Book Review: The American League Of Nations Mandates—A Masterpiece of French Diplomacy
By: Michael Jordon, Professor of History, Northwestern Illinois University
Professor Jordan puts a new spin on the well-known story of the way in which the United States came to rule Eastern Galicia, Kurdistan, and Armenia in the aftermath of The Great War. Most writers have assumed that the United States ended up with these mandates (mandate being League of Nation-speak for colony), as part of the division of spoils at the end of the Great War. After all, the United States did a great deal to make the Allied victory possible. It seems only natural that it would end up with new territory, just as England gained control of Iraq and Palestine, among other areas, and France got ‘mandates’ to rule Syria and Lebanon.
Professor Jordan claims that European intrigue and US isolationism almost prevented the rewarding of these mandates to the United States. He also claims that the idea of US mandates was revived and vigorously pushed by French diplomats who saw those mandates as a solution to French long-term problems. According to this theory, the French saw the US as a counterbalance to British and Russian power in the Middle East. Dr. Jordan also claims that the Galacian mandate was the result of French efforts to ensure that the new state of Poland saw Germany instead of Russia as their primary enemy. He also claims that because of the many ethnic conflicts within them, the mandates were a net drain on US power, and that French diplomats foresaw that as they worked behind the scenes to mobilize US and European support for those mandates.
Frankly, the argument that French diplomats were able to foresee so much seems a little improbable to this reviewer. While it is probable that the French wanted to keep the US involved in the Old World in case Germany became aggressive again, there are ample explanations for the US mandates without resorting to conspiracy theories. The idea of US mandates floated quite naturally in the aftermath of the Great War, and the mandates were at least superficially attractive to the US. There were and still are large oilfields in the area around Mosul in Kurdistan. Eastern Galicia also has major oil fields. US oil companies would have mobilized behind the idea of these mandates with or without any French encouragement.
Fortunately, once he gets beyond that initial problematic hypothesis, Jordan is quite effective in analyzing the political background of the US mandates, and the impact that they had on European and Middle Eastern affairs. He correctly points out that the American mandate in Eastern Galicia kept a simmering war between Polish-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking Galicians from becoming a full-blown conflict which would in all likelihood have drawn the new Polish army eastward, and eventually into conflict with whatever power emerged from the Russian Civil War. Whether the mandate helped the Poles gain more formerly German territory on its Western border is more problematic. The French undoubtedly did want to ensure that any reconciliation between Poland and Germany was impossible, which explains French support for Polish claims to ethnically mixed areas on the border between the two countries, and even for areas that were undoubtedly ethnically German, such as Danzig. The fact that those disputed areas were awarded to Poland probably has very little to do with the US mandate in Eastern Galicia, and a great deal to do with the allied desire to punish Germany.
Probably the best section of this book is the section on the history of the US mandates in the Middle East. Professor Jordan points out correctly that the US found both the Armenia and Kurdistan mandate to be hot potatoes throughout the twenty-five year history of the mandates. The Armenians and Kurds both claimed much of the same land, and there was continuous low-level fighting in the disputed areas. The Kurds also had a long tradition of tribally-based revolts against the Turks. There were at least two major revolts against the Americans, along with several minor ones, in the 1920’s. To make matters worse, the Turks didn’t accept losing all of that additional territory with good grace. For a time, they were weak and preoccupied with fending off attacks on their core territories, mostly by Greece. By the time they fended off those attacks, the US had troops in place to deter any Turkish attack on the US mandates. The Turks put up with the mandates—though very reluctantly. Turkish hostility was a constant problem for the mandates, especially in the 1920’s.
Professor Jordan’s analysis of military affairs in the US Middle Eastern mandates is also very good. He points out that the US maintained a typical colonial-style army in the area. It was small by European standards, but large by US peacetime standards. As things settled down in the late 1920’s that army dwindled, especially in the wake of the Great Depression. As US forces in the area were drawn down, the US recruited a large number of locals to supplement a few tens of thousands of American soldiers. In Kurdistan, the US initially recruited from the warlike hill tribes. They found out that was a mistake during the revolt of 1925. To crush that revolt, the US recruited city-dwellers who had long resented the power of the hill tribes. They tried to break the power of the tribes after the first revolt—and pretty much succeeded by 1929. In Armenia, the US sided with the Christian Armenians against the Kurds, but somewhat subtly so as not to make the Kurds too restless in the other mandate.
The US also had to worry about the growing power of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan had a long-standing territorial dispute with Armenia, and the US inherited the Armenian side of that dispute. As the Soviet Union industrialized and built up military power, the US military became increasingly alarmed about the vulnerability of the mandates. Congress was also alarmed, but had very little money for defense spending in the light of the Depression. As the 1930’s wore on, the US depended increasingly on an Armenian militia for defense of that mandate. The Armenians were tough and well-trained as an infantry force, but they were poorly equipped and had nowhere near the firepower that the Soviets were building up. By the mid-1930’s Azerbaijani enclaves inside the Armenian mandate were the sites of guerrilla movements that tied down several thousand Armenian troops, along with several hundred American officers.
Professor Jordan points out that the threat to the mandates made American foreign policy much more anti-Soviet than it might otherwise have been. The fact that the Soviets also appeared to be threatening the mandate of Eastern Galicia made that even more of a problem.
Professor Jordan also does a good job in tracing the history of the Eastern Galician mandate With their Galician mandate-to-be controlled by heavily armed rival Polish and Ukrainian armies, the US had to tread carefully initially. Professor Jordan claims that the Polish government was bought off by US support for border adjustments at the expense of Germany. That is not at all clear from the diplomatic record. In any case, as Dr. Jordan explains, that was only part of the problem. Local Polish militias still wanted to become part of Poland. The local Ukrainians wanted to unite with the part of Ukraine that was held by Russia before the war as an independent Ukraine. It was a situation that required a great deal of diplomatic skill on the part of the US. Fortunately, most people on both sides bought into regarding the mandate as a temporary truce. The US mandate commission essentially ratified the military situation on the ground. It set up a federal system, with the most heavily Polish areas in several states and the predominantly Ukrainian ones in others. There was a weak federal council, but the states were given considerable powers. Polish and Ukrainian militias became the militias of their various states. Heavy weapons were hidden away for a renewal of fighting when the mandate ended. The US did try to maintain economic integration of the mandate.
Not everyone was satisfied by the arrangement. Thousands of Ukrainian nationalists headed east out of the mandate into the independent Ukrainian state that existed briefly in what was to become the Soviet Ukraine. Many of them fought in the Ukrainian army, giving some units training and cohesion that they had previously lacked. Thousands of Poles headed west into Poland. The Polish government encouraged them to settle in areas along the German border to give Poles the majority in those areas.
The Ukrainian-speaking states in the mandate quietly kept a flow of money and military supplies going to the rest of the Ukraine. In spite of that aid, the independent state of the Ukraine gradually collapsed into anarchy, then most of it was taken over by the Bolsheviks. The remnants of the Ukrainian government and its army then retreated to a small strip of land along the border with the mandate, along with hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Professor Jordan points out the importance of events outside the mandate in influencing what happened next. By this time, Bolsheviks had temporarily taken over Hungary, and Bolsheviks were trying for power in Germany. As a result, a red scare was in full swing.
In that atmosphere, the US declared that it would defend a thirty-mile buffer zone to the east of its mandate. US troops and Ukrainian militias from the mandate then took up positions along a line roughly 30 miles from the border. There was some skirmishing with the Bolsheviks, but the Russian Civil War was still going on, so the Soviets decided to bide their time on the issue until the Soviets dealt with the rest of their enemies. Lenin did deal the US one major blow though. He uprooted thousands of relatively wealthy peasants and political opponents and terrorized them into fleeing to the buffer zone. The US had to rush food over to feed over 500,000 refugees.
The buffer zone and its refugees became a symbol of US resolve against the Bolsheviks. That made it hard to abandon later, even when it would have made sense from an economic and military standpoint to do so. The remnants of the Ukrainian government based themselves in the buffer zone and tried to take on the trappings of a government. A few countries recognized that government, though most didn’t. The area languished as a backwater through the early 1920’s as financial mismanagement by the inexperienced Ukrainian government made the natural problems of a tiny, poor rural statelet even worse. The Soviets made matters worse by encouraging a continued exodus of opposition groups through the first few years of the 1920’s. By the time the exodus stopped, there were nearly a million Ukrainian exiles in the buffer zone.
Professor Jordan also looks at the economic history of Eastern Galicia. The mandate began to prosper in the mid-to-late 1920’s. There were plentiful national resources and as postwar education programs took hold, the area began a modest light industrialization. When the Great Depression hit, the mandate suffered because of its economic ties to the US economy. For a year or two, the Soviet Ukraine actually seemed like a good alternative, and a trickle of people immigrated there. That reversed as the Soviets squeeze their peasants to initiate their military buildup. Millions of people starved in the Soviet Ukraine from 1929 through 1933. Thousands more managed to make it past the increasingly tight Soviet border security to the buffer zone.
This is a frustrating book. The historical and economic sections are extremely well researched and shed a great deal of light on the history of the mandates. On the other hand, Professor Jordan often goes off on conspiratorial tangents. The thesis of the book is the most important of those tangents, but Professor Jordan also makes claims for the impact of the mandates that are difficult to sustain. For example, he claims that the presence of the US mandates postponed The Great Burning by at least five years. While it is suggestive that the European political situation began to deteriorate shortly after the mandates expired in 1944, that probably had more to do with the paranoia generated among the European powers by the ongoing race to acquire nuclear weapons. That race was fast approaching its goal by the mid-1940’s, and a few thousand US troops probably had less to do with postponing the resulting disasters than did economic and scientific constraints on the European powers.
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One of the major figures in the Soviet biological weapons program makes some interesting claims in this book. Among them:
This book has some obvious potential for Alternate Histories. For example, how would the Germans have responded to unequivocal evidence of Soviet biological warfare in World War II? Would they have gone to gas warfare, or would they have gone into their own biowar techniques? I don’t recall reading anything about a German biowar effort. I assume they had one of some kind. Leningrad would have probably been very vulnerable to even relatively primitive biowar efforts. How would Western Allies have responded to the German response? What would have happened if that train full of viruses and other nasties had been hit by German bombs? Would the Soviets have used their biowar resources if the Cuban missile crisis had gone hot? What if something deadly had gotten loose over there in—well, pick a time. The later you go, the more deadly things get.
There are a lot more tidbits in this book, and I do recommend it.
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Divided and Conquered By: Jeffery A. Gunsburg
This is the first book I’ve read about the fall of France in 1940 that doesn’t repeat a bunch of sets of conventional wisdom about the campaign. It uses a variety of new sources to understand what the French generals were thinking, and why they thought it. After reading this book, I still think that the French made some fundamental mistakes in the war, but those mistakes were an entirely different set than the ones the conventional wisdom about the campaign put forward.
The conventional wisdom about the fall of France in 1940 says that France prepared to fight World War I again, spreading their tanks out in penny packets to support the infantry. Most importantly, the conventional wisdom says that the French tried to re-fight World War I by building the Maginot line, and then cowering behind it until the Germans swept around behind it through Belgium and Holland and swept the French army away.
There are some elements of truth to some of that conventional wisdom. The French probably did spend too much money on the Maginot line. They did spread a lot of their tanks out in infantry support roles. That’s not the full story though. The French high command understood the advantages of concentrating their armor, and they did have three light armored divisions (DLM’s) and three heavy armored divisions (DCR’s).
Those divisions were not hasty reactions to German successes in Poland. As early as 1930, the French planned to motorize five infantry divisions, turn one cavalry division into a light armored division and motorize one brigade each of the other five cavalry divisions. Those plans were delayed by the Great Depression, but by 1936 the French had a functioning light armored division. In the early 1930’s, "Students of the Army Staff College learned that strategic maneuver by motorized and mechanized forces, particularly on the flanks, would dominate at least the early stages of the next war." In the fall of 1936, the French government approved a program that would equip 3 light and 2 heavy armored divisions, along with 7 motorized divisions. The program would also produce equipment for 3 more motorized divisions. That plan called for production of 3200 tanks, 5000 armored utility vehicles, over 6500 25mm and 47mm anti-tank guns, and mechanized artillery for the armored divisions.
The French were quite aware that the Germans could and probably would avoid the Maginot line by attacking through Belgium. Channeling the Germans in that direction was the main point of the Maginot line.
The French had a plan to counter that attack, and attempted to implement it in May 1940. That plan resulted in the defeat of France, but not because France cowered behind the Maginot line (they didn’t), and not because the French high command attempted to re-fight World War I. The French lost primarily because they tried to implement a daring, highly mobile strategy in May 1940 with an army that simply wasn’t as good at or as well equipped for that type of war as their German opponents.
The French had three fundamental problems as they developed their forces and strategies for World War II. First, the defense of the vital northern industrial areas of France was dependent on Belgium. Meeting the Germans on the France/Belgium border was a prescription for the devastation of Northern France. Unfortunately, even after the experience of World War I, Belgium refused to cooperate with France on defense issues in the late 1930’s. Instead Belgium enforced a very strict interpretation of neutrality, refusing to even covertly talk to the French about coordinating defenses. That made things very difficult for the French. If the French took the offensive on the French/German border, they risked the Germans going through Belgium and cutting off any forces used in that offensive. As long as they respected Belgium’s neutrality, the French handed Hitler the initiative. He could chose the time and place that any war got serious.
Second, France simply didn’t have enough high-quality manpower to match the Germans. They didn’t have the population base Germany did, and as a result they had to use people who would not have been in the German army, at least not at this stage of the war. They had a number of ‘Series B divisions’ composed mainly of flabby shopkeepers in their late 30’s, who had last trained ten or fifteen years ago. These men were officered by a minuscule cadre of active duty officers, supplemented by reserve officers who had often also been out of the army for years. The French had enough sense to put that kind of division on sections of the front that they thought would be quiet. Unfortunately, that meant that a couple of ‘Series B divisions’ ended up taking the initial assault from elite German units like Gross Deutchland, followed by most of the German panzer divisions.
Third, France’s main ally, Great Britain, simply was not prepared for a war on the continent. With a population comparable to France’s, and all of the resources of the Commonwealth countries to draw on, they still had an army on the continent about half the size of Belgium’s, and an even smaller fraction of France’s. By May 1940, England had less than a dozen divisions capable of actually fighting on the continent. Given their population, they should have had four or five times that number of divisions, and they approached that later in the war. England did have a very good airforce, but it wasn’t designed to help defend France. England’s fighter aircraft were tied to an elaborate system of air defenses that later proved its worth in the Battle of Britain, while its bombers were designed for a strategic bombing role. Together, England and France had enough aircraft to give the Germans very strong competition. Unfortunately, the majority of England’s aircraft, though not all of them, sat on runways waiting for German attacks on England through much of the battle of France.
Given those constraints, French strategy called for bold action as soon as the Germans attacked Belgium. The best, most mobile French army units would dash forward into Belgium, occupying positions along something called the ‘Dyle line’. If Germany attacked the Netherlands too, then French forces would make an even longer dash through Belgium to link up with the Dutch army. In theory, that would keep the Netherlands and Belgium in the fight, and make the British more apt to fight seriously because of the threat that German occupation of the low countries posed to England.
The Netherlands part of that strategy--called the Breda variant--was very controversial among the French high command. The French commander, Gamelin, rammed it through in spite of almost unanimous opposition from the other French commanders. It may have been part of the reason that French Prime Minister Reynaud tried to fire him—ironically on the day before the German offensive started. The problem was that the Breda variant cut French reserves for the central front in half, taking seven of the most mobile French divisions, including one of the three light armored divisions and putting them in the worst possible position to counter any German breakthrough. The Breda variant also diverted scarce anti-aircraft guns from more important fronts, as the French set up an anti-aircraft screen to protect those divisions as they dashed across Belgium.
France had made enormous strides in rearmament from September 1939 to May 1940. Gamelin apparently looked at the large French mobile forces and felt that France had built up to the point where it could match the Germans at mobile warfare, at least under certain circumstances. France had implemented most of the 1936 plans. It had 3 light and 3 heavy armored divisions, (versus 10 panzer divisions) 7 motorized infantry divisions, (versus the same number of German motorized divisions) and 5 partially mechanized cavalry divisions. The Germans would have to go fight their way through Dutch and Belgian defenses, while the French would be arriving at the battle site relatively unscathed. Doing the Dyle plan with the Breda variant was a gamble, but Gamelin though it was worth it. If it succeeded, it would keep Belgium and the Netherlands in the war, and make an allied offensive in 1941, after England built up a real army, a realistic possibility.
The Breda variant probably made the German task much easier than it would have otherwise been, but the fundamental problem was that the French command was trying to implement a mobile strategy with an army that really wasn’t as well trained or equipped for that type of warfare as the French high command apparently thought. The French training philosophy was one of "Methodical Battle". The French were not taught to go off on impetuous, risky tangents. They were trained to hold a line, bring up massive firepower, then go over to the offensive. That philosophy might have been fatal against the Germans even given more rational deployment of French resources. The point is that an army trained that way was flung into a wild adventure that had to result in an encounter battle between them and the Germans—exactly the type of battle they had been trained to avoid. In adopting that strategy, Gamelin also managed to commit every one of his seven motorized infantry and three light mechanized divisions before he knew where the main German thrust was coming. That proved fatal when the Germans broke through south of the mobile French forces, cutting them off in Belgium.
The French did make some major mistakes in weapons design and organization. For example, their heavy armored divisions (DCR’s) were built around the B1 series of tanks. The B1 was heavily armored and had a lot of firepower, but it was also very expensive, complex, hard to produce, and not very reliable (The reliability was apparently made worse by some very sophisticated sabotage efforts on the part of French Communists). The B1 tanks had a very short range without refueling, and track life was short. The French intended to get the tanks to the front by railcar, while moving the rest of their armored divisions by road. In the confusion of the German breakthrough, the two components of the armored divisions tended to never link up, and tanks did tend to be used in small packets, but that was not the French intention.
Some individual French commanders apparently didn’t get the concept of armored divisions, and one vital heavy armored division was squandered when a corp commander scattered it along the flank of the German breakthrough as mobile pillboxes. Again, this was not French doctrine. It was a matter of an individual being stupid. Every peacetime army gets a few people like that in key positions, and spends the first months of active combat getting rid of them. The French didn’t get time to get rid of them.
Another major French problem was their shortage of radios. They relied on telephone systems to make up for that shortage, which turned out to be a major mistake. Their phone network got cut to pieces by a combination of bombing, military movement, and actions of refugees. The radios they had were not very reliable, and they were overly cautious about using them, at least partly because the French had no equivalent of the German Enigma coding machines, and they suspected that the Germans would be able to monitor radio traffic. As the phone system fell apart, the French command lost contact with their armies to a greater and greater extent.
Another problem: all French tanks, including the otherwise very good Somua S35, had one-man turrets. The one man in that turret had so many roles that it was virtually impossible for him to do them all well. The Germans captured quite a few S35’s and apparently initially thought they would be valuable additions to their armored force, but ended up realizing that there really wasn’t much they could do with them, beyond security work.
Yet another problem: as mentioned earlier, the French had five partly mechanized cavalry divisions. Those divisions each still had a major component of horsed cavalry, along with armored cars and light tanks. These divisions proved to have very little fighting ability. They couldn’t move any faster than the horsed component, while at the same time they didn’t have the cross-country mobility that a purely cavalry force would have had. The Germans really hammered a couple of these divisions early on, and routed them. That may have played a role in destroying the morale of some of the French "B" divisions who saw the remnants pass through their positions shortly before the main German assault.
Bottom line: Divided and Conquered claims that the French worked hard and reasonably rationally to prepare for a German attack. The fact that they were defeated so quickly was due in part to mistakes on their part. They had some serious flaws in their weapons and organization. Gamelin’s strategy made those flaws worse by putting French troops into a situation that they weren’t trained or equipped for. On the other hand, England and Belgium share a major part of the blame too. French "B" divisions wouldn’t have had to be on the front line if England had built a serious land army. The French dash into Belgium wouldn’t have been so dangerous if the Belgian government had allowed some covert coordination between the forces. The Germans would not have had as easy a time as they did in the air if the English had been willing to commit the fighter squadrons they had sitting on the runways of England early in the German offensive. The French are still bitter about the fact that hundreds of British fighters were sitting idle while French troops were getting picked apart from the air, and French pilots were flying their inadequate planes against the full weight of the Luftwaffe.
The defeat of 1940 was an allied defeat, not just a French one. England and Belgium contributed to it in very major ways. This book paints a picture of a French command that made mistakes, many of them in efforts to make up for the deficiencies of their allies, but which generally acted in a reasonably rational way to prepare for the assault that they knew was coming.
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Fortress Europe—European Fortifications
of World War II By: J.E. Kaufmann and R.M. Jurga
This book points out that not just the French, but essentially every European nation built massive fortifications during the time leading up to World War II. That includes Germany. The Germans planned massive fortifications for both the French (West Wall) and Polish! (East Wall) borders. They put a lot of money and effort into both of those systems. The East Wall included a huge network of tunnels. Most work on it stopped in 1938, after Hitler toured it and was not impressed. The Germans hastily attempted to finish it as the Soviets approached in 1944, but it was too far from completion to be of much use. The Germans did use a few parts of the Maginot line against the Americans in 1944, and it proved very formidable, even though it was designed primarily against attacks from the other direction.
What does any of this have to do with alternate history? Well, I included it because I thought of quite a few scenarios as I was reading it. The book does have a detailed chapter on the Czechoslovak fortifications—valuable if you want to do a World War II in 1938 scenario. (By the way, the Czech forts were not done. Work on them started in 1936, and was slated to be done in 1946. Most forts didn’t have their artillery yet by the time of the 1938 crisis.) There are also some other interesting tidbits scattered through the book. The Soviets had put a lot of effort into a "Stalin line" on their prewar border with Poland. After the partition of Poland, they started work on a new line of fortifications on their new border. In spring of 1941, before the German invasion, there is some evidence that the Soviets quietly decided that the Stalin line was their better bet in case of a German invasion. In any case, neither line was completed, and neither was much of a barrier to the Germans. The Italians continued fortifying their border with Germany until at least August of 1942. That work didn’t make Hitler overly happy, but was understandable given the nature of the German regime. Unfortunately, the Italians didn’t attempt to fight for that border when they attempted to switch sides. What if they had? What if Hitler hadn’t reacted the way he did to the East Wall in 1938, and work on it continued another year out of bureaucratic inertia? The Germans were planning some formidable stuff for that wall. Would the extra year of construction made a difference against the Soviets in 1944/45? Probably not a major one, but a delay of two or three weeks at the right time might have made a difference in how postwar Europe was carved up.
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The Bicycle In Wartime: An Illustrated
History By: Jim Fitzpatrick
H.G. Wells wrote a visionary story in the early 1900’s (before World War I) which predicted the use of tanks (he called them land cruisers), airplanes, and even atomic bombs. He also predicted wide-scale military use of bicycles. This book looks at actual military use of bicycles in the wars of the 1890’s and throughout the twentieth century. They didn’t play as crucial a role as Wells predicted, but they did play some crucial roles.
In an era before radios, bicycles played a major role in keeping both the British and Boer armies in touch with their various components during the Boer War. The British also designed a two-man bicycle with a machine gun mounted on it to ride the railroads of South Africa during that war. The fact that they were riding the rails meant that the riders could easily aim their machine gun.
In the time leading up to World War I, the various armies experimented with bicycle-riding detachments. They were very attractive to the armies because of their mobility, which was much greater than that of either the infantry or the cavalry of the time. Unfortunately, in an era before radios, it was very difficult to control fast-moving elements like bicyclists.
Once trench warfare took over in World War I, bicycles could play only a minor role—mostly getting messages back and forth quickly, and after World War I the western allies disbanded most of their bicycle units. In World War II, the Allies continued to shun bicycles, though the British did equip some units with them for the Normandy landing. The French resistance made good use of bicycles for mobility. At times the Axis made good use of them. The Japanese offensive that captured Singapore got much of its mobility through use of bicycles. The Germans were forced to use bicycles extensively for mobility as they ran out of oil toward the end of World War II.
The author also goes rather extensively into the role of bicycles in the Vietnam War, where they kept the Viet Cong in the game by giving them logistics and mobility.
So, what does this have to do with Alternate History? Well, for fifty points: come up with an AH that gives bicycles a major combat role in World War I as H.G Wells envisioned. For an additional twenty-five points, come up with the bicycle which plays that role.
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