major military powers without World War I

[hipper]

Rough parity with Germans. But behind French. If you look at my posts, I did not say the UK was at the back of the pack, but that they let others take the lead. Your are comparing the RN to the 4th of 5th best U-boat force in June 1914, and saying they are a little better. By doing this, you are basically conceding the UK is not the leader. BTW, that almost all the value of the German Navy came out of a rounding error in their budget is also an indictment of the German admirals.

Not quite, I'm saying that the Royal Navy had the largest number of diesel submarines in service in any navy in 1914 with the largest number building,

they kept this lead in terms of numbers, untill the mass production of german coastal U boats in 1916 gave them the lead. I suspect that he German U boat was of slightly superior quality (more powerful egines anyway), however the most advanced submarine of WW1 was the british R class.


The french were unable to mount a decent Diesel engine in their submarines thus cannnot have been said to have the leadership in this field of Naval endevour.

You are wrong on this fact. The Japanese attacked with airplanes at Tsingtao. Japan did sustained naval aviation at the beginning of the war. The UK did not. It is clear who is the leader. It is only by playing creative with the definition of carrier does the RN claim to have the first. If the ships primary role is to launch planes, it is a carrier. In fact, I am not sure the UK ever did sustained month long carrier operations in WW1. Perhaps later in the war. And the key to this thread is we are discussing what happens if no war, so we can only look at prewar actions and the very early battles of WW1 to see who was ahead.

Well OK, the conversion of Japanese Wakamiya transport (built on the Clyde, ex Russian) seaplane carrier was completed in August 1914. It carried 2 + 2 (British) Farnham seaplanes, note the Wakamiya lowered seaplanes to the sea which then launched.

The RN converted the Hermes in May 1913 as a seaplane carrier, launching planes from a platform on the front rather and recovering by crane. The Hermes was re comissioned from reserve in August 1914.

The Ark Royal was commissioned on 10th November 1914 and could carry up to 9 aircraft.

The RN converted 3 further ships as Seaplane carriers in 1914 to have at the end of that year the largest and most capable sea going airforce in the world.

Ark Royal alone would have been the biggest & best carrier afloat in 1914 without any war.

I think the operations off Galipoli were quite sustained enough and in advance of anything the Japanese were capable of, for example the worlds first successfull attack on a moving ship by air dropped torpedo in August 1915.

am actually shocked you are arguing these points. The RN, itself, admitted prewar that it was not trying to be a leader outside of the main battle line, better fortified ports and number of cruisers. It was a deliberate policy choice that was widely know at the time. It relates to the RN attitude and arrogance related to what a "First rate Navy" versus a "Second rate Navy" does. If the UK would have lead across the board in these categories, they would have become a second rate navy in their own minds. I doubt other powers would have thought more naval aviation, better submarines, more/better mines, airships, and escort ships made the RN "weaker" or "second class", but the Sea Lords thought that way. You need to check the publish dates on your sources. The RN did a substantial misinformation campaign post war to cover their many lapses prewar. All the stuff about submarines, merchant warfare, mines, airplanes, and other non-battleship being important is post war CYA. Take U-boats as an example, the UK complained because the German Navy had too FEW U-boats. They complained about the Germans not upgrading the colonial ports. The complained about not enough ships at colonies. The prewar stuff I did in my TL is not based on what I thought was wise, but simply having the Germans do what the RN publicly called for the Germans to do IOTL. The RN was so focused on building capital ships, they forgot about the rest of what was needed.
Now IMO, this has a simple reason. Just like the Kaiser built ego capital ships with little strategic rational to feed his ego, the RN admirals did the same thing. Being a captain of a BB was much better than being the captain of a squadron of submarines or gunboats. Prestige blinded the admirals to the needs of the British Empire. Without a major setback in a major war, these attitudes would continue for decades.

you've heard of Admiral Fisher have you ?

the man who scrapped more royal navy battleships than the High seas fleet ever saw, In order to change the Royal Navy into a modern fleet ready for war, I would argue that he succeeded.

In 1914 The RN had the largest number of Battleships, Battlecrusers, Light Cruisers destroyers and effective submarines.

In September 1914 the Royal navy, the Japanese navy and French navy all had one seaplane carrier, The French converted theirs back to a conventional cruiser, The Japanese had theirs damaged after a month and based their seaplanes onshore for the remainder of the Tsingato Campaign, They did nothing else with aircraft carriers untill the end of the war when the RN training party showed them how to operate Carrier aircraft. The Royal Navy meanwhile had the worlds largest fleet of Aircraft Carriers until say late 1943.

cheers Hipper

 

[David S Poepoe]

Fear God and Dreadnought

you've heard of Admiral Fischer have you ?

That would correctly be Fisher.

 

[machine3589]

Yugoslavia (Croatia and Bosnia WILL join Serbia, to deter Italian revanchism, although Yugoslavia will be in a precarious position between Italy and Hungary, hopefully they ally with Romania and maybe Czechs. Yugoslavia is unlikely to have Slovenia, which will still be part of Austria, due to being pretty highly Germanised, more so ITTL)

"Joining Serbia" IITL will be somewhat different from OTL. Serbia won`t have such a huge position of strength it had after WWI in comparison to Croatia and Bosnia. This causes problems with the fundamental idea behind the Serbian reason for accepting the unification; the expansion of base Serbian influence in comparison to everyone else in the Kingdom of SCS, and later Kindom of Yugoslavia.

This is especially true if the HSS is in power in *Croatia-Bosnia (almost inevitable) and if they accept Borojević`s idea of creating a formal army of K.u K. Southern Slavs. Since the issue of the Kustenland will be one between Vienna (and by extension Berlin) and Rome even if Austria turns some of the areas over to *Croatia-Bosnia (not likely, but plausible), you could very well have the State of SCS (probably not called that way) form and survive on its own. It would probably end up Germany`s vassal in the long run, though.

 

[GarethC]

TBH, in a larger sense you'd pretty much have to say that the butterflies are so massive that there are a wide range of sensible and reasonable yet largely-conflicting outcomes that are viable in the 20s, let alone a decade later on. So I have no conclusions to contribute, only questions, really.

Europe -
It's really down to any timeline author's choice here. If, for instance, Wilhelm says "no blank cheque" to Austria-Hungary, but FF is still shot, then we avoid a war but might get AH breakup anyway. If instead FF's driver goes the right way and he doesn't get shot, then we might well not.

How much is tension lowered compared to OTL1914? The more Germany gives on HSF strength, the less Britain will cleave to France.

Would Wilhelm III ever consider something like a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine to move France out of Russia's sphere? Perhaps with some form of autonomy and free trade with both France and Germany? I have to say, I have little knowledge of the Kronprinz beyond idle speculation here, and it would really be dependent on an aggressive Russia, which chooses Germany, rather than the Balkans, the Bosporus, the Middle East, Iran, or Korea as a path to expansion, perhaps as a distraction from Baltic/Polish hopes for independence.

Without WW1, unrecontructed Anglophiles (that's you, Astrodragon) might consider how the Air Committee might work with the RFC and RNAS - would Smuts even produce the sort of paper that would create an RAF and an Air Ministry, and cripple British naval aviation for two decades?

With the British Empire not losing a million men, will immigration to the Dominions be significantly greater? How will British culture evolve without war poets to take up the mantle of Kipling?

One thing that stands out to me, looking at British defence spending 1820-1940, is that the interwar years OTL are actually in line with pre-WW1 spending in terms both of absolute and % of GDP figures - without the Boer and Crimean wars, the British spend is about 3% of GDP consistently over the century. With no WW1, how well- or poorly-equipped will the British armed forces be in 1930 if that sort of expenditure is maintained?

China -
If there's no WW1, then Tsingtao stays German, and China remains a hotbed of intrigue between Britain, Germany, the US, Japan, and Russia as they all try to make a ton of cash from Chinese markets, will Japanese militarism and expansionism flourish in the same way as OTL?

Without US involvement in WW1, will Canadian fears over being drawn into a US-Japan war still be valid and lead to the abandonment of the Anglo-Japanese alliance? Will the US be perceived as isolationist at all - what will the US' foreign policy be like in the 1914-1920 period?

If Britain moves away from the Entente because Germany agrees to naval reductions for some Portuguese colonial deal, then France might seek to build up Russia as a counterweight to German land power. But a Russia with constitutional reforms and a Kerensky or Kornilov government which actually begins proper modernisation and industrialisation will be a larger threat to Japan, both constraining ambitions in China and encouraging... an Anglo-Japanese alliance.

If Germany draws down the HSF enough to chill Anglo-French relations, will it in fact be so weak that Japan might consider unilateral DoW over some pretext to annex Tsingtao? That might be a neat mini-TL to explore in itself, along the lines of Sharlin's corking Franco-Japanese War, as Scheer tries desperately not to duplicate Rozhtdestvensky's voyage a decade before, with ships which are powerful but really not designed to circle the globe.