WW1 - the neverending conflict

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
Are you serious with that map? Because Germany would basically need to be in constant mobilization just to keep all the Eastern minorities under their boot. There was a reason WW1 Germany preferred to setup Puppet states and WW2 Germany just preferred to kill the original inhabitants.

But regarding a peace between Germany and Britain. Yes, Germany would have to say good bye to the colonies if they can't challenge Britain at sea. The Kaiser and the Junkers would definitely not be amused. I could well see them going for a costly Middle Eastern Campaign to aid the Ottoman Empire just to somehow get to humiliate perfidious Albion, and maybe convince London that Germany can threaten the Empire and they should totally get their colonies back and get some French and Belgian colonies too.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
And why did he have to concentrate forces?
It's because his army was significantly understrength.


pdf27 said:
By this stage of the war - and particularly in Fifth Army, which was seriously under-strength thanks to Lloyd George who was deliberately holding them back in the UK to starve Haig of manpower - the front lines were very thinly held indeed, with the majority of the defences quite some way behind it. They also tended to be a series of field fortifications rather than formal trench lines as were seen earlier in the war, and to some extent could be built quicker than the Germans could advance when the troops were available. In my terminology (and the one I've always seen used elsewhere), you transform break in to breakthrough when there is no longer organised resistance requiring a set-piece attack stopping you. Until you can mechanise your attacking forces, that just isn't possible until you've destroyed the opposing army as the Germans did to the Russians in 1917 and then the British and French did to the Germans at the end of 1918 (by November they were averaging almost 5 miles per day, every day).

The number of fighting troops available to the British falls by 78,500 between January 1917 and January 1918; Haig has a shortfall of 100,000 infantry, and predicts a shortfall of 250,000 by the end of March. At this point there are over 600,000 troops available for general service in the UK, excluding Dominion troops, but Haig only receives 134,636 reinforcements between the start of the year and 21st March.



So - your contention is that (though Haig was making decisions as he did due to a shortfall on the scale of fifteen divisions) had he had an extra fifteen divisions he would have simply placed them with the rest of his well held line rather than bringing his seriously weakened section up to the same strength as the rest.
 
So - your contention is that (though Haig was making decisions as he did due to a shortfall on the scale of fifteen divisions) had he had an extra fifteen divisions he would have simply placed them with the rest of his well held line rather than bringing his seriously weakened section up to the same strength as the rest.


Since Haig did not foresee any serious danger in that section he had no reason to strengthen it.

Indeed, if given more troops he might well have employed then in another Flanders offensive - one reason why Lloyd George was reluctant to let him have them.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Since Haig did not foresee any serious danger in that section he had no reason to strengthen it.
That's post hoc, though, isn't it? He had to leave some areas less strongly held than he'd like because he was missing fifteen divisions out of his theoretical ORBAT, and the British government had sixty divisions kept at home - so he picked the area he felt was relatively unproblematic to thin out. It's not that he weakened the sector because he felt it should be weak, it's because he had to weaken somewhere.
But if he'd had those extra troops?



Michael succeeded largely because Fifth Army was so weak, having been extended by Lloyd George against military advice to cover more frontage and then denied reinforcements (which started flowing as soon as the German attack looked like it might break through). It's worth noting that the other German attacks were far more costly and less effective.


Mind you, if he had had them and used them in a Flanders (or indeed further south) offensive, what are the Germans going to do? They'll have to respond, because by this point (1918) the British and French have basically worked out how to do bite-and-hold offensives, and can conduct them along the entire length of the line shifting forces from one axis to another (OTL 1918 Hundred Days) on organic artillery. The Germans can't launch a major and wildly successful offensive while also running into the problem of the British (and French) iteratively blasting their way into the lines place after place.


The thrust of your argument seems to be that an army denied reinforcements and overstretched by political manoeuvres is as effective as an army given those reinforcements and permitted to act according to its own preferences... and that if Haig had an extra fifteen divisions he'd just have expended them for no effect on the enemy.
Basically it's quite a slander on Haig.
 
IMO, it would be the Germans who would be developing torpedo bombers and eventually carrier aviation to counter the numerically superior RN battleships.

The Germans were developing torpedo bombers - Wiki states "On May 1, 1917, a German seaplane loosed a torpedo and sank the 2,784-long-ton (2,829 t) British steamship Gena off Suffolk. A second German seaplane was downed by gunfire from the sinking Gena. German torpedo bomber squadrons were subsequently assembled at Ostend and Zeebrugge for further action in the North Sea.[7]" - and true carrier aviation is a logical development of seaplanes and Zeppelins. But the first German aircraft carrier conversion was still being designed in 1918 and construction resources were being diverted into U-boats.

In contrast, the RN had done a seaplane bombing raid in 1914, and by 1918 had multiple aircraft carriers and dedicated torpedo bombers under construction. The likely effects of the proposed 100-bomber raid are unclear, because of inexperience/disorganisation/unreliability etc., but certainly the RN was a long way ahead of the HSF in carrier aviation in 1918.
 
There's no way both sides can continue fighting. Germany would be completely exhausted, and Britain would be completely bankrupt. I see the U.S. helping to broker a peace conference should the war go into the Spring of 1919.
 

NoMommsen

Donor
There's no way both sides can continue fighting. Germany would be completely exhausted, and Britain would be completely bankrupt. I see the U.S. helping to broker a peace conference should the war go into the Spring of 1919.
Sry, but ... would you mind looking at the opening post ?

ITTL discussion starts in summer/autumn 1919 with the Entene already defeated, France taken etc., etc..
(whatever the plausibilies of these are ..., which I personally regard close to if not ASB ... age-old question of USA entry or not to the war)
 
Sry, but ... would you mind looking at the opening post ?

ITTL discussion starts in summer/autumn 1919 with the Entene already defeated, France taken etc., etc..
(whatever the plausibilies of these are ..., which I personally regard close to if not ASB ... age-old question of USA entry or not to the war)
Yes, I acknowledge that Germany has won on the continent. I'm saying that neither Germany or Britain could continue the war much past that. Change Spring, 1919 to the Autumn, 1919. The U.S. would be actively working/pushing for a peace settlement by this point.
 
That's post hoc, though, isn't it? He had to leave some areas less strongly held than he'd like because he was missing fifteen divisions out of his theoretical ORBAT, and the British government had sixty divisions kept at home - so he picked the area he felt was relatively unproblematic to thin out. It's not that he weakened the sector because he felt it should be weak, it's because he had to weaken somewhere.
But if he'd had those extra troops?

Is he any more likely to have them TTL than OTL?


Mind you, if he had had them and used them in a Flanders (or indeed further south) offensive, what are the Germans going to do? They'll have to respond, because by this point (1918) the British and French have basically worked out how to do bite-and-hold offensives, and can conduct them along the entire length of the line shifting forces from one axis to another (OTL 1918 Hundred Days) on organic artillery. The Germans can't launch a major and wildly successful offensive while also running into the problem of the British (and French) iteratively blasting their way into the lines place after place.


What have the tactics adopted in the Hundred Days to do with anything likely to be done in March or April?


The thrust of your argument seems to be that an army denied reinforcements and overstretched by political manoeuvres is as effective as an army given those reinforcements and permitted to act according to its own preferences... and that if Haig had an extra fifteen divisions he'd just have expended them for no effect on the enemy.
Basically it's quite a slander on Haig.

Hardly a slander to suggest that he'd put most of his troops at what appeared to be the danger point.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Is he any more likely to have them TTL than OTL?
With no US? I think so.

What have the tactics adopted in the Hundred Days to do with anything likely to be done in March or April?
Because the British offensive tactics of the Hundred days were their March-April tactics.

Hardly a slander to suggest that he'd put most of his troops at what appeared to be the danger point.
But it is a slander to suggest that he'd neither be able to make the enemy react nor defend better against his enemy if he had an extra fifteen divisions. Do you really mean he'd double-stack bits of the line already well held instead of shoring up the weakly held bit?
 
Keep the propaganda presses going and make Wilhelm II the next Napoleon

Well, for domestic propaganda, its okay, but for international? And by international i mean the USA and the south american countries and i do not think, at that time they seen Napoleon as the devil himself.
So that could even backfire.
 
I don't really believe France would roll over at this point.

1918 would not be like 1871 or 1940 where one quick, however bloody, campaign ended the war. At this point, France has put everything it had to hold back the "Huns" and basically torched half the country in an effort to do so.

Even in 1871, it took the full destruction of every single vaguely competent corps, the gruesome siege of Paris, a captured Emperor and the German armies waltzing around the countryside as they pleased to provoke peace, and even then it was not a given.

Even the American were not that significant until very late in the war, so what makes the French break that bad? I don't recall the Germans being in top strength either by 1918.
 
so what makes the French break that bad? I don't recall the Germans being in top strength either by 1918.

With the northeast already occupied their main remaining industrial area was Paris. If that falls (or its rail links to the French Army are severed), then it's hard to see how the army can carry on.

In any case, though, the important factor is morale. Thus between Summer 1917 and Summer 1918 German troops were taken prisoner only in dribs and drabs (except briefly at Cambrai) but from August they started surrendering by the tens of thousands, to the point where one General observed that if this continued they would soon have to give up from sheer lack of manpower. The reason for this, of course, that with the failure of their recent offensives, the troops, including many officers, just realised that victory was impossible, and if they couldn't win the war they would settle for surviving it. Haig remarked on this, observing that had the Germans still been fighting as stubbornly as earlier in the year, he would not have dared assault the Hindenburg Line.

The same applied to French and British troops. As long as the war seemed winnable, they would fight, and fight hard. But if they became convinced that the war was lost, their priorities would soon (and quite rightly) switch to looking after number one. And things couldn't go on long after that.
 
Top