First was their lack of adequate supply lines. To EH Carr, historian of Soviet Russia, to speak of what might have happened in history, as opposed to what did happen, was just a "parlour game". A week later, Charles I abdicated his sovereign power over both kingdoms, effectively abolishing the empire. For more information, visit Alpha History or our Terms of Use. The Western Front continued to hold firm. It would have been grim, repressive and unpredictable in many ways. Germany’s generals staked their war fortunes on a major offensive in 1918, while the Allies planned for 1919. But it could plausibly have ended in a very different way in spring 1918, if Ludendorff's offensive on Paris and towards the Channel had succeeded. These men were organised into battalions of shock troops called Sturmmann (meaning ‘stormtroopers’). Now if the Germans refused Allied armistice terms in 1918 then the fight goes on, but Germany was falling apart into communist uprisings, so were literally unable to continue, which is why they accepted ANY terms the Allies offered OTL. An orderly occupation of the country is impossible, for Nazi Germany, though entirely overrun, has not surrendered—cannot surrender—in any legitimate sense. And although his essay suffers from the fact that the Eurosceptic Ferguson is over-eager to portray the kaiser as the godfather of the later European Union, his account of the cabinet debates of 1914 is fascinating because Herbert Asquith's Liberal government could so easily have decided to stay out of the war – and very nearly did. The ceasefire was signed in a French rail car just before dawn two days later. First World War: What would happen if USA had join the Central Powers, instead of the Entente, in 1917? To EP Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class, such counterfactual speculation was "unhistorical shit". Europe would have been different if Germany had won in 1918. By 1918, most Germans were consuming pitifully low amounts of meat (12 per cent of pre-war levels) fish (five per cent) and eggs (13 per cent). The mission was to penetrate the Western Front at its weakest points. "The historian must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors will seem to permit different outcomes," wrote Johan Huizinga. The Soviet Union, with a wary but powerful neighbour in victorious Germany, would have been the great destabilising factor but it might not have been invaded as it was in 1941. This site was updated last on August 19th 2020. But one can say that a victorious Germany, imposing peace on the defeated allies at the treaty of Potsdam, would not have had the reparations and grievances that were actually inflicted upon it by France at Versailles. But it was about something more than tragic sacrifice too. The Sturmmann were given training in how to infiltrate enemy lines through pre-determined weak points. But what kind of Germany? Pushed back to the area now held by Turkey, the Ottomans signed an armistice on October 30th. What happened IOTL was the Germans asked for the … If Germany's Jews had survived, Zionism might not have had the international moral force that it rightly claimed after Hitler's defeat. But there is a plausible case for saying many fewer people would have died in 20th-century Europe. Other historians have confessed to being more intrigued. But no one can prove it. In the kaiser's Europe, defeated France would be the more likely seedbed for fascism, not Germany. On the other, there are those who insist that it was nevertheless "about something". In time Werewolf Radio falls silent, and it is whispered that Hitler has died. Germany’s situation was further imperilled by her domestic conditions. The Allied armies would revolt if they found out the Germans surrendered and their generals refused to accept it. 4. Meanwhile, defeated Britain would have seen its navy sunk in the Heligoland Bight, have been forced to cede its oil interests in the Middle East and the Gulf to Germany, and have been unable to contain Indian nationalism. In November 1917, a meeting of the German high command drew up plans for this offensive the following spring. The first world war came to an end in November 1918, when the German armies surrendered near Compiegne. A parlour game? Sections of the French army, devastated by the butchery at Verdun, were largely useless because of widespread mutiny and desertions. The allies entire stand was on french soil. 1. German forces would then pursue two objectives. If you’re saying just Russia vs Germany and it’s allies (Which seems to be what you’re asking) then it would be a easy victory for the Central Powers. But this rarely happens in a debate that is polarised between collective myths of national sacrifice on the one hand (certainly in Britain and France) and an indiscriminate muddy catastrophe on the other. Their initial advances were successful. The definitive text was signed in Karlshorst, Berlin, on the night of 8 May 1945 by representatives of the three armed services of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and the Allied Expeditionary Force together with the Supreme High Command of the Soviet … At the start of November 1918, a sailors’ mutiny in Kiel lit the fuse of revolution in Germany. And what might 20th-century Europe have been like if it had? With the war's centenary near, this is not a parlour game. The outcome – what happened and what did not – made a difference. A disproportionate share of this was set aside for the military: civilians comprised 67 per cent of the population but received only 33 per cent of the grain. By the winter of 1917-18, the availability of food in German cities was critically low. The militaristic, conservative, repressive Prussian power created by Bismarck? Allied troops even managed to penetrate this line at a couple of points. What really kept Germany's Operation Sealion from invading and conquering Britain was the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (in that order). As a consequence, the rise of Hitler would have been much less likely. The Spring Offensive gained significant ground but at a significant cost. When the Spring Offensive began in March 1918, these Sturmmann led the German advance. What happened IOTL was the Germans asked for the … At present, argument about the war mainly consists of two mutually uncomprehending camps. Title: “The German surrender” But what was the something that the first world war was about? If a few months after the war on the eastern front ceased, then America would be crossing the Atlantic post-haste. But it could plausibly have ended in a … Germany's possible defeat of Britain in 1940 is by some distance the national treasure trove of might-have-beens. People who see a divine hand or the iron laws of dialectical materialism at work in human affairs bridle at the question: "What if things had turned out differently?" Wilhelm’s abdication was announced by the German chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, on November 9th, without the Kaiser’s approval or endorsement. Whatever events were being played out on the German home front, there should have been no disguising the fact that it was the army in the field that had lost the war. But at least we can see that the outcome mattered. More recently, a succession of novels, including Robert Harris's Fatherland, Resistance by Owen Sheers and CJ Sansom's Dominion – which imagines a Vichy Britain in 1952 ruled by Lord Beaverbrook and Oswald Mosley – have explored the same theme.