The 1955 Gewissien uprising was the August 1955 armed rising in which rebelling dockworkers on Gewiss took control of the capital Edgwareston, overcame the Kruhlstutt occupational force. The Gewissien state calls it the ‘Dockyard Liberation’. The fighting ended thirty-seven years of Kruhlstutt occupation and led to the proclamation of the neo-Marxist Gewissien Republic under Chairman Arthur Vance.
Background
Kruhlstutt had invaded the island in 1918 during the collapse of the Vosti Empire, after some skirmishes with Bosken fleets in the Treviglio Strait. The Kingdom’s intent was to control the eastern seas around Nastavak to prevent a country as hegemonic as the empire from re-emerging, by blockading the ports of Boskenmark and the Republic of Kaskiv.
1950s
The blockade was tightened again in June 1955 during the Kresimirian Iron Era and the Great Purge of 1955, when the Kruhlstutt navy began stopping and searching shipping vessels carrying Kresimirian freight.
Amid domestic unrest, the Kruhlstutt monarchy, especially King Johannes II, had neglected Gewiss for decades. By 1955, food rationing on the island had tightened. Underground committees led by the veteran stevedore Arthur Vance and his deputy Thomas Graves began stockpiling tools and small arms in preparation for a potential rebellion.
Kresimiria, facing an economic standstill, began to smuggle arms across the Kaskivian border and the Treviglio Strait into Gewiss, without the knowledge of the Kaskivian government or Prime Minister Lieto Ezzo, to accelerate Vance’s revolt. A permanent injunction granted to the Council for Defence in 1955 barred Otonik Ordnance from selling the Kres-55 rifle abroad, so the rifles were requisitioned by the CIA.
Course of events
On the night of 14 August 1955, the dock night-shift crews disabled the harbour searchlights and cut the mooring lines of three Kruhlstutter destroyers. Vance’s committee seized the customs house and the radio shack within two hours. By midnight, Kruhlstutt officers attempted to rally at Fort Whitewall on the headland, but dockworkers armed with rifles and molotov cocktails sieged the garrison inside the fort until the 16th of August.
On 17 August union demolition teams reportedly opened the seacocks of four blockade frigates at anchor. Contemporary accounts describe two ships sinking in the channel and a third running aground on the north reef. The remaining Kruhlstutt garrison surrendered on 18 August, once its ammunition, fresh water and medical stores were exhausted.
Vance proclaimed the republic from the roof of the customs house, later demolished for the National Council Hall, and announced the formation of the Gewiss Workers’ Vanguard.
Aftermath
Kruhlstutt recalling any escaping fleet to Kruhlstadt and has never re-occupied the island. Kaskivian Prime Minister Lieto Ezzo publicly condemned the “communist seizure” of the island of Gewiss.
Vance soon announced trials of captured Kruhlstutt officers and Gewissien citizens viewed as ‘collaborators’ in public proclamations. The estimate of the number of executions during this period ranges from seven to twenty-two. The first National Council Mandate occured in November and confirmed Arthur Vance’s leadership, but was widely seen internationally as a sham.