Germany wins WW1 in 1914

This has been some great input, thanks everybody. I'm going to continue to ask leading questions in hopes of getting more opinions.

You're Germany. You just walloped the French like it was no big deal. How would a brilliant tactician win the rest of the war at this point? Obviously you would have to make nice with Britain and Belgium or risk a protracted naval battle. So what happens, annex a little bit of France, offer Belgium compensation and sign a treaty with the British, all while keeping the Russians at bay? It might have been a brief colonial style war on the western front if the chance to dig in and make it a war of attrition was bypassed. Then let another ten or fifteen years of alternate history pass where there is no war, no German Revolution, no Weimar Republic, and an entirely different dictator rising to power, and see where it goes?
 
Even with Paris having fallen, the French would have launched another offensive to try and get it back. If the German lines are 10 miles South of Paris and an offensive (remember, it was still fluid at this point) knocks the Germans back 15 miles then Taking Paris is a moot point.
 
The only way, from my understanding of things, for Germany to have won WWI and taken France, is this:

-The Willy-Nicky telegrams actually manage to avert conflict between Germany and Russia, even if Russia decides to mobilize against the Austrians over Serbia.
-The Schleiffen Plan goes as it should have. This means that the Germans are more aggressive in Liege, they invest Antwerp to busy the Belgians, but not to the extent they did OTL. Also, when the armies move closer to Paris, the wide left hook is taken as necessary to strike at Paris from the south, instead of the tight hook used to bring about the battle on the Marne.

The Willy-Niky telegrams can not do anything since neither the Kaiser nor the Tsar decide policy - foreign or military - during the July-August Crisis in 1914. It is overlooked that their cabinets and ministers excluded them from interfering in mobilization. The telegrams aren't going to work.
 
I think the best that Germany could have done without major (and thus not realistic) changes is to occupy a line from Verdun more or less due west to the sea, the high ground on the north side of the Siene valley. On paper this isn't much, but I think it would make all the difference. Holding a position on the Channel would allow Germany to attempt to seperate the 3 major entente powers from each other. Using it's navy to stop shipping through the Dover St and across the Channel German could seperate France and Britain, and Russia is already well and truly alone. If German naval action could hinder direct and timely British assistence to crises would France start to think not as an alliance partner but as a single power, and one not doing so well at that?
 
There is no way on God's green earth the Schlieffen plan would have worked. When he proposed it he was using it to get the Kaiser to add 20 divisions to the German army to make it happen, it also required Britain to stay neutral even as Belgium was stomped on

I think that's absolutely correct; the problem with the Schlieffen plan was that it demanded a level of operational mobility that an infantry army simply didn't have. Remember, in those days, infantry armies were just that, they walked around, using horses to pull guns and supply wagons. In the original memoranda outlining the plan, Schlieffen himself had considered the likelyhood of success to be slim, with three main problems unsolved - how to neutralise the very strong fortifications and garrison of Paris, the inability of the transport network to take the number of troops his plan required, and an unsolvable shortage of troops even after full mobilisation. IIRC the main problem was that the Belgian road network was incapable of handling a movement of this size leaving the plan with the position that the plan needed more troops to be completed but the roads couldn't even handle the ones originally assigned. This leads to speculation that the subsequent watering down of the Schlieffen Plan was really intended to bring it within the realms of the troop movements that were actually possible.

Also, the Schlieffen Plan was conceived at a time when Russia was extremely weak after the Russo-Japanese War so by 1914 when Russia had largely recovered, many of its elements were obsolete. So, the idea of a rapid Schlieffen Plan victory isn't really on.

The best way to get a rapid end to WW1 is to somehow make sure Russia doesn't invade East Prussia - preferably Russia stays neutral but a plausible way of doing that is hard to conceive - and that France caves in after losing most of the North East. Again, thinking of a rationale for that defies plausibility. Anyway, don't you think that the "Germany becomes a superpower" meme has been done to death?
 
Using it's navy to stop shipping through the Dover St and across the Channel German could seperate France and Britain

I think the British might object to that - and the Royal Navy is more than capable of driving the High Seas Fleet back to port and keeping it bottled up there. If there isn't a British European commitment, the resources placed in teh Army will be diverted back to the Royal Navy and we would see the RN pulling even further ahead of the German fleet in effective combat strength.
 
Additionally the Germans spent less on the army per capita than the French which wasn't helpfull either.

Sorry about going off-topic:

I have been planning to look into pre-WW I military spending for some time, but I only did a quick google some time ago ...

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/courses/milex.html

I am esp. interested in Japan, AH and Russia. Data on Italy and the US would be a bonus.

A more detailed source/compilation would be appreciated. :eek:

Thanks.
 
What none of these posts actually get at is the sheer hatred felt by the Allied powers against Germany. In the UK it was tangible; crowds both celebrated the end of the war and its beginning, and the French saw the war primarily as revanche.

This is a very valuable point; the Germasn had made themselves very unpopular before the war begun and rapidly made themselves a lot more so, For example

At the center of the condemned district lay the Catholic University of Louvain---the oldest in Belgium---and its library. The library's basement doors were broken open, flammable liquids were poured in and soon the building was engulfed in flames. The fire burned for several days, consuming over 230,000 books, some 800 of them incunabula, printed before the year 1500, and the library's famous collection of more than 900 manuscripts. Nothing was saved. The German high command telegraphed the news to the world---"Louvain is no more."

By the way, after an international effort to rebuild the library and its collection, in 1940, the Germans repeated the atrocity and burned the library and its contents to ashes again.

The reason why atrocity propaganda in 1914 was so widely accepted was that the Germans seem to have gone out of their way to provide validation for said propaganda. I'd suggest that the degree of hatred you refer to would have made any compromise peace - had it even been possible in the first place given German intransigence - impossible. What that would mean for a Germany that survived WW1 is predictable and has no good outcome.
 
The common misconception is think that averting the crisis of the Battle of the Marne was averted, then the Schlieffen Plan works. There is an ancillary error that assumes the primary goal of the Schlieffen Plan was to take Paris. Actually destroying most of the French Army was primary---taking Paris was secondary. That plan was going to fail eventually for a number of reasons not the least of which was logistics.

There is also a complementary misconception that all the Russians needed to do was to avoid Tannenberg and lo and behold they would've been in Berlin and game over.
 
Sorry about going off-topic:

I have been planning to look into pre-WW I military spending for some time, but I only did a quick google some time ago ...

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/courses/milex.html

I am esp. interested in Japan, AH and Russia. Data on Italy and the US would be a bonus.

A more detailed source/compilation would be appreciated. :eek:

Thanks.

The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War by David G. Herrmann answers most of those questions.

Michael
 
Bill, the RN is plenty powerful enough to contain the HSF unless a change of geography forces them to split their forces. If the Germans held Cap Griz Nez they could create a safe coastal shipping lane by using guns and mines so that their own warships could transit into the Channel. Light warships could attack through and cross Channel shipping that came within range, and could scuttle back to the safety of the minefeilds and coastal guns. They did this on a limited scale IOTL from the forward bases in Belgium.

Where would the RN get the forces to cover this sudden threat, stripping cruisers and desrtoyers from the GF? And what about the possibility of a major warship or three slipping into the Channel, would the GF be weakened to cover this? How many ships can the GF lose before it becomes vulnerable to an undiminished HSF?
 
Bill, the RN is plenty powerful enough to contain the HSF unless a change of geography forces them to split their forces. If the Germans held Cap Griz Nez they could create a safe coastal shipping lane by using guns and mines so that their own warships could transit into the Channel. Light warships could attack through and cross Channel shipping that came within range, and could scuttle back to the safety of the minefeilds and coastal guns. They did this on a limited scale IOTL from the forward bases in Belgium.

Where would the RN get the forces to cover this sudden threat, stripping cruisers and desrtoyers from the GF? And what about the possibility of a major warship or three slipping into the Channel, would the GF be weakened to cover this? How many ships can the GF lose before it becomes vulnerable to an undiminished HSF?

Interesting, I've heard this before and even then it was pure balderdash.
 
Bill, the RN is plenty powerful enough to contain the HSF unless a change of geography forces them to split their forces. If the Germans held Cap Griz Nez they could create a safe coastal shipping lane by using guns and mines so that their own warships could transit into the Channel. Light warships could attack through and cross Channel shipping that came within range, and could scuttle back to the safety of the minefeilds and coastal guns. They did this on a limited scale IOTL from the forward bases in Belgium. Where would the RN get the forces to cover this sudden threat, stripping cruisers and desrtoyers from the GF? And what about the possibility of a major warship or three slipping into the Channel, would the GF be weakened to cover this? How many ships can the GF lose before it becomes vulnerable to an undiminished HSF?

All of which depends on the Grand Fleet co-operating in its own destruction which is why David called it balderdash. Your whole concept depends on the British doing exactly what you want them to do and ignores any other posisble event. Lets look at a few likely countermeasures.

Coastal defense guns on Cape Griz Nez - sure, but the UK can install them as well, in Kent and along the South Coast. They did so historically and their heavy naval gun production is greater than that of the Germans. The British build more guns and bigger guns (14 and 15 inch by 1914 as opposed to 12 inch) and if needed they have an 18 inch gun coming down the pike. So in any cross-channel artillery duel, the British have a great advantage. By the way, the idea of such duels is not implausible - they happened regularly in WW2.

The British can lay mines as well - and they many more assets to do the minelaying with. They are not going to allow the Germans to lay their minefields undisturbed - nor are they going to leave those mines unswept. Also, minefields are declining assets, they require regular maintenance and "topping up" (mines get swept away by tides, moved by currents, they snap their cables and drift away). British mine technology is way in advance of German; the British were laying magnetic mines off Flanders in 1917. The British have vastly more minelaying resources than the Germans, in WW1 the minelayers were trawlers and Britain had the biggest fishing fleet in the world. So, for every mine the Germans lay to keep the British out; the British lay dozens to keep them in. Its Britain's doorstep remember.

And what makes you think that if the High Seas Fleet slips a few major warships into the Channel, they won't get sunk? We've already established that the UK can - and historically did - establish long-range gun batteries along the south coast. So, your major ships run into the British minefields and start getting pounded by shore batteries. We have an example of what happens when navies try that in the Dardanelles,. In this case, its the Germans who start losing ships, to mines, gunfire, submarine attack. If you look at a map, the southern coast of the UK is studded with naval bases (heavily defended ones at that) that could be used for submarine and destroyer bases.

How many ships can the HSF lose before it becomes hopelessly outclassed by an undiminished GF?

Sorry, but David's right when he is dismissive of your suggested "plan". It just isn't realistic.
 
Surely the RN could be supplemented by British industry?

Oh, undoubtedly it would be, especially if there is no UK land commitment to drain resources from the navy. British shipyards could build fast when they needed to so in this scenario we'd see a lot of new construction. More submarines and destroyers for the Channel, more capital ships for the Grand Fleet. I haven't got the exact data to hand but Britain still had the biggest shipbuilding industry in the world in 1914 - IIRC (may be wrong) something like 3/4 of the world's ships were built in British yards.
 
I'm sure someone will tell me that there's a different thread for this!

But wouldn't Germany in 1914 have been more successful if it stayed on the defensive in the West, and focused - in conjunction with the Austro-Hungarians - on acquiring territory in th East. The Russian Generals were not only over confident but also incompetent, their solders were ill-equiped and unprepared for the horrors of war.

If the situation with Britain is that it only went to war because Belgium's neautrality was violated, then it will stay out while the war is confined to the East. Likewise, with Britain neutral - there is no blockade. If France attempts to launch any assault on a defensive Germany in the West - surely Britain is less likely to join in!?

With numerous Russian defeats as the front-line goes further & further east, at what stage will panic grip the Russian hierarchy?

Now with peace in the East - with vast tracts of land added to Germany's and A-H's borders. Germany has the option of turning on France or assisting A-H deal with Serbia.

Inerestingly, with this scenairo an air-war is less likely to develop, and tanks - you only need tanks in the desert - to store water!!
 
If Germany was to stay on the defensive in the west (no Shlieffen Plan, just Russia), that could prove interesting. France drives deep into German territory, but Germany drives them back; the war is fought slightly further into German soil; France needs a place it can outflank the German armies, and invades Belgium and Holland; Britain intervenes perhaps??!
My TL goes a little bit like that, only the French doesn't actually drive deep into German territory. Also, Italy remains loyal to the Triple Alliance (which is one reason why the French doesn't drive deep), Britain doesn't intervene because of the invasion of Belgium, and the Netherlands doesn't join because the French violated their neutrality, but because they violated the Luxembourgish neutrality (there was an agreement that was hushed when the Germans did it... but if the French did it, well, it might have come up).
 
End the war in 1918

If you want to arrive at a scenario where Germany can "win" World War I, I think its best to get 1914 right out of your thoughts and move onto 1918.

You need one thing to happen to give Germany a chance at winning. The US needs to stay neutral. A couple things could forestall American entry into the conflict. No Zimmerman note being discovered and no sinking of the Lusatania might stall things quite a bit.

Germany had mopped up the Eastern Front and their offensive in the west had broken through the Allied lines. While it was clear that the Germany lacked the reserve strength to fully exploit that breakthrough and shatter the French army, it is also clear that without the Americans pouring into France, that the other allies lacked the strength to mount a significant counter attack. If forced to face that daunting task, the French army may very well have faced additional mutinies.

At that stage in the war, both sides were quite exhausted. Its very probably that Germany and the western allies may have arrived at a peace settlement by late 1918 or early 1919. Given the poor state of Germany's allies, its probably Germany wouldn't try and hold the western allies over a barrel, since their fortunes on other fronts would begin to turn should the fighting continue. The Austro-Hungarians would have to give up any claim on serbia and I imagine Serbia might ever get a slice out of some of their bulkan territories. Italy would like get what it got in our time line. I expect the Germans would give back their gains on the western front in exchange for a return of their captured colonies in Africa. The Brits and French would still have carved up the Ottoman mid east holdings. Germany would have lost all of its Pacific holdings.

But the Germans would have been free to dictate the reshaping of boundaries in the east. The Finns would have still had their independence, but I suspect Germany would have claimed all of Poland and at least portions of the Ukraine for themselves. While the Reds may have chosen to take a crack at them at the end of the Russian Revolution, I doubt that the Germans would have had any problem holding it.

The question is, does a peace settlement avoid the near total collapse of the German economy after the war? Given that they would have continued some semblance of a military industrial complex, maybe not. But not sure.

Ryan S. Johnson
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If Germany was to stay on the defensive in the west (no Shlieffen Plan, just Russia), that could prove interesting. France drives deep into German territory, but Germany drives them back; the war is fought slightly further into German soil; France needs a place it can outflank the German armies, and invades Belgium and Holland; Britain intervenes perhaps??!

Of course Britain intervenes - it pressures Belgium to let the French to pass thru.
 
If you want to arrive at a scenario where Germany can "win" World War I, I think its best to get 1914 right out of your thoughts and move onto 1918. {snipped excellent points}

Your dead on, just the word the the Yanks were coming kept the French army from totally folding up, plus once the US declares war there is no longer a true mediator left.

With no US (the POTUS making clear we're staying out) I just don't see the French goverment surviving 1918... and definitely the French aren't going to be launching any offensives.

So your in a race to see who collapses first Paris or Berlin. In OTL, the French had the American ace in hole, and Germany had no one to approach as a third party (at least one with leverage).

So Ryan's scenerio is very likely...Now the real question in this TL, is the Washington Treaty (Wilson actually able to dicate) just a "super" truce till either the German's settle the East or French rebuilds and/or they and London convince the Americans a German dominate over middle and east Eurpoe is not good for them... say by 1932?
 
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