alternatehistory.com

This is my latest TL based on several PoDs which should lead to an interesting situation. The first is no unlimited submarine warfare and the second is no Zimmermann Telegram. This has several butterflies for Italian politics as well. I divided it into three parts for readibility. Enjoy.:)

Note: the first post is only an intro without a PoD. If you have a general knowledge of WW I, than you can skip it.




The Old World Burns



An Essay on the victory of the Central Powers in 1918 and its aftermath, 1917-2009



Chapter I: From the February Revolution to the Spring Offensive, February 1917 – May 1918



Introduction


It was 1917 and the Great War, also commonly referred to today as the First World War, had dragged on for three years now without rest, without mercy and without anything that resembled the chivalrous wars of the 19th century which seemed to be of a long forgotten age. Those wars of that bygone age were replaced by industrial wars, total wars fought with mass produced novel weapons which had greatly increased the capacity of humans to kill each other, such as machine guns, aircraft, tanks and the horrible new weapon known as poison gas.

The war had begun in 1914 after the murder of the Austro-Hungarian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a seeming triviality in the greater scheme of things, but the Austro-Hungarian leadership used this to their advantage and with the geopolitical situation at the time, some kind of large European War had seemed inevitable for quite a time and some actually even wished for it to settle differences that had festered like ulcers for ages now. All major European powers held some sort of grudge against another power or fostered longstanding geopolitical and geostrategic ambitions or irredentist claims which conflicted with those of other countries, leading to hostility and this was both a cause of and a result of the inherent nationalism and militarism of the day which contributed majorly to this powder keg. There are a great many examples of these conflicting interests between countries, often dating back decades or even centuries. France had been defeated at the hands of Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 which led to the Treaty of Paris, a humiliating peace for a country that considered itself a great power. They had been forced to cede Alsace-Lorraine to Germany and pay a war indemnity of some 5 billion francs and, in addition to this, the German leaders had proclaimed the German Empire in the palace of Versailles which was even more a national embarrassment to France than the capture of Emperor Napoleon III and the catastrophic defeats in the war itself. France lapsed into revanchism instead of coming to terms with their loss while Russia was drifting away from Germany which it had an alliance with. Russia was forced by the great powers to give a moderate peace to the Ottoman Empire which it had defeated in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 in the Berlin Conference, where Bismarck had supported Vienna’s position. This would eventually lead to the breakup of the Three Emperor’s League which was re-established once, but definitively ended when Emperor Wilhelm II had refused to reconfirm the Reinsurance Treaty between St. Petersburg and Berlin. As a result of dissatisfaction with the settlement of the Balkan problems, the liberal Third Republic and the autocratic Russian Empire became unlikely allies in 1892. France started to give Russia cheap loans from the Paris Bourse to modernize Russia’s technologically deficient army.

This was the start of the formation of the two alliance blocs that would divide Europe and eventually lead to a domino effect that would plunge the entire old continent into a war of epic and unseen proportions, a war that dwarfed previous great European wars and world conflicts such as the War of Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars in both lethality and in the way they changed the face of Europe. Italy joined the Triple Alliance in 1882 out of discontent for France’s seizure of Tunisia. The young German Emperor Wilhelm II, in the meantime, announced his plans to create a war fleet that could beat the Royal Navy and give Germany its place under the sun with a colonial empire that could easily match the British Empire. This, along with the generally aggressive and tactless attitude of the German Emperor, led to Britain drifting into the direction of France and Russia even though it shared disputes with the latter over both the Middle East and the coveted Bosporus and with the former it had recently had a colonial conflict which had luckily been settled peacefully. These differences were set aside and the Entente Cordiale was formed. With the start sign of the war given, the European powers crashed themselves into a war.
Top