PART I: THE BREWING STORM
I. For Want of a Battle...
"The German offensive of 1917 was one of the turning points of history."
- A History of World War One
"They are at the door - Saxon...Saxon, where are you? WHERE ARE YOU?"
- Last words (alleged) of Lewis Hill, British Prime Minister, 28th March 1948
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Mysteries of the 20th Century [1]
...The explosion of the Lusitania is one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th Century. The ship was barely out of New York harbour on its final voyage on May 1 1915, when it suddenly exploded [2]. Though the official inquest put the disaster as the result of a boiler malfunction, dissenting voices claimed that it was the ship's transportation of alleged war materiel that led to its destruction...
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Collapse in the West: The Last Days of World War One
The German offensive of late 1917 was the greatest push forward since the early battles of 1914. The French Army, paralysed by mutiny [3], was helpless to prevent a general break-through. The British troops fought proudly and with courage, but with the general collapse of French military power in the north and east, they could not simply stop the Germans from pressing on. To make things worse, with the Peace of Brest-Litvotsk in early January, thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian troops were freed to join the fight in the Western Front. Paris fell to the Germans on the 1st of April, and the French government, for all its pride, was helpless to do anything but surrender.
In the Balkans, Greece was knocked out of the war in the ferociously bloody Battle of Salonika. With no hope of an American intervention, its primary ally incapacitated and its commerce being strangled by the German strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare [4], things looked bleak for Britain. In September 1918, an armistice was put in place as negotiations began. France paid the heaviest burden at the Treaty of Frankfurt of early 1919, made to pay an immense indemnity and to give up all claims on Elsass-Lothringen. Britain and Germany agreed to a status quo ante bellum - no territories or colonies switched hands. However, Britain still felt humiliated, a feeling which was to darken the 1920s and result in the disastrous government of Lewis Hill, which lasted from 1930 to 1948.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] A bit like one of those 'who shot JFK'-style books, i.e completely made up of conspiracy theories
[2] Our POD
[3] As in OTL
[4] Not stopped as in OTL