Well if they gust wait a month (about how long it would take for the liberal cabinet to fall apart and for conservatives to reform the government, pasumably with a imperial liberal coalition, assuming in a bid to stay in power the liberals don't declare a election in wich case Britain isn't going to have a government able to go to war untill 1915) I wonder how much england would want to join then after a million people have died in Europe.
WI: Imperial Germany does not attempt to compete with Royal Navy
- Thread starter RousseauX
- Start date
The French doctrinal debate went through several phases were offensive and defensive strategy both had their own strong proponents. Plan XV was a cautious mobilization behind fortress lines, for example.
What if Germany invaded France in 1905
You can't move wars back and forth twenty years and expect them to proceed the same. It's not Hearts of Iron. You can't do that in Hearts of Iron, either.
www.alternatehistory.com
And even with French offensive doctrine, the military geography of the region meant that Germany had slim chances to win with a single campaign against France:
What if Germany invaded France in 1905
I do sometimes wonder how the German staff kept their jobs if they were so spectacularly incompetent. I mean, defeating the French in a few weeks and establishing hegemony in Europe was easy- every commentator on every history forum on the internet can explain how if their plan had been...
www.alternatehistory.com
RousseauX
Donor
longer ranged ships which can directly reach the colonies
ironically if Germany ends up expanding its submarine fleet it would be much more dangerous for UK than the dreadnoughts
Yeah I do wonder
Does the UK still intervene when the war is very very bloody? The politicians could at least pretend it's going to be a short and quick war in Summer 1914. But if it's a year later and the UK is jumping in on the losing side it will be obvious the price in blood is very high. Is there enough political will to do it?
This is an important point.
For Jackie Fisher and Asquith's cabinets, it wasn't just about the German *numbers*. It was the kind of Navy it was building: short-legged ships useless for anywhere but the North Sea or Baltic. The expansion of crewing in the 1912 Novelle that gave them a year-round strike capability. It was a major capital ship navy with only one possible foe in mind: Britain.
And the British, of course, immediately figured that out.
People still like to knock the Maginot Line, but it wasn't remotely as strategically stupid as giving Joffre charge of French Army planning and doctrine.
I mean it really shouldn't have been a surprise after a British diplomat theretend to "Copenhagen" the german fleet during the bore war. Which frankly gave all the ammunition turpitz and William need to get there fleet built.
It is not this simple.
Langlois retained a lot of influence after his membership of the CSG through his role as the main editor of the Revue militaire général from 1907 onwards. He was not invited to the
Académie Française in 1911 as a participation award.
He was proponent of decisive battles and destruction of enemy forces, critical of Séré de Rivières plan of fortifications, and preferred field fortifications instead. He also supported the focus on light artillery.
Langlois was also a strong proponent of increasing the size of the French standing army, and the Army Law of 1913 was in line with his views. He wanted to destroy the enemy army instead of focusing on capturing or defending territory.
Here diplomatic realities and politics met strategic planning. General Michel, who preceded Joffre looked the available military intelligence, and drew the following conclusions:
- Germans would seek to use the Belgian territory to full extend, since the country was militarily weak and had the best terrain for offensive warfare westwards.
- Michel predicted that the Germans would use their reserve corps to create enough forces to allow them to attempt a wide envelopment that would advance along the western side of the Maas River.
Michel held views that were against the prewar orthodoxy - that reservist formations would be unable to partake to major offensive actions at the start of a war. His recommendations of focusing on Belgium and to the plans of meeting the Germans there were also diplomatically impossible considering the treaties with Britain.
Enter Joffre, in a situation where the Russo-Japanese War and the First Balkan War seemed to confirm the ideas of the proponents of the offensive.
His plans were part of the joint Franco-Russian military planning of 1911-13, and the time when the Moroccan Crises had gradually turned revanchism and the anti-German sentiment from a niche topic to a major factor of French domestic politics.
Joffre believed the Germans would not have troops to spare to go to Belgium, and that they would invade through the Franco-German border. Joffre planned to meet and destroy them there.
Like Bonnal and Foch, Joffre planned to place the French centre de gravité so that their deployment areas would enable the French armies to mobilize and rapidly meet the Germans in a mobile decisive battle.
tl;dr - The French strategic thinking and planning was a result of a complex combination of strategic, diplomatic and political factors as well as internal military debates.
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Yep, and while I'm sure Bismarck wold have been smug about being proved right about his warnings to the Kaiser, I'm sure he was still spinning in his grave about Germany's moves
That's not how British foreign policy worked. By that logic Britain would reach deals with Germany if its navy represented a bigger risk than France's and Russia's. Which is exactly what Tirpitz did, using that exact same logic, and to put it mildly Britain didn't act as he predicted.
The RN would be geared against the French or Russian navy and their kinds of ships, just like they were up until Germany's Second Naval Law (the one that really made Germany's navy the main threat to Britain). Probably the Russian Navy would be the focus more than the French Navy by the late 1900's.
Do we have any numbers on the artillery available to both French and German armies in 1905 or 1908 ?
Thanks
a few thoughts. GB gets off way way to easy in the Who is the Blane for WW1. I often think this is because they write most of the english books on the subject. GB was a complete bully in the 1800s and was still a bully in the early 1900s. It is pretty much its own fault tjat Germany decided to build up a fleet. It had acted like bullies with its fleet durring the Boar War (a war that was frankly pure GB aggression/expansion). and proved to pretty much anyone that looked that you had to have a large fleet to resist GB. So the naval race was frankly as much GB fault as anyone elses, they just thought it was there god given right to be boss of the oceans and most of the world.
If GB stays out until mid to late 15 they stay out forever, (with one possible exception). the destruction and death was way way to high. Only the Americans are dumb enough to get into that mess after it was obviously a huge disaster. And frankly that was as much due to the stupidity of the financial decisions as anything else. The exception is if GB gets into the same issue the US did and financially support France and Russia to the point that it would take a huge hit if France falks.
As for the Argument that GB didn’t have an army to be worried about (from the point of view of the rest of the world). I tgink this is another example of GB writing the books. First off they didn't need a huge standing Army as no one could just march in and take London like they could Paris or Berlin. So the continental powers need a large standing Army to provide instant protection from possible invasion. GB had the Channel and the fleet for that. But the real wars were fought by the mobilized Army and GB could do that about as well as anyone else. It had a bit less Army but being as it had a much larger Navy and a HUGE merchant marine and industry to maintain it was pretty close to the rest of them. And for France, Germany and the rest the Army was priority #1 To GB the Army was probably priority 3 or 4.
But once again the “story” is better if GB seams like an underdog. Not sure how the largest Naval power in History with the largest empire in History gets the underdog position but…. whomever writes the history gets to control the narrative.
If GB stays out until mid to late 15 they stay out forever, (with one possible exception). the destruction and death was way way to high. Only the Americans are dumb enough to get into that mess after it was obviously a huge disaster. And frankly that was as much due to the stupidity of the financial decisions as anything else. The exception is if GB gets into the same issue the US did and financially support France and Russia to the point that it would take a huge hit if France falks.
As for the Argument that GB didn’t have an army to be worried about (from the point of view of the rest of the world). I tgink this is another example of GB writing the books. First off they didn't need a huge standing Army as no one could just march in and take London like they could Paris or Berlin. So the continental powers need a large standing Army to provide instant protection from possible invasion. GB had the Channel and the fleet for that. But the real wars were fought by the mobilized Army and GB could do that about as well as anyone else. It had a bit less Army but being as it had a much larger Navy and a HUGE merchant marine and industry to maintain it was pretty close to the rest of them. And for France, Germany and the rest the Army was priority #1 To GB the Army was probably priority 3 or 4.
But once again the “story” is better if GB seams like an underdog. Not sure how the largest Naval power in History with the largest empire in History gets the underdog position but…. whomever writes the history gets to control the narrative.
I rather suspect that if it takes till mid 1915 or so for England to be able to politically join in, they'd have had more than enough time to look at the bloody massacre unfolding on the continent and come to a decision that of *course* they'll support their allies.... from safely 500 miles off the coast and in the Colonies, naturally. France can scream bloody murder about it all they want, but at the end of the day, What are they going to do about it?
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Dosnt help that the longer it takes to get into the war the longer the Irish question can take center stage, as it was the war provided a handy excuse to delay home rule wich nomader what the British did was going to anger a lot of people, if a conservative government is elected and they try to stop home rule then the nationalist are going to rise up (as apposed to the liberals do to there need to keep a majority in parliament and need the Irish parliamentary party inorder to have one and there for turning all of Ireland over leading to the Unionist almost rising up) meaning that if it takes even a month to get a pro war government together there could very easily lead to a war in irland making Britain joining a war in Europe a very remote possibility.
And Michel was clearly vindicated by events - and Joffre was not.
Unquestionably, though, Joffre's views had more support in the senior French army leadership.
There is a TL about the Michel plan being accepted: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...nt-a-different-french-strategy-in-ww1.413092/
The French civilian-military relationship was a paradox - on the one hand the military obeyed the civilian command. When Michel proposed an invasion of Belgium, he was promptly replaced by Joffre, whose views held more support both among the soldiers and politicians. Both sides of this relationship knew that deep down the French politicians did not trust the French officer corps too much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_Fiches
This distrust was a major factor in French defence policy all the way to 1940.
Riain
Banned
A lot of people think this is the case even now, and that Germany had no business (or even right) building a big navy.
The army of the late Third Republic was certainly a better one than that of Napoleon III, a kind of undead corpse of his uncle's day which worked successfully to keep the best minds completely out of its senior ranks.
Yet there's still a kind of detachment from reality in how it operated and thought, and that was certainly driven by the internal contradictions of fin de siecle France, which you're clearly alluding to here. When added to the fundamental inferiority in demographics and warmaking power to Germany, it was a potentially lethal delusion, retrieved in the end only by the timely intervention of more powerful allies.
I think Michel was problematic, too, in his own way; but had he been in charge in August 1914, France would not have come as close to disaster as it did under Joffre.
I mean, not to play the Anglophile here, but an imperial power that *isn't* arrogant is almost a contradiction in terms. I can't think of one that *wasn't.* Lesser powers simply have to find a way to cope with it - at least, in its noontide of power. For every plucky set of Greeks that challenges the Great King there's a long, long list of conquered Medes, Babylonians, Lydians, Egyptians, Massagetae, Phoenicians, Thracians, and Bactrians that weren’t so lucky.
The question isn't whether Wilhelmine Germany had a right to build a big navy; the question is what kind of navy was best suited to its genuine strategic interests. As Paul Kennedy rightly pointed out, the Dual Alliance represented a combination which Germany, in alliance with Austria-Hungary, could confidently overcome, albeit not in one campaigning season. So why undertake a direct challenge that will add the world's greatest empire to that enemy alliance when you don't have to?
Because even Tirpitz's fear of a "Copenhagen" was no longer a real danger in the era when large scale naval minefields were a reality, but airpower was still a long ways off from being a means to get around it. But we know pretty well now that Tirpitz was using the Royal Navy as the justification for the big navy he wanted, a boogeyman to supply the place of the rational strategic interest that was lacking.
Riain
Banned
Fair enough, but the problem is that building a fleet is a peacetime task that takes decades. Germany will have to some point face the fact that Britain is just over the North Sea, and if Germany doesn't rise to that challenge until the Dual Entente is dealt with then it will have to suffer Britain's naval power for 20 years until Germany builds the fleet it needs.
As others have said in this thread, building a fleet equal to the Dual Entente will almost certainly provoke a reaction from Britain AND not building a seagoing fleet is no guarantee that Britain will not join the Dual Entente.