Does the Entente win if the USA doesn't enter WW1?

Who wins the war?


  • Total voters
    128
Is it not possible that the Germans could continue to prop up AH without the pressure of having to launch one last attempt at a death blow to the entente? At the very least that should keep AH in a little longer, that could be enough to see Italy cut its losses, depending of course on what happens on that front. If CP knock out Italy and don't show any signs of folding in the balkans now that Russia is out its going to be a heavy hit to Entente morale.
Personally I think it will be Entente perception of German strength more than anything else that causes them to throw in the towel.

The kind of aid the Germans sent the Dual-Monarchy was troops and weapons, what they extracted in return was food and raw materials, the particular vital shortage in both Austria and Hungary and all the other subject principalities of the Empire was food. For AH the Germans are part of the problem and no longer part of the solution.
 
The Germans not launching Operation Michael (launched mainly as a desperation offensive to beat the Allies before the Americans could arrive if force) will definitely change the strategic picture. The Germans committed 72 divisions to Operation Michael. If the standard German division was roughly 15,000 men, then the Germans now have 1,080,000 troops that won't be immediately committed to battle. Just a fraction of these would be enough to make another attack into Italy which would go a long way to propping up Austria-Hungary.
 
The kind of aid the Germans sent the Dual-Monarchy was troops and weapons, what they extracted in return was food and raw materials, the particular vital shortage in both Austria and Hungary and all the other subject principalities of the Empire was food. For AH the Germans are part of the problem and no longer part of the solution.
They may be part of the problem for AH's people but I don't see them collapsing with that many German divisions floating around.
 
They may be part of the problem for AH's people but I don't see them collapsing with that many German divisions floating around.

Well as hunger takes ever more of an effect then productivity will inevitably decline, even assuming the Germans manage to do what they could not OTL and enforce compliance on the common people, the Imperial and Royal Army and of course Kaiser Karl himself. In effect the Germans would have to redeploy enough troops to garrison AH while of course then committing more of their own arms to keep the KuK viable in the field.
 

trajen777

Banned
What i see :
1. Russia falls
2. USA not sending troops
3. Germans not under pressure to attack in the west
4. food shortage were worst in the 1916
5. Romania and Ukraine wheat flows in 1918 to CP
6. 20 number of German divisions allocated to Mac front -- Salonika front crumbles
7. 10 Div to Italy -- and anyone say Capareto 2nd === Italy falls away
8. Brit / French offensives fail growing rebellion concerned by Russia comm party -- Germans afraid of revolution
9. Treaty reached -- (like most Euro wars in limited balance ) --- AL goes to election in x years -- Germany navy reduced to % of Brits -- BL in place German col gone
10. German becomes more democratic as per Kaiser promises
 
What i see :
1. Russia falls
2. USA not sending troops
3. Germans not under pressure to attack in the west
4. food shortage were worst in the 1916
5. Romania and Ukraine wheat flows in 1918 to CP
6. 20 number of German divisions allocated to Mac front -- Salonika front crumbles
7. 10 Div to Italy -- and anyone say Capareto 2nd === Italy falls away
8. Brit / French offensives fail growing rebellion concerned by Russia comm party -- Germans afraid of revolution
9. Treaty reached -- (like most Euro wars in limited balance ) --- AL goes to election in x years -- Germany navy reduced to % of Brits -- BL in place German col gone
10. German becomes more democratic as per Kaiser promises
Mostly possible but the Germans arnt giving up A-L and frankly any referendum there would probably be rigged even if they thought they were likely to win anyway.
 

BooNZ

Banned
I might humbly suggest 5.5%

So you're suggesting a 0% premium on unsecured debt with a nation, which if it loses the war, might be unable to repay unsecured creditors. Could I interest you in the purchase of a slightly used bridge?...

In reality, the Entente might only suffer a modest increase in finance costs initially, but interest rates are likely to steadily rise with the balance of unsecured debt - ultimately there is a limited appetite for unsecured debt, unless an appropriate risk premium is on the table . The level of British procurement from the USA would initially need to be scaled back compared to existing levels. This is a total contrast to OTL, where the entry of the US provided almost limitless credit and resulted in a flood of war materials to the Entente cause - over and above the relatively modest military contribution of the USA. The immediate shortfall of US material would ITTL almost immediately and increasingly impair the Entente's combat performance compared to OTL.

Further, if the Entente were to continue to attract purchases of unsecured debt at reasonable rates, it would need to demonstrate an Entente victory (and ultimate repayment of unsecured Entente debt) remained viable. Conversely, potential investors in Entente debt would be digging for information upon which to make their investment decisions. So not only would the Russian February revolution create a crisis of confidence, but otherwise suppressed problems like, French manpower crisis, French morale crisis, French fuel shortages, British naval fuel shortages, British Army fuel crisis, British manpower shortages, British tanker shortages and British naval shortages are far more likely to be publically identified and make potential investors ever more nervous.

So, the Entente access to credit (and therefore US materials) is gradually and increasingly strangled, until Russia taps out and the Entente access to unsecured credit dries up altogether.
 
So you're suggesting a 0% premium on unsecured debt with a nation, which if it loses the war, might be unable to repay unsecured creditors. Could I interest you in the purchase of a slightly used bridge?...

For all of his snark about how anything less than OTL American aid to the Entente is "America sending itself into depression to help out the CP's", he's sure adamant that American banks must gamble billions of dollars to help out Robert Lansing and the arms industry.
 
For all of his snark about how anything less than OTL American aid to the Entente is "America sending itself into depression to help out the CP's", he's sure adamant that American banks must gamble billions of dollars to help out Robert Lansing and the arms industry.

For all of my snark not one of you has actually offered a contemporary document outlining how the Entente who primarily consisting of countries like Britain and France have a history of at least trying to honour war debt, win, lost or draw and in Britain's case at this time an unblemished one might be considered a totally unacceptable risk. In fact when I pointed out that the private lenders of OTL did not actually lose money, they just did not make as much as they expected it provoked outrage.

Indeed what we have here is precisely BooNZ trying to sell me a used bridge without the documentation that demonstrates that he is a legal agent for the sale.

How badly do any of you envisage Britain and France losing with US credit? Seriously as it has been pointed out by scholars such as Ferguson that the Germans could have honoured their debts post-world war had they chosen and they lost.

No the snark is on the other side here, indeed I half expect the jabberwocky to turn up.
 
Well I think here my analysis is more based on the food riots in Vienna which is not surprising seeing as supplies of meat had fallen to 23g per person per day in Austria and 10g per person per day in Hungary and the supply of potatoes was just 70g per person per day or 1/5th the German ration by the beginning of 1918 Herwig, The First World War p361 and it is hard to blame any of that on the Americans.

IOW conditions in Austria-Hungary were even worse than in Germany, yet even AH was able to fight on as long as Germany was in a position to prop it up. So Germany can certainly fight on, blockade or no blockade.

The blockade may indeed have accelerated the collapse of German morale after the failure of her 1918 offensives, but that collapse was caused by the military failure, not especially by the blockade.

And as previously noted, US entry allowed a considerable tightening of the blockade.
 
IOW conditions in Austria-Hungary were even worse than in Germany, yet even AH was able to fight on as long as Germany was in a position to prop it up. So Germany can certainly fight on, blockade or no blockade.

The blockade may indeed have accelerated the collapse of German morale after the failure of her 1918 offensives, but that collapse was caused by the military failure, not especially by the blockade.

And as previously noted, US entry allowed a considerable tightening of the blockade.

The Sixtus Affair is one of several indicators including as you point the much worse situation in AH and the fact the Germans kept extracting food from their ally, that suggest that no in fact the Dual-Monarchy was not capable of carrying on much longer than it did and was not so much being propped up as shackled to the German war effort.
 
But that just means that Germany fails later on - you have to attack to win, [

Not when you are standing on enemy soil virtually everywhere. All you have to do is hang in until the enemy's soldiers despair of ever breaking through. When that happens the enemy will have to make peace.

unless you can win by blockade, and the blockade of Germany was not going to go away.

It doesn't have to go away. Certainly it makes life unpleasant for many Germans et al - though as others have noted this was as much down to German mismanagement (which could be corrected given more time) than to the blockade per se, but it is not going to cause a German collapse in any foreseeable future. There was no way to "win by blockade" - the blockade was a supplement, not a war-winner in itself.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Not when you are standing on enemy soil virtually everywhere. All you have to do is hang in until the enemy's soldiers despair of ever breaking through. When that happens the enemy will have to make peace.
But can you "hang in", when your generals have been saying your army's flower was destroyed in 1916 by enemy attacks? When your food supply is getting increasingly threadbare?


It doesn't have to go away. Certainly it makes life unpleasant for many Germans et al - though as others have noted this was as much down to German mismanagement (which could be corrected given more time) than to the blockade per se, but it is not going to cause a German collapse in any foreseeable future. There was no way to "win by blockade" - the blockade was a supplement, not a war-winner in itself.

That seems... odd... as a statement. It suggests that Germany could have lost just as much without the blockade?
 
Not when you are standing on enemy soil virtually everywhere. All you have to do is hang in until the enemy's soldiers despair of ever breaking through. When that happens the enemy will have to make peace.

Yet in OTL it was German troops who despaired of ever breaking through and in part this despair was a result of being confronted with the difference between their material condition and that of the enemy.



It doesn't have to go away. Certainly it makes life unpleasant for many Germans et al - though as others have noted this was as much down to German mismanagement (which could be corrected given more time) than to the blockade per se, but it is not going to cause a German collapse in any foreseeable future. There was no way to "win by blockade" - the blockade was a supplement, not a war-winner in itself.

But history demonstrates that home fronts do matter in wars it was despondency on the home front that provoked the conscripts in Petrograd to mutiny. Not only that but we see the demand for better management by the Germans than they in fact demonstrated OTL.

This is a bit like the credit argument, the Entente probably win with credit so credit must be cut off so the odds of the Entente losing and being un-creditworthy go up.
 
The Sixtus Affair is one of several indicators including as you point the much worse situation in AH and the fact the Germans kept extracting food from their ally, that suggest that no in fact the Dual-Monarchy was not capable of carrying on much longer than it did and was not so much being propped up as shackled to the German war effort.

They certainly were shackled to it. According to Norman Stone (not a relative afaik)in 1917/18 more than a third of the NCOs and junior officers in the KuK Army were actually Germans seconded to them by their big brother - an enormous "fifth column" which would make it next to impossible for AH to desert Germany until the Germans' own morale collapsed - which happened only after the failure of their 1918 offensives. This failure was also what prevented the Germans from reinforcing the Balkan Front whose collapse initiated that of AH. The Dual Monarchy's collapse was a result of German military failure.
 
They certainly were shackled to it. According to Norman Stone (not a relative afaik)in 1917/18 more than a third of the NCOs and junior officers in the KuK Army were actually Germans seconded to them by their big brother - an enormous "fifth column" which would make it next to impossible for AH to desert Germany until the Germans' own morale collapsed - which happened only after the failure of their 1918 offensives. This failure was also what prevented the Germans from reinforcing the Balkan Front whose collapse initiated that of AH. The Dual Monarchy's collapse was a result of German military failure.

Yet the evidence would appear that the German military will continue to fail ITL. The Germans were running out of rope by 1916 let alone if the war lasts longer and with the US not entering that is the only thing that the CP can honestly expect to gain, time. Now a lot would depend on how they spent their negotiating capital but the clique around Ludendorff and Hindenburg were determined that only territorial expansion would appease the working class. Which is why I think the Germans would continue to ask for too much at the peace table compelling the Entente to fight on and because the Entente while stretched is less stretched than the Germans by an order of magnitude and the Germans are less stretched than their allies, the expectation must surely rest on a likely Entente victory.
 
Yet in OTL it was German troops who despaired of ever breaking through and in part this despair was a result of being confronted with the difference between their material condition and that of the enemy.

They only despaired after their offensives had failed.

Of 712,000 Germans taken prisoner on the Western Front, 386,000 were captured in the final hundred days - more than in the previous four years put together. So until later July 1918 the average number of Germans surrendering had been a bit over 200 per day. At that point it soared to nearly 4000 per day, and continued at that level to the end of the war.

Did the blockade really get that much worse between early July and early August? Hardly. The collapse of morale resulted from defeat on the battlefield. The food situation may have accelerated it after it had started, but was not the primary cause.
 
They only despaired after their offensives had failed.

Of 712,000 Germans taken prisoner on the Western Front, 386,000 were captured in the final hundred days - more than in the previous for years put together. So until later July 1918 the average number of Germans surrendering had been a bit over 200 per day. At that point it soared to nearly 4000 per day, and continued at that level to the end of the war.

Did the blockade really get that much worse between early July and early August? Hardly. The collapse of morale resulted from defeat on the battlefield. The food situation may have accelerated it after it had started, but was not the primary cause.

The blockade had long been having an effect on morale, further the troops at the front thought the civilians back home were getting better food and care than they themselves coupled with the fact that Bolshevik revolution had inspired increased radicalism among the left. Even the Reichstag had soured on the war with its "Peace Resolution" of 19 July 1917 and this was during the period the German high command could still argue the Americans would be irrelevant.

Certainly I agree with you that Germany was fundamentally military defeated in OTL and the stab in the back was a myth but civil society which is the fabric on which military power is merely sketched was already stretched to breaking by mid-war and from then on it was only a matter of when and not if it broke taking the military with it.
 

BooNZ

Banned
Yet the evidence would appear that the German military will continue to fail ITL. The Germans were running out of rope by 1916 let alone if the war lasts longer and with the US not entering that is the only thing that the CP can honestly expect to gain, time...
Shall we recap the year prior to 1916:
  • The Dardanelles disaster
  • The inauspicious entry of Italy on the Entente side
  • The entry of Bulgaria on the CP side, eliminating Serbia and allowing the Ottomans to be reinforced
  • The miraculous recovery of AH military, illustrated by the collapse and 'great retreat' of Russian forces
  • Ineffectual Entente offensives on the Western Front throughout 1915
  • A generally ineffectual Entente blockade, coupled with increased nitrate production
Have we missed any other evidence of German 'failures'?
 
Shall we recap the year prior to 1916:
  • The Dardanelles disaster
  • The inauspicious entry of Italy on the Entente side
  • The entry of Bulgaria on the CP side, eliminating Serbia and allowing the Ottomans to be reinforced
  • The miraculous recovery of AH military, illustrated by the collapse and 'great retreat' of Russian forces
  • Ineffectual Entente offensives on the Western Front throughout 1915
  • A generally ineffectual Entente blockade, coupled with increased nitrate production
Have we missed any other evidence of German 'failures'?

Verdun
 
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