Alternate History
What follows below is an open letter to Donald Sensing, concerning his disdain for French taxicabs and the outcome of the First World War.
Donald,
I loved your essay on French taxicabs. While I never looked at how the Germans might have invested Paris (John Keegan argued in The First World War that the Schlieffen Plan couldn’t have worked, because there was simply no way on the French and Belgian road systems to move the additional corps into position in time. Schlieffen fudged the schedule for the siege of Paris.), I have given some thought to what an Imperial German victory would have looked like.
We know from the German archives that bits of the Belgian frontier, and the Metz and other French border towns would have been annexed outright. Belgium (and eventually, Holland) was to be made a client state. The eastern French Channel coast would have been, if not Reich territory, then certainly under the control of the Kaiser’s army and navy. France was also to be punished with war debts to dwarf those of 1871, and probably on the scale of what happened to the Germans at Versailles in 1919.
And that’s just the Western Front.
We know what for certain what Germany would have done in the east, because they did do it, however temporarily, in the Brest-Litovsk treaties. Lithuania — annexed. The few remaining choice bits of Poland — annexed. What was left of Russian Poland — a client state. Moldavia — annexed. Crimea — annexed. Georgia — a client state. Greater Ukraine and Byelorussia to be placed under German princes.
Germany would have had her dream of lebensraum in the east, and (Lesser?) Russia left in the chaos of White-on-Bolshevik-on-Menshevik civil war. Absent firm Soviet control, Japan would surely have held on to Vladivostok and Russia’s Far Eastern Maritime Province. The two were enemies in the real Great War, but that didn’t stop them from allying in 1936. Surely, they would have still found reason to ally in this alternate scenario, if only to keep the Russians down.
In the Balkans, Austria-Hungary would have survived, enlarged-but-diminished. They’d have had a more democratic government, in an ethnic-federal system. A Triple (Constitutional) Monarchy, of German, Hungarians, and Slavs. The Roumanians, practical as ever, would have accepted the new system. The Greeks and Serbs wouldn’t be happy, and would keep on fighting — but alternate history can only change so many things (grin).
The Ottomans? Who knows? Europe’s Sick Man would still stay sick, but with German soldiers and bureaucrats, they might have held on to their Arab lands de jure, while Berlin ruled them de facto. No Balfour Declaration, no Israel, and Germany with at least 20% of today’s known oil reserves.
In the West? A triumphant Imperial Germany, with the coal and steel of the Low Countries, an enlarged (and thus more easily violated) border with an impoverished France, the Channel ports from which to directly threaten Great Britain.
The situation in 1915 Europe would have been 1942 all over again, but with one important difference: The United States would never have gotten involved, never mobilized, and never had the opportunity to get used to the idea of acting like a Great Power.
The good news is, we would have been spared most of Lenin, all of Stalin, and the Holocaust.
The bad news is, there would still have been a Second World War. There would have had to be. The US and Great Britain simply cannot tolerate (as I’m sure you know) Europe under the control of a single, powerful regime. A united, hostile, powerful Europe was Britain’s rationale for fighting the Napoleonic Wars, and part of America’s reason for sticking around for the Cold War. And that’s exactly what Germany, victorious in 1914 or ’15, would have had.
How that war would have played out, I have no idea. Our Pacific War with Japan was going to happen no matter who won The Great War — so perhaps Japan’s ambition for more fighting would ignite the Kaiser’s, too. What I do know is that Imperial Germany would have been in a much better position to fight it than Nazi Germany was — and that’s a scary thought.
This sort of thing is what Avalanche Games’ “War Plan Black” & related games cover. Nifty stuff.
Stephen, thank you for the link and for your thoughtful response. I wasn’t trying to establish an alternate-history certainty, just playing mental game of “what if?”.
On such slender threads do hang enormous consequences. Consider the broken radio on the Japanese scout plane at the battle of Midway. It spotted Yorktown but couldn’t tell Nagumo. And the battle turned on Nagumo’s ignorance.
Austin Bay emailed me to say that he once wrote about why the Battle of the Marne was one of the most important battles of the last 1000 years. So it was.
“A united, hostile, powerful Europe…” Isn’t that what some British look across the channel and see today?
Take your scenario a little further. With France as the crippled defeated party, internal French politics mirror what historically happened in Germany. I think you get the rise of French fascists, who in turn blame French Jews for a “stab in the back” (Dreyfus redux). The Holocaust has a Gallic flavor. Instead of Teutonic efficiency, you get spontaneous mass killings by “citizen’s commitees”. Horrendous to ponder, but anti-semitism is not an exclusively German trait.
Ernie:
United? – somewhat.
Hostile? – definately.
Powerful? – no way!!
Germany’s war aims in 1917 were not the same as in 1914, particularly in the East. For instance, I doubt whether in 1914 Germany would actually seek the fall of the Russian Empire. The Tsar was the Kaiser’s cousin, and now that the Slavs knew their place, better a Tsar than a Commissar. Extreme territorial demands would bring down the Russian monarchy, and so would not be made. Most probably the cession of Poland, and no more.
Belgium would be a satellite, yes, and a severe indemnity laid on France.
But for a short war, relatively small demands.
As for Austria, Trialism was never a realistic possibility. The Magyars hated the idea, and would never give up any part of Hungary to a Slav state.
Most important, I think, would be the boost to militarism in Germany and elsewhere. Success breeds imitators. This would also promote fascism, which competed with Leninism for the allegiance of radicals. If there was no Bolshevik success in Russia, fascism’s appeal would be all the stronger.
Interesting that you mentioend H. Turtledove – the American Front series discusses a lot of this. Essentially, the civil war ends up with the south victorious, and split into another country. The North becomes more socialist, and allies with Germany, while the south allies with Britain and France. WWI ends up with the US and Germany triumphant, with harsh fines on the losers, which only sows the seeds of a much larger and bloodier conflict that as of the last book, has just been started.
No Jew hatred though – there are enough foreign enemies to keep people focused that they don’t need to blame the Jews.
“The bad news is, there would still have been a Second World War. There would have had to be. The US and Great Britain simply cannot tolerate (as I’m sure you know) Europe under the control of a single, powerful regime.”
Precisely. Exactly. The critical point so often missed. Whether an early win by Germany would have led to lesser demands at the peace table is an open question. Probably. But that would just have meant the “Finlandization” of the rest of the Continent. The Germans of that day were forthright imperialists to a degree we can’t imagine. They’d have created a pan-European superstate, with all the other powers as satellites.
And they had Einstein. They’d have gotten the bomb. The 1914-15 war would have been followed by a global war with the Anglophone powers on the losing side.
I just can’t find any way to like that outcome.
Well, I must say I wouldn’t mind the outcome of a united Europe victor over the anglosaxon powers. What’s there to dislike about that?
I doubt many people really appreciate how relatively new the US-Britain “special relationship” is. It is naive at best and historical revisionism at worst to think that the US aiding Britain in WWII and especially WWI were due primarily to an anglospheric friendship. In actuality, the US and Britain competed against and opposed one another as much as any of the great nations during the early part of the 20th century. Indeed, the arms races preceeding both World Wars were as much between America and Britain as between any other nations, even though now the race is cast mostly through the prism of the aliances and oppositions of WWI. During the first half of the 20th century America and Britain held many grievances against each other. For example, the US was very upset that Britain kept its Empire (which at the time represented a substantial fraction of the population, economy, and surface area of the Earth) sealed off to outside trade, as large markets for trade goods were precisely what the US was looking for at the time. And Britain was none too happy about the ever growing encroachment through the 19th and 20th centuries on British naval dominance over the oceans of the world, and issue which became increasingly important as technology kicked up the pace of the game. Nevertheless, the US and Britain ended up having too much in common, including enemies, to make enemies of each other so they worked out their grievances and allied together.
My point is, as hard as it is to see, that the US and Britain were not drawn close together by inexorable forces but rather by circumstances. If Germany had won WWI on the Continent it would have created precisely the circustances to bring the US and Britain close together much faster than they did historically. Even post WWI their combined economic, industrial, and military might was tremendous. I have little doubt that a German win in WWI would have been impossible, because after they had won the phase which we think of as the entirety of the war there would have been another phase and another series of battles soon after with the US and Britain together. Just as the seeds of WWII came from WWI so would the seeds of WWI v.2 come out of this other WWI, only they would be so close together time-wise that they would be labeled as the same war.
As for nuclear weapons, it’s important to recognize the details which are important. Surprisingly, great scientific minds are not necessarily of primary importance. Yes, these alternate history Germans would have Einstein (though he didn’t do much real work on the bomb, but they would probably have Oppenheimer and others as well), but the real Germans in the real post-WWI history had Heisenberg and Hahn and so many others. But that research came to crap whereas American research succeded tremendously. The difference was not just the scientistist but the environment and the support, something which America does pretty well and which Nazi Germany under Hitler did horribly. More important than Einstein, I think, would be the differences above the scientists in the government and the bureacracy. If, instead of a collection of toadies and lick spittles scurrying about under a brain dead idiot (der Fuhrer), they had an effective, thoughtful, and supportive bureaucracy and leadership then perhaps they could have succeeded in building a nuclear weapon. Still, I’d give the edge to America in such an endeavor simply because of the industrial prowess and might needed for nuclear weapons design and manufacturing at that time. It’s tempting to view the initial development of nuclear wepons as an inevitability but I think the evidence weighs heavily that it was a tremendous, unique, and rare occurance that would almost certainly not have occured within the same time frame if events had been different.
Moreover, there’s little to suggest that a hypothetical matchup between US/Britain and a Mega-Germany (plus whatever Allies) with nuclear weapons would necessarily favor the side with nuclear weapons. The non-nuclear destructive power of the US/Allied armed forces during WWII was tremendously awesome (representing the captive power of mostly America’s enormous industry), and that pitted against a nuclear armed Imperial Germany would have been a mother of a war, certainly, but I would not lay a wager as to who would be the victor, because either side very well could be. Keep in mind that in late 1945 the greater ability to erase cities off the map went to the conventinal bomber forces, not to nuclear weapons, though the later did with relative ease what the former did with great effort.
While Robin is correct that institutional functionality matters as much as talented individuals, an Imperial Germany that quickly won the first World War need not have been as dysfunctional as Nazi Germany was, and certainly would not have been as explicitly anti-Semitic.
So besides Einstein — who would have been largely a figurehead in any case — the Central Powers would have had at their disposal the talents of Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and John Von Neumann, among others. Not a pleasant prospect for the human race.