Should Germany Have Won WW1?

[Winner]

I'm the biggest Turcophile on the forums and even I think that's ridiculous.

I had pretty much one of my best laughs ever when he said that Turkey could plant a flag on moon in the 1940s! Even r16 cannot beat that!

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Anyway, nice necro. Always nice to see a glimpse of CFC as it once was...

To answer the question with a single thought - if Germany won quickly in 1914, then the main lesson of WW1 — i.e., war is HELL and national pride is NOT WORTH IT — wouldn't have taken root in Europe and the rest of the world.

And Germany could have won WW1 as late as 1918, if it hadn't dragged the Americans into declaring war on them. Once the US was in, there was just no way.

See the Kaiserreich scenario for hints on what would have happened next

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

And Germany could have won WW1 as late as 1918, if it hadn't dragged the Americans into declaring war on them. Once the US was in, there was just no way.

The string of extremely unlikely events required to generate a German victory after 1914 makes this proposal laughable at best.

 

[Domen]

And Germany could have won WW1 as late as 1918, if it hadn't dragged the Americans into declaring war on them.

I really don't think that American involvement was all that decisive in WW1.

They participated in one major military operation only, IIRC - the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

After WW1 claim about "stab in the back" by Germany's Jews was developed, which further fueled already existing German Anti-Semitism.

But this is no surprise because already since the Middle Ages Jews were often blamed for lost wars and called traitors to their homelands.

 

[Dachs]

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Anyway, nice necro. Always nice to see a glimpse of CFC as it once was...

To answer the question with a single thought - if Germany won quickly in 1914, then the main lesson of WW1 — i.e., war is HELL and national pride is NOT WORTH IT — wouldn't have taken root in Europe and the rest of the world.

And Germany could have won WW1 as late as 1918, if it hadn't dragged the Americans into declaring war on them. Once the US was in, there was just no way.

See the Kaiserreich scenario for hints on what would have happened next

This post was good until you mentioned Kaiserreich as a halfway plausible scenario and I don't really care that you included a . Even if you don't actually like it, I'm going to include a short rant against the plausibility and construction of the mod because I feel like it.

At this point, they're at a stage where they refuse to jettison some of the dumbest and most bizarre elements of the scenario (the second American Civil War, Russia in 1936-37, that horrific German thing in southern China) and merely tinker with what exists, trying to make that more plausible. It's putting lipstick on a pig, and the main writers' refusal to consider alterations to some of those primary aspects of the scenario is obnoxious.

Plus, nobody actually knows what the PoD is. The scenario is effectively "Germany wins WWI in 1918-19 because reasons". There's a vague sense that the Americans didn't fight, even though the Third OHL existed. I think that somebody brought up tanks, without actually explaining how these tanks would've been useful and what trade-offs would be made to get them. Ludendorff apparently disappeared into the bowels of history after the war, because he was totally the Cincinnatus type and everything. Germany went on to launch a wave of global conquest despite the total exhaustion that had set in by that point, and rebuilt the High Seas Fleet even though the fleet had been virtually abandoned as an instrument of warfare by the summer of 1915. Yada yada yada.

With all that said, the setting is reasonably fun and allows any number of jackasses, including myself, to take control of their particular favorite cause and achieve world domination. A disagreement with the scenario's historical plausibility is not an indictment of its playability; I've sunk lots and lots of time into it, especially as the Russians. I think my only real quibble is that no power, with the possible exception of Germany, has any global reach. So most of the game feels very regional, with no real need for a player to pay attention to anything outside her country's sphere until the mid-1940s. That, combined with the mostly indifferent HoI2/Darkest Hour AI, is what eventually got me to lose interest.

The string of extremely unlikely events required to generate a German victory after 1914 makes this proposal laughable at best.

Nonsense. Germany could've won the war in 1917 without American involvement, and came within an ace of winning the war in 1918 despite American involvement.

I really don't think that American involvement was all that decisive in WW1.

They participated in one major military operation only, IIRC - the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

The Americans were useful less for their inherent military value and more for their money and raw materials. Had the United States not joined the war in 1917, Britain would have run out of food and of the stuff necessary to feed the gaping maw of its military-industrial complex. Financial collapse was imminent; military, economic, and social collapse might well have followed. At the very least, Britain and France would have been weakened dramatically at precisely the worst possible time.

Furthermore, American troops were also useful in that they allowed Entente planners to be more profligate with the uses of their manpower; they had plenty of Americans to spare. Pétain and Foch both acknowledged after the war that French resistance in 1918, let alone the end-of-war offensives, would not have been possible without two million American soldiers sitting in reserve in case something went horrifically wrong. Imagine Operation MICHAEL without French forces arriving from theater reserve to save the BEF's ass.

Finally, the US Army exerted a powerful influence on German planners because of what it could do. Ludendorff felt constrained to open his 1918 offensives in the west in a decidedly suboptimal fashion purely because he believed that waiting for the summer would prevent the Germans from making any headway at all: there would be too many Americans. And he believed that simply waiting for an Entente attack and then riposting with a decisive counterblow (the favored approach of some of OHL's best staff officers, like Fritz von Lossberg) would be similarly impossible because the weight of American numbers would allow the Entente to sustain an offensive far longer than it otherwise might. The threat of what the Americans might do given time forced OHL into a premature and somewhat poorly planned offensive that still almost managed to succeed. And most importantly of all, Ludendorff believed that prolonging the fight into 1919 and beyond would not be possible due to the strength of the US Army. France and to a lesser extent Britain were played out, but the Americans had colossal amounts of manpower and matériel to spare.

 

[Domen]

Wasn't the initial German success in Operation Michael the result of terrible mistakes of British commanders and also French commander Duchesne - who did not understand what is "defence in depth" (for example British forces used several lines of trenches, but first line was manned by largest forces, while each subsequent line was defenced by smaller forces - while it should be totally inversely to work properly)? Later in July of 1918 when Germans launched another attack near Reims, French commander Gouraud - who understood how proper defence in depth should look like (first "defensive zone" was weakly manned - and it "absorbed" German artillery preparation fire; further "defensive zones" were stronger - each subsequent line of trenches being defended by stronger forces) - repulsed them quite easily. And I suppose that without American reserves a competent French or British commander would also be enough to stop them.

BTW - was Operation Michael really an attempt to win the war, or just an attempt to improve German situation in peace talks ???

France and to a lesser extent Britain were played out, but the Americans had colossal amounts of manpower

Wasn't Britain played out to a greater extent than France when it comes to manpower reserves / replacements availability?

It was Britain not France (maybe France too, I'm not sure) which reduced size of its divisions from 12 to 9 battalions after 1917.

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BTW - I found the following info regarding casualties in those last German offensives of the war:

Operation Michael (Kaiserschlacht) 21 March - 4 April 1918 - ca. 240,000 Germans (40,000 on 1st day); 180,000 British (40,000 on 1st day); 70,000 French

Allied losses in that Operation Michael included 90,000 prisoners of war - mostly British.

German losses were 240,000 out of 1 million and several hundred thousands who took part - so very heavy losses.

Operation Blucher-Yorck (battle of the Aisne) 27 May - 6 June - ca. 130,000 German casualties; ca. 130,000 Allied casualties

Second battle at the Marne, 15 July - 6 August - ca. 130,000 Allied losses (95,000 of them French); ca. 139,000 German losses

But Allied losses in materiel were much greater than German (BEF lost huge amount of artillery pieces captured by Germans, for example).

In terms of manpower losses, 40,000 German vs 40,000 British was still much better than 57,000 British vs 9,000 German (1st day of the Somme). Also German territorial gains in that offensive were significant (as well as amount of materiel captured). In WW1 conditions (in which usually attacker suffered huge losses without any benefits), it was definitely a success to achieve so much success and territorial gains at similar human cost to that suffered by the enemy.

Had the United States not joined the war in 1917, Britain would have run out of food and of the stuff necessary to feed the gaping maw of its military-industrial complex

But Germany did run out of food and other necessary stuff already in 1917, didn't it ???

Moreover - Germany did manage to eliminate Russia from war, but also a couple of Germany's allies were practically eliminated from war by 1917.

So the overall balance of forces would not change that much. BTW - in Operation Michael also German veterans of the Eastern Front took part.

Operation Michael offensive was spearheaded by veterans, gathered in so called Angriff-divisionen (Assault divsions). But as we can see, Germans suffered huge losses in Operation Michael - which means that after it ended, a lot of their veterans from Angriff-divisionen were dead or wounded.

 

[Antilogic]

Subscribing to follow up on the PoD discussion.

With regards to the Turkish situation, I'm not sure how the Ottomans would control 70% of the global oil reserves. Are we assuming they take over the Arabian peninsula following this alt-WW1 and perhaps Iran as well? Are these resources being exploited earlier than they were historically, as the US was either the #1 oil exporter or close to it during the middle of the 20th century?

What actually would have pushed Spain into WW1, or what was the sticking point?

 

[Winner]

This post was good until you mentioned Kaiserreich as a halfway plausible scenario and I don't really care that you included a .

I did it to draw you in. It's like a red rag to a bull

And hay, I said "hints" and hedged it with a smiley face.

You are also to invited to speculate on what would **really** have happened if Germany won by a hair's breath in, say, 1918

At this point, they're at a stage where they refuse to jettison some of the dumbest and most bizarre elements of the scenario (the second American Civil War, Russia in 1936-37, that horrific German thing in southern China) and merely tinker with what exists, trying to make that more plausible. It's putting lipstick on a pig, and the main writers' refusal to consider alterations to some of those primary aspects of the scenario is obnoxious.

Well it's a mod that's designed to make most countries playable and fun, and moreover replayable many times with very different results. Yes, a lot of things are crazy (Sternberg, Papal Italy), but that's part of the fun. (As you said yourself below).

Plus, nobody actually knows what the PoD is. The scenario is effectively "Germany wins WWI in 1918-19 because reasons". There's a vague sense that the Americans didn't fight, even though the Third OHL existed. I think that somebody brought up tanks, without actually explaining how these tanks would've been useful and what trade-offs would be made to get them. Ludendorff apparently disappeared into the bowels of history after the war, because he was totally the Cincinnatus type and everything. Germany went on to launch a wave of global conquest despite the total exhaustion that had set in by that point, and rebuilt the High Seas Fleet even though the fleet had been virtually abandoned as an instrument of warfare by the summer of 1915. Yada yada yada.

I think the main PODs are that unrestricted U-boot campaign is not implemented, keeping the US neutral, and that the offensive in the West is postponed to 1919, giving France the time to rot from inside while Germany finishes off the Entente in Greece and then Italy. After the war, Germany didn't get most of the colonies around the globe through warfare, it simply seized the colonial empires of France and Britain after they fell to Syndicalism.

At least that what I remember reading, maybe they changed it later.

With all that said, the setting is reasonably fun and allows any number of jackasses, including myself, to take control of their particular favorite cause and achieve world domination. A disagreement with the scenario's historical plausibility is not an indictment of its playability; I've sunk lots and lots of time into it, especially as the Russians. I think my only real quibble is that no power, with the possible exception of Germany, has any global reach. So most of the game feels very regional, with no real need for a player to pay attention to anything outside her country's sphere until the mid-1940s. That, combined with the mostly indifferent HoI2/Darkest Hour AI, is what eventually got me to lose interest.

Yup

 

[Dachs]

Wasn't the initial German success in Operation Michael the result of terrible mistakes of British commanders and also French commander Duchesne - who did not understand what is "defence in depth" (for example British forces used several lines of trenches, but first line was manned by largest forces, while each subsequent line was defenced by smaller forces - while it should be totally inversely to work properly)? Later in July of 1918 when Germans launched another attack near Reims, French commander Gouraud - who understood how proper defence in depth should look like (first "defensive zone" was weakly manned - and it "absorbed" German artillery preparation fire; further "defensive zones" were stronger - each subsequent line of trenches being defended by stronger forces) - repulsed them quite easily. And I suppose that without American reserves a competent French or British commander would also be enough to stop them.

French and British commanders did not have a full institutional grasp of defense in depth at that point, either; it was a German tactical advantage just as much as the Germans' superior artillery doctrine was. One might point out that the British and French hadn't exactly had a lot of practice fighting defensive actions in the West at that point in the war, so there weren't many opportunities to develop those skills.

Anyway, those sorts of things balanced out; Britain and France might have failed to meet what modern observers, with the benefit of hindsight, would describe as basic competence on the defensive, but the Germans also made what some would describe as "elementary" errors during the offensives, of which the British and French expertly took advantage. Ludendorff's failure to weight the main attack, and his inability to recognize Amiens and Hazebrouck as the keys to the BEF's entire existence, made the Entente's task much, much easier.

BTW - was Operation Michael really an attempt to win the war, or just an attempt to improve German situation in peace talks ???

No, it was unquestionably an attempt to win the war. Ludendorff believed that total military victory was possible and believed that the Entente would only yield Belgium and French border "rectifications" with an offensive. This was true, but it was foolish to risk the success or failure of the war on retaining Belgium.

Wasn't Britain played out to a greater extent than France when it comes to manpower reserves / replacements availability?

It was Britain not France (maybe France too, I'm not sure) which reduced size of its divisions from 12 to 9 battalions after 1917.

British manpower only appeared to be attenuated worse than France's because after 1917, the Cabinet refused to release most of the available manpower to Haig on the grounds that he would misuse it. Robertson and Lloyd George didn't trust Haig to not fight another Ypres, and so would only send troops across the Channel if the BEF was under severe threat. After March and April, those reserves were released and the BEF gained a fairly ridiculous numerical preponderance.

But Germany did run out of food and other necessary stuff already in 1917, didn't it ???

Moreover - Germany did manage to eliminate Russia from war, but also a couple of Germany's allies were practically eliminated from war by 1917.

So the overall balance of forces would not change that much. BTW - in Operation Michael also German veterans of the Eastern Front took part.

Operation Michael offensive was spearheaded by veterans, gathered in so called Angriff-divisionen (Assault divsions). But as we can see, Germans suffered huge losses in Operation Michael - which means that after it ended, a lot of their veterans from Angriff-divisionen were dead or wounded.

Germany was in a bad way in 1917-18, yes (another reason I think that the Kaiserreich scenario is silly). With that said, though, Germany still had viable options for obtaining the stuff of war and subsistence that it required. The conquest of the Ukraine and of Romania promised to alleviate the food and supply situation considerably. Furthermore, Germany's position had gotten worse by degrees, which meant that it was easier for Germans and German institutions to adjust; what would happen to the Entente would be a very sharp, disastrous shock to the system. And Germany's financial situation was never as integral to national stability as the UK's was to Britain's.

I don't think it's possible to seriously argue that Germany's defeat of Russia in 1917-18 was in any way comparable to the difficulties being faced at that time by the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. Ignoring the Americans, the scales were tipped far more by the former than by any other event in the war.

Subscribing to follow up on the PoD discussion.

With regards to the Turkish situation, I'm not sure how the Ottomans would control 70% of the global oil reserves. Are we assuming they take over the Arabian peninsula following this alt-WW1 and perhaps Iran as well? Are these resources being exploited earlier than they were historically, as the US was either the #1 oil exporter or close to it during the middle of the 20th century?

What actually would have pushed Spain into WW1, or what was the sticking point?

The Ottomans would not control 70% of global oil reserves. That's just silly - along with most of the rest of the post you were talking about.

I can't see anything that would induce Spain to fight in the Great War, unless somebody invaded. Too many drawbacks, not enough benefits. But I don't know Spanish domestic history during the period very well at all, so take that for what it's worth.

 

[r16]

what the necroing poster wants to imply it is that these new super duper Ottomans would buy into "Free-Market" oil companies to have the 7 sisters in one Harem , including the ones in the US . To this end he has Mexico invaded and stuff ; helps American conscience and other mental processes in order not to drop dead by jealousy . In that they are big enough not to be "scared" by some bunch of Asiatic horsey people comin' in and buyin' blueblood American Corporations .

 

[EnglishEdward]

The Ottomans would not control 70% of global oil reserves. That's just silly -

Iraq, Saudi peninsular and Iran were already part of the wider Ottoman Empire in 1914.

If the Germans had won WW1. their Turkish allies would likely develop the oil reserves
under German, rather than British or USA, financial and industrial leadership.

 

[Dachs]

Iraq, Saudi peninsular and Iran were already part of the wider Ottoman Empire in 1914.

If the Germans had won WW1. their Turkish allies would likely develop the oil reserves under German, rather than British or USA, financial and industrial leadership.

Those countries did not possess 70% of discovered and accessible global oil reserves in 1918.

If you think that the Ottoman Empire would've survived the twentieth century in such a state, thereby retaining control of those territories up to the point when they did control 70% of global oil reserves, then you have an interesting take on the notion of 'probability'.

 

[r16]

whenever ı play Civ III scenarios that almost require me to go one direction , ı always start from the opposite direction so that ı won't be taken by "surprise" from attacks from that quarters later in the game . Iran was never under Ottoman control and maybe it should have been , but the thing is Iranians are always particularly tough ...

 

[ParkCungHee]

and rebuilt the High Seas Fleet even though the fleet had been virtually abandoned as an instrument of warfare by the summer of 1915. Yada yada yada.

IIRC, the German high seas fleet in that scenario is mostly British ships, interned by the Germans after the war. Feel free to go off on that point.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Those countries did not possess 70% of discovered and accessible global oil reserves in 1918.

I never said they did.

If you think that the Ottoman Empire would've survived the twentieth century in such a state, thereby retaining control of those territories up to the point when they did control 70% of global oil reserves, then you have an interesting take on the notion of 'probability'.

I never said it would survive the 20th century in such a state.

 

[EnglishEdward]

whenever ı play Civ III scenarios that almost require me to go one direction , ı always start from the opposite direction so that ı won't be taken by "surprise" from attacks from that quarters later in the game . Iran was never under Ottoman control and maybe it should have been , but the thing is Iranians are always particularly tough ...

I agree Iran was not under Ottoman control but it was in their sphere of influence, hence my use of the term wider empire.

 

[christos200]

If Germany had won WWI, it may had been good for the Germans, the Bulgarians, the Austria but not so good for the French, who would not get Alsace-Lorraine, for the Polish who would still be under German control, for the Serbians, for the Greeks who would lose Macedonia and Thrace to the Bulgarians, for the Jews, who would not gain Israel without the holocaust and might still be discriminated, and so on. So, the answer to the question depends on your nationality.

 

[Kyriakos]

It would have better if Germany won ww1, cause then ww2 would not be such a nightmare.

Likewise, had Germany won ww2, what is coming would not involve upwards of 500 million people killed/maimed.

True story

 

[Masada]

Likewise, had Germany won ww2, what is coming would not involve upwards of 500 million people killed/maimed.

This is weirdest form of Nazi apologism I've ever seen. It also ignores the ample evidence that the Nazis full-well intended to butcher the Slavs. And after that, who the hell knows.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Sometimes if something is too weird to even be a kind of nazi apologism, it probably is not?

(the point was that it is not wise to try to say what would have taken place had Germany won ww1, and it might not have been that better than ww2, run by Germany).

 

[Domen]

for the Polish who would still be under German control

WW1 era map titled "Europa's Zukunftskarte" by Albert Rymann. With autonomous Poland (although without many of ethnic Polish and historically Polish territories - still occupied by Germany) and independent Scotland. France is southern France (northern is part of Germany), England is part of Germany as "Deutsches Schutzgebiet" (except for Cornwall), Russia reduced to "Novgorod Bis" - most of Europe is part of either Germany or Austria-Hungary: