AHC: An Even Worse WWI Outcome

Let's see if we can up the chaos and bodycount a bit

Have Britain be desperate enough to introduce conscription in Ireland, but also scared/dumb enough to be openly insulting. I.e. have irish conscripts serve in "native" regiments under white - sorry - english officers, and without integral heavy weapons (mgs, mortars).

Eventually open revolt breaks out in Ireland, and when news reaches the continent, some of those regiments mutinies and murders their officers.
This of course leads to full scale clashes with regular units.
There are however many thousand irishmen in regular units, so we may see desertions, fraggings and even small scale assaults on hqs and heavy weapons units.
 
Let's see if we can up the chaos and bodycount a bit

Have Britain be desperate enough to introduce conscription in Ireland, but also scared/dumb enough to be openly insulting. I.e. have irish conscripts serve in "native" regiments under white - sorry - english officers, and without integral heavy weapons (mgs, mortars).

Eventually open revolt breaks out in Ireland, and when news reaches the continent, some of those regiments mutinies and murders their officers.
This of course leads to full scale clashes with regular units.
There are however many thousand irishmen in regular units, so we may see desertions, fraggings and even small scale assaults on hqs and heavy weapons units.

They would have to be conscripted at gunpoint and would murder their officers and desert at the first opportunity. The Germans could be smart and assist as much they could with the mass desertions and form an Irish unit of their own. Imagine what a slap in the face that would be to Great Britain!
 
Mutinies in Irish regiments

Mutinies, on a small scale, occured in OTL - the Connaught Rangers mutiny in India 1920 against Martial law in Ireland for example. A really nasty outcome to the 1916 Rising could have made events like that more likely. Interestingly the same Regiment was part of the forces loyal to the British and took an active part in putting down the Rising, so the possibility of formal actions between elements of the British Army in Ireland at least can't be dismissed.
 
Guys, there were already Irish regiments, and Britain raised new battalions in existing regiments on the standard pattern, that was our military system. Like all our battalions, Irish ones were led by a group of men chosen for their ability to conjugate Latin verbs and play the bally game, but there is absolutely no reason whatever to deny them weapons.

When you think how heavy-handed and self-defeating our Irish policy could already be, and then think that we never for a moment thought of doing something that stupid... yeah.

Also, this 'conscripted at gunpoint' stuff. Yes, it would have been bitterly unpopular in Ireland. It wasn't exactly uniformly welcomed in Britain. But are people aware how many Irishmen were already serving and managing not to immediately desert? Obviously the ones left behind are those least keen to serve in the first place so that makes a difference, but really, one ought not to regurgitate stereotypes.
 
The war goes on for another year, leading to communist revolutions in France and Germany in addition to the Soviet Union.
 
Also, this 'conscripted at gunpoint' stuff. Yes, it would have been bitterly unpopular in Ireland. It wasn't exactly uniformly welcomed in Britain. But are people aware how many Irishmen were already serving and managing not to immediately desert? Obviously the ones left behind are those least keen to serve in the first place so that makes a difference, but really, one ought not to regurgitate stereotypes.


There's a difference between being unenthusiastic about military service and regarding the army you are drafted into as an enemy army. And by 1918, whatever may have been true earlier in the war, quite a few Irishmen were beginning to see the British army in that light.

Nor did conscription in Britain ever come anywhere near to causing a general strike there. In Ireland (Apr 1918) it did cause one.
 
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The war goes on for another year, leading to communist revolutions in France and Germany in addition to the Soviet Union.

Actually those two countries have the best chance of Communism working as designed, a major part of the problem in Russia with the Revolution is that the society was still essentially feudal in a mostly feudal state which was ill suited for the kind of rapid fire industrialization that they where subjected to. Also correct me if im wrong but wasnt most of the French Far-Left anarchist?
 
Actually those two countries have the best chance of Communism working as designed, a major part of the problem in Russia with the Revolution is that the society was still essentially feudal in a mostly feudal state which was ill suited for the kind of rapid fire industrialization that they where subjected to. Also correct me if im wrong but wasnt most of the French Far-Left anarchist?

The HOI2 mod Kaiserreich, diverging after a German victory, has both Russia and Britain establish Syndicalist governments instead of Communist ones. In the British case, local administration is run by trade unions which send representatives to a general congress. There's less oppression (at least in the game) than in IRL communist countries, but it won't be practical in the long run as the economy basically turns into a giant version of British Leyland in the '70s - old, horribly run and ready for collapse.
 
When a small French scientific mission continued their work on a research for a possible vaccine against yellow fever, few paid much notice amidst the chaotic events of June 1918. Then, shortly after the latest shipment of Callithrix monkeys had arrived from Côte d'Ivoire for testing, few of the scientists and research aides got sick. They became feverish, complained limb and muscle pain, but the medical official realized this was more than yet another local influenza outbreak when the patients begun to suffer from severe fits diarrhea and vomiting and their bodies became bruised, while one of the patiens begun to bleed blood from his nostrils and eyes as well. By this time quarantine efforts were already too late, and soon a pandemic of unseen proportions swept through the French countryside, crossed the English Channel and trenches of Western Front and reached the starving civilian populations of central and Eastern Europe.

Peste Rouge, "der Rote Tod", Red Death, Красной смерти...the disease had many names, all pointing to the bleeding disorders it caused alongside the high fever that eventually killed most infected who didin't recover. Together with the devastating flue epidemic it swept through the war-torn countries of Northern Hemisphere only to finally succumb after touring all continents and sowing death and devastation on its wake. The paranoia and frustration caused by the highly contagious and deadly disease was the fatal final straw to societies that had already been on the edge because of the strain caused by war, and the sparks of Red Death set the flames of following unrest and revolution to full fury.

Summa summarun: what if an even worse pandemic than OTL Spanish Flu got loose on the final moments of WW1?
 
I think I can make an earlier one worse:

The US never enters the war. Both sides continue to fight even as things fall apart internally. Both sides believe if they can just hold on a little longer the enemy will have to admit defeat. In the summer of 1919 Austria-Hungary disintegrates as various nationalities revolt. Soldiers in Italy revolt against their stubborn and idiotic military leaders. The French Army openly mutinies refusing to carry out a new offensive. Before the German Army can really take advantage of this there is a communist uprising in Berlin and other parts of Germany. With the homeland nearing starvation there is wide support. Ireland in in open revolt and there are strikes and anti war protests all over the UK but especially in Scotland. There is widespread inflation as the value of the British pound plummets.

With all sides at the breaking point and desperate they agree to a temporary armistice which leaves the armies in place until a final agreement can be reached. Similar to the end of the Korean War.

Unfortunately, chaos and government collapse all around mean a final agreement is never reached. Many military units disintegrate. Some begin trying to go home while still organized in more or less cohesive units; most of these degenerate into banditry. Some try to grab resources around their current locations; the successful ones become warlord statelets of various sorts. Various halfhearted (and halfassed) interventions/peacekeeping missions/landgrabs by the United States, the UK, Sweden, Persia, China, Japan, and even a couple of tries by Muslim states newly independant of the Ottoman Empire, only add to the chaos; most of these countries end up washing their hands of the whole continent of Europe.

You get the Thirty Years War, combined with choice bits of the Russian Civil War, raging from the Pyrenees to Siberia. If not further--I don't see Spain staying stable through all this, for instance.

With all this, the mutated version of the Spanish flu (with a longer incubation period and an even higher fatality rate) ends up not being Europe's biggest concern.
 
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