DBWI: The "Great Eastern War" Esclates

As I'm sure fans of our genre know quite well, yesterday marks the convenient "11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month" that caps off notable author Robert Cobroys "A Greater War" Trilogy with an armastice to the catastrophic conflict that engulfed the globe. For those unfamiler with the books,the theory covers an alternative timeline in which, instead of the rise of the Reformist-Left faction in France during the early 20's, a better showing by the Right avoids the dipolomatic split between Russia and France by having the more expansionist governments actually back one another during the Manchurian, Bosnian, and Moroccan Crisies, thus insuring the two were still allies at the outbreak of the "The Great Eastern War" when,in a more extreme parallel to OTL's bombing of the conferance between the Ottoman and Austrian forgein Ministers during their meeting in Sarajevo to discuss reforming the status of Bosnia by a disgruntled veteren of the failed Balkan League, future Emperor Ferdinand is shot by a radical Panslav terrorist high on patriotism following a successful campaign against the Turks and resulting breakdown in relations between the Balkan States

This, of course, means that The Great Eastern War of our timeline isent initially limited to Eastern Europe but instead results in Austria and Germany (Italy and the Ottomans aren't in this war, at firs) facing an "Entente" of France and Russia that turns it into a two front war, eventually drawing in every other Great Power into over four years of hell (yes,even the USA) rather than the relatively conventional campaigns of manuver and limited tactical siege of real life. By the time we reach the end,everything's in flames, everybody is broke,and pretty much every state east of the Rhine on the verge of or already having collapsed into Revolution (and France could be said to be a near run thing). So, what if this nightmare scenario had come to pass? Some questions in particular....

  1. What would be the financial effects of not only more than doubling the scope of the War,but it's timeframe as well? International debt markets would be saturated to the limit, especially since London and Paris would how have to be borrowing as well instead of sending out.
  2. Could the advent of "Trench Warfare" and the narrowness if lines changed military development? The advent of the motorcycle is one thing that probably gets pushed back a little, at least,but what about the decline of fortresses following the "Just go around it" attitude that prevailed in the Eastern expanses?
  3. How would the Balkans handle the fall of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires? I mean, I won't get into the Magyarization and Turkification doctrines of OTL, but you have to admit in the end it resulted in a more homogonized region that could eventually be split down ethno-religious lines without overly dividing people groups and leaving room for more wars. Plus, this "Yugoslavia" thing...
  4. How would the "Russian Revolution" pan out? I mean, Czar Nicky did only barely manage to keep dissent from boiling over after his defeat, but a total Socialist takeover is pretty radical. Personally,I think Conroy was just taking some creative liberties so he could have his dramatic Spring Offensive to round out the last half of the third book, but who knows?
 
  1. How would the "Russian Revolution" pan out? I mean, Czar Nicky did only barely manage to keep dissent from boiling over after his defeat, but a total Socialist takeover is pretty radical. Personally,I think Conroy was just taking some creative liberties so he could have his dramatic Spring Offensive to round out the last half of the third book, but who knows?

Creative liberties! I think the man has a sick mind. His imagining of the assassination of the Russian Royal Family in a basement in Ekaterinburg is terrifying. I wonder what Conroy had against them. Grand Duchess Olga, as we all know, was unhappily married off to the Prince of Wales in 1920. Even after her playboy husband was shot to death in the backseat of a car in Marseilles in 1934, the Dowager Princess of Wales continued as a popular, well-loved member of the British Royal Family. The British public's outpouring of grief at her untimely death in 1957 was exceptional. I will never forget how deeply moved I was when I first heard Sir Benjamin Britten's elegiac Requiem for Olga, written in her honor after her death.
 
I'm not familiar with the book, but are we dealing with a war that just snowballs into an avalanche as country after country joins in for no particular reason?

Which side are the British on? Is there a big naval war between the British Empire and the United States?
 
I'm not familiar with the book, but are we dealing with a war that just snowballs into an avalanche as country after country joins in for no particular reason?

Which side are the British on? Is there a big naval war between the British Empire and the United States?

It's a series, actually. One of Conroy's first works, though I guess it diden't get on many people's radars until the reprinting for the Centennial celebrations back in 2016.

Basically, the fact France is allied to Russia (rather than splitting with the Czarist regeime in disgust and patching things up with Britain directly once she abandoned the "Splendid Isolation" policy) means that when Austria and Serbia went to war, drawing in Russia and Germany, the situation spins further out of control as Paris ends up declaring war as well. Viviani is still Prime Minister, but lost his spine somewhere and gets dragged along by warmongers (they kind of gloss over the internal politics of getting the party to go along). This obliges Germany to try to take out France in a quick strike, cutting through a corner of Belgium to try to outflank the main French concentration facing E-L which gets Britain into the war nominally to protect the country (but really as an excuse by the Liberals to rescue their floundering government by getting attention off the Irish Crisis and to weaken their German commercial rival). They end up throwing up a blockade to try to starve the German economy, which eventually results in the German High Seas Fleet being bottled up and resorting to Submersables as a way to conduct commerce warfare. Then, by some miracle of Republican vote-splitting the Americans actually elect a pro-Southern Anglophile President (some professor named Wilson) who drums the public opinion up enough to draw the US in on France's side in 1917.
 
Wouldn't the Germans have just ignored the French in that situation and concentrated on Russia? Their frontier with France was short and well fortified.

I don't see how even the most francophile British government would have thrown a hundred years of diplomatic strategy overboard and intervened.
 
Creative liberties! I think the man has a sick mind. His imagining of the assassination of the Russian Royal Family in a basement in Ekaterinburg is terrifying. I wonder what Conroy had against them.

He had something against them? TBH I think it was just something he added to dramatize the book. Though still annoyed that we never found out if the daughters survived to be rescued by the Czechslovaks (Man the segment was amazing well written and somehow keeping up my suspension of disbelief)
 
Wouldn't the Germans have just ignored the French in that situation and concentrated on Russia? Their frontier with France was short and well fortified.

I don't see how even the most francophile British government would have thrown a hundred years of diplomatic strategy overboard and intervened.

The British Intervention part is amazing; whole chapters are dedicated to the "Liberal Triumverate " and their internal political shadow-boxing with Balfour and Carson over turning the war into a way to impose censorship, rally support for the party, and cut the Conservative justification for the tarriff out from under them. Lots of proverbial back-stabbing and meetings in the night that goes DEEP into the internal rifts British society was going through during that critical decade. It was a forgein adventure (expected to be short and cheap) that went horribly, horribly wrong.

I was overjoyed when he announced there'd be a sequel trilogy coming out over the next few years. I'm really looking forward to seeing how events unfold after the war.
 
The state that the new German Republic can be charitably called unstable. The epilogue of final book focuses on this Jerry bit character named Aton Drexler, who is portrayed as a Far right demagogue. OTL he was a Locksmith and died in '42.
 
He had something against them? TBH I think it was just something he added to dramatize the book. Though still annoyed that we never found out if the daughters survived to be rescued by the Czechslovaks (Man the segment was amazing well written and somehow keeping up my suspension of disbelief)

Common writers technique. Leave us hanging so we'll buy the sequel to find out what happened.
 
The state that the new German Republic can be charitably called unstable. The epilogue of final book focuses on this Jerry bit character named Aton Drexler, who is portrayed as a Far right demagogue. OTL he was a Locksmith and died in '42.

Yah, I'm not quite sure where Conroy picked up such an obscure name from if he did so purposefully. Maybe he just grabbed some public records and pointed to a name at random? If anything, I'm predicting the sequal trilogy is going to involve the Freikorp clashing with Luxemburg's Reds in a German Civil War. Probably the Communists are going to win, if the wanking the Russian Reds got is any indication.
 
No I think Conroy is going to balance the scales. A major socialist power and an equal far right power which will try to take back Alsace-Lorraine. You know not to make it look like a full socialist wank. Now the headcanon I got is that the American stock market is going to crash. While America wasn't focused on in the trilogy, the immediate post war saw to an unstable boom in the NYC stock market. With the failure of the world market, will lead to France and Britain to call in German debt. The Economy fails and the constitution fails the people and the people choose the far right or far left. Democracy dies in darkness, and the world is primed for the great war round 2.
 
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