Short version... Russian Revolution caused Russians to go home and German troops from Eastern Front to be sent to Western Front to give the Allies a kicking. Could you beef up that kicking to give them victory?
Book suggestion - The Kaiser's Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen goes into the nastier aspects of 19th & pre WW1 German colonialism in southern Africa. Some inspiration there too?
The March 1918 offensive very nearly came to victory anyway. According to Haig's diaries (which I was reading recently, though I think it was only extracts) the French at least were getting very worried about Paris, and there was a debate about whether the BEF should fall back on the Channel or stick with the French army when the breakthrough came.
Yes, so I think I need some reason why Germany took so long to finally win. I'm going with flu and expanding the war to the colonies rather more than was the case in real history.
Well, America probably doesn't become a global superpower or build a military industrial complex.
This means America gets the chance to head in a very socialist direction when the Great Depression happens.
That said, we still end up with a huge war down the line, because once Stalin comes into power in the USSR and starts with gulags and attempts to annex Eastern Euro states, Germany has the dominant power in Western Europe has to confront them.
At which point the US probably sides with Germany. During this crisis Germany wins by nuking Moscow and becomes the global nuclear superpower.
That makes some sort of sense. In fact, with the war raging in Europe throughout the 1920s, cutting off major export markets, does the Great Depression in the US start rather earlier?
The US would have gotten very anti-German. They were quite anti-British due to concerns over imperialism (to be distinguished from the US having a sphere of influence and dependent states, which was an entirely different matter), and I'm sure that would have been transferred to Germany if she took over ex-Allied colonies.
But not having a Lusitania sinking makes a difference here (enough to not enter the war in the first place). How US internal politics turns out in response to a) a German victory and b) an earlier or later Depression will play a very important role in shaping the world of 1935.
These are all good points. I definitely see a resistance movement in the bits of France now under explicit or implicit German control - assassinations of Franco-German aristos, shaming of collaborators, civil disobedience - that sort of thing
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Yeah - the impact on the economy of the USA and the effect on feminism in Germany and other parts of Europe might be interesting. You definitely got an effect on feminism from the work that women did in the factories during WW1 and WW2 but this time round you have a whole generation of it. If I were a German feminist leader in 1935 I’d be majoring on how it was German Women Who Won the War. In fact, I might well have tried to bargain the franchise for women during the war in exchange for not going on strike
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There's a very interesting book called Lords of Finance, by L. Ahamed, that deals with economic policy during and after WWI, and how they lead to the Great Depression. Worth a read, not least for the parallels with today. Based roughly on that, there's a serious risk that the Great Depression would *not* have been avoided, and that the US would emerge as the world's major economic player anyways
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Jon Courtney Grimwood's Pashazade and sequels are novels set in a world where the Ottoman Empire didn't get carved up, and there are German ambassadors and the like as minor characters in those.
Thank you, I was going to have to go look it up before suggesting them, although the history there is always a little vague (and I keep losing book one).
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Short version... Russian Revolution caused Russians to go home and German troops from Eastern Front to be sent to Western Front to give the Allies a kicking. Could you beef up that kicking to give them victory?
Book suggestion - The Kaiser's Holocaust by David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen goes into the nastier aspects of 19th & pre WW1 German colonialism in southern Africa. Some inspiration there too?
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This means America gets the chance to head in a very socialist direction when the Great Depression happens.
That said, we still end up with a huge war down the line, because once Stalin comes into power in the USSR and starts with gulags and attempts to annex Eastern Euro states, Germany has the dominant power in Western Europe has to confront them.
At which point the US probably sides with Germany. During this crisis Germany wins by nuking Moscow and becomes the global nuclear superpower.
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Churchill, perhaps...? Or would it need to be someone untainted by wartime failure?
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