How long could WWI last?

Spanish.

Flu.

Can we move on now?
The timing of both the less lethal 1918 version and the very lethal 1919 rendition, are of course, not written in stone. When you're talking PODs of more than a year before the outbreak, you could easily see butterflies that moved the timing around or made the disease less lethal.

You might be able to actually make moving the timing of the flu around the POD for extending the war a bit. Let's see how that might work. What if the lethal version of the flu hits at just the right time to break the momentum of the revolutionary fervor in Russia that overthrew the Tsarist regime--sometime in early 1917? The other powers also get hit, but because of wartime censorship nobody knows how bad things are, except in the US, which wouldn't have entered the war yet, and probably wouldn't for a while under those circumstances.

I'm guessing that Germany pulls its U-boats in after a few stumble into port with most of the crew dead, and they do a face-saving "We're suspending unlimited operations as a goodwill gesture" thing. Everybody suspends large-scale offensive operations and hopes that the enemy doesn't attack while the flu is raging.

The Central Powers put out peace feelers, but can't appear to be too eager lest they appear weak. The flu hits a population in the Central Powers that is somewhat weakened by malnutrition, but not anywhere near as bad as in 1918/1919. It also hits the Russians very hard, especially the working class areas of the big cities where Tsarist incompetence had left populations short of food.

The war goes on at a low level as the flu meanders around the world. It might lead to a peace treaty, but I suspect the powers would be too afraid of revealing weakness to push too hard for it. Casualties from the flu are partially counterbalanced by less loss of life in the battles of 1917.

The Central Powers would eventually get scuppered by food shortages, but the timing might get extended a bit under this scenario. Food shortages were obviously a factor in the German collapse, but so was the prospect of fighting fresh US troops, and the very effective Bolshevik propaganda once the Bolsheviks took over in Russia.

Speaking of Russia, I suspect that the flu would postpone, but not eliminate the Russian revolution. If the revolution happens six months later and after a devastating flu, the course of events gets real hard to predict. The devastation of the flu might finally convince the Tsar to hand over significant power to the more responsible parts of his government. Then again it might not. And of course a different timing for the flu may make for different victims. Lots of ways that could go: Lenin dies in the flu? Stalin? Hitler? As I said, nearly impossible to predict.
 
One POD no one has mentioned: winter of 1916 was nasty in Europe, with an early frost that knocked out much of the German potato crop, which provided a very large percent of their calories. Postpone the frost so the Germans get their potato crop in. That doesn't carry the Central Powers food-wise indefinitely, but might get them through into 1919 and to the flu if it hits on schedule, which probably puts the war into slow motion for a few months.

The war could drag on into late 1919, which would allow for some interesting developments in tanks, with several nice designs actually making it to the front, and with tank tactics that were just discussed historically being tested in battle.
 
If you really want a challenge, try coming up with a World War I ending that comes as close as possible to the Edgar Rice Burroughs scenario in "Beyond 60" where Europe keeps fighting until it puts its self back to the stone age, with Lions and spear-chuckers roaming London and the forests of Europe. I don't think that's realistically possible, but maybe the demented collective imagination of the board could come up with something.
 
The timing of both the less lethal 1918 version and the very lethal 1919 rendition, are of course, not written in stone. When you're talking PODs of more than a year before the outbreak, you could easily see butterflies that moved the timing around or made the disease less lethal.

Possible, but every theory I'm aware of states that the war, problems associated with it, and issues stemming from wartime medical practices played a big role in the Spanish Flu taking the course it did. Obviously, an ongoing war would exacerbate those factors.
 
I'm not questioning the general consensus here, as it seems altogether reasonable from my understanding of WW1. But on the blockade - how much would having the whole continent really help Germany? Certainly their now-confirmed gains in Russia, Poland, and the Ukraine would, as would the fact that with every passing month the rail connections to the Ottomans get better, but wasn't France already a net importer of food by WW1? And I know for sure that France is not exactly the most mineral-rich region of the Earth's surface! They won't be getting any coal or oil from France, that's for sure.


They can certainly extract enough food from France to feed their army - iirc they had about three million on the Western Front, and it's now mostly on garrison duty - plus a little something for them to send to their families in the Fatherland (provided of course that the soldier doesn't forfeit that privilege by desertion or mutinous conduct). Also, of course, the WF is no longer consuming vast amounts of high explosive, so much of the nitrates used for making it can be switched to making fertiliser instead.

If they do as the Allies did in Nov 1918, and demand the surrender of many French locomotives and rolling stock, their railway system will be working much better, so that food etc can be more easily distributed, especially as they now need far fewer troop trains. Their shortage of rubber tyres for trucks can also be alleviated at France's expense.

Re oil, they still have Rumania, and possibly Baku as well if the release of troops from the west enables them to take it (they control the Black Sea and Georgia is friendly, so the logistics are probably in their favour) and the air war has dwindled to some fighting over the Channel, so military consumption is lessened.

Italy, of course, will be providing similar compulsory service for the Austro-Hungarians, whose army (considerably smaller than the German) will probably be eating quite well courtesy of their defeated enemies.



Of course, like others, I see no reason why the British actually would continue the blockade. With France & Russia both fallen, now seems the perfect time for perfidious Albion to once again cut its losses and try to make the best peace it can. I'm just asking, in part, to help clarify my knowledge of the global economy at the time.

If America gets fed up with the now futile war then I don't see how Britain can continue on her own. The u-boat war is worse than OTL, morale is shattered by defeat in Flanders after nearly four years of wasted sacrifice, and there's no prospect of evicting Germany from any of her continental conquests.

Sidenote: As an American, I can't help but think that one of the consequences of all this will be Wilson being viewed as even more of a dip than in OTL.

Politically speaking there'll be murder done. Wilson was already unpopular, as the 1918 midterms showed, and on this TL Democratic losses will be far greater, with more to come in 1920.

Thousands of young Americans will have been sent to France only to ignominiously leave again (shades of the Grand Old Duke of York) or else kick their heels in German prison camps, captured almost before they've had a chance to fight. Thousands more will have been dragged from their homes by draft boards (many dying of fever in unhealthy training camps) only to find there is nothing now for them to do. The Republicans, as OTL, will be able to have it both ways, gaining the votes of those dissatisfied with the progress of the war and of those who never wished to fight at all. Warhawks and pacifists alike will turn on Wilson, and with no League of Nations issue he will find fewer liberal historians to defend him.
 
If the USA was kept out of the war by one means or other, it could last a long time. The Germans had some very fertile Russian territory (the Ukraine) that might produce food in the next growing season.

I could see the war slowing down--attempts at negotiations, but not really geting anywhere, while the troops mostly stare at each other across trench lines. The war winds down, as both sides try to conserve resources for a big push--but at the same time, with negotiations ongoing, don't want to throw everything into chaos and perhaps torpedo the diplomats' efforts.

Then, sooner or later, someone decides that negotiations are useless, and resumes heavy fighting.

yeah

ceasefires that don't wrap up the war itself, but buy the combatants lethal opportunities to "recover" just enough for some demented fool to think that attacking would be worth something.

throw in revolutions/overthrows in selected countries and the odds of a military-dominated junta acting with delusions of being another Napoleon or Bismarck and spending as much firepower on repressing citizen outrage as on enemy military.

throw in enough technological breakthroughs so that combatants think a new weapon could be "just the thing" to throw it in their favor.

coups, counter-coups, crushed mutinies, murdered would-be protest organizers, with enough pauses it could be a Hundred Years War.


edit
for what it's worth, I envision this potentially occurring without direct US involvement in the war, or at least not during the full length of the war (or even from 1917 to its conclusion.)
 
-, and Tsar empire on bring of collaps

with a unlikely WI USA stay out of WW1
there a chance through diplomatic channels,
the Warring parties negotiate a temporal armistice agreements.
in that case the Great War could go on for decades
only interrupted by temporal armistice agreements.

No-realistic ?
the thirty Years' War (1618–1648) is perfect example for that senario


I guess if I'd read the rest of the thread before posting, I could have just responded to your post and said, "yeah!"
 
Not much longer. Early 1920 at the latest and that is stretching. Simply put it, none of the combatants had the ability to sustain the casulaty rate, least of all Germany. Bear in mind that throughout the last two years of the war, the German people were barely getting half of their daily calorie requirements on average and that was at the best of times; to make the war carry on longer, you need a more efficient German use of the occupied territories in the east and a less incompetent leadership.
 
If you really want a challenge, try coming up with a World War I ending that comes as close as possible to the Edgar Rice Burroughs scenario in "Beyond 60" where Europe keeps fighting until it puts its self back to the stone age, with Lions and spear-chuckers roaming London and the forests of Europe. I don't think that's realistically possible, but maybe the demented collective imagination of the board could come up with something.



I think you did a typo and meant "Beyond Thirty" ?

The linked site has summaries of each chapter of the story, I think it's quite enjoyable. The author wrote it in 1915, and the story takes place about two hundred years into the future, withthe Western Hemisphere kind of sealing themselves off from the hell of Europe.


(I'm slightly slightly colorblind, so, I know the ink-color I chose is probably not as "invisible" as I would have liked. So much for my fancy "spoiler alert" attempt.)
 

Geon

Donor
A Possible Scenario

If I may put in my two cents, for what it's worth, and based on what I've read on this thread so far?
---------
In 1917 the US enters the war on the side of the Allies. Germany launches one final offensive to try to win the war in France before the Americans arrive in force. The offensive succeeds in driving to the outskirts of Paris but is halted by a desperate "third miracle of the Marne" involving every possible reserve as well as newly arrived American troops being thrown into the fray.

Instead of being allowed to fight as a separate force, General Pershing is forced to integrate the AEF into the Allied forces. Thus American troops simply become new canon fodder for the Western Front. Attempts by Pershing to change this are met with intransigence by the Allied command. Instead of the AEF playing an important role in pushing back the Germans they instead get sucked into the interminable war of attrition on the Western Front.

The year 1918 goes by with a series of offensives and counteroffensives on the Front which fare no better then their predecessors. By the end of the year, there is growing discontent in the US over the entry into the war as casualty lists at home grow longer and longer.

As the war drags into 1919 the Spanish Flu pandemic strikes creating havoc in every major country involved in the war. It is the straw that breaks the camel's back. Open revolution breaks out in Germany and the Kaiser is overthrown by an angered and hungry populace which is now being ravaged by this new threat. Almost simultaneously in France another revolution breaks out this one led by soldiers in the French Army determined to bring the war to a halt. In Britain a peace at any price party comes to the forefront (someone better versed in British political history in the early 20th century then I am could tell who the candidates for this--if any--might be) and wins sufficient power in Parliament to demand an end to the war.

By the end of 1919 all the sides are exhausted. Between the war and the flu epidemic as well as hunger and sheer economic exhaustion no one is enthusiastic to continue the fight any further.

In late 1919 the major combatants including representatives from the new provisional governments of Germany and France meet in neutral Geneva, Switzerland to decide on the peace treaty.

The peace treaty of Geneva calls for Germany to withdraw from Belgium and Alsace Lorraine. Germany gets to keep its holdings in the East. Reparations are demanded but are considerably less then in our timeline. Germany has to reduce it's navy by half and either scuttle or turn over to the Allies several of its heavier ships. However, these are the only real conditions. Everyone is simply too war weary to want the whole thing to restart up again.

After the war France and Germany descend into political chaos. Likewise the longer war means a shorter period of prosperity for the U.S. with a longer post-war recession.

----

Like I said, this is just one idea of a slightly longer World War I.

Geon
 
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I think you did a typo and meant "Beyond Thirty" ?

The linked site has summaries of each chapter of the story, I think it's quite enjoyable. The author wrote it in 1915, and the story takes place about two hundred years into the future, withthe Western Hemisphere kind of sealing themselves off from the hell of Europe.


(I'm slightly slightly colorblind, so, I know the ink-color I chose is probably not as "invisible" as I would have liked. So much for my fancy "spoiler alert" attempt.)

Actually it was a mind-glitch rather than a typo, but yes, Beyond Thirty is the story I was thinking of. I read it twenty-plus years ago, and I think the version I had was given another title. Checking...Yep. It was retitled "The Lost Continent" in the version I read. I don't know if I would like it if I reread it now, but it was one of my favorite Burroughs stories back when I read it.
 
Actually it was a mind-glitch rather than a typo, but yes, Beyond Thirty is the story I was thinking of. I read it twenty-plus years ago, and I think the version I had was given another title. Checking...Yep. It was retitled "The Lost Continent" in the version I read. I don't know if I would like it if I reread it now, but it was one of my favorite Burroughs stories back when I read it.

Project Gutenberg version available here.
 
Project Gutenberg version available here.


sweet!!

downloaded, reading...


"...Even prior to this, transoceanic commerce had practically ceased, owing
to the perils and hazards of the mine-strewn waters of both the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Just when submarine activities ended we
do not know but the last vessel of this type sighted by a Pan-American
merchantman was the huge Q 138, which discharged twenty-nine torpedoes
at a Brazilian tank steamer off the Bermudas in the fall of 1972. A
heavy sea and the excellent seamanship of the master of the Brazilian
permitted the Pan-American to escape and report this last of a long
series of outrages upon our commerce. God alone knows how many
hundreds of our ancient ships fell prey to the roving steel sharks of
blood-frenzied Europe. Countless were the vessels and men that passed
over our eastern and western horizons never to return; but whether they
met their fates before the belching tubes of submarines or among the
aimlessly drifting mine fields, no man lived to tell..."
 
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