I really enjoyed reading 1919: Britain’s Year of Revolution a book that looks at the (all too real) prospects of a revolution in the United Kingdom post the Great War.
1919; Britain’s Year of Revolution tells the story of an almost unknown passage in British history. On the August Bank Holiday that year, the government in London despatched warships to the northern city of Liverpool in an overwhelming show of force. Thousands of troops, backed by tanks, had been trying without success to suppress disorder on the streets. Earlier that year in London, 1,000 soldiers had marched on Downing Street, before being disarmed by a battalion of the Grenadier Guards loyal to the government. In Luton that summer, the town hall was burned down by rioters, before the army was brought in to restore order, and in Glasgow, artillery and tanks were positioned in the centre of the city to deter what the Secretary of State for Scotland described as a Bolshevik uprising. Industrial unrest and mutiny in the armed forces combined together to produce the fear that Britain was facing the same kind of situation which had led to the Russian Revolution two years earlier. Drawing chiefly upon contemporary sources, this book describes the sequence of events which looked as though they might be the precursor to a revolution along the lines of those sweeping across Europe at that time. To some observers, it seemed only a matter of time before Britain transformed itself from a constitutional monarchy into a Soviet Republic.
I found it a real gripping read and learnt so much about that post war era and the sparks that could have resulted in a full blown revolution and civil war.
Here are some ideas for scenarios.
Soldiers are deployed to remove strikers who are occupying important buildings in the city centre. The army bring in tanks and armoured cars. The strikers build improvised armoured buses, trucks and cars.
By the winter of 1919, the quiet horror of the Western Front had migrated to the cobbled thoroughfares of Britain’s industrial heartlands. Where the War Office dispatched Mark V tanks and Peerless armoured cars to break the council building occupations and clear city centres, they encountered an urban vanguard forged in the foundries of the Clyde, Tyne, and Mersey. Red Guards and striking boilermakers had systematically stripped heavy steel plating from dormant shipyards, welding makeshift parapets over double-decker trams, commercial lorries, and motor-coaches. Behind barricades of paving stones and overturned omnibus chassis, these improvised “Red Ironclads”—rattling top-heavy monstrosities studded with riveted boiler-plate and improvised firing slits—clanked into the grand town squares, meeting the state’s war-surplus armour in an unprecedented, suffocating clash of steel on domestic soil.
With Britain’s commercial trade paralysed at the water’s edge, the Admiralty took the drastic step of ordering Royal Navy destroyers and light cruisers directly into the nation’s key ports, deploying armed naval landing parties to clear the quays and force the unloading of essential supplies. The bluejackets expected passive non-cooperation, but they disembarked into a brutal gauntlet constructed by thousands of furious dockers, coal-heavers, and unionised merchant mariners. Armed with cargo hooks, heavy iron marlinspikes, and improvised Molotovs, the strikers swarmed the gangways and crane gantries, driving back the sailors with a volley of cobblestones and heavy freight blocks. In dockyards from Liverpool to the Thames, the salt air turned acrid with smoke as naval forces found themselves pinned down behind stacked timber-crates, fighting off ferocious hand-to-hand charges by a maritime workforce determined to hold the port gates at any cost.
Soldiers mutiny and take over buildings in city, but more troops are sent in to stop this.
What began as a quiet refusal to entrain for anti-Bolshevik deployment in Russia swiftly erupted into outright mutiny when regiments stationed in the provincial garrison towns seized control of local municipal halls, telegraph exchanges, and railway stations. Emboldened by months of demobilisation delays and rising revolutionary fervour, the rebellious soldiers declared these strongholds liberated “Soldiers’ Councils.” In response, the War Cabinet acted with cold, decisive speed, dispatching battle-hardened loyalist brigades direct from the Western Front—troops untainted by industrial unrest and supported by field artillery—to isolate and besiege their former comrades. As cordon lines tightened around city centres, loyalist machine-gun posts took position atop church spires and departmental rooftops, turning former army barracks and grand Victorian civic halls into contested war zones where British veterans faced British veterans across barricaded avenues.
A government armoured train is used for rear area security. Opposition forces plan to ambush the train with improvised armoured vehicles.
As military control unravelled across the rail corridors connecting London to the industrial North, the Ministry of Munitions pressed heavy armoured trains into service to maintain rear-area security, protect vital supply lines, and guarantee the passage of government troops. Yet these rolling fortresses, formidable on open track, found themselves hopelessly vulnerable to the partisan warfare brewing in the railway cuttings. Laying in wait near a coal-dusted junction, insurgent forces assembled a mobile strike force of improvised armoured lorries and plating-reinforced traction engines. Packed with high explosives and shielded behind layers of riveted boiler-plate, the rebel vehicles charged down parallel railway access roads, blowing the rails behind the train to cut off its retreat before using heavy improvised rams and makeshift sticky charges to breach the iron flank of the state’s juggernaut.
There are lots of miniatures out there that can be used for this kind of gaming across different scales.
I have written a number of blog posts on the different kinds of armoured vehicles developed in the inter-war period.
You can also see from the book how the seeds were potentially sowed for an armed conflict along the lines of the Very British Civil War background.
VBCW or Very British Civil War is an alternative history created by messers Jones, Mortimore and Douglas and published by Solway Crafts and Miniatures. In their scenario Edward VIII refuses to abdicate triggering a constitutional crisis which divides the nation and results in Civil war. As a result instead of going to war in Europe, the nation is facing a very British crisis.
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