds pause to collect his thoughts.

Operation Black Christmas was a plan drawn up after the failed assassin revealed an imminent attack. After his suicide, they had begun collecting Intel from confidential sources all over the Union. What they had learned was the plans for an attack on the free states that had largely been covered up as a training exercise against an aggressive enemy that managed to make it to American soil. They had developed a neurological toxin that could be detonated above an enemy encampment and based on the wind speed could wipe out nearly one hundred percent of the people in a downtown sized city per bomb. The human nervous system would be wracked with pain as the victim would experience respiratory problems as well as loss of senses and deteriorating organ function leading to a very painful death. They had learned, not only had these chemical weapons been created, but that they had a plan of attack on the five free states. This was all going to be rationalized with a fake plot to secede from the Union, sparking another Civil War. With few options on the table, Palmer and his group of intelligence officers decided their best defense would be a quick decisive offense. There were several factories in the East that had been manufacturing the main ingredients to make these chemical bombs. However, those ingredients were then shipped to a chemical plant outside Sacramento, California and perfected into a bomb that was stockpiled in nearby low key Air Force base just outside the city. Boeing had been contracted to create large bombers that could cover an entire city with one pass. What they needed to do was infiltrate and destroy the factories and bombers being stockpiled in California.

This wasn't a simple sabotage because as soon as they struck, they would be surrounded all around with several Army bases along their borders with the training to go in and take over the free states. Instead they planned on a multi front strike that would cripple the chemical bombing as well as make a definitive line between themselves and their aggressors. They had little time to plan and a lot to accomplish. Palmer himself would take a smaller force of fifteen thousand to the capitol of California. This group would oversee the complete destruction of the chemical weapons being stockpiled there, as well as overtaking several bases in the valley and organizing the rest of the war from a better logistic vantage point. The free states would be bombarded by air attacks night and day, to counter this Palmer had staged several anti air companies along his border and surrounding major cities to minimize his civilian casualties. They would eventually be outmatched in ground warfare, since they didn't possess much armored vehicles like the tanks the US Army had. Twenty thousand troops headed to Ft. Hood, Texas to overtake an enormous stockpile of armored tanks and begin an assault from that base outward. There were similar troop makeup sent to different staging areas outside the free states. Palmer had hoped this multifaceted multistage attack would throw the military in disarray for the first few crucial days.

Palmer had carefully chosen his Generals to command each part of his plan. General Mills would take on Ft. Hood and control the armored division of his new army as it fought outward from Texas. General Grant would take a division of troops to Ft. Cheyenne in Wyoming to relieve the military of their assembly of fighters and bombers. From there General Grant would push South toward Denver, CO and provide aerial cover to the free states. His most trusted military confidant, was General James Patterson. Gen. Patterson was in the first generations born in the free states following the civil war. He had attended officer training with whites at West Point in New York and received a very cruel and intensive time of study. His treatment by the whites pushed him to come back home to the free states and serve there. General Patterson would command the rest of their military scattered around the five states. He would have to defend along the borders, with Iowa and Missouri likely seeing most of the ground assault. If he was going to stand a chance, the other attacks could not fail, he knew he wouldn't last long if there was fighting on all sides, there had to be a front to push from.

It is bitterly cold in the central valley of California this Christmas morning 1928. Private Willshire was selected to work gate duty at the Mather Air Force base just outside Sacramento. He was eighteen years old and longed for his warm bed back home in Pennsylvania. Right now, he guessed, his family was still sleeping waiting to open presents and eat food. It was just past one a.m. and was around thirty degrees when he heard a slight murmur of sounds coming from the distance. He couldn't make out what it was and left the shack to take a look. With his flashlight in hand, still yawning, he walked up onto a slight hill that ran on the North side of the road leading out of the base. From this higher vantage point he could see what looked to be thousands of soldiers following a nearby tree line towards the side of the post. He rubbed his eyes and looked again, at that moment it sunk in, they were being attacked. He turned quickly and ran back down the embankment towards the booth, almost there he turned behind him to make sure he wasn't seen. Right when he was looking back towards the guard booth, he was frozen in place. He saw a tall man with camo face paint sneering at him just inches from his face. His first thoughts were, who was this man and why couldn't he move. Then he felt a sharp pain in his abdomen as the shock slowly wore off. He glances down and sees the knife handle still protruding from his stomach and looks back up at the man and realizes what has happened. Before he can let a scream out, the man covers his mouth and twists the blade furthering the damage. He is unconscious in seconds, but doesn't bleed out for a minute or two. His lifeless body is drug away to a nearby ditch, Operation Black Christmas has begun.

Palmer, with Roger always at his side, has led an attack on a Mather Air Force base. They had completely outnumbered the personnel on hand during this holiday. Everyone that wasn't killed was captured and locked in a nearby police station that was also overtaken. Moving from the Air Force base they spread out to nearby points of interest, including further West towards the San Francisco area military bases, mostly naval in nature, and Palmer himself leads three thousand men to overtake the state capitol and use it as a base of operations. The casualties for the free states have been minimal in the California theater and they had caught most bases understaffed and off guard. When new personnel were alerted and sent to base they were easily rounded up and locked in nearby barracks where they are treated as prisoners of war. This has effectively cut off the US military on the West coast. General Grant had suffered many casualties trying to overtake Ft. Cheyenne. They were not as light on duty as the other posts for Christmas and had been able to reinforce their numbers from the nearby military community that was on the opposite end from Grant and his forces. It would be long into the day before Grant was able to overtake the base and commandeer the fleet of bombers and fighters. His twenty thousand troops had suffered almost fifty percent casualty or wounded by the time the fighting stopped. He was not able to provide proper burials, or even much needed medical attention, before commanding his forces to take the newly acquired planes and head South into Colorado and West into Utah. Grant had several targets to bomb before being able to swing back over to the free states and provide air cover for General Patterson.

Ft. Hood, Texas was a scene of unflinching carnage and terror. The base had quickly mobilized its new tanks and fought off General Mills and his fifty thousand troops. Mills' forces had been outnumbered and outmatched. The US General Walter S. Jacobs was commanding the armored division and was part of the planned invasion of the free states so his forces had been training for precisely this type of engagement. His post had stockpiled the new Liberty Tank, that was largely designed by comparing the British and French tanks in 1920. Production of the Liberty began in 1924 and they had amassed over two hundred of them at Ft. Hood, with training beginning in 1926 with the implementation of defending the US from a foreign enemy invasion. General Jacobs knew full well that was only partially true, he was attending a meeting in January 1926 at the newly constructed West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C. Top cabinet members and the leaders of the US military held a meeting discussing the plan and preparation needed to end the "free states" push for involvement in national politics and influence. They talked about a fake attack in New York City that would take place sometimes in 1930, targeting the Stock Exchange that had recently been built to handle the increase in America's global trading. This attack would destroy the building and inside they would find thirty black men with identifications leading to the free states. This was a twofold attack, one is blaming the black states for an act of war and the other was to ramp up military might and production. General Mills had to fall back towards Dallas, just South East of Ft. Hood, and regroup his forces. They took quite a beating from Jacobs and his armored tanks barely able to hold the city they claimed. Supplies had quit coming to Jacob's men with the successful bombing of bases around Colorado and New Mexico, which is likely the only reason Mills wasn't wiped out completely.

After several weeks, and Mills bleeding troops daily, it looked as if Jacobs and his men would reclaim Dallas and capture or kill Mills and his men. It was the morning of January 17th that the final push was coming. Mills had lost communication with his command structure the week before and was holding out the best he could but knew defeat was imminent. It was in the afternoon on this cold Texas winter day that Mills considered surrender when overhead bombers and fighters began to systematically annihilate the tanks and armored vehicles. One of these bombing runs had hit directly the command bunk Jacobs was leading the assault from, killing him and the rest of the commanding officers. Disarrayed and leaderless, the rest of the tanks that weren't wiped out in the bombardment fled back to Ft. Hood to try and regroup. However, they were forced to surrender when the base they made it back to had been compromised and their fortified defenses of artillery and anti armor weaponry had been turned on them. General Grant had flown a fighter plane with several bombers to help Mills, and just in the nick of time. Little celebration could be had for Grant, once again, as the majority of the US military was pushing into the free states, threatening to exterminate all the citizens that lived there.

General Patterson commanded the Free States Army from the capitol building in Topeka, KS. But his forces on the front line had been whittled away against the might of the US Army. General Chuck Summerall commanded the remaining US Army but met heavy anti air resistance during the initial months of this second Civil War. He had all but abandoned the remaining forces in the West and decided to pool his resources in the East and push against the Free States Army that was setting up formidable defenses along their borders. His air attacks attempted to bomb their military factories and bases but was outmatched with anti air gun placements as well as very well trained pilots in fighters that had been stolen from Ft. Cheyenne. General Summerall was very calculating in his troop movements and attacks, he was very confident it was a matter of when not if the US Army would prevail. At the same time both sides had dedicated a lot of resources to their propaganda campaigns, with the US portraying the attacks as cold and ruthless from the Negro men and women. They told tales of white women and children being savagely raped and tortured for the sport of it. The Free States fought back with released documents detailing the planned fake attack in NYC and the use of chemical weapons that they had stopped. The whole country was split on public opinion with mostly Eastern States having a savage hate for blacks and Mexicans that comprised the free states with the Western States beginning to slowly accept the US Army's planned attack as truth.

Sixteen months have gone by and the war was getting costly on both sides. The US Army had suffered over one hundred thousand troops in death or serious injury with the Free States suffering close to the same amount but much, much more in civilian casualties. General Summerall decided to strike around military positions along the Iowa and Missouri borders often decimating civilian towns with no prisoners taken. He had the 32nd Infantry Division, out of Wisconsin, pushing on the North Eastern edge of Iowa and eventually busting past General Patterson's 4th Free Army Battalion. Waterloo in the month of June 1930, with a population of forty five thousand, was decimated with all the civilians there either killed or fleeing to Des Moines. The Waterloo Massacre, as the Free States media had reported, help cement the people backing them publicly and was used as a battle cry from that point forward. Patterson had a stalemate with his 37th ID (Infantry Division), out of Ohio, against the 2nd FAB (Free Army Battalion) that had fortified St. Louis and its surrounding areas. The same was not true for the 3rd ID, coming all the way over from Georgia, they had stalled momentarily but were able to push past the defenses in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas. This created a huge hole in the border defenses of the FSA (Free States Army), even though Little Rock was recently taken by the FSA, and the 3rd ID was able to push all FSA forces out of Arkansas. They had regrouped and prepared to advance on Oklahoma, which would create two offensives into Free State territory.

Palmer was sleepless most nights, especially after the Waterloo Massacre, and worked tirelessly with his command staff to try and out maneuver General Summerall and his forces. However, every time they tried a counteroffensive they were defeated and lost resources needed to hold key defensive points. After Little Rock fell, the US Army had a straight shot to Oklahoma City, if that fell, Palmer knew, he would lose Kansas and the majority of his Army would be lost. General Grant and General Mills had been fighting in Texas against different militias and military sabotages effectively taking them out of the equation. There had been a large militia, that was staging attacks from nearby Abilene and made it very difficult for Grant and Mills to aid the rest of the FSA.

February 19th, 1931 Summerall's 3rd ID had staged around the outskirts of OKC and was preparing to invade in the coming weeks. Their scouts had reported only thirty thousand poorly armed troops remained in the city, which was pale in comparison to his ninety thousand well trained and well armed Infantry. They used the Artillery they had over the next few days to pepper the city with shells and weaken the already weak FSA. The morning of February 23rd he led his troops against the city, they had tried different approaches but the soldiers fought with such ferocity that it made their numbers and lack of training matter not. After four weeks of fighting and testing their defenses the 3rd ID was beginning to push on the Eastern edge of the city, with the fall of the city the war would surely be over. It was on the 24th that the 3rd ID was dealt a tremendous blow from the air and ground. Simultaneously General Grant led bombers up from Texas and began to erode the 3rd ID's swarming forces away from the city, with General Mills leading an armored battalion from the South towards the heart of the 3rd ID command center. After twelve hours of bombing, the armored battalion pushed the 3rd ID out of Oklahoma and back to Little Rock. They had little time to regroup there as Mills and his reinforcements pushed again driving them out of Little Rock and back across the Mississippi river. If this wasn't enough of a devastating blow to the US Army, General Grant had refueled and headed to Des Moines and helped fight back the 32nd ID out of Iowa and maintained fly over of military bases outside the Free States borders.

Even with these monumental defeats, the US Army refused surrender. Palmer had finished dispatching the last military opposition, the 40th ID from Nevada, in all the now controlled Free States territories. A cease fire during the winter of 1931 was broken when US Army forces attempted to retake Ft. Hood after most of the tanks and planes left to push along the Mississippi River. It would have succeeded but a New Mexico regiment of volunteers, the same ones that defeated the militia in Abilene freeing Grant and Mills, arrived in time to fight off the superior trained forces with sheer numbers and determination. Palmer was forced to do something drastic and put the US Army on its knees for a surrender. They had loaded any of the chemical bombs they didn't destroy onto bombers in Arkansas and prepared several bombing targets including, Washington D.C., New York City, Atlanta, Boston and Richmond. The estimated casualties, mostly civilian, would be over three million. Palmer tried to appeal to the US Army with several radio broadcasts explaining his imminent attack without the unconditional surrender of the US Army. All attempts to broker a peace failed, so in March of 1932 Palmer OK'd the bombardment of the five cities he had previously listed as targets and many people tried fleeing the cities. Anti air placements around the city were going to be ineffective against the high flying bombers and on March 24th, 1931 all five cities simultaneously had bombers approaching for a later afternoon strike.

The panic in the cities was very thick and heavy. Schools were closed and people that were unable to flee the city hid in basements and held their children tightly awaiting the imminent attack. Police and US Army personnel tried to help people out of the respective cities but were only able to evacuate one third of the people by the time the bombs would fall. It was right at three o clock when the bombers were center of their designated city and all was quiet. The longest thirty minutes of most of these peoples' lives were spent with those bombers overhead. But not one bomb fell, it was a show of force, of how easily Palmer and his forces could devastate and cause mass casualties. The following week the public cried for surrender, fearing the next time wouldn't be a bluff. General Summerall had no choice but to surrender and flew out to Sacramento to sign a treaty to end Civil War II. Palmer had his lawyers draft up a surrender notice earlier that year and it contained several important factors for surrender that Summerall absolutely did not want to sign, but he had no choice. The major points were a new border along the Mississippi River and the Forming of the Western United States, also there would be a nine month amnesty period where anyone from either side was free to relocate without penalty or stipulation. This treaty did not limit the military capacity of what would become the Eastern United States. The WUS would not oversee anything that happened in the EUS border and vice versa. Palmer gave a speech on the steps of the new Capitol building of the Western United States in Sacramento.

"Today we have concluded a very bloody and costly war from both sides. Like the Civil War before this pitted countrymen against countrymen, brother against brother, American against American, and like the first Civil War this was fought over equality and freedom. No longer will people with a different skin color, or a different religious view, or a different gender be treated any differently than any other citizen. From this day forward any citizen of these Western United States can strive to be free of injustice, false imprisonment, or political subterfuge. Finally every parent can turn to their child and say, Yes you can be the President someday."