Would it have been better for the world had Germany won WWI?

[Strychnine]

Not to make this all about the podcast, but there are SO many details that you just don't learn about in American history classes.

When the Germans decided to try to coast right through Belgium and expected no resistance, but they put up a fight with their fort defenses... blew my mind.

Hearing stories from the Battle of Liège was nuts. The Germans needed to break through this line of VERY well built Belgian forts. The Belgians weren't having any of it though, and as the Germans charged they would mow them down with rifle and machine gun fire, along with field cannons (They were built so that a long line of these forts all had overlapping fields of fire and trenches connecting between them). Literal stories of Belgian officers wondering if they should have their men try to shoot holes through the mounting piles of bodies... or send men out to clear the piles of bodies so the Germans wouldn't have barriers to hide behind...

And then the Germans finally got their LARGE ass cannons up to the front. Large like 420 mm and 2200 lb shells (the gun crews, which were like 100 guys, had to move 300 yds away and fire remotely). They would shoot a 4000 ft high arc (60 sec flight time) and drop these shells straight down on the forts (which were mostly buried and had underground rail lines, etc) and just pound the fuck out of them until surrender or until a round connected with the magazine and blew it to hell and back.

Or the German general, who was not even fighting, just there as an observer, took over for a fallen leader, led a group of men straight through the fort line right to the citadel in Liège and pounded on the door with the hilt of his fucking SWORD and demanded surrender... which the Belgians finally did.

And that was just one of the VERY early battles.

[Strychnine]

Made it through about 6 hours of it today (almost through episode 2). The background leading up to WWI is pretty incredible.
The history on Gavrilo Princip was awesome.
The whole thought process about how this was what would take us from the old world to the new... that the Russian Czar, German (Prussian) Kaiser, (both words rooted in "Caesar"), etc are all constructs going back hundreds or thousands of years, but in this case those men were not the most powerful or best options - that blood put them in place, not merit - and that weak leadership (Wilhelm was a pussy compared to Bismarck, who managed a super complex group of alliances and kept the whole region in check) of powerful nations leads to very bad things... very thought provoking.


To the original question, yeah it would have made a difference. The French on the western front needed to stall long enough for the Russians to come in from the east and the stalling lent itself well to trenching in. It wouldn't matter if the Germans took Paris if the Russians were marching into Berlin at the same time. But Germany would have needed to win quickly and decisively... and not let another reason for stalling and drawing it out to come up.


I'll probably get through another 6 hours tomorrow. Will check in again.

[Strychnine]

You'll enjoy it. Well worth the time.

Btw I know there was a podcast thread elsewhere, but you should go download the Port of Dallas episode of 99% Invisible.

[sc281]

Yeah, 6 episodes. Woops

You'll enjoy it. Well worth the time.

[Strychnine]

Blueprint for Armageddon is like 18 hours long if I remember correctly. You mean all 6 episodes?

Yeah, 6 episodes. Woops

[sc281]

Assuming my SD card has enough space, I'll start on all 6 hours of "Blueprint for Armageddon" tomorrow morning. Looking forward to it.

Blueprint for Armageddon is like 18 hours long if I remember correctly. You mean all 6 episodes?

[Strychnine]

In the interest of the planet, do you not think the great wars may have delayed the rate at which we are destroying the planet? Not talking about greenhouse stuff, I am talking about water supplies, fish, and other things needed to sustain life. People keep breeding like they are and it won't be long before there are issues.

It's a weird thing to contemplate. Mathematically, just looking at trend-lines, yeah we'd probably have more people without global wars.
There are some arguments that wars actually help increase the population though. In times of conflict there are a large number of deaths, but in the post-war periods there were usually larger growth numbers - whether because children were assets (farming, etc) or because of prosperity (more jobs).

But at the same time without WWII the US would have probably struggled to recover from the great depression for even longer.


Back to WWI, same thing. It's pretty hard to determine which way it would have gone.

Niall Ferguson, 'The Pity of war'

The demographic reality was that the dead (though not always their skills) were quite quickly replaced. Fewer British men were killed during the war than had emigrated in the decade before it.
Although the German birth rate had fallen sharply since 1902(from above 35 per thousand to a nadir of 14 per thousand in 1917), there was no shortage of young men in the immediate post-war period; rather the reverse. As a percentage of the population as a whole, men aged between 15 and 45 rose from 22.8 in 1910 to 23.5 per cent in 1925.
In England and Wales the number of men aged between 15 and 24 was also higher in 1921 than it had been in 1911; as a proportion of the total population it fell only slightly (from 18.2 to 17.6 per cent).

[Strychnine]

Assuming my SD card has enough space, I'll start on all 6 hours of "Blueprint for Armageddon" tomorrow morning. Looking forward to it.

[kingjason]

In the interest of the planet, do you not think the great wars may have delayed the rate at which we are destroying the planet? Not talking about greenhouse stuff, I am talking about water supplies, fish, and other things needed to sustain life. People keep breeding like they are and it won't be long before there are issues.

[davbrucas]

I have complete faith that even without the Germans the Japanese would have started one hell of a war with the U.S. at some point.

Agreed. The outcome would have been the same, however.

[Broncojohnny]

I have complete faith that even without the Germans the Japanese would have started one hell of a war with the U.S. at some point.

[davbrucas]

We'd find another way to f things up or someone would...etc. Could it also be argued that the a-bomb/nuclear warfare progress would have been slower too?

Possibly...all the European scientists that fled Nazi Germany to the US would not have happened.

[ceyko]

We'd find another way to f things up or someone would...etc. Could it also be argued that the a-bomb/nuclear warfare progress would have been slower too?

[svauto-erotic855]

74% of Germans died in the Russian front.

My grand dad told me that not a single man that he knew at the beginning of the war survived the Eastern Front and made it home. Of course that is anecdotal since there is no possible way for him to have know everyone in the entire Wehrmacht but it still sounded pretty damn bad when he told me that.

[32vfromhell]

And of course English would not be so readily the world's unifying language as it has become.