We've had a couple of WIs and timelines in the past about quick CP victories, all of which eventually begin to turn towards the matter of the post war peace in the event of a quick victory where the winner is still more or less intact, but I can't really recall the opposite - what would the peace treaty look like if the Entente somehow manages to achieve a quick and decisive victory in WW1?
The general backstory behind this WI comes from one of my games of HoI2. Playing as the United Kingdom, I managed to achieve a very, very fast victory in one of the game's WW1 mods by shipping the BEF across to France quick enough to stop the Germans when they had a string of bad things happen one right after the other causing them to take long enough going through Belgium for my forces and those of my French allies to reinforce the front and stop the advance in Belgium...after which I withdraw my forces and sent them to the Eastern Front via Arkhangelsk, where I managed to reinforce the Russian forces enough to cut off dozens of divisions in the Ukraine, which were destroyed by the Russians and which triggered an almost total collapse of the German army as the AI gutted the western front to try and stem the tide in the east, inadvertently causing the French to be able to advance into the Rhineland and seize its industry.
The war ended a year or so in, with British troops marching into Berlin from the east, Austria-Hungary peacing out with their empire intact - albeit in trouble both domestically and externally for throwing the German Empire under the bus - and Germany forced into a peace treaty that saw the return of Alsace Lorraine, the concession of some territory in the east and financial reparations to the Entente, which came in the form of industrial machinery in the case of the Russian Empire, which basically went to German factories, packed up the machines and sent them back to the Empire...but other than that, relatively little was actually done other than me taking their colonial empire, with Germany continuing to field a somewhat sizeable.
Obviously I'm pretty sure that's at the very least an implausible way of winning the war, if not entirely impossible, but its the post war situation I'm interested in. So, what does the post war peace treaty look like if the Entente manage to achieve a quick victory in the First World War? Alsace Lorraine is basically a given, but could we see something like the above where the Russians seize German industrial equipment as war reparations, or maybe even a surviving Austria-Hungary?
This isn't an era of history that I'm all that knowledgeable about, alas, so I'm really interested in hearing what people have
The general backstory behind this WI comes from one of my games of HoI2. Playing as the United Kingdom, I managed to achieve a very, very fast victory in one of the game's WW1 mods by shipping the BEF across to France quick enough to stop the Germans when they had a string of bad things happen one right after the other causing them to take long enough going through Belgium for my forces and those of my French allies to reinforce the front and stop the advance in Belgium...after which I withdraw my forces and sent them to the Eastern Front via Arkhangelsk, where I managed to reinforce the Russian forces enough to cut off dozens of divisions in the Ukraine, which were destroyed by the Russians and which triggered an almost total collapse of the German army as the AI gutted the western front to try and stem the tide in the east, inadvertently causing the French to be able to advance into the Rhineland and seize its industry.
The war ended a year or so in, with British troops marching into Berlin from the east, Austria-Hungary peacing out with their empire intact - albeit in trouble both domestically and externally for throwing the German Empire under the bus - and Germany forced into a peace treaty that saw the return of Alsace Lorraine, the concession of some territory in the east and financial reparations to the Entente, which came in the form of industrial machinery in the case of the Russian Empire, which basically went to German factories, packed up the machines and sent them back to the Empire...but other than that, relatively little was actually done other than me taking their colonial empire, with Germany continuing to field a somewhat sizeable.
Obviously I'm pretty sure that's at the very least an implausible way of winning the war, if not entirely impossible, but its the post war situation I'm interested in. So, what does the post war peace treaty look like if the Entente manage to achieve a quick victory in the First World War? Alsace Lorraine is basically a given, but could we see something like the above where the Russians seize German industrial equipment as war reparations, or maybe even a surviving Austria-Hungary?
This isn't an era of history that I'm all that knowledgeable about, alas, so I'm really interested in hearing what people have