Nige Tassell and Professor Nick Lloyd consider the alternative shape of the 20th century had Germany\u2019s bold military strategy not failed <\/p>
Revised back in 1905 by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the Schlieffen Plan was a military strategy deployed by Germany in 1914 with the aim of winning the war in Europe in swift fashion. Rather than engage with France on its border, German troops would take a circuitous route through Belgium and the Low Countries in order to outflank and envelop the French army, forcing a quick surrender. With the French threat removed, Germany would then relocate its forces to nullify Russia in the east.<\/p>\n
Based on a misguided prediction that Britain wouldn\u2019t step in to defend Belgium, the plan failed, leading to a protracted stalemate on the battlefields of western Europe and a four-year world war that is estimated to have claimed up to 15 million lives.<\/p>\n
Nick Lloyd, professor of modern warfare at King\u2019s College London and author of The Western Front: A History of the First World War<\/i> (Viking, 2021), <\/i>is in no doubt that the successful execution of the Schlieffen Plan would have avoided such a catastrophic amount of casualties. \u201cHad it achieved its aims and knocked France out of the war, then the Western Front as it became known would not have existed. The British Expeditionary Force could not have continued without French support and would have been forced to leave the continent very quickly, akin to the scenes witnessed in the summer of 1940.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> As well as the heavy death toll having been avoided, Europe would not have suffered from the crippling economic damage caused by the First World War. \u201cIf the war had come to a conclusion in 1914 or 1915, Europe would have remained the most powerful continent in the world. It\u2019s likely that some form of economic recovery would have taken off in 1917\u201318 and brought greater prosperity all round, thus avoiding the kind of economic crash we would see in 1929.\u201d<\/p>\n Had the Schlieffen Plan achieved its goals both in the west and the east, Professor Lloyd sees the map of Europe being redrawn, with Germany possibly annexing coveted territory such as Poland and the Baltic states. In the west, Belgium \u201cwould also certainly have been annexed and put into a close economic and political relationship with Germany, with garrison troops being stationed in the country to guarantee Germany supremacy.\u201d And what of France? \u201cBerlin would have likely demanded a more punitive peace treaty to that of 1871, with significant reparations, the demobilisation of the French army, and adjustments on the border to suit German interests.\u201d<\/p>\n The political and military make-up of the following decades would have looked very different had German domination prevailed. \u201cIt is certainly likely that a victorious war in 1914 would have added greatly to the prestige and power of Imperial Germany,\u201d explains Professor Lloyd. \u201cKaiser Wilhelm II would have taken his place among the great leaders of history as his empire expanded in both the east and west, and looked to dominate Europe in peacetime with its chief rivals unable to stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n Victory, of course, wouldn\u2019t have precipitated the depth of domestic dissent that Germany suffered from after the strict terms of the Treaty of Versailles were announced in 1919, which ultimately led to the rise of Adolf Hitler<\/a> and the Nazi Party.<\/p>\n \u201cThere would have been no great grievance or betrayal to react against, as the National Socialists would do, and Adolf Hitler would have remained a fringe figure in German politics, likely campaigning for a more hard-line victorious peace and for more annexations, but without the appealMore from our alternate history series<\/h4>\n
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Prestige and power<\/h3>\n
A different cold war<\/h3>\n