Narrative Two: The Dynasty Lives On & War Hero
The Dynasty Lives On

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Olga Romanov Reading to Her Sister Anastasia Before the War

Late afternoon, 22nd May, 1918
Sakharnoye Cloister, Siberian Krai (1), Russian Republic

Ana, that was what she and Olga had agreed she would call herself until they were truly safe - though she doubted that would ever happen, felt the tears trickle down her cheeks.

Hidden away in an alcove in a corner of the cloister, she felt just barely safe enough to grieve. She hadn't when they heard the news from Petrograd that morning.

Mama, papa, little Alyosha, and of course Tanya and Masha, were all dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. OTMA had become OA (2).

She remembered the horror she had felt when her sisters screamed. Cried. Howled. Went Silent.

She remembered hiding amongst the snowbanks with Olga through the day, listening to the ragged cavalrymen butcher each other over her family's jewels, freezing so hard she shook and had to be checked for frostbite afterwards.

She remembered the long trek. Hours upon hours seemingly without end.

The first peasant hut they stumbled across had seemed like a balm to the soul, right up until a deranged, dirty peasant had come screaming out of the darkness with an axe in hand - undoubtedly hoping to murder them both.

She remembered running. Running and running, seemingly without end.

She had thought they were going to die, food for the wolves she had heard howling in the night, when they finally stumbled across the shack.

It had seemed about to fall in on itself, but they were finally able to take a day's rest.

As she explored the small wooden hovel, she had discovered a treasure trove of books and a couple of letters - left unsent. It was here that she discovered that infernal book. "What is to be Done?" it asked (3).

That was the question. What were she and Olga to do now? What to do? What to do?

That question had rung through her head ever since she read that book. At first she had thought the story ludicrous. Here was a couple with wealth and means who decided to sacrifice it all to tear down the world which had given them everything. But, the more she thought about it, the more she felt the author had a point. The subordination of the self to a greater cause, even in the most dire of circumstances, could be a noble and just action. The blather about a revolution to bring equality to the peasantry was obviously wrong-headed - an indication of his inferior stock. The peasantry were barely better than beasts from everything she had seen of them since they left that shack and continued east.

She had witnessed a peasant man beat another to death in a drunken rage. Heard the cries and shrieks of peasant women in the night, as she and Olga hid on the outskirts of a village. Listened as her sisters were brutalised and murdered by such monsters.

No. The truth, which had become apparent when she learned of the spectacle that had been made of papa and mama's murders, was that she would dedicate herself to vengeance. That was what she would do. As long as she lived, the enemies of her family would live in fear of her retribution. For every slight, for every injury, for every death she would repay them a million-fold.

She would teach them grief. She would teach them helplessness. She would teach them rage.

Wiping her tears away with half a gesture, she got to her feet and dusted off the dust and cobwebs.

She had work to do.

Footnotes:

(1) I have had a hard time identifying where precisely the different Krai (large territorial divisions in Russia) began and ended in Siberia at this point in time, but from what I have been able to gather this is more than a decade before the Siberian Krai was partitioned into Eastern and Western sections by the Soviets in 1930, and far before those were partitioned even further towards what is the case now. This is the best I could do with what information I had, so I hope it works. The Siberian Krai would have covered almost all of Siberia east of Omsk, though excluding the Far-East. This is taking place around 250 kilometres north-west of Kranoyarsk in the modern Kranoyarsk Krai.

(2) These are all references to Anastasia's family - Alyosha was Alexei's diminutive, Tanya was Tatiana and Masha was Maria. The four girls had a tendency to sign their letters collectively as OTMA on the basis of their names. That should clear any possible confusion up.

(3) This is the novel by Nikolai Chernyshevsky which served as inspiration to countless revolutionary movements in Russia's 19th and early 20th century. It focuses on a well-to-do couple who give up everything to join the revolutionary movement in Russia. A minor character in the book, Rakhmetov, became the primary inspiration for a generation of revolutionaries with his cold-hearted and ruthless pursuit of radical revolution to the detriment of all else. He became something of a guiding star to Lenin's own revolutionary career, and he even used the title of the novel "What is to be Done?" for one of his most famous pamphlets. It was this pamphlet which advocated a "vanguard party" and provoked, at least in part, the schism between the Bolshevik and Menshevik wings of the RSDLP. It is a vital part of any Russian revolutionary's literary diet and suggests that the cabin they are staying at was once inhabited by an exiled political prisoner who has since departed.

War Hero

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Oberleutnant Erwin Rommel

8.45, 22nd of November, 1917
Monte Asolone, Monte Grappa Massif, Veneto, Italy


The struggle to reach the summit of Monte Asolone had been amongst the hardest of Erwin Rommel's career. After the monstrous work that followed the breakthrough at Caporetto, he had thought he knew what exhaustion was. In that time he and his company of 150 men had captured men by the thousands and word had only just arrived that he was being put forward for a Pour la Mérite for the action (1). But by the time he and the rest of the Königlich Württembergisches Gebirgsbataillon had come to a halt at the Piave, orders had come down sending them back into the mountains and up the side of the Monte Grappa massif which towered over the plains they had fought on for days on end.

The men of the Eleventh Army had done good work taking most of the massif, but it took the men of the Alpenkorps to finally shut down the supply road up Monte Asolone. Mortar shells had burst all around them, wounding and killing men by the handful when they were forced into the open. Machine-guns had rattled. Rifles barked. The mountain streams had run red with blood.

The cold, wind and snow at the end of the struggle had been like nothing he could have imagined. Men slipped and fell, smashing against the rocks on their way down. The wounded died before help could arrive, the cold taking them as often as their wounds.

Rommel had seen much over the last few years of war, but few things compared to the fighting on Asolone. The Italians had kept coming. And coming. And coming.

There were some parts of the fighting that had been almost pleasant. The cold had kept the smell half-way decent and after they had taken the road they had mostly been fighting a downhill battle. After the constant rush forward of the previous weeks, being able to sit and wait for the enemy to come to them had been a refreshing experience.

It had been almost a week and a half since the defenders in the mountain had been forced to surrender and Rommel and his men were seated on an outcropping of rock on the massif to enjoy the fireworks that had been going since early that morning. They were lucky enough to have been given guard duty for the fortress during this last offensive.

From atop the mountain it wasn't really possible to pick out individual Italians down on the plains below, but from where he was standing they seemed in complete disarray from the heavy bombardment.

"It is nice to be on this side of those guns for a change." said Gefreiter Kiefner - a giant of a man - while picking at something between his teeth with a pick, gesticulating with the knife in his other hand (2). "Don't usually have this nice of a view either." came the response from Leutnant Streicher (2) from behind Rommel, as Kiefner sat down on a stone outcrop and picked up Jäger Schmidt's (2) bowl of broth, and slurping it down in a single gulp as Schmidt gave an outraged howl and grabbed for his bowl. Kiefner responded by pulling it out Schmidt's reach.

The sight of the short, toad-like, Schmidt trying to topple the massive Kiefner quickly set the men off, howling with laughter, while Erwin felt some of the tension leave his shoulders. It seemed the men were recovering well, but he was not sure how many more fights like that they would be able to take. How many more battles like that he would be able to take.

A roar of approval went up from the artillery, prompting Rommel to turn back to the battle below where he could see the Italian frontlines crumbling.

'We might just make it through this hell after all,' he thought with a slight smile.

Footnotes:

(1) This is based on Rommel's OTL participation in the Battle of Caporetto. Rommel's battalion, consisting of three rifle companies and a machine gun unit, was part of an attempt to take enemy positions on three mountains: Kolovrat, Matajur, and Stol. In two and a half days, from 25th to 27th October, Rommel and his 150 men captured 81 guns and 9,000 men (including 150 officers), at the loss of six dead and 30 wounded. Acting as advance guard in the capture of Longarone on 9 November, Rommel again decided to attack with a much smaller force. Convinced that they were surrounded by an entire German division, the 1st Italian Infantry Division – 10,000 men – surrendered to Rommel. For this and his actions at Matajur, he received the order of Pour le Mérite IOTL and ITTL.

(2) Both Gefreiter Kiefner and Leutnant Streicher are real people who were part of Rommel's battalion IOTL. They are mentioned in Rommel's War Diaries. Jäger Schimdt is of my own invention, as are the interactions described.

End Note:

The section on Anastasia is written in a different style than the other narratives, but I hope that you find it interesting. I have tried to give an idea of how Anastasia Romanov processes learning of her Father and Mother’s executions, as well as the death of their young brother. Keep in mind that a lot of this is the grief stricken thinking of a sixteen year old girl, so while there are some key character developments in this Interlude, she is going to evolve and develop with time.

The second vignette is of Erwin Rommel and is more standard fare, meant to give an idea of what these men are going through and the way even professional soldiers are yearning for an end to the war.
 
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I don't think either of you are wrong. He was a weak-willed naive man, completely unprepared for the task before him, who acted callously and cruely towards his subjects - particularly those among them who were Jewish - and was insistent on his own authoritarian rights to the detriment of all else.

He'd have done swimmingly in the 18th century I bet. Shame time had happened.
 
He'd have done swimmingly in the 18th century I bet. Shame time had happened.

I don't think so to be honest. He would have been even more unsuited to that period. He would have done a fantastic job as a member of the British middle gentry, managing a small estate and going into the city every couple months or so to meet with his fellows, but any place calling him to a position of any greater authority than that is simply asking for trouble.

He was incredibly close-minded. I mean, he went on a trip across the world, visiting all sorts of places, and did little more than complain the whole way. He got talked into a war with the Japanese before getting soundly trounced by them. His handling of the 1905 Revolution saw his supporters having to almost force him to compromise and that might actually have been one of his more succcessful accomplishments. He presided over a state that in the right hands could have dominated Eurasia by the mid-1910s, and he pissed it all away. While he did not single-handedly bring about the Russian Revolution, he undoubtedly played the largest role in bringing about the circumstances that led to it.

Hmm... I can't help but imagine how Fox's Anastasia changes ITTL...

I doubt the rating system would manage what I have planned for dear Anastasia. She is going to be in for a rolercoaster ride of a life.
 
I doubt the rating system would manage what I have planned for dear Anastasia. She is going to be in for a rolercoaster ride of a life.
Ana could grow up to become a dangerous young woman. Hope she doesn't get too bad with it...


It appears that her childhood grief will convince her that human beings are just animals needing guidance. I think it implies a life of cruelty and fanaticism.
 

Vuu

Banned
The kind of person who laughs at video of injured motorist with a completely torn off face hanging, but you would never guess that she do that by appearance, like a friend of mine does that
 
Nicholas had an unshakeable belief in his divine right to absolute rule, a religious fanaticism only outdone by his wife that Russian Orthodoxy was the WAY ordained by God, and an almost willful ignorance and inability to learn. He and Alexandra were involved in a folie a deux which reinforced these qualities. Unfortunately fate placed him in a position and in a time where he was able to maximize the damage done to Russia, and subsequently the world. Had he been Tsar a hundred years sooner, or even further back, he still would have been a disaster but perhaps no worse than many other bad kings.
 
My bet’s on an emotionally damaged Anastasia Stark plowing through Mother Russia putting Bolsheviks into pies.
Accompanied by The Ho...Baron Roman Fjodorovitš Ungern von Sternberg.

Great stuff, I especially liked your extensive source list! "The House of Government" by Yuri Slezkine is a book that might fit well there.
 
Accompanied by The Ho...Baron Roman Fjodorovitš Ungern von Sternberg.

Great stuff, I especially liked your extensive source list! "The House of Government" by Yuri Slezkine is a book that might fit well there.

Leave Roman alone! I have plans for him...

I have actually read the first couple of chapters of The House of Government, but found the style it is written in a bit difficult to cope with and had other books that I needed to get to. It has a fascinating thesis and at some point I will get around to it, but I haven't been able to find the time just yet.

Another PoD I was playing around with a bit before I went with this one dealt with Stalin being killed by his wife when she committed suicide in 1932 IOTL. It would have explored what a world without Stalin, after his consolidation of power, would have looked with. The main issue with it was that I find Hitler a pretty tedious figure - sure he is reprehensible, but he is also such a boring one-note character. I was reading Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler and he pointed out how there really isn't much personality behind Hitler's mask of Fuhrer. He had no private life, he had no real hobbies or interests, he was always at a remove from the rest of the world - living in some sort of pseudo-fantastical world of his own.

Stalin on the other hand is honestly one of the most interesting figures of the 20th century. He starts out as the abused son of a drunkard cobbler, is able to get into seminary school and is on his way to becoming a priest when he gets radicalized. He rebels against the Russian state and becomes a bandit and outlaw, commiting acts of piracy on the Caspian Sea and robbing banks in Georgia. He has these passionate love affairs with a series of women but finds himself consumed by the needs of the revolutionary movement and neglects his family - resulting in multiple tragedies. He takes part in the dark and gritty side of the Bolshevik movement while others stay above it. He gets sent to prison on multiple occasions and eventually is sent into internal exile in the artic circle (interesting note: he would aparently sketch wolves in the margins of his notes from then on). Then you have the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War where he serves as Lenin's right hand and begins building an actual base of support. The powerstruggles at the end of civil war and during the 1920s are really interesting and show how much of a political beast he could be, completely outmaneuvering and outplaying Trotsky, before turning on his allies and taking power for himself. Once he was in power he did everything he could to consolidate his hold on that power, first through the Holodomor, then the rapid industrialization plan and finally in the Great Purge. Then you have the gross miscalculations that left the Soviets open to the German invasion and the constant struggle to drive back the Germans. By the end of World War Two, Stalin had emerged as a giant bestriding the world, whose words set the world a trembling.

Sure, Stalin was a monster who killed millions - but at least he had personality, which is more than I can say for Hitler. He is interesting to read about and in some ways follows a macabre twist on the hero's journey. I honestly think that Montefiore's monicker for him "The Red Tsar" is extremely fitting in many ways. Stalin reads in many ways like Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible, he shares much of their genius, madness and cruelty. It is sort of interesting, Stalin left a country in ruins behind him but I am not sure anyone else could have accomplished what he did during his reign - specifically, leaving his state one of two superpowers in the world and setting the stage for the Soviet's dominant position during the latter half of the century. It is really quite fascinating how little open conflict occured in Russia in the period following the Second World War - sure you had struggles for power, but the fact they were able to avoid popular discontent for as long as they did has always interested me,.

Sorry about that, wasn't really relevant but got sidetracked for a bit.
 
@Zulfurium that ostensibly-Stalinist USSR-without-Stalin sounds like an amazing TL.

I was getting a bit too ambitious with it by the end. I had decided to pile on killing off FDR and Hitler within the year, before either of them could really exert much influence on the world around them. That said, paring it down to just Stalinist USSR without Stalin would probably be the right way to go about it. The problem is that many of the figures who would play a key role in such a state were removed from power and often killed over the course of the next decade, which makes figuring out what would happen with them still in the game a bit difficult. Furthermore, I am not sure how stable such a state would be and worry it might be the setup for a Nazi-victory scenario. I have a hard time really finding Nazi Germany particularly interesting but I think I might be able to do something with it given some more time to research. I have been slowly making my way through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer on Audible, but I think I would much rather explore Germany with a PoD in the 1910s as I have here.

The interesting aspect of a PoD Stalinist USSR without Stalin is that you still have Trotsky stuck on the outside. Any prospect of him getting into power in the USSR is relatively remote, but he could function as a counterpoint to the Stalinists - in effect making Stalin's OTL claim of the purged being Trotskyites into the actual case. You would have a Trotskyite revolutionary underground while the Stalinist power players struggle for the central position Stalin showed was possible. Without Stalin's massive purges and the revulsion towards one-man rule that followed him, the Soviets will continue to seek a single leading figure - with everyone fighting for the top spot. Basically a massive game of King of the Hill.

The reverberations from such a struggle could have major consequences in the rest of the world. I haven't researched enough to have a proper idea of what would happen.

I was also playing around with a PoD in the late-WW2 period, where the planned match between Stalin's daughter and Beria's son goes forward and Beria emerges as Stalin's political heir earlier. It would also involve killing off Stalin in the late 1940s, before his last purge and the Korean War, and basically seek to butterfly the Cold War. It would see the Soviet Union take on increasingly monarchical undertones similar to the Kim regime in North Korea - though not at all as insulated - with the attempts of a Stalin-Beria lineage to consolidate a Georgian ruling dynasty. Yes it is wierd and would likely go completely off the rails, but god damn would it be fun to write.

I have another potential TL I was playing around with centering on the premise of Ghandi surviving his jaunt in Delhi and then being killed by Muslims in the Punjab soon after. It would chart the rise of Hindu Nationalism and Indian Communism in a far bloodier and confused Partition period than OTL, with reverberations in the Chinese Civil War, Indonesia and Russia before spreading to the rest of the world. This could turn into the start of a bid for the Vlad Tepes awards with relative ease.
 
Stalin is indeed an interesting character. So much that in my TL (The Century of the Common Man, still in works) where I get SRs winning at Kazan and the civil war with it, I still don't know what to do exactly with him, and for the time being, I have him fleeing Tsaritsyn in midst of Bolsheviks post Kazan collapse and ending up in Gilan helping the Jangali uprising, but here I left him.
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...of-the-common-man.412096/page-6#post-16585435
 
I have actually read the first couple of chapters of The House of Government, but found the style it is written in a bit difficult to cope with and had other books that I needed to get to. It has a fascinating thesis and at some point I will get around to it, but I haven't been able to find the time just yet.

The style of the aforementioned book is indeed captivating and occasionally infuriating at the same time.

This is also worth a read: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/mo...o/9780199642052.001.0001/acprof-9780199642052

As for Stalin, he has always struck me as a figure who presents himself as the only remedy and solution to malaises and problems that he himself has largely brought about.
 
Update Seven: Intriguing with Allies
Intriguing with Allies

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David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

With Friends Like These…

At the end of 1917 the Western Front still ran in the old zigs and zags from the Belgian coast down to Picardy in France, from there it continued westward to Verdun and then southward again to Switzerland. The eighteen miles nearest the English Channel were defended by thirteen Belgian divisions and, more decisively, by the broad shallow lakes created when the coastal dikes were opened in 1914. This flooding made the northern end of the front impregnable - essentially taking it out of the war. Nearly as impregnable were the 150 miles at the southern end, where the steep pine forests of the Vosges Mountains, the heights looming over the River Meuse, and France’s mighty chain of fortresses formed a formidable wall. That left hundreds of miles of potential battleground. German initiatives were feasible everywhere from the start of the British line at a Belgian stream called the Coverbeeck to south of Verdun. Flanders, Picardy, Champagne, the Argonne, the big German salient at St. Mihiel—all remained in play. The known fact that the Germans were now transferring large numbers of troops to the west made it probable not only that an attack was coming but that it would be on a greater scale than what had been seen thus far.

During the 1917–18 winter the Allied attempts at reaching an agreement on a common strategic posture proved largely abortive, and were often downright hostile. The Supreme War Council (SWC) was established in the immediate aftermath of the Caporetto Offensive, occurring concurrently with the bloody fighting at Monte Grappa, and took the form of monthly meetings of the British, French, and Italian heads of government, while a committee of permanent military representatives (PMRs) at Versailles acted as a secretariat, gathered information, and drew up plans for discussion. The PMRs had advisory but no executive functions, and political rivalries complicated their work. Orlando nominated Cadorna to ease him out of his command role; Woodrow Wilson was reluctant to be committed politically, and although he appointed General Tasker H. Bliss as his military representative, he agreed only to an American diplomat acting as an observer at the heads of government meetings. But the idea of the SWC had originated with the British, and specifically Sir Henry Wilson, who became the first British military representative, Prime Minister David Lloyd George welcoming the opportunity for a more congenial source of advice than Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) Sir William Robertson, who he had struggled with constantly since the formation of the British Coalition Government in 1916.

From the beginning the SWC's decisions were contentious and hard to implement - experiencing an early blow when the Italians were forced to withdraw from it prior to the first actual meeting of the SWC, a result of the Italian collapse and surrender in late 1917, though not before Cadorna was able to recommend the occupation of Turin by the French. When the heads of government asked the PMRs to recommend operations in 1918, they suggested staying on the defensive in France and the new Italian Front while attacking in Palestine and Mesopotamia - though only if no troops were diverted from the Western Front. Reflecting Henry Wilson and Lloyd George’s thinking, this recommendation was as much anathema to the French as it was to the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), Sir Douglas Haig, and his close ally CIGS Robertson. However, the recently ascended French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau reluctantly agreed to Middle Eastern offensives as long as Britain maintained its efforts in the west.

This debate had a bearing on Allied war aims, outlined separately in Lloyd George's Caxton Speech in early January and President Wilson's Fourteen Points two days later (1), and also on two other issues discussed by the SWC. The first was the extension of the British sector. The BEF in May 1917 held 158 kilometers of front with sixty-two divisions while the French held 580 with 102 divisions (2). Although much of the French front was unlikely to be attacked, in Paris the disparity seemed excessive. The French wanted to release their older conscripts and Clemenceau hoped that making the British take on more of the line would hamper Lloyd George’s activities in the Middle East, where France also had interests, but lacked the strength to pursue them. Lloyd George, in fact, welcomed the extension as a check on further offensives by Haig and he endorsed the principle. An agreement between Haig and Pétain therefore lengthened the British line by forty kilometres southwards to Barisis, just south of the Oise, in January 1918, but when the SWC asked for a further extension the British refused.


The most controversial proposal of all, however, was for an inter-Allied general reserve. On the 2nd of February 1918 the governments approved a plan for the PMRs under General Ferdinand Foch’s chairmanship to hold authority over a pool of thirty divisions as a reserve for the Western, Italian, and Macedonian Fronts. Henry Wilson was sympathetic, but Haig and the Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, General Philippe Pétain, were hostile to the notion, both because they saw that it was linked to a rash scheme of Foch’s for counter-offensives against the Germans, and also because they wished to control their reserves themselves. Clemenceau, apparently reluctant to ride roughshod over the two commanders, back-peddled, but what ultimately killed the plan was civil-military infighting in Britain. The dismal outcome of Third Ypres and of Cambrai the year before had dented the British GHQ’s prestige, reducing its support from the Unionists and the press. Indeed, The Times was now openly critical of the BEF's military leadership. Moreover, Haig and Robertson had become estranged, Haig thinking Robertson not ‘Western’ enough in his approach to the war.

Haig’s position became crucial when in February 1918 the High Tory Morning Post defied the censors by publishing an article denouncing the general reserve plan and condemning Lloyd George’s "incapacity to govern England in a great war". The incident brought civil-military tensions to a head and Robertson was demoted. Wilson replaced him but only with the more restricted powers held by the CIGS before Robertson had taken up the post. In fact, Wilson resembled Robertson in wanting to concentrate forces on the Western Front while also being sympathetic to imperial considerations, but he had better personal relations with Lloyd George and reasonable ones with Haig. The latter’s price for not supporting Robertson was the end to talk of a general reserve. He warned Lloyd George that he would resign rather than assign troops to it, and once he refused Pétain did the same. In early March the SWC abandoned the scheme, over Foch’s vehement protests but with Clemenceau’s acquiescence, and approved a bilateral agreement between Haig and Pétain. If Haig’s southernmost Fifth Army were attacked, the French would either take over a portion of its line or reinforce it with six divisions, Haig undertaking to provide similar assistance if the French were the target.

However, the most serious Allied weakness on the Western Front was not the collapse of the general reserve but the inadequacy of the British authorities’ own preparations. In January the British sector was extended by about a quarter, the French handed over the line in mediocre or poor conditions, and the BEF received no compensating increase in its fighting strength, which was lower than a year before. Although the total strength of the Expeditionary Force increased between the start of 1917 and the start of 1918, the number of combat troops fell from 1.07 million to 0.969 million, around 4 percent. Between January and November 1917 the BEF had suffered nearly 790,000 casualties, and in October the new Director of National Service, Auckland Geddes, said the home economy could spare no more men.

Two debates followed. One was over whether Britain should adopt a more technology-intensive warfare, using tanks and other equipment to economise on manpower and save lives. Churchill, now munitions minister, led the advocates of 'new' tactics; Haig and GHQ were more conservative and reserved about the tanks’ mechanical reliability and ability to substitute for infantry as a means of holding ground. The difference was mostly one of nuance, and had more of a bearing on offensive rather than defensive operations. Churchill’s advocacy won increasing support in the War Office but GHQ remained unpersuaded and tried, unsuccessfully, in the spring 1918 to reduce tank shipments to France. The BEF experienced no big increase in weapons deliveries, but it lacked the personnel to use the equipment in any case, as a result of the second debate.

On the 26th of November the war cabinet agreed that Britain must be able to continue fighting if necessary into 1919. It appointed a Committee on Manpower, which endorsed Lloyd George’s goal of 'staying power’ until more Americans arrived in France. The first manpower priority was to be the navy, followed by shipbuilding, the air force, and naval aircraft production, then agriculture, timber felling, and building food stores, with the army at the bottom of the list. The military wanted 600,000 category ‘A’ men, the strongest and fittest, withdrawn from civilian life by November 1918; but the manpower committee decided to allocate only 100,000. More could have been provided, given that in addition to able-bodied civilians, around 175,000 trained soldiers were kept at home from January 1918, in part as a precaution against attempted invasion and internal unrest. But the major reason that they were held back stemmed from the cabinet's suspicions that if it sent the men, Haig would waste them in fruitless assaults, thereby depriving Britain of the chance to contribute decisively to the final campaigns of the war (3).

At the same time, the cabinet ministers underestimated how dangerous a German attack might be. In consequence not only was the BEF thinly stretched but GHQ had to carry through a reorganisation that the Germans and French had already implemented and the cabinet had long envisaged, namely avoiding reducing the number of divisions by instead cutting the number of battalions in each division from twelve to nine. Excepting the Dominion divisions, between January and April fifty-seven divisions lost three battalions each, a process carried out quickly and without warning. The reorganization disconcerted many men who were moved from their old units and likely exacerbated the stress of garrisoning the trenches. Because each division kept the same length of front, the first line would have to be garrisoned more weakly or the infantry rotated out of it less frequently. Even allowing for the handicaps imposed on the BEF from outside, GHQ’s new defensive dispositions probably made matters worse. All of this was coupled with a major reshuffle of GHQ, though the men who were brought in as replacements would prove a significant improvement. The government had insisted on GHQ being reshuffled after Cambrai, Lawrence replacing Kiggell as chief of staff and the very able Brigadier-General Cox replacing Charteris as head of intelligence and keeping Haig accurately informed about the movement of German divisions to the west.

From December Haig expected a German attack in the New Year, and he ordered the BEF to construct a system of defense in depth. Unfortunately for the Allies, the BEF was unused to defensive fighting and particularly to the system GHQ ordered, which rested on a misunderstanding of German defensive practice in 1917. The system comprised three zones: the forward zone, a 3,000-yard battle zone, and a rear zone four to eight miles behind it. The first zone, comprising ‘outposts’ rather than a continuous line of trenches, was to be held to the last man and in greater strength than by the Germans, and the battle zone was to be held rigidly. Counter-attacks would be less speedy and automatic than under the German system, fewer response troops being stationed in the rearward area to deliver them and less discretion being delegated to their commanders, in keeping with the BEF’s more hierarchical practice. In reality few of the British armies actually prepared the rear zone at all, and 84 percent of the British battalions were within 3,000 yards of the front line and were therefore more exposed to bombardment, compared to a maximum of 50 percent under the German system, while relatively few troops were available to relieve the ‘redoubts’ in the battle zone (3).

Footnotes:

(1) Given the defeat of Italy, the earlier defeat of Romania and a seemingly democratic Russia (as opposed to the Bolshevik menace of OTL), there are a couple of important alterations to the Caxton War Aims Speech, actually bringing it much closer to Wilson's Fourteen Points (although significant disagreements on self-determination remain):

The Caxton Speech retains its call for a reduction of the Ottoman Empire to ethnically Turkish lands, the demand for a complete evacuation and restoration of Belgium, its guarded support for a return of Alsace-Lorraine to the French and the call for Austria-Hungary to remain a unified state provided it grant autonomy to its minorities. Importantly, it doesn't make any mention to national self-determination due to fears of what it might mean for the British Empire despite American pleas, just as per OTL. The major departures from OTL focus on a lack of support for Italian irredentism, which is replaced by a simple call for a restoration of Italy to status quo antebellum, and the inclusion of a number of statements supporting the restoration of lost lands to the Russians, as opposed to the OTL decision to abandon any and all Russian war claims in response to the Bolshevik power grab.

One very important departure from OTL is that the Russians haven't published any of the Allies' dirty laundry yet, as the Bolsheviks did IOTL, at this point in time. This means that the Fourteen Points don't seem quite as hypocritical and, importantly, that Wilson remains somewhat in the dark as to quite how imperialistic his allies are in their outlook. This will have consequences in the future.

(2) This is three less British and seven less French Divisions than IOTL, these having been rerouted to the desultory fighting on the Italian Front. These forces are almost all drawn from the reserves of the two forces. The British have drawn three additional divisions from among the men held back in Britain IOTL to boost their commitment to six British divisions in total at the Italian Front (in addition to those divisions detailed in update five, having reached their new positions in Piedmont after the bloody trek across northern Italy.

(3) These two sections are actually completely OTL and should help make clear how divided the Allies were just before the Spring Offensives, both internally and between each other. When you know what is coming, it is hard not to feel that the decisions made in this period are incredibly wrong-headed (to put it mildly). These numbers are all from OTL as well.


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Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff

…Then What Need We With Enemies

Central to the conflict between Haig and Lloyd George throughout the war, though particularly in early 1918, was a fundamental disagreement over how the war could be won. This was the divide between Easterners and Westerners, imprecise and unannounced though the terms might be, who fundamentally disagreed over whether the war would be won on the Western Front or on one of the numerous subsidiary theatres in the Balkans, Italy or the Middle East. While these divisions weren't always clear-cut, and often functioned as more of a spectrum than an either-or proposition, this division had played havoc with the British military effort since 1915. Lloyd George had always been an Easterner by persuasion, but particularly in 1917 he had acquiesced to a primarily Western strategy for the year. By early 1918 Lloyd George was determined that 1918 would have a primarily Eastern-focused strategy, with the aim of capturing Palestine and Mesopotamia, hopefully driving the Ottomans out of the war.

This prioritisation was just as much of a political decision as a military one, based on the backlash provoked by the loss of a quarter million men during the horrific fighting at Passchendaele, and Lloyd George's antipathy towards Haig. At the same time, Haig remained firmly convinced that the fighting in 1918 would center on France, as the Germans sought to end the war before the Americans could get involved. Haig and Lloyd George were thus at a cross-roads and would spend much of early 1918 in a bitter conflict over the disposition of troops. With the extension of British lines in France, Haig found his position dangerously vulnerable and launched numerous efforts at securing reinforcements - growing ever more worried as one month after another passed without a German Offensive. Lloyd George had initially been willing to listen to Haig, but the Russian Parsky Offensive and the subsequent bloody fighting on the Eastern Front convinced him otherwise. Certain that Haig was being hysterical and that the Germans would be unable to launch any sort of assault before the conflict in Russia was brought to a close, Lloyd George held back what men he could on the Home Isles, ostensibly with the argument that they were there to maintain order, while dispatching further forces to the Middle East (4).

The struggle between Haig and Lloyd George grew ever more bitter as the year moved forward. During this period Lloyd George sought to undermine Haig's position, both by strengthening bodies like the SWC and by replacing Haig loyalists and allies with men outside Haig's circles at GHQ. This was partially the reasoning behind the almost complete replacement of Haig's General Staff as well as the weakening, and eventual resignation, of Robertson over Eastern-Western disputes in mid-February. Lloyd George's focus now turned squarely against Haig, who he hoped to see dismissed and replaced with someone more amenable to the Prime Minister's wishes - both Herbert Plummer in Flanders and Edmund Allenby in Palestine being considered. However, Haig was not only a national hero - he was also a darling of the Conservative Party, who made up a good part of Lloyd George's ruling coalition. This wrinkle made Lloyd George's fondest wish an incredibly difficult to accomplish, though as time passed and Haig's pronouncements of doom on the Western Front grew ever more shrill, Lloyd George was able to gradually weaken Haig's political support. Lloyd George's concentrated campaign against Haig grew ever more bitter, particularly once leaks to the British press by sources in GHQ made public the struggle over between Haig and Lloyd George.

While the struggle was initially depicted as of relative inconsequentiality, this all changed when Major General Frederick Barton Maurice, formerly of the Imperial General Staff, published a letter to the press warning that unless immediate action was taken to reinforce the Western Front by the government, it would be risking utter disaster. Maurice had collaborated closely with Robertson during their time on the Imperial General Staff but had been reassigned when Henry Wilson replaced Robertson in February. Initially, Maurice had been promised command of a division, but as month after month passed without posting he grew ever more embittered. This was not helped by the death of his baby daughter in mid-March, nor by the news he was receiving from friends closer to the frontlines - who outlined how dangerously overstretched they were and detailed the increasing worry in GHQ over the prospects of a German Offensive. What provoked Maurice to write his letter was Lloyd George's statements in early April dismissing leaks from GHQ of these worries as overblown, claiming that plenty forces stood ready to oppose the Germans should they attack - though Lloyd George was quick to iterate that an offensive seemed highly unlikely given how long the Germans had been fighting in Russia. The Maurice Letter, published in mid-April, was thus a bombshell in the midst of what had otherwise been a rather positive news cycle, refuting Lloyd George's claims and providing a detailed and extremely accurate rebuttal of the Prime Minister's claims. While Lloyd George was largely able to quiet much of the initial uproar, events on the Western Front were about to set the letter centre stage in British domestic politics. Maurice himself was put on half-pay immediately and efforts were begun to quietly "retire" him from the service, denying him a court martial in order to keep the entire matter as quiet as possible (5).

Simultaneously with all of these intrigues in Britain, the Irish Convention played out against a backdrop of tense negotiations over the fate of Ireland. The Irish Convention had been convened on the 25th of July 1917 to discuss the "Irish Question" and various other constitutional problems surrounding the implementation of early self-government - as promised in the Third Home Rule Act of 1914, which had been enacted and simultaneously postponed the act for the duration of the Great War. Outrage over a delay in enacting Home Rule, and ultimately in an effort at securing Irish Independence, had boiled over in the 1916 Easter Rising. While the Easter Rising itself had been a dismal failure, it was the harsh and heavy-handed British response which had firmly galvanised much of the Irish population, causing a major shift in the island's political landscape.

In the aftermath of the Rising, the Liberal Government of H.H. Asquith had announced that they would begin negotiations on a permanent settlement of the Home Rule question in June 1916. With the debate in Parliament over the issue drawing into July, the issue was placed on the backburner - the horrific slaughter of the Somme and escalating U-boat campaign distracting from Ireland's woes. This was then followed by George Lloyd's ousting of Asquith in December 1916 with support from the Unionists, with a resultant slow-down of discussion the issue through the early months of 1917. Momentum built sharply for a new approach after America's entry into the war on the 17th of April 1917. As a result, Lloyd George found himself facing increased pressure to settle the Irish question, partly in deference to Irish-American sentiment, an American population group which had been isolationist and presented a threat to continued American participation in the war, and partly to gain further Irish support for the war. This was what finally forced Lloyd George to acquiesce to the convening of the Irish Convention.

The Convention was composed of representative Irishmen from different political parties and spheres of interest, numbering 95 delegates. However, this representative nature was soon discarded as actual negotiations were delegated first to a Grand Committee of 20 delegates and finally to a Committee of Nine, who would conduct all actual negotiations. Sinn Féin declined to participate, citing the presence of non-Irish at the Convention, the lack of commitment by the British to uphold decisions made at the Convention and the lack of willingness to include independence as a parameter for the convention. This absence would do a great deal to undermine the claims of the British government that any agreement made was representative of the wishes of all Irish peoples. The months of negotiations over the fate of Ireland saw the general outlines of an agreement made rather early, but key provisions soon provoked a deadlock on the 17th of November when the Ulster Unionists rejected the proposal worked out by the Committee of Nine.

It became apparent by late November that a fleeting breakthrough might be attained when Lord Midleton, the moderate leader of the Southern Unionists, alarmed by the rise of militant separatism in Ireland and the high losses on the war front, in an effort to break the deadlock on the fiscal question, proposed on the 22nd November a Home Rule settlement without partition, in which an Irish parliament, with minority safeguards for Ulster, would have full control of internal taxes, administration, legislation, judicature and the police, but not of customs and excise. Opposition to the Midleton Plan came not only from the Ulster delegates but from a majority of the nationalists led by Bishop O'Donnell who had held out for full fiscal autonomy since the start of negotiations. When the full Convention met on 18th December just before a recess, Midleton made an address in which his scheme further conceded to Ireland the control of excise in addition to all purely Irish services. Merely customs and defence were to remain for the period of the war with the Imperial Parliament, thereafter to be decided by a joint commission. He appealed to both Nationalists and Northern Unionists to seek agreement on these lines.

Although an understanding took a long time in coming, a form of consensus was for a moment attained with a deal nearly being struck. For a brief period during December, until early January 1918, it looked as if Midleton's initiative would provide the basis for a political breakthrough, with justification for believing that the Convention was moving towards an agreed settlement. On 1st January 1918 Midleton returned from London with a written pledge drafted by Lord Desart and initialed by Lloyd George, that if the Southern Unionist scheme were carried by substantial agreement, the Prime Minister would use his influence to give it legislative effect. Ulster Unionists, influenced by their southern counterparts, wavered towards a settlement, as indicated by Berrie's assurances to Midleton the previous day. Many at the time thought that a deal was in the offing. Everything hinged upon timing, a speedy settlement was essential. There was considerable feeling that the Convention was on the verge of a settlement.

At this point a major error of judgment was again made by the chairman Horace Plunkett when he intervened and rather than clearing the timetable to rush through a vote on the agreement, he asserted his authority, insisting it was too early to take a vote and was diverted by initiating a lengthy debate on land purchase. Before the next decisive debate on 15th January, adversaries of the proposed settlement gained ground. On 14th January, the northern nationalist representatives Bishop O’Donnell and Joseph Devlin had joined forces and informed John Redmond - the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, whose health had kept him in seclusion for ten days since he gave a powerful speech during the previous debate, of their opposition to the agreement in the absence of an advance agreement from Ulster to join the rest of the Isle. Nationalists were now seen as the obstructers by which the Midleton Plan failed to win unanimity. On 21st January the Ulster Unionist leader Carson left the Cabinet over a vague offer by the government to assist the Convention to "finally reach a basis of agreement which would enable a new Irish Constitution to come into operation with the consent of all parties". He was afraid that a settlement would be imposed and that Lloyd George was doing nothing to allay his fears. Lloyd George in a letter that day to Plunkett, expressed his grave concern at the lack of progress towards reaching an agreed settlement, and extended an invitation for a representation of the differing groups to confer with the Cabinet, to enable a new Irish Constitution to come into operation with the consent of all parties. During February the government played a more active role in negotiations. The Armagh South by-election on 2nd February appeared to improve Redmond's position when the Irish Party won over Sinn Féin by 2,324 votes to 1,305.


Lloyd George, Bonar Law and George Curzon met the Southern Unionists Midleton, Bernard and Dezart on 6th February. The Southern Unionists emphasised that one thing Ireland would not accept was partition. On 13th February the Prime Minister then met the invited delegation from the Convention. He pointed out that wartime necessitated that fiscal relations remain as they are until its conclusion, and that a settlement was only possible if partition was ruled out. With a lengthy letter to Plunkett on 25th February, read next day to the Convention when it reassembled, Lloyd George began with a definite pledge of action. On receiving the report of the Convention the Government would "proceed with the least possible delay to submit legislative proposals to Parliament". He outlined his formula for a compromise – customs and excise would remain as they were until two years after the war, a Royal Commission deciding on an appropriate settlement, there would be an increase in Unionist representation in an Irish Parliament, with an Ulster Committee empowered to modify or veto legislation "not consonant with the interests of Ulster". Included in his package was a future bill to settle land purchase, and a substantial provision for resolving urban housing. His letter made a limited impression on Ulster Unionists, having stressed, that he was determined to legislate upon receipt of the Convention's report, emphasising the urgent importance of a settlement by consent, but that controversial questions would have to be deferred until after the war.

Cardinal Logue of Armagh who had hoped for some alternative to Sinn Féin, dismissed Lloyd George's letter and the suggested safeguards for Ulster as "disguised partition". In view of the new situation created by Lloyd George's letter, Midleton's scheme was dropped. The various sides now gained time to reconsider and recoup, with the earlier momentum lost, committees came under the influence of outside institutions and hard-liners. Ulstermen who had been under pressure to settle, reverted to a hardline stand, without appearing to have ruined the Midleton deal. Barrie, the Unionist leader who had wavered towards doing a deal, was summonsed with his delegates to Belfast to meet their advisory committee on 25th February and told to hold to traditional partitionist demands. Midleton was undermined by hardliners who formed a "Southern Unionist Committee", publishing a 'Call to Unionists' on 4 March, which reinforced a fundamentalist line. The bishops made plain their opposition to a Swiss federal system, under which Ulster would be a kind of Protestant canton, and O'Donnell went to great length to frame a scheme that would exclude any provincial autonomy. O'Donnell called a meeting of Nationalists on 5 March and tried to obtain a final declaration against compromise and in favor of full fiscal claims. Many delegates were now drifting back to Redmond's view, and against the likelihood of a renewed division into Nationalists and Unionists. At this point Redmond, who had undergone an operation, died on 6th March in London.

When the Convention reassembled after Redmond's funeral on 12 March opening its fourth phase, a resolution was put forward by Lord MacDonnell, a moderate home ruler, that Irish control of customs and excise should be postponed until after the war, on condition such control should come into automatic effect three years after cessation of hostilities. The first division in eight months was however taken on Bishop O’Donnell's resolution, that "the matters specified as unfitted for immediate legislation", for example, Irish control of customs and excise being postponed, when it was defeated in a vote of 38 for and 34 against. The political calculations of the government for an agreed solution among the Irish was dealt a set-back when at the same time, Ulster Unionists presented the Convention with a plan for the exclusion of nine counties. The fiscal question continued to be dealt with from 13th March and twenty one resolutions of provisional agreement adopted.

The final Convention report signed 8th April, carried by sixty-six votes to thirty-four, marking the final phase of the Convention, arrived in Downing Street. The main document called for the immediate establishment of self-government by an Irish Ministry consisting of two houses, with special provisions for southern and northern Unionists and was accompanied by two minority reports along with five notes expanding on particular issues under negotiation. On 11th April government ministers formed a cabinet committee to supervise the drafting of Home Rule as recommended by the Convention. The committee was chaired by Walter Long, self-claimed to be the best informed person on Irish affairs, also a champion of federalism, a lifelong Unionist and committed adversary of Home Rule. Long would delay for as long as possible, but was finally forced to give way on the 25th of April - Home Rule was set to go into effect in Ireland from August 1918, following an election period in the latter half of July. The prospect of All-Ireland Home Rule being introduced led Carson to agree with Nationalists – that Ireland had suffered from nothing in its history as much as the "broken pledges of British statesmen" (6).

Footnotes:

(4) The Parsky Offensive and the continued fighting on the Eastern Front has several important impacts on British internal politics, particularly within the military-civil relationship. The most important of these is that the German assault in the east convinces Lloyd George that there isn't going to be an offensive of any major significance on the Western Front, allowing him to press even harder on Haig than IOTL.

(5) Lloyd George's efforts at removing Haig are based on his actions IOTL, with him having been given longer time to proceed with his plans than IOTL. The delay from the OTL Spring Offensive means that their antagonism has more time to play out. I realise that the Maurice letter, which was sent IOTL after the disaster of Operation Michael, might be a stretch - but I think that there are enough elements in place for it to still be published. Of course the contents of the letter, while still damning, are adapted to the situation ITTL and it is being published before any sort of Spring Offensive has happened - making it less of a news story, at least initially, than IOTL. The important thing is that there is now part of the public record warning of the dangers of an offensive on the Western Front.

(6) The agreement to enact Home Rule was passed alongside a Conscription Act IOTL, which largely poisoned both Acts and provoked immense divisions within Ireland - culminating in the Sinn Féin Party winning a massive majority in the newly created Irish Parliament in late 1918. This was soon followed by the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence. By decoupling the Home Rule Act from the Conscription Act, the British are more successful in building some minor degree of trust in Ireland than IOTL for the time being. How successful this will be in the long run, and if the British will be able and willing to release their grip on Ireland is another question entirely.


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Turkish Howitzer on the Palestine Front

The Eastern Campaigns

The natural result of Lloyd George's victory in the debate over military strategy for 1918 was that significant resources were poured into the Middle Eastern fronts - though the Salonica front would also see reinforcement in this period, but that would have little impact for the time being, the stalemate in the theatre having held steady since 1916. Perhaps the most immediate issue addressed in 1918 was shutting down the Austro-Hungarian fleet's ability to sally from the Adriatic. This would require significant naval forces and a gruelling patrol schedule, particularly given stipulations in the Italian terms of surrender which forced the Italians to expel Allied shipping from their ports. The British would base themselves out of the Ionian Isles, maintaining the Otranto Barrage with significant difficulty, gaps often forming in the tumultuous waters (7). With the Mediterranean supply lines secured once more, the transfer of forces eastward could be undertaken.

The Palestine Campaign had been under way since early 1917, when multiple abortive attempts at crossing the Sinai and defeating the Turkish defences around Gaza were undertaken by the British, followed by a stalemate from April to October 1917 as Ottoman and British forces held their lines between Gaza and Beersheba and reorganized their forces. It was at this point that the dynamic and talented commander General Edmund Allenby was given command of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) and ordered to press through the Ottoman's defensive positions. The British captured the important supply point of Karm on the 22nd of October 1917, inaugurating a period of intense combat that would stretch forward for months and see the British make unprecedented gains in the region. Following the capture of Karm, the German commander Erich von Falkenhayn, who had been given command of the Yilderim Army Group opposing Allenby, planned an assault simultaneously with the beginning of Allenby's own offensive.

Allenby opened his Southern Palestine Campaign with the Third Battle of Gaza, fought between 31st of October and 7th of November 1917, by having his mounted divisions turn the Turkish left flank at Beersheba. In the climax of the action on the 31st of October, the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade rushed across 6.5 kilometers of open ground under artillery and machine-gun fire to breach Beersheba’s defenses, forcing the evacuation of the town. Two days later, Allenby began the infantry assault on Gaza itself, supported by an artillery barrage and six tanks. On the 7th of November, British forces took the city, and the entire Gaza–Beersheba line crumbled. The battle cost the attackers 18,000 casualties and the defenders 13,000, but Allenby’s troops also took 12,000 prisoners. After the Gaza–Beersheba line was breached, Falkenhayn deployed the Turkish Seventh Army under General Fevsi Pasha on the inland flank of Friedrich von Kressenstein’s Turkish Eighth Army in order to block a British drive up the road from Beersheba through Hebron and Bethlehem to Jerusalem.

In the battle of El Mughar Ridge on the 13th of November, a daring charge by 800 British mounted infantry, reminiscent of the action of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba two weeks earlier, helped to secure the junction of a rail spur connecting Beersheba to the Haifa–Jerusalem railway, and enabled Allenby to drive a wedge between Kressenstein’s Eighth Army, which retreated up the coast to Jaffa, and the Seventh Army, which fell back on Jerusalem. After detaching a corps to pursue Kressenstein and secure Jaffa, Allenby deployed the rest of the EEF against Fevsi Pasha’s army in the battle of Jerusalem, fought from the 8th-26th of December. On the first day of the action British forces attacked the city simultaneously from the west, through Deir Yassin, and the south, through Bethlehem, breaching the Turkish defenses in both places. Jerusalem fell on the 9th of December and Allenby entered the city two days later. Skirmishing continued in the hills around Jerusalem, while Falkenhayn reinforced the Seventh Army for a major counterattack, scheduled for Christmas Day. Amid heavy fighting on the 25th-26th December, Allenby’s troops held the city. Meanwhile, on the coast, a British attack across the Auja River on 21st–22nd December forced Kressenstein’s Eighth Army to retreat another 13 kilometers north of Jaffa and secured the port as a base for supplying Jerusalem. The Jerusalem campaign as a whole cost the Turks 25,000 casualties against 18,000 for the British and Imperial troops. After the defeat, the Germans reassigned Falkenhayn to the Eastern front, leaving Liman von Sanders in charge of the defense of Palestine.

It was a month after the capture of Jerusalem that a tragic loss caused significant turmoil in the relationship between the Arab rebels and their British patrons, causing severe disruptions in the lines of communication. Having captured a cluster of villages at the bottom of the Dead Sea in a region known as Tafileh, the Arab rebels had found themselves counter-attacked by a force of 900 Ottoman Turks under Hamid Fakhri Pasha. It was here that during the early stages of the fighting that, the close friend and British military attaché of Emir Faisal, Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence was killed when an artillery shell struck next to him. The Battle of Tafileh would eventually turn in Arab favour as their commander Jafar al-Askari defeated the Turks and crushed them in the following pursuit. However, the death of Lawrence would prove a bitter blow as Emir Faisal mourned the loss of his friend. The British would dispatch a number of other men over the coming months to replace Lawrence, but none of them would succeed in building the same sort of rapport Lawrence had developed with the Arabs (8).

While Allenby lacked clear instructions on what to do after taking Jerusalem, he was far from inactive. In February 1918 he sent an EEF column to capture Jericho and made preparations for a series of raids across the Jordan River to cut the Hejaz railway at Amman - though the death of Lawrence and consequent disruption in channels of communications made this difficult. It would take till mid-March before orders arrived, alongside a division and reinforcements for his other forces, calling for the capture of Damascus. The main thrust of this new offensive would come in early April and centered on the Jordan River Valley, expanding on the capture of Jericho. This offensive once again coincided with an Ottoman thrust in the region. Attacking on the 3rd, the British forces had swept northward along the valley over the following week - reaching the outskirts of Zubaydat after a period of fierce fighting on the 10th. The Ottoman Offensive began on the 11th and swept out of Nablus, slamming home south of Zubaydat and threatening to overrun the EEF's front and to capture their supply lines. At the same time, a formation crossed the Jordan from Amman and launched a series of attacks on Jericho which threatened to completely overturn British control of the Jordan Valley.

This forced Allenby to pull back from Zubaydat, which in turn allowed him to relieve the besieged defenders in Jericho and send the Turks besieging it scrambling back over the river. The Jordan Valley now settled down into a frontline around Al-Auja resembling that held around Gaza the previous year. All of this coincided with an incredibly intense struggle in the Judean Hills as Allenby's main thrust towards Nablus and Sebastia came under way. From the 5th-22nd of April Allenby put intense pressure on Liman von Saunders' positions in the Judean Hills, driving forward into the harsh terrain with a multitude of lesser assaults, searching for a weakness. The rough terrain and intense heat made this assault extremely difficult and it largely floundered after some early hopeful developments on the southern edge of the Hills, though this progress was halted at the Battle of Shiloh where the Ottomans successfully fought the EEF to a halt in the ancient ruins of the town on the 18th. By early May, as news of movement on the Western Front began to arrive, the British offensives in the region had come to a halt (9).

When the September Rising happened in Petrograd, it provoked a major crisis on Russia's Caucasian Front which only grew worse as time went on. The Russian Government's dedication to preparing for the Parsky Offensive resulted in a slow collapse of the Russian Caucasian Front. With the most capable of the Russian divisions in the Caucasus pulled out and the rear of the Russian frontlines gripped by nationalist and socialist unrest, the Turks were able to launch an army eastward into the mountains in early February. While a few thousand Armenian volunteers prepared to defend their fellow Armenians from the oncoming Turks, the Russian defences completely collapsed. The Ottoman forces moved forward at the eastern end of the line between Tirebolu and Bitlis and took Kelkit on 7th February, Erzincan on 13th February, Bayburt on 19th February, Tercan on 22nd February and the Black Sea port of Trabzon on the 24th February. Incoming sea-borne reinforcements began to disembark at Trabzon soon after. Manzikert, Hınıs, Oltu, Köprüköy and Tortum fell over the following two weeks and by the 24th of March the Ottoman forces were crossing the 1914 frontier into what had been Russian Empire territory.

In response to these Turkish successes, and spurred on by the increasingly clear defeat of the Russian Republic in the Baltic, the Muslim population of the Caucasus rose up across the region in a bid to support an Ottoman conquest. As events in Petrograd turned sour, the Georgian Mensheviks declared in favor of an independent Georgia and swiftly found themselves greeted favorably by the Germans who offered an alliance to the infant state on the condition they aid in the continuation of the war in the region. This left a bitter taste in the mouths of the Turks, but allowed them to focus their attention against weaker enemies further east in Armenian and Azerbaijani lands. As the Turks pushed ever further into Armenia in a welter of blood and death, the Armenians sought to contain and destroy the Azeris to their rear in Baku. The resultant Battle of Baku, fought between the 1st and 5th of April, saw the Azeri Musavat Party resist an effort by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation to secure control of this vital city. The resultant bloodbath would eventually see the Azeri's emerge victorious and lead to the ejection of the Armenian population of Baku, some 25,000 in all, alongside some 5,000 dead on either side (10).

From Baku the Musavat Party were able to organise Azeri resistance to Armenian encroachment. Attacked from both sides, the Armenians crumbled under the pressure. By late-April, the Ottomans had secured control of most of the Caucasus outside Georgia. As the Azeri's, with complete complicity from the local Turkish commanders, began massacring the Armenian population across the region - a massive refugee crisis became entangled with the Turko-British frontlines in Iran. As tens of thousands of Armenians streamed into northern Iran, the Turks launched a further offensive into Iran, having already taken Van from the Armenians - they would pursue them southward to Lake Urmiah where the Armenians and their Assyrian allies were crushed against the lake in early May. This allowed the Turks to enter Tabriz on the 8th of June 1918, marking one of the greatest achievements of Pan-Turkish dreams. Over the course of the first half of 1918 the Turks had thus retaken all of their lost land in Anatolia and further extended control all the way to the Caspian, gained a contentious ally in the Georgians and secured the most important city in north-western Iran. They would spend the rest of the year consolidating control of these regions and extending their line of control to the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, while redirecting forces southward to help defend against the British forces in Mesopotamia and Palestine (11).

Footnotes:

(7) I don't think that the Austro-Hungarians could have done much more than inconvenience the British once forces are moved to block them in the Adriatic but, as detailed in a previous update, before that they were able to temporarily cut off supplies to the Salonica Front causing significant supply shortages during the bitter 1917-1918 winter, resulting in a number of casualties from disease and deprivation.

(8) The death of T.E. Lawrence probably counts as a secondary PoD, given how little actual influence the events previously detailed would have had on events in Arabia, but I hope you can forgive that. The death of T.E. Lawrence won't have too many immediate impacts on the actual course of the war in the Middle East, but it will have quite significant consequences in a post-war world. Lawrence was a crucial actor in smoothing over British relations with Faisal on numerous occasions and Faisal's trust in Lawrence's personal honour played a key role in his acquiescence to a number of bad-faith actions by the British government. Without Lawrence there to reassure him of British good will, the Arabs are going to be significantly more wary of the British.

(9) The Turkish successes in repelling the British April Offensives in Palestine might come as a surprise, but from what I have been able to read the Turkish defenders were actually quite motivated and willing to fight in early-mid 1918, their morale and effectiveness only really cratering following the siphoning of their best troops for the Turkish offensives into the Caucasus and the defeat of the Spring Offensives. As such, the Turks prove themselves the tenacious defenders that they had proven themselves to be previously. There are also slightly more forces available from the defeats of Italy and Romania while the British are slightly weaker than OTL due to the supply disruptions that followed the defeat of Italy. Additionally, the British are attacking extremely strong defensive positions in the Judean Hills. All of this adds up to the British making some headway, but probably not enough to justify the cost.

(10) IOTL this is known as the March Days, where the Bolsheviks and Armenians allied to crush the Azeri Musavat Party before it could join with the Turks. IOTL the Armenians relied very heavily on forces from the Savage Division which participated in the Kornilov Affair and were disbanded in the immediate aftermath by the Provisional Government. Under a Soviet Government, they are never disbanded and instead are retained as forces loyal to the revolution. This is coupled with a lack of Bolshevik support for the cause in Armenia and Azerbaijan, resulting in an Azeri victory in the affair. Generally, ITTL, the Armenians find themselves abandoned by the rest of the world and left for the Turks to deal with. This results in an utter bloodbath, seeing the Armenian Genocide played out with almost the entire Armenian population rather than just the half under Turkish control from IOTL. While some Armenians find safety in Georgia, the vast majority of those that escape make their way to Iran and from there to half a hundred other places around the world.

(11) The defeat of the Armenians results in a national disaster, which sees the Armenian people of the Caucasus caught in a genocide. Armenia's hopes of independence disappear with it, their population becoming one of a number of large diasporas caused by the Great War. This is joined by the virtual destruction of the Assyrian population of Persia, with half of it killed and a third sent into exile by massacres by Turkish and Kurdish bands from the region. The radicals of the CUP government of the Ottoman Empire have thus largely achieved their ambitions in the Caucasus and now must slow the British in Mesopotamia and Palestine. I haven't discussed Mesopotamia, but events there largely go as per OTL with a great deal of their forces transferred to Palestine in preparation for a Summer/Autumn Offensive.


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Depiction of the Zeebrugge Raid in Popular Sciences Magazine

A False Sense of Security

April of 1918 would see several major incidents in the North Sea and along the Belgian Coast, as first the Zeebrugge and Ostend Raids were conducted, followed by the Sortie of the 26th of April by the German High Seas Fleet. The raids on Zeebrugge and Ostend were originally planned in 1916 but the plans were rejected due to the unlikeliness of their success. This changed when Vice-Admiral Roger Keyes was appointed director of the Plans Division at the Admiralty in October 1917 and on 3rd December, submitted another plan for the blocking of Zeebrugge and Ostend using old cruisers in a night attack in the period from 14th–19th March. This was combined with a number of other plans for the capture the Zeebrugge mole and the blocking of the harbour.

For the plan, a monitor, HMS Sir John Moore, was to land 1,000 troops on the mole, the monitor HMS General Craufurd was to bombard the lock gates and fortifications from short range; and blockships were to enter the harbour in the confusion. The first opportunity for the raid was in early April 1918 and as a result, on 2nd April the fleet sailed and Zeebrugge was bombed by 65 Squadron from Dunkirk. The success of the raid depended upon smokescreens to protect the British ships from the fire of German coastal artillery but the wind direction was unfavorable and the attack was called off. Zeebrugge was visible to the fleet and the fleet to the Germans in Zeebrugge; seventy-seven ships of all sizes, some with their lights already switched off, had to make a sharp turn to the west to return to their bases.

The second attempt was made on the 23rd April alongside a raid on the neighbouring harbour of Ostend. The raid began with a diversion against the mile-long Zeebrugge Mole before a landing on the mole was attempted by sailors and a battalion of Royal Marines. At the time of the landing the wind changed and the smokescreen to cover the ship was blown offshore. The marines immediately came under heavy fire and suffered many casualties. The attempt to sink three old cruisers to block the flow of traffic in and out of the Port of Bruges-Zeebrugge failed. The failure of the attack on the Zeebrugge mole resulted in the Germans concentrating their fire on the three blocking ships, HMS Thetis, Intrepid and Iphigenia, which were filled with concrete. Thetis did not make it to the canal entrance, after it hit an obstruction and was scuttled prematurely. The two other ships were sunk at the narrowest point of the canal but these obstructions were cleared within a couple of weeks. The Ostend Raid was against a canal that was the smaller and narrower than that at Zeebrugge and was considered a secondary target behind the Zeebrugge Raid. Consequently, fewer resources were provided to the force assaulting Ostend. While the attack at Zeebrugge garnered some limited success, the assault on Ostend was therefore a complete failure. The German marines who defended the port had taken careful preparations and drove the British assault ships astray, forcing the abortion of the operation at the final stage.

The Sortie of the 26th occurred in an effort to intercept one of the regular Scandinavian convoys crossing to Britain. These large convoys were often escorted by heavy ships and posed a tempting, and isolated, target. The Germans concealed their intentions from the British by maintaining strict wireless silence and a great success looked likely. While the raid was originally planned for the 24th, Admiral Scheer's fear that what had happened to Ludendorff might happen to him in the case of a failure led him to order the contacting of the German embassy in Norway to determine the scheduling of convoys - something that had not been done previously. No convoys were scheduled for the 24th, but there was one on the 26th which Scheer chose to target instead. As part of this same process, an additional check of the German High Seas Fleet was conducted in which a major fault in the Battlecruiser Moltke was identified, and it was therefore dispatched to repairs and the fleet sailed without it (12).

The Sortie caught the North Sea convoy completely by surprise, overrunning it and sinking all five escorts, numbering two destroyers, two auxiliary ships and a torpedo boat, while capturing eighteen merchantmen, sinking three and allowing six to escape. The British Grand Fleet, recently reinforced with five American Fast Dreadnaughts, set out from Rosyth immediately on hearing of the sortie - having learned of it from the broadcasts of the attacking High Seas Fleet. In their rush, the American ships and their screens were separated from the British and ran into German submarine pickets who put several torpedoes into the fleet, sinking two destroyers and gravely wounding one of the Dreadnoughts - forcing them back to the British dockyards where the dreadnought would spend the rest of the war in drydocks. The Grand Fleet would miss the High Seas Fleet, which sailed into Wilhelmshaven to wild celebrations on the morning of the 28th. While the convoy itself was a significant but manageable loss for the British, it would be the resultant reaction in Britain that shifted the sortie from a moderate accomplishment to a major victory. Specifically, it provoked a panic among merchantmen sailing from Norway as they demanded significantly greater protections if they were to continue sailing a route that could be attacked directly by the High Seas Fleet. This forced the redeployment of significant naval resources from behind the Dover Barrage to Rosyth to provide the requisite protection beginning on the 30th of April and led to the premature deployment of the North Sea Mine Barrage, which served to tie up even more naval resources and focus at the British Admiralty.

By late-April a sense of complacency had come to characterise the British General Headquarters and Home Front, where the general belief was that they were nearing the end of the danger period and that it had grown too late for the Germans to launch a successful offensive. The Germans had launched several minor attacks and demonstrations throughout the spring against both British and French positions, including at Lens, at Cambrai, west of Verdun and near the Meuse and had made major demonstrations against Verdun and Cambrai in mid-April. These attacks and assaults had led to some redistribution of forces by all three Allied combatants, particularly from Flanders to the environs of Cambrai and Arras. While the overstretched Fifth Army had made some progress in building up the porous defences along their part of the front, they remained insufficient by 1918 standards and committed many of the same mistakes made elsewhere on the British line, ordering holding lines to the last man and placing far too many at the forward edge of their line, were present. While information from across the front still indicated a coming offensive, this had been the case for the last three months and as a result the British were increasingly dismissive of these claims. Furthermore, the fact that the Germans were seemingly making preparations everywhere, and launching assaults in numerous sectors, left the Allies uncertain of where an offensive would occur under any circumstances.

The Allies were increasingly dismissive of the current threat and looked further into the future, beginning plans for future offensives once American troop levels became sufficient for offensive action. For the first year after the American entry into the war the AEF remained small, the cause for this comes down to a couple of different factors. First of all, the British and French wanted American soldiers as reinforcements to plug the gaps in their own armies while Pershing and Wilson wanted an independent force with which to exert influence on the eventual peace settlement. Both sides saw the implications as political as well as operational. Pershing estimated that his allies could hold out until America fielded an independent army, the creation of which necessitated transporting equipment and administrators as well as front-line troops. The AEF’s proportion of non-combatants actually rose from 20 to 36 percent in the seven months prior to May 1918. However, 51 percent of the Americans crossed in British or British-leased ships, as opposed 46 percent in American ones, leaving the Americans extremely dependent on British good will and needs. With a seeming lack of urgency on the part of the British, the British merchant marine demanded payment in full for helping to ship these American forces across the Atlantic - completely fair in their eyes considering the immense wealth the Americans were extracting from their Allies in this period. The result was that American troops landing in France remained at a low 40,000-60,000 per month through the first five months of 1918. However, in late April and early May, all that changed (13).

Footnotes:

(12) This is all based on an OTL sortie launched on the 24th. Scheer hadn't actually checked whether there was a convoy on the day when he sortied, and the entire project proved to be for nothing when the Moltke experienced a catastrophic machine failure, forcing them to initiate radio contact warning the Grand Fleet. They were then forced to sail back to Wilhelmshaven with the whole effort a wash. It was the last sortie of the war for the High Seas Fleet IOTL. The next attempt at launching a sortie triggered the Kiel Mutinies in late 1918 which in turn ultimately resulted in the fall of the Empire and the rise of the Weimar Republic.

(13) The fact that the Spring Offensives haven't happened yet mean that the AEF doesn't experience the incredible growth in troop numbers that happened IOTL. That happened IOTL because the British dropped everything and turned over their merchant fleet completely to the transport of American forces, with the reinforcements growing to more than 200,000 within two months from some 50,000. Here the same rate of reinforcements remains in effect, and as a result the actual threat posed by the Americans to German plans actually remain surprisingly minimal. This, of course, means that the Americans have more time to set up their logistical and administrative framework for the time being. ITTL the number of non-combatants rose to 36% in seven months, while IOTL the five months prior to the Spring Offensives came to 32.5%.


Summary:

The Allies experience significant infighting over everything from their organizational structure and military commands to war aims and troop numbers.

The struggles between Haig and Lloyd George make reverberations in the media while the Irish Convention comes to a close, with Home Rule to be implemented.

The Middle East sees significant action, as Allenby makes assaults into Palestine with mixed success while the Turks tear into the Russians and crush Armenian resistance.

By late April there is a sense of complacency among the Allies while the Anglo-Americans and Germans take swipes at each other.

End Note:

This update is probably a bit dull, but it does a lot of work to help outline the situation by late-April 1918. There is a lot of research and speculation in this but it also leans very heavily on OTL events. The main focus for this update is thus, what are the consequences if the Spring Offensives don't happen in March 1918. This actually has quite significant consequences on everything from the Irish Convention and command of the British Army, to AEF troop numbers and the Palestine Front. The events in the Caucasus are more tied to events in Russia, but I thought that since we were in the neighborhood we might as well pop by. I didn't really get into the Salonica or Mesopotamian fronts in this update since they remain largely unchanged. I realize that this update paints a rather dismal picture of the situation for the Allies, particularly the British, but I hope that I have justified the changes I have made from OTL.

The next series of updates are pretty long, even for me, so i hope you can forgive me that. There are a lot of footnotes and the like because the next series of events are extremely important to the TL and really need to be justified and argued out in full.
 
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And now you even went and killed poor Lawrence. I hope you have a damn good reason for offing him ;)

T.E. Lawrence played a critical role in getting the Hashemite leadership of the Arab Revolt to acquiesce to a large number of provisions which really ended up screwing them over. He was instrumental in getting the initial settlement in place during the critical period around 1918-1922 and opened the path for mass Jewish settlement in Palestine.

Without him, it is going to be much more difficult to implement the Balfour declaration, secure British and French interests in the region and a host of other issues. The relationship between the British and Hashemites is going to be a great deal more contentious this time around. What the consequences of that will be remains to be seen.
 
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