alternatehistory.com

I was thinking about this while reading PlC, and didn't want to clog P's excellent timeline.

Anywho, the basic POD in that is "French Army better prepared for WWI". Was there anybody who remotely predicted what WWI would be like? I know for WWII there was Guderian, and DeGalle, and [that british guy whose name I forget] all of whom had at least adequate conceptions of what WWII was going to look like. Whereas, for WWI, the only one I can think of was (er, some guy again) who wrote the book explaining that what with the interconnectedness of the 1910s world and the new mass armies, any war would be absolutely economically devastating, but even then he came to the wrong conclusion (War is now to horrible to contemplate! as opposed to the historically-attested People are absolute f***ing idiots). Oh, and HGWells, a bit, even if it was a tankwank.

So - was there anyone who had an idea of what WWI would be like? And, a related topic: if somebody published a Turtledovesque light fictionalization of WWI in, say, 1903, what would people have thought of it?
Top