CH: World War 2 Like World War 1

whitecrow

Banned
The former though wasn't against a military target that could really resist against such an attack in any fashion.
How does a military target defend itself any better against infected flees in days before antibiotics any better than civilian villages? Yeah, Yeah, anti-aircraft weapons - but if bombers delivered conventional bombs despite AAA, they could deliver biobombs too.
 
How does a military target defend itself any better against infected flees in days before antibiotics any better than civilian villages? Yeah, Yeah, anti-aircraft weapons - but if bombers delivered conventional bombs despite AAA, they could deliver biobombs too.

Not just AA, but also interceptor fighters.

This isn't even taking into account that countries like France or Germany have higher amounts of antibiotics available compared to China.
 

whitecrow

Banned
Not just AA, but also interceptor fighters.
Nothing OTL bombers haven't faced.

This isn't even taking into account that countries like France or Germany have higher amounts of antibiotics available compared to China.
Er, as far as I know the 1st large scale use of antibiotics were used by Americans in the Pacific durring WW2, not by the French & Germans.

Plus I'm not sure if Yersinia pestis is susceptible to early penacilins.
 
OTL Japanese bombed Chinese villages with plague-infected flees and British plans to infect German cattle with Anthrax. Delivery shouldn't be that big an issue.

First rule of WMD. Only use them against people who can't retaliate.

Hence Italian use on the Ethiopians and Japanese use on the Chinese and not German use on the British or Japanese use on the US.
 

whitecrow

Banned
First rule of WMD. Only use them against people who can't retaliate.

Hence Italian use on the Ethiopians and Japanese use on the Chinese and not German use on the British or Japanese use on the US.
Then make one side over-confident and falsely believe their defenses make retaliation impossible ;)
 
Then make one side over-confident and falsely believe their defenses make retaliation impossible ;)

Even the overconfident ones didn't do this, like Nazi Germany, despite them being plenty wasteful in other areas in OTL. Why would this change here?

The precedent is that your victim must not be able to counter it, and I can't see that changing here.
 

whitecrow

Banned
Well, OK, here is my idea (feel free to pick it apart at your own leisure):

“Bigger is better” strategy is adopted when it comes to tanks post-WW1. Have some inter-war period conflict (Russian Civil War? Sino-Japanese Conflict?) where heavy tanks win in confrontation with (inferior) enemy forces reinforce this notion.

WW2 breaks out on the western front. Different tank strategy means there is no Blitzkrieg and battle lines bog down between France and Germany. UK enters on the French side.

Wanting to end the conflict quickly and avoid another WW1-like protracted war, UK decides to attack German pastures with Anthrax, causing an epidemic and food shortage due to cattle die off. Its hoped that Germany the disaster will cause Germany to collapse, forcing the “Huns” to the peacetable. U.K. does not fear retaliation because they feel the RAF and the new radar stations are up to the tasks of stopping any German bombers. Or maybe even the Germans have not been seen wielding bombers capable of reaching Britain. It also would help if British intelligence believes Germans don’t have a similar biological weapons program. Take your pick out of any of these or their combinations to explain why U.K. would not fear retaliation.

U.K. gambit fails. Although crippled, Germany retaliates by bombing U.K. cities with Yersinia pestis-infected flees, causing a black plague outbreak in crowded metropolises :eek:
 
Eh... no. For one, I don't see battleship tanks catching on because of the resource consumption, and that they just wouldn't be combat effective.
 
If you really want it to be another "infantry slog" war, how about this:

The USGS estimate of 1915 that there is only enough oil left for another 10 years turns out to be true...

Steam powered tanks FTW...
 
If you really want it to be another "infantry slog" war, how about this:

The USGS estimate of 1915 that there is only enough oil left for another 10 years turns out to be true...

Steam powered tanks FTW...

A bit ASB, but for an ASB scenario may be open.
 

whitecrow

Banned
Eh... no. For one, I don't see battleship tanks catching on because of the resource consumption, and that they just wouldn't be combat effective.
Hm. What about tanks not catching on, period? Let's say due to some poorer performance in WW1 they're deemed inefficient failures and waste of time & money. Would that make WW2 more like WW1?
 
Hm. What about tanks not catching on, period? Let's say due to some poorer performance in WW1 they're deemed inefficient failures and waste of time & money. Would that make WW2 more like WW1?

That's pretty much impossible because World War 1 tanks were pretty bad to begin with. They broke down constantly, were quite slow, and... well, really had more psychological value than anything else then. It took World War 2 to make them respected battlefield weapons.
 
Wasn't WWII a lot like WWI under all these categories IOTL?

1) The Siege of Leningrad and the Italian Front, to say nothing of the war in Belarus certainly all qualify for this. Not to mention the Battles of Narva. Much of the actual combat and the way victories were won boiled down to attrition. Certainly the Soviet victory qualified as that, and the victory of the Allies in the West has shades of it. Can we really say that the Bocage fighting wasn't attrition? Or God forbid the Huertgen Forest?

2) WWII was plenty grey IOTL if we look at it. Obviously the Nazis are in nobody else's league, but they don't have very many pre-modern equivalents either. Maybe Genghis Khan and Tamerlane but that's about it. You had the British do things like this:

http://www.oldindianphotos.in/2009/12/bengal-famine-of-1943-part-1.html
.

You had the USA and British both accept area bombing, which in the words of people like Bomber Harris was purely "let's kill enough civilians until morale cracks. You also had not to mention Mao Zedong as a leader of one of the major Allied movements (albeit after 1942 Japan rendered him irrelevant in the not-very-subtly named Kill All, Burn All, Loot All offensive). And of course the Soviets pulled off things like the Katyn Massacre and got Nazis hung for that one. It was very much black and grey, and the guys coming across the *least* nasty of them all are the USA with its concentration camps for Japanese, Italians, and (some pro-Nazi) Germans, its strategic bombing campaign, and its atrocities, primarily in the Pacific Theater.

By comparison both the British and the Soviets had mass-scale atrocities as their responsibilities in this timeframe.

3) The Cold War and decolonization certainly showed a great disenchantment with the pre-WWII Great Power establishment......
 
Yes, so the key is to replace Nazi Germany with someone as gray as the United Kingdom, or at least the Soviet Union. The latter isn't too hard considering what it did!:eek:
 
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