The Great War: American Front grim official holiday marking the 1882 surrender and keeping alive the dream of revenge for the two humiliations inflicted by the South. The novel's main plot begins on June 28, 1914, the same day Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg of Austria-Hungary, are assassinated in Sarajevo by Nedeljko Čabrinović with a bomb thrown into their car and explodes (as opposed to Gavrilo Princip with a gun in our timeline), with the incident drawing the European powers into a whirlwind of war. At the eruption of an alternate World War I known as the Great War, the
SMS Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand of these dreadnoughts, the navy shifted "Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand" and her sisters to the 2nd Division of the 1st Battle Squadron. The ship was named after Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination on 28 June 1914 triggered World War I. At that time, the battleships in the Austro-Hungarian Navy consisted of the "Radetzky" class, the "Tegetthoff" class, and the older and es. Along with the remainder of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, "Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand" was mobilized in late July 1914 to support the flight of and . The two German ships broke out of Messina, which was surrounded by the British navy,