NationStates Jolt Archive

So let's assume Schlieffen doesn't die in 1913, and Von Moltke doesn't modify the plan, that keeps us with 90% of the German army to March through Belgium and northern France. What happens? What about the Weiamr republic. Would Germany lose? Would the Russian Revolution happen? Would Hitler rise to power?

Im gonna put some money on something close to D-Day but in 1919 or 20 lol...

And similar outcome as the original, but in the early 20's...

Maybe just shift everything back a couple years, lol...

Im gonna put some money on something close to D-Day but in 1919 or 20 lol...

Wrong war.

Im gonna put some money on something close to D-Day but in 1919 or 20 lol...

And similar outcome as the original, but in the early 20's...

Maybe just shift everything back a couple years, lol...
Bar tanks, I reckon.

Wrong war.

No, Im saying that I think they wouldve done something similar to D-Day from WWII, in WWI...

Because the Tactical Situation wouldve been similar with Germany in control of France...

No, Im saying that I think they wouldve done something similar to D-Day in WWI...

Oh. So you're assuming France falls?

Bar tanks, I reckon.

Why no tanks?

Oh. So you're assuming France falls?

Well....it IS what France does best, :p...


But, in all seriousness, it is a Big assumption I know, but With a larger force, I think Germany wouldve been more successful, and could possibly have taken over France...

The continent ends up under the control of Germany with a sort of free trade alliance being constructed (that an increasingly desperate Ottoman empire hopes to join)

yadda yadda yadda

Well....it IS what France does best, :p...


But, in all seriousness, it is a Big assumption I know, but With a larger force, I think Germany wouldve been more successful, and could possibly have taken over France...

But then would the US have got involved? Because if they didn't, I can't see a D-Day type operation succeeding with just the UK and Canada.

Why no tanks?
Well, you'd have a lot more of the shitty inter-war period tanks, which were mainly ill-thought-through jokes.

A lot of the armoured doctrines only came out of the wipespread use of armour in WWII, bar those thought through by some of the more visionary commanders prior to WWII. Mainly the armoured doctrines thought up (like the British ideas of Cruiser and Infantry tanks) kind of fell down as a lot of the time they had the idea that tanks won't be engaging enemy tanks - that was what infantry and artillery were there for. As soon as the enemy stopped playing by those rules, the whole system collapses and you've got Matilda II tanks with armour heavier than the German tanks of early WWII but a 2pdr gun or a machine gun that can't do anything to them.

Admittedly, if WWI was more mobile, then the ideas gained from RL WWI armour wouldn't have found root, so a lot of the more untested interwar doctrines would not have been thought of.

I still think they would have lost the war, I think their best bet for winning wouldve been to stop targeting American ships, maybe not putting so much faith in Mexicans and keeping America from joining the Allies...with the US joining, its just too outgunned and outmanned and outproduced...

But then would the US have got involved? Because if they didn't, I can't see a D-Day type operation succeeding with just the UK and Canada.

Yeah, with the German Policy of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare...I believe its inevitable that the US would have gotten involved...and just as in WWII, I dont think Germany could have taken over Britain, its Navy is too strong, and without the Luftwaffe its almost a certainty that the UK would still make it...

So eventually the UK and US would still end up fighting Germany...and eventually the Germans and Russians wouldve had to come to blows because of the Russian Policy with Serbia...

It wouldn't have mattered.

UNLESS the German Army could have actually taken Paris on the first push, and ended the war, the degeneration into pointless tench warfare was inevitable. The technology dictated the tactics - and the technology gave all the advantages to the defender. Semi-auto and bolt-action rifles gave the defender rapid aimed fire for picking off individuals, while the machinegun would annihilate groups. Artillery became both rapid firing and accurate, and long ranged, making it utterly necessary to dig out protective bastions if infantry had any hope of survival - while Cavalry could not survive at all.

Simultaneously, both machineguns and artillery were too heavy for rapid movement and deployment, and thus could not be used for shock purposes. They were defensive only.

The Schlieffen was fatally flawed by it's inability to deal with the new realities. Whether in original or modified form, te end result would have been trench warfare, unbreakable stalemate, and an eventual German collapse due to blockade.

can a thread be reported to the mods?

can a thread be reported to the mods?

I dont see why not....but what would be the complaint?....

can a thread be reported to the mods?

Post in Moderation Forum.

It wouldn't have mattered.

UNLESS the German Army could have actually taken Paris on the first push, and ended the war, the degeneration into pointless tench warfare was inevitable. The technology dictated the tactics - and the technology gave all the advantages to the defender. Semi-auto and bolt-action rifles gave the defender rapid aimed fire for picking off individuals, while the machinegun would annihilate groups. Artillery became both rapid firing and accurate, and long ranged, making it utterly necessary to dig out protective bastions if infantry had any hope of survival - while Cavalry could not survive at all.

Simultaneously, both machineguns and artillery were too heavy for rapid movement and deployment, and thus could not be used for shock purposes. They were defensive only.

The Schlieffen was fatally flawed by it's inability to deal with the new realities. Whether in original or modified form, te end result would have been trench warfare, unbreakable stalemate, and an eventual German collapse due to blockade.

This. It was kind of a boring war, really. Maybe Germany would have done more damage to France, but in the end the result would be the same. A better exercise might be imagining what would happen if the war on the Russian front had gone differently, which might have altered the formation of the Soviet Union.

can a thread be reported to the mods?

Nope.

And all this is well and good, but the Germans had learned a lot about trench warfare. With the numerical advantage france would have probably fallen.
The brits had no idea what to do the whole time. The plan was for troops to walk slowly across the open and shell everything ahead of them, and the German bunkers were dug far too deep and effectively for it to work. US involvement would have been inevitable, though, and eventually the result would have been the same.
And who knows what would have happened if there were different results in Russia. It's depression would have hit one way or another, and even if it won it probably would have been credited to Lenin by that time...

If the Schlieffen Plan had worked in 1914 and the german Army had entered Paris, France would have sued for peace which would have put pressure on Britain to negotiate terms with Germany. Germany would have grabbed some of France's territories.
There would have been no Russian Revolution and no Third Reich (Hitler would have remained a nobody)
Thhe USA would NOT have entered the war because Germany would not have needed to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare and would not have been desperate enough to send a stupid telegram asking for Mexico's help.
Austria Hungary and Turkey would have kept their empires and even expanded on them.

can a thread be reported to the mods?

What's you beef Behaved? How can this hypothetical scenario be offensive?:confused:

So let's assume Schlieffen doesn't die in 1913, and Von Moltke doesn't modify the plan, that keeps us with 90% of the German army to March through Belgium and northern France. What happens? What about the Weiamr republic. Would Germany lose? Would the Russian Revolution happen? Would Hitler rise to power?

France Falls.
Russia has almost the exact same history (Lenin was a German agent after all).
Germany signs a peace with France, claims only a few areas of french territory(which were subject to debate anyways).

France has a Fascist revolution, lead by De Gaulle . WWII is started when France blitzkriegs Germany, Germany falls. The free Germans are lead by Adolf Hitler.
A soviet Polish alliance stops the French in the winter of 1942 and fights a long drawn out war. Germany is liberated by the Russians late 1943.
1944. A double landing occurs the Russian Soviet alliance invades southern, avoiding french defensive lines) France. and the UK, US alliance invades Northern France.
Germany becomes a communist block country. France is divided into North Capitalist and south communist.
However Poland has a strong military of its own and sides with the west and becomes a leading industrial economy. Germany is not longer divided east west it is instead largely divided north/south with Germany splitting the capitalist countries up.

40 years later France is reunited with the fall of the Paris Wall. followed by the fall of communism. Northern Europe struggles to develop southern Europe and Germany, as it forms the EU.

How many more of these are we going to have to endure?

How many more of these are we going to have to endure?

until everyone agrees my alternate history is right.

until everyone agrees my alternate history is right.
Yer version of history ignores so, so much. For starters, the German government at the time saw war essentially as an end as well as a means, so there's no doubt they'd ask for more and more and more French territories. They're not going to be polite with a country whose arse they kicked. If that happens, the rest of Europe and the US starts to worry a fair bit, thus making the 20s and 30s a bit more arms-racey instead of "hurrah wealth" and then "oh shit it's 1937 and we don't have any cool guns or tanks yet".

Yer version of history ignores so, so much. For starters, the German government at the time saw war essentially as an end as well as a means, so there's no doubt they'd ask for more and more and more French territories. They're not going to be polite with a country whose arse they kicked. If that happens, the rest of Europe and the US starts to worry a fair bit, thus making the 20s and 30s a bit more arms-racey instead of "hurrah wealth" and then "oh shit it's 1937 and we don't have any cool guns or tanks yet".

in WWI ? the Germans were more concerned with the East. mainly because Russia had been on the verge of collapse for awhile and the Germans were not happy with having a collapsed government next door.

to the west there were some areas of France that had swung back and forth between France and Germany for the better part of a millennium.
Look a the treaty with Hitler, The 3rd Reich actually annexed very little French territory(the Italians technically annexed more).

WWI Germans were not war like conquers they were mainly concerned, because the Russian empire was on the verge of collapse and having instability and a flood of refugee is bad for the economy.

Germany conquers Europe, invades Britain, King Arthur returns and defeats the entire German army single handedly, before releasing a bestselling jazz album. All countries agree to be ruled by Britain for their own damn good, war is rejected as a means of settling disputes, and Hitler makes a living baking cakes with his life partner, a gay black Jewish man.

in WWI ? the Germans were more concerned with the East. mainly because Russia had been on the verge of collapse for awhile and the Germans were not happy with having a collapsed government next door.

to the west there were some areas of France that had swung back and forth between France and Germany for the better part of a millennium.
Look a the treaty with Hitler, The 3rd Reich actually annexed very little French territory(the Italians technically annexed more).

WWI Germans were not war like conquers they were mainly concerned, because the Russian empire was on the verge of collapse and having instability and a flood of refugee is bad for the economy.

Nyet. Tsarist Russia, though ineptly led and poorly ruled, was NOT on the verge of collapse in 1914.

Tsar Nicholas may not have known his ass from his elbow (though to be fair, his real weakness was decisiveness), but the basic forms of government - the bureaucracy, the nobility, and the church, in this case - could have survived him.

It was the mobilization to go to war (handled about as badly as it possibly could haave been) that destabilized the populace, and Russia's continuous and sickening losses that fed that destabilization. Even then, it took three years of getting hammered on by Germany and Austria-Hungary (and some conflict with the equally ill-led Ottomans) to drive the people and the nobility to the point of rebellion.

Germany was not worried about Russia at all - they really only fought the Russians because the Russians were France's allies. Their objective was a repeat of the Franco-Prussian War - but this time, they would strip France of her overseas colonies and make them German possessions. Instant Empire.

Thus, the Schlieffen plan to conquer France. Which MIGHT have worked in '03, but was never going to work in 1914.

And all this is well and good, but the Germans had learned a lot about trench warfare.

So superior was German knowledge of trench warfare, in fact, that they spent the best part of four years demonstrating just how effective they were at breaking through the Allied lines.

Oh, wait. Wasn't it a bloody slaughter on both sides of the trenches?

The brits had no idea what to do the whole time. The plan was for troops to walk slowly across the open and shell everything ahead of them, and the German bunkers were dug far too deep and effectively for it to work.

Which differs from German, French and Belgian Western Front tactics how, precisely?

It also rather conveniently ignores that the BEF controlled a comparatively small part of the Western Front.



For what it's worth, addressing the OP, put me with those who think the German's best chance was taking Paris early - but there's no guarantee that this would have led to the catastrophic collapse in morale that had already overwhelmed the French before Paris fell in 1940. There's little sign that the French army was as brittle in 1914-14 as it was to prove in 1940.

Perhaps in 1914-15, the French might have fought harder for Paris than they did 25 years later, with the Seine itself forming the eventual front line (at the cost of a demolished and ruined Paris).

But didn't the Schlieffen plan depend on a sweep through the Netherlands as well as Belgium? And wasn't this one of the reasons why the plan was modified? What if the Dutch had opened several strategic dykes? Without air support to parachute troops behind the lines (which would prove effective in the low countries in 1940), how would the Germans have prevented a potentially disastrous weakening of their Dutch flank?

i thought alternative history threads were not allowed here. that's my beef

i thought alternative history threads were not allowed here. that's my beef
Nah, you're thinking of the roleplay sections, 'cos threads not related to NS aren't allowed.

This is just a general discussion area. If the whole non-NS thing was followed here, we wouldn't have any discussions about the next US president or anything like that.