WWI: What if the U.S. stayed neutral?

[Ned]

Imran, I was reading up on the WWI U-boat campaign. It appears that the only defense the Brits had to U-boats what to shoot at them while they were on the surface. So they came up with the stealth merchantman concept, where they would arm a cargo ship to the teeth and cover up its guns. When a U-boat would surface to shoot at the ship, the Brits would open up in return.

Prior to this technique being employed by the Brits, U-boat captains would surface, give prior notice and allow debarking to lifeboats before sinking the ship with its guns. After the Brits started using this technique, though, U-boats would hit without prior warning with torpedoes.

But in all the propaganda surrounding the U-boat campaign, the American public was not really informed as to why the Germans had changed their tactics. Naturally, therefore, the American public was outraged.

So, the Germans might have prevented the war with America by simply countering the Brit propaganda just a bit.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Ned


I think Wilson was biased against Germany because of its government. The Germans thought so too, as they turned the government over to the Reichstag in 1918 in order to get a peace deal with Wilson.

No, they did so cause there was revolution in the streets, and giving the democrats a chance was seen as the only alternative to Communism.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Ecthy
Was it Wilson or Congress who declared war on Germany?

I'm not a strict adherent to any theories of political realism, but especially in this case I'm more convinced by the financial argument raised by Strangelove than by the idealistic of the US fighting for representation.

Don't think they supported the whites in Russia because those stood for a post-czarist regime (Kerensky) that was supposed to establish freedom - it rather guaranteed the pursuit of business interest more than the reds.

er doesnt assuming its either idealism or financial interests leave out you, know, US STRATEGIC interests.

The US and Germany were the two powers that had surpassed the UK in GDP. The UK was a declining power, as was France. Russia was growing, but no immdediate threat to the US. Germany was threatening to "unite the world island" or at least the dominant European part of it. Germany had a large and growing navy. US and German interests had already come into conflict in the southwest Pacific. Mahanists like Theodore Roosevelt were concerned with the growth of German power.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Sandman


No they didn't. Turning Ottomans and Bulgarians into Germans is the sort of schoolboy error that characterises Mosier's work.

from what I recall of Keegan the Bulgarians did a minor attack in Dobruja, the major campaign from Transylvania was German troops.


Of course the Germany could spare troops was due not to anglo-french incompetence so much as to Germanys strong defensive line in Northern France. If the Germans had the sense NOT to attack at Verdun they would have had even more troops available in '16.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


No, they did so cause there was revolution in the streets, and giving the democrats a chance was seen as the only alternative to Communism.

Also the conservatives wanted the socialists and democrats to be seen as the ones surrendering and signing the peace treaty, so they would not carry the blame for Germany's defeat in the future.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove


Also the conservatives wanted the socialists and democrats to be seen as the ones surrendering and signing the peace treaty, so they would not carry the blame for Germany's defeat in the future.

Probably true of Ludendorff. I dont think Groener, Prince Max of Baden or the others were thinking that far ahead.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by GePap
Tanks in WW1 were still too technically backwards for them to be a real breaktrough weapon. The German innovations in infantry tactics and how to support them with artillery was certainly more important in terms of breaking the stalemate, as the huge and innitially crushing German spring offensive of 1918 shows.

Hm,
the tanks didn´t make a difference when they were first used by the Brits, due to the fact that the british generalstaff made the failure of employing too few of them.

But when they were later used in masses (from the battle at Cambrai on) IMHO they really made a difference.

I don´t think that the Brits had been able to penetrate the german trenchlines in these battles without the support of the tanks (meaning that the war probably would have lasted much longer and perhaps with the german Kaiserreich being in a better position during the negotiations for peace)

[Lancer]

Stalemate, eventual cease fire. Sooner or later a peace treaty with the Germans leaving France & the Low countries in order to be able to trade again.

No WW2 but an eventual war with resurgent Russia.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


Probably true of Ludendorff. I dont think Groener, Prince Max of Baden or the others were thinking that far ahead.

Nevertheless they did not want to stain their honor by signing the armistace. They wanted someone else to carry that stain, preferably someone lowly and icky like a democrat or a socialist.

[Ned]

LoTM, so you think Germany was going to implode politically in 1918 regardless of the Americans. In other words, the most significant event of 1917 was not America's entry into the war, but the commie revolution in Russia that threatened Germany as well.

[Ned]

Bump. No comment from even LotM about the Ruskie revolution having more effect on the outcome of the war than the US entry?

[Ned]

I'm amazed. LoTM contends that Germany's move to turn its government over to the anti-war socialists in 1918 was to forestall and even worse commie revolution and no one comments? Germany would have collapsed in 1918 under this theory regardless of how its military was doing and regardless of America's entry into the war.

No one seems to address that the German high command had decided to continue the war but was ordered not to by the socialist government who continued to seek peace even after they were given unacceptable terms. But, given the somewhat total collapse of German society (civilian and military) to commies of one flavor or another, it would be hard to imagine how the German army could have continued the war.

What happened to Germany is similar to what happened to the USSR. America applied some pressure in both cases, it is true. But the collapse of both was mainly an internal matter, not a matter of US pressure.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Lonestar
Germany would have won.

No, it wouldn't.

Germany and its allies in the Alliance, Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey had nowhere near the level of cooperation or integration that the Western Entente powers possessed.

After 1916, Germany's allies were more like satellites dependent upon German troops, German coal, German food and German commanders and subject to the vagaries of Imperial German decisions.

The Imperial command was not only out of touch with its own people and armed forces, it also proved itself more than capable of alienating the military commanders of it allies and their statesmen.

The effectiveness of the Continental blockade by the British was such that Germany suffered two 'hunger winters', in 1916-1917 and 1917-1918.

The Allies used not just the naval blockade but also intelligence and industrial espionage in the neutral countries too, making use of commercial pressures to interdict supplies for Germany through the Netherlands or Denmark and Sweden.

German imports during the war dropped by 60%, and exports fell off by an even greater percentage. Disproportionate resources were channelled to sustain the German and its Alliance partners' war efforts.

In February 1917 German daily rations dropped to
1 000 calories per person. This was the 'turnip' winter, when food usually given to cattle and pigs was made into bread or used instead of potatoes.

The Prussian Minstry of War created a War Food Office, and this department recognised that the availability of the normal peacetime foodstuffs had a psychological role to play in keeping up civilian morale: German ingenuity in the food/chemical industry which could create substitutes such as ersatz coffee, could not prevent ersatz changing its meaning in common parlance from 'substitute' to 'fake', with the predictable knock-on effect .

German coffee ceased being a delightful pick-me-up and became a an acrid beverage manufactured not from chicory or beets but treebark. German bread was no longer rye or wheat based, but Kriegsbrot , calorifically adequate in itself, but Germans were not used to bread made from potatoes, no matter how nourishing a substitute it might be.


At the end of the 19th Century and in the run-up to the First World War, German agriculture had massively imported phosphates and nitrates from Nauru and Chile- these supplies were cut off, with the result that nitrate use in German agriculture dropped by 50%.

Although Germany had the Haber process, its value was seen as lying more in the production of explosives for the war.

Germany suffered from price increases for staple foods, almost from the beginning of the war and introduced food controls a full four years before the British.

In 1915 milk cost 12 pfennigs a litre, but then rose to 33 pfennigs, which workers' wages did not rise to match.

City was set against country- farmers saw the townsdwellers as unscrupulous profiteers and city folk saw the farmers as sleek hoarders of necessities.

In 1917 rye could be bought for 380% more than the government set price, beans for 200% and butter 90% more. The army had no choice but to fall back on the black market to supply its soldiers.

Without America's help, it appears that Britain would have collapsed in 1917 at a time when Germany was still very powerful.

Ned


Really ? And there I was thinking that the British instituted the convoy system and the Q-Ships to counter the U-Boats. It was precisely because the convoy system and the Q-Ships were successful and the Allied blockade was working that Germany resumed unrestricted U-boat warfare.

Germany had the second biggest economy in the world, and, incidently, the number one chemical industry. They had the vast majority of the war material and cash they needed, and the British blockade was a joke.

You're wrong.

As I've already indicated in detail the blockade was far from being a joke, and the German approach to financing the war was to act as if they were issuing post-dated cheques, with the expectation that ultimate victory over the Allies and future war reparations and the creation of a German dominated common market would pay for current wartime expenditure.

Karl Helfferich, Minister of Finance & Minister of the Interior:

(Germany would hang)....the lead weight of milliards...

round the necks of its enemies.

He certainly had it in for the German government

Ned.


He may well have done, but that doesn't make him a Germanophobe. He made a clear distinction between the German Imperial government and the peoples it governed.

Germany also didn't have to burn cash paying for chemicals and material needed from outside sources, either.

Lonestar


Germany also didn't have the resources of the Dominions and the Commonwealth to call upon: in 1914, the British possessed the largest merchant marine in the world.

In 1913, British local and central government expenditure equalled only 12.3% of G.N.P. .

The British allocated a smaller share of national income to defence than any other Great Power in Europe. The British had $ 19.5 billion invested overseas, which equalled 43% of the world's foreign investments.

British textiles had enjoyed an export boom in the run up to 1914, and its shipbuilding industry launched over 60% of the world's merchant tonnage and 33% of its warships. The British still had 13.6% of world manufacturing output in 1913 and 14.1% of world trade in 1911-13. Most of the United States' foreign trade was done in sterling and London was still resorted to for gold-borrowing. Germany and its partners could not compete economically.

but if this is the kind of ally he was to the Brits and French, then I'd hate to have an enemy.

Ned


Strictly speaking, Wilson and the United States were 'associates' of the Entente, not full allies in it. Their war aims were very different, after all.

Americans simply would not stand for a war for purely economic reasons.

Ned

Uh huh. So the Spanish American War was a war of liberation which liberated who, exactly ? And the numerous wars against Native Americans were wars of high moral principle were they ?

Nothing to do with valuable agricultural land or mineral deposits.

It would be a foolish government which boldly set out its real agenda for going to war- the United States did rather well out of its late entry into the First World War, as by 1916 the British were spending $ 250 million in the U.S. PER MONTH on their own behalf and on behalf of their allies, much earmarked to support the sterling-dollar exchange rate.

In November 1917, Paul Warburg (a German born member of the Federal Reserve Board) persuaded his colleagues that the U.S. was too heavily dependent on a future Entente victory and that U.S. over-exposure should be cut back. $ 1 000 million was lost from the U.S. stock market in a week.

After Romania was wiped out Germany moved these troops to Italy to finish off the Italians.

Lonestar


No, they didn't. Not only because the troops in Romania were Bulgarian, Turkish and Austro-Hungarians, but because the Italians threw back the German/Austro-Hungarian forces at Piave, and with the British and French defeated them at Vittorio Veneto.

Well there still is the argument that Germany was much stronger than UK and France combined prior to the war

Ecthy


In which aspects ? Certainly not financially, nor in terms of fleets, either merchant or combat, nor in access to resources.

They could have emphasized the justice in their position.

Ned.


You should read Fritz Fischer's work based on the Wilhelmine archives. The German Imperial command wanted a war, but were caught on the backfoot by Sarajevo. They issued a 'blank cheque' to Austria-Hungary because it was in their interests to do so, as Bethman-Hollweg's September Programme indicates.

I fail to see how the assassination of an Austrian aristocrat in a recently occupied province of Austria-Hungary in any way directly concerns Prussian aristocrats. Or am I missing something ?

Imran, I was reading up on the WWI U-boat campaign. It appears that the only defense the Brits had to U-boats what to shoot at them while they were on the surface.

Ned.


Not enough in depth or breadth, clearly.

The destroyer/convoy system, Q-Ships, and depth charges were all ways U-boats could be countered.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned

I'm amazed.

No one seems to address that the German high command had decided to continue the war but was ordered not to by the socialist government who continued to seek peace even after they were given unacceptable terms. But, given the somewhat total collapse of German society (civilian and military) to commies of one flavor or another, it would be hard to imagine how the German army could have continued the war.

What happened to Germany is similar to what happened to the USSR. America applied some pressure in both cases, it is true. But the collapse of both was mainly an internal matter, not a matter of US pressure.

I've no idea where you have derived this garbled notion of what was supposedly occurring in the German Imperial command and Reichstag.

Perhaps from Ludendorff's self-serving post-war memoirs ('Advertisements For Myself' would be a better title for them).

The Imperial Command had known they were losing the war for some time; the offensives of 1918 were all failures. Prior to the Imperial Council of August 14th 1918, Ludendorff's view was that to continue the war would be 'an irresponsible act, a game of chance'. He deliberately misled the civilian authorities.


General Fritz von Lossberg:

"...July 18, 1918 was the precise turning point in the conduct of the war. The OHL's (High Command) failure to understand that the combat strength of the German army was already severely shattered in July 1918 [and] required systematic rebuilding."

Ludendorff again:

( He described 8 August 1918 as) "The black day of the German army," and

"...success was easy for the enemy."

General von Lossberg:

(8 August 1918 was)

"The worst defeat that a [single] army had ever suffered in war."

On September 28th 1918 Ludendorff approached Chancellor Hertling to address Wilson and ask for an immediate cessation of the war, saying:

"...the army cannot hold out for another 48 hours. "

In order to stave off the kind of revolution experienced in Russia, reform and revolution from above were proposed, with Ludendorff belatedly demanding a parliamentary system with cabinet government answerable to the Reichstag.

Desperately attempting to unload his personal responsibility for the conduct of the war and the debacle, he also wanted to exonerate the military and Imperial commands of responsibility for defeat too. Ludendorff asked to be put on the retired list on October 26th and ignominiously fled to Sweden and exile in disguise, assiduously cultivating the Dolchstoss myth in the postwar period and passing blame on to home front, politicians, socialists and anyone else he could think of.

LoTM contends that Germany's move to turn its government over to the anti-war socialists in 1918 was to forestall and even worse commie revolution and no one comments?

Which 'antiwar Socialists' were these ?

The same Socialists who had decided on August 3rd 1914 and voted on August 4th in favour of war credits ? Of 111 social-democratic deputies only 15 called for a no vote (among them Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht).

When the decision was reached to support the call for war credits, even Liebknecht followed the party line.

Perhaps the same 'antiwar' socialists who worked with the business community and army authorities in adminstering the labour directions provided for by the Auxiliary Patriotic Service Law of 1916, or the same Socialists who out of the wreckage left to them by the Imperial High Command, effected the Stinnes-Legien Agreement with the Army and business community in November 1918.

...the German high command had decided to continue the war...

Ned


Remarkably difficult when your Navy refuses to accept a final Gotterdammerung mission in the North Sea and the dockers come out in strike in sympathy with them. Or when your army has suffered defeat after defeat on the Western Front and your allies have collapsed in Middle East, the Balkans and on the Italian Front.

[Saras]

Molly sighting!