What if Gavrilo Princip had missed?

[ka9q]

I hadn't heard of the poppy exhibition so I went and read about it. It seems quite simple, much like the Vietnam War memorial in Washington DC. And it seems to have the same effect on people.

All those poppies, 888,246 of them. And that's just the British losses, and just in WW1. Sigh.

[Halcyon Dayz, FCD]

One possibility: [..] The Soviets would have been the first to land a man on the moon.

Without a Great War political revolution would probably still have happened in Russia, the empire was rotten, but there is no guarantee that the same gang would have ended on top.
That was pretty much a fluke as it was, and the Bolshevik position had been greatly strengthened by the deprivations of war. Constitutional democracy or a right-wing authoritarian regime are just as likely.

[Andromeda]

So, it was there for those with eyes to see. I'm really more surprised by the number of very well-educated, well-connected people who saw those same demonstrations and didn't see anything alarming about them.

I've often thought the same, about Hitler and Mussolini.  I see footage of them screaming and posturing, and I wonder if anyone at the time said, "Erm....?!"

[Peter B]

I find it ironic that Princip, according to his shooting instructor and other witnesses, was a piss poor shot; while Franz Ferdinand was an accomplished marksman, having bagged many thousands of game animals.

I didn't know that about Princip. But note what I said in reply #12: "...if you want a good conspiracy theory, how about this: Gavrilo Princip was a patsy, and the assassination was actually carried out by German Military Intelligence, in order to cause a war."

Hmmm, that might make a good thriller - British Secret Agent finds out that a German marksman is going to be in Sarajevo for a "holiday" at the same time as Archduke Franz Ferdinand...

[Peter B]

My favourite series of mystery novels was written between the wars; the main character is also something of an occasional diplomat.  There are interesting bits and pieces dropped in that tend to confirm that a war was coming, and the author was not herself a diplomat.  She was an academic.

Lord Peter Wimsey and Dorothy L Sayers?

[Peter B]

It is also interesting that long before the architects of Munich were laying Hitler's path for war, Churchill warned of  acquiescence to fascist demands and where it would lead. He was deeply concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe long before Chamberlain held the piece of paper aloft. During his wilderness years he wrote extensively about the abyss that Europe was facing.

This is always a tricky question to discuss. It's been said that when German forces marched in the Rhineland in 1936, they were under orders to immediately retreat to the Rhine River if France raised any objections. The French government declined to call Hitler's bluff, and so his stocks rose within Germany.

The problem with Churchill's assessment is that, while accurate, the simple response of the governments of the time was to ask rhetorically how they were supposed to stop Germany.

Britain had started re-arming in about 1934, on the basis of an assessment by the Imperial General Staff that war would break out around 1939. Even at the time of the Munich Crisis in November 1938 the British and French were poorly prepared for war. They felt that time was on their side, and that delaying the outbreak of war would help them more than Germany. If this meant sacrificing Czechoslovakia then so be it - the extra time gained would allow the Allies to out-produce Germany.

For that matter, things weren't helped by large over-estimates of Germany's military forces in terms of both numbers and quality. People looked at the relative effectiveness of aircraft in particular in the civil war in Spain - German aircraft fighting for the Nationalists (such as the Me-109 and He-111) greatly outperformed the Soviet-supplied aircraft fighting for the Republicans - and drew obvious but incorrect conclusions.

This production difference was also what was behind the inactivity of the Allies in the Phony War. Not realising how weak the German forces in the West were in September 1939, the Allies were instead content to keep building up their resources, figuring that the decisive year of the war would be 1943. (It turns out they were right, but not in the way they thought.)

[Peter B]

I asked my father who was a youngster during the thirties if they ever thought a second war was coming.

"Of course!" he said. "We knew it was coming for years."

"How?"

"Every time we saw a newsreel of thousands of people standing there chanting Hitler's name," he said. "And Hitler screaming about Germany regaining her greatness. We knew that wasn't going to lead to anything good."

So, it was there for those with eyes to see. I'm really more surprised by the number of very well-educated, well-connected people who saw those same demonstrations and didn't see anything alarming about them.

That's interesting to hear, and I have no doubt it's true. There was certainly no shortage of people in Britain and France (and the USA for that matter) who were willing to fight fascism in the 1930s, with many striking their first blow with the International Brigades in Spain.

I wonder what my Dad (Australian) thought - he was 24 when war broke out, but he didn't sign up straight away. Instead, he and his brother both volunteered in May 1940, a few days after Germany attacked in the West.

It's worth pointing out, however, that while many people may have considered war inevitable through the 1930s, there was also a lot of support for Chamberlain's actions at Munich in 1938. In fact Chamberlain seems to have matched his actions to public opinion extremely well from this time until the declaration of war in September 1939: not only was he praised for his actions at Munich, but when in March 1939 Germany occupied the remains of Czechoslovakia (in breach of the Munich Agreement) Chamberlain offered British and French protection for Poland, exactly when public opinion in Britain turned sharply against Germany; and Chamberlain's decision to go to war in September 1939 also had broad public support. Chamberlain's problem was that his government didn't vigorously engage in the warfare he'd just committed the country to. (There was also the issue of failing to get Soviet support, but this was always an unlikely possibility given that the Soviets wanted a third of Poland's territory.)

[Peter B]

At the beginning of 1918, Germany looked on the up somewhat. They'd pasted Russia with the Treaty of Brest-litovsk and held their ground in the West. The reversal of fortune came quite suddenly relatively speaking. No wonder the stab in the myth about the successful German military being betrayed by the politicians gained traction.

The other part of it was that when the war ended in November 1918, the front line was still entirely in Belgium and France (barring a tiny sliver of Germany near the Swiss border). Stab-in-the-back proponents were able to point out that Germany had "surrendered" (even though it was initially presented only as a ceasefire) without the Allies occupying any part of Germany during the fighting.

It was a reason why the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender at the end of the sequel was signed by the military commanders, so noone could allege they were sold out.

Well, this, plus the fact that >90% of Germany was occupied by Allied and Soviet forces in May 1945 - apart from Norway, Denmark and bits of the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Yugoslavia the Reich just didn't exist.

Incidentally, it's worth noting that Germany was really the only Axis country which surrendered unconditionally, despite this being an Allied requirement from the Casablanca conference - both Italy and Japan were able to surrender with conditions.

The great irony about German bitterness over the territorial losses was both that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was harsher than Versaille and that German irredentism in the 30s and 40s ultimately led to Germany getting an even harsher round of territorial losses through Potsdam. If Germany ever tried it again, all that would be left would be Dusseldorf.

Agreed. I understand that Germany's harsh conditions in the Brest-Litovsk treaty was partly to maximise the amount of grain the Central Powers could extract from former Russian territory to feed starving citizens back home. However it's also worth considering that the peace conditions the German government was considering for France were almost as extreme.

In this context it's worth going back to the period leading up to World War One: there was a view among a lot of British liberals that war between nations was pretty much impossible given the value of international trade - war would be an economic disaster, with the victors almost as economically ruined as the losers, and thus no rational leader could possibly want it. In a way it could be seen as a pre-WW1 version of Mutually Assured Destruction, the concept which seems to have helped keep the peace during the Cold War.

However, what seems to have been missed by the liberals was that many in the German government seem to have been completely unconcerned by this possibility. Instead, the German view seems to have been that if they went to war and won, then all of Europe would be available to pay for German (and Austrian) reconstruction; that would be an economic disaster for the rest of Europe but simply the Darwinian price the losers would have to pay.

If my view is correct (and I have no idea whether historians think this) then I suspect that hypothetical German occupation of Europe following their hypothetical victory in WW1 would have been very similar to actual German occupation of Europe following Germany's actual victories in the early part of WW2. (One obvious difference would have been the treatment of Jews. This in turn leads to a number of dark places, such as how Jews would have been viewed and treated by disgruntled Britons and French.)

[gillianren]

Lord Peter Wimsey and Dorothy L Sayers?

Yup.  Though one of the most interesting lines from a historic standpoint, in my opinion, comes from Gaudy Night, wherein one character says, "What this country wants is a 'Itler."