Grey Tide In The East
Page 18
The ties that bound the Empire together were weakened by the four years of WWI. Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who had eagerly sent their young men to aid the mother country in 1914, after the war came to resent what they saw as needless sacrifice of their young men by British generals at battles like Vimy Ridge in France and in the Gallipoli Campaign. (To see why the Australians felt this way, see the 1981 film Gallipoli, directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson.) Canada lost almost 1% of its population, Australia 1.3 % and New Zealand 1.6% fighting in a war in which they had no direct stake. They would answer the call again in 1939, but not so eagerly and not as colonies. As a result of the Great War, the Balfour Declaration at the Imperial Conference of 1926 granted independence to all three countries (the Declaration was ratified in Australia and New Zealand in 1942 and 1947 respectively). Thus, the Empire did not last very many years after victory in 1918.
If the result of the GEW depicted herein was a mitigated disaster for France, her victory in 1918 in WWI was a complete catastrophe, with a worse result for France in almost every measurable way.
The French Army, in four years of trench warfare, sustained 1,679,000(!) dead, amounting to more than 4% of the country’s population. France suffered a proportionate number of wounded: more than four million. This was out of a total population of less than 40 million. (All casualty figures are from Wikipedia: http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ World_War_I_casualties.) In the GEW, I estimate her casualties at around 500,000 in approximately one year of war. As for the monetary costs of WWI, where Great Britain expended 15% of her pre-war national wealth, France mortgaged her future by spending nearly 55% of her accumulated national wealth. If this was victory, it was of a kind that was indistinguishable from defeat. It was a “victory” which led directly to defeat in 1940, when the demoralised French Army was defeated by the Wehrmacht in just six weeks.
The preceding only goes to show that defeat in a short war can be less costly than victory in a long one. The GEW would have been better for all the participants than WWI actually was (with the possible exception of Russia) if only because one year of war is better than four.
Even Russia, the big loser in the GEW, did not suffer nearly as much as she did in WWI. At least her people did not. Russia lost approximately 3 1/2 million dead as a result of WWI, including 1 million civilians who died of disease or famine as a direct result of the war. The numbers would of course, have been far lower in the GEW, for reasons already stated.
Mention of Russia brings up the question of whether the Bolsheviks would have succeeded in establishing the world’s first Communist government after the GEW. I am inclined to think that they would not. For one thing, Germany actually helped the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 by sending Lenin into Russia on a sealed train in the hope that he would be able to disrupt the Provisional Government, which was still bent on prosecuting the war. In the GEW, this would certainly not have occurred.
Then, even if the Bolsheviks had somehow managed to seize power in Russia, or even looked as if they were about to do so, it is a safe bet that Germany would have made certain they would not be in power very long. The Kaiser would never have tolerated a revolutionary government on his border. At home, the German equivalents of the Bolsheviks were outlawed, and their members either in prison, in hiding or in exile. It is difficult to say what kind of government would finally have emerged in Russia after the GEW, but I suspect that even if it were not friendly to Germany, it would be one that Germany could tolerate.
Eventually, however, I would expect Russia to emerge from the GEW, revolution and civil war as a Great Power again, whether it took ten, fifteen or even twenty years to recover. The borders of Russia in 2013 are very similar to where they would have been left by Germany after the Treaty of Cracow at the end of the GEW, and no one disputes Russia’s Great Power status today. It is still a very large country, with a large population and immense natural resources.
For the United States, WWI was the beginning of her rise to world power. The United States was the only major participant in WWI (excluding Japan’s very limited involvement) to enjoy a net benefit from the conflict. The U.S. economy boomed during WWI, supplying food, fuel and other raw materials to the Entente Powers, and as a major source of munitions. Even more profitable for the U.S. was serving as the banker to the Triple Entente, floating billions of dollars in war loans to the combatants. After the war, the U.S. was in an even stronger position in the commercial world, as the economies of all her potential rivals (except Japan) had been badly strained or crippled by WWI as set forth above. The American rise to a position of global military-political dominance by 1945 began with her rise as the manufacturing titan as a result of WWI. The relatively short GEW would certainly not have had any such effect. It would be more reasonable to assume that the newly enlarged German Empire would rise to the top of the manufacturing world, once it had assimilated its new acquisitions. Would this eventually lead to a war between these two Powers? If Germany attempted to throw its weight around by trying to exclude American products from European markets, such an outcome is not unlikely.
Considering the further course of relations between Germany and Austria after the GEW, I think it probable that the alliance between the two could end over the course of the 1920s. Without the fear of a mutual enemy (Russia) to keep Austria-Hungary attached to Germany, friction over issues such as the spoils of the war (Germany would, as the dominant partner, undoubtedly keep all the best pieces of Russia for herself, throwing the scraps and leavings to Austria), the treatment of minorities in the Dual Monarchy (Austrian policy was to favour certain ethnic groups within the Empire over others, such as the Poles, to keep them too busy to think about how a German minority dominated everyone; the German Empire believed that everyone should be assimilated and that all former ethnic ties should be forgotten), and so on. Therefore it is certainly possible that, not very many years after the end of the GEW, Austria-Hungary might become the Eastern ally for which France was searching, especially since the two nations had no direct cause for enmity, and both were bordered by the same large and dangerous Power.
WWI did not merely affect international politics; it was the direct cause of great changes in the very structure of society. In four years of total national mobilisation, all the combatant countries were forced to staff their factories with women. This was the first time in history that the female populations of Western nations were called upon to provide the majority of the labour force. In Great Britain, by 1917 there were 819,000 working in the munitions industry alone. In France by 1918, 425,000 women were working in state run armaments factories, with a further 132,000 in the privately owned metal industry compared with only 17,731 at the start of the war.
WWI dramatically expanded the role of the state in daily life as it took over direction of the nation’s economy, as for example, by being obliged to provide state-run day care centres for mothers working in munitions plants. By war’s end, General Erich Ludendorff was in an unprecedented position as virtual dictator of Germany, having assumed direction of practically every aspect of the economy. The scope of governments in France and Britain had also grown tremendously. This growth would prove, after the war, to be the first step in the construction of the modern social welfare state. Whether these profound changes would have occurred anyway is impossible to say, but it is certain that it would not have happened so quickly without the pressure of four years of total war.
I have said nothing about the enormous changes in military technology brought about by the war, in particular the invention of the tank and developments in aviation, none or very few of which would have happened in the short GEW depicted here. Moreover, I will not speculate to what extent the second great trauma of the 20th Century, the Great Depression, would have been affected by the relatively short and inexpensive GEW. There are too many conflicting views among historians and economists about the relationship between WWI and the Depression. Some believe WWI was the principal cause of the Depressio
n, or one of the principal causes. Some hold that it was one cause among many, and some that the two events had no causal relationship at all. Under the circumstances, I will just say I am pretty certain that there must have been some substantial long term consequences arising from the major disruptions to the economies of the participants in WWI, and that this had something to do with the size and possibly the timing of the Great Depression. Whatever that something was, obviously it would not have been a consequence of the GEW.
What, if anything, can we learn from this counterfactual examination of the Schlieffen Plan? I would argue that it stands as a case study and a warning to policy makers as an example of the potentially disastrous consequences that can follow when political leaders, such as Wilhelm II, abdicate their responsibilities by leaving political/diplomatic decisions to be made by their generals. Had its political leadership acted responsibly, Germany would have been spared the consequences of defeat after four years of bloody warfare, and the rest of the world the convulsion of 1939-1945 that resulted from that defeat.
April, 2013
Erdenheim, PA