| September 9 |  |
Editor says, what if the Imperial German Army captured Paris in 1914? muses Jeff Provine on This Day in Alternate History Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s). This story was published in the September 2010 edition of Changing the Times Magazine.
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In 1914, the opening battles of the World War had been sweeping victories for the German offensive. As they pressed past the Marne in early September, the British Expeditionary Force and the French Army fell back in covered retreats. Several of the German army commanders began to swerve to the southeast in pursuit of the Allies, but Chief of Staff Hulmuth von Moltke pushed them to aim directly for the war's goal: Paris.
Battle of Paris Begins Keeping lines tight, the Germans held the Eastern Flank and pressed west. The Allies launched a massive counter-attack on September 6 directly for General von Kluck's First Army. For two days, the Germans held and slaughtered oncoming Allied troops. On the 9th, the tide of battle turned, and von Kluck led fresh reinforcements in the press into Paris.
A new story by Jeff ProvineThe week-long battle of Paris would cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides with bloody and unpredictable urban warfare. The French government would flee along with many of the civilians to Orl?ans, protected by French soldiers ferried by the famous Parisian taxicabs as they had been since the days of the Marne. Once Paris was taken on the 17th, the Germans assumed the French would call for armistice as they had in the Franco-Prussian War. However, seeing German troops in Paris only caused French nationalism to soar and thousands new soldiers to surge to the battlefield.
As the German advance ended, a Race to the Sea began with battles and trenches moving northward through France until reaching Amiens and then following the Somme to the English Channel. By winter, the Germans had secured Belgium and both sides sat down for a stalemate. While the Allies calculated their moves in the spring, the Kaiser pondered the fact that the French had not surrendered as he had anticipated. Battles had been extremely costly on both sides, and he did not want to see Germany weakened by years of fruitless warfare. When consulting Moltke, the Chief of Staff told Wilhelm, "Your Majesty, this war cannot be won".
Wilhelm flew into a rage and fired Moltke for his lack of faith in Germany. He charged his replacement, von Falkenhayn, with determining a way to win the war. Falkenhayn battled with Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, eventually concocting a plan for a war of attrition. Recalling Moltke's warnings, Wilhelm rejected the plan.
The new German plan called for a defense in the West, using the new notions of trench warfare to keep the French and British at bay as well as combating numerous amphibious assaults on Belgian beaches. Falkenhayn conceded to the idea of pushing east, and the majority of the offense would be against Russia in 1915. Suffering terrible casualties, Russia would erupt into revolution and drop out of the war in 1916. Now turning back to focus on the Western Front, the Germans worked to break the British blockade, but their actions would only result in attacks upon American citizens, drawing the United States into the war.
In a massive Allied landing, Belgian liberation began and many of the German lines found themselves surrounded. The war turned against the Germans quickly, and American and British troops marched onto German soil while the French held much of their army in the trenches. Reeling, the German empire collapsed. At the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, the Allies would break up Germany into small states like they broke up the Austrian and Ottoman Empires.
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Jeff Provine
© Jeff Provine, 2010-.Story Tags
Permalinks: Post, Day. Browse Thread: Jeff Provine Blog Source: Jeff Provine’s Blog Labels: Great War, World War 1, Britain, France, Germany. Editor says, in reality the First and Second Armies of Germany did swing southeast, allowing the Allies to launch a successful push in the Battle of the Marne. Von Kluck moved the First army in a swinging defense, but the action formed a massive gap that the British Expeditionary Force and the French exploited. Moltke saw the disaster and broke down, retiring from the army and dying of ill health just two years later. Wilhelm believed the war was still winnable (even declaring victory in 1916), and his commander Falkenhayn began the battle plans for a war of attrition that would ultimately end with the surrender of Germany.
~ Talk about "Be careful what you wish for..."
~ Hmm...maybe this could have been 'the war to end all wars', at least in Europe. Unless Hitler somehow reunites Germany in the 30s or 40s.
~ I've often wondered why the Allies let Germany stay in one piece in 1918...the German Empire was very new then and quite a few people remembered when large chunks of it had been independent countries, like Bavaria.
Comment from Arlena Arteaga Kelly on Facebook: The Americans would have hustled earlier than 1917, the war would certainly be more of a legacy at least for the Americans than a mere forgotten war, and perhaps Germany's attention would have been focused more on political unity post WWI.
~ One would imagine that a Germany forcibly dvided by its foes would have been a hotbed of extremism, inless either held under tight control (as was East Germany after World War II) or essentially bribed with massive economic aid and political favors, as was West Germany in the same years.
Also, I find it hard to believe that a battle for Paris would cost "hundreds of thousands of lives." Tens of thousands, maybe.
~ How does Kluck penetrate the Paris fortifications? Also what reinforcements The entire right wing was out of supply and essentially out of communication with OKH. The potential reinforcements went east for Masurian Lakes.
~ What if the Germans had halted their advance on Paris, and instead raced to the sea at Dunkirk? They would have split the French and the British, forced the British to evacuate...
~ The trick here is keeping the right in communication with the rest. Kluck wheeled too far to meet the Allied advance, which was tactically the appropriate move but strategically disastrous. Although E Lipps is right about the life cost. I'll edit that as "casualties", which is along the right bounds with some half a million killed, wounded, captured, or missing in so many battles, like the Second of the Marne.
Comment from Norton James on Facebook: Historical assessments
Treaty of Versailles
"In his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes referred to the Treaty of Versailles as a "Carthaginian peace", a misguided attempt to destroy Germany on behalf of French revanchism, rather than to follow the fairer principles for a lasting peace set out in President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which Germany had accepted at the armistice. He stated: "I believe that the campaign for securing out of Germany the general costs of the war was one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible."[4] Keynes had been the principal representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference, and used in his passionate book arguments that he and others (including some US officials) had used at Paris.[31] He believed the sums being asked of Germany in reparations were many times more than it was possible for Germany to pay, and that these would produce drastic instability.[32]
French Resistance economist Étienne Mantoux disputed that analysis. During the 1940s, Mantoux wrote a book titled, "The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes" in an attempt to rebut Keynes' claims; it was published after his death.
More recently it has been argued (for instance by historian Gerhard Weinberg in his book "A World At Arms"[33]) that the treaty was in fact quite advantageous to Germany. The Bismarckian Reich was maintained as a political unit instead of being broken up, and Germany largely escaped post-war military occupation (in contrast to the situation following World War II.)
The British military historian Correlli Barnett claimed that the Treaty of Versailles was "extremely lenient in comparison with the peace terms Germany herself, when she was expecting to win the war, had had in mind to impose on the Allies". Furthermore, he claimed, it was "hardly a slap on the wrist" when contrasted with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that Germany had imposed on a defeated Russia in March 1918, which had taken away a third of Russia's population (albeit of non-Russian ethnicity), one half of Russia's industrial undertakings and nine-tenths of Russia's coal mines, coupled with an indemnity of six billion Marks.[34] Eventually, even under the "cruel" terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany's economy had been restored to its pre-war status.
Barnett also claims that, in strategic terms, Germany was in fact in a superior position following the Treaty than she had been in 1914. Germany's eastern frontiers faced Russia and Austria, who had both in the past balanced German power. But Barnett asserts that, because the Austrian empire fractured after the war into smaller, weaker states and Russia was wracked by revolution and civil war, the newly restored Poland was no match for even a defeated Germany.
In the West, Germany was balanced only by France and Belgium, both of which were smaller in population and less economically vibrant than Germany. Barnett concludes by saying that instead of weakening Germany, the Treaty "much enhanced" German power.[35] Britain and France should have (according to Barnett) "divided and permanently weakened" Germany by undoing Bismarck's work and partitioning Germany into smaller, weaker states so it could never disrupt the peace of Europe again.[36] By failing to do this and therefore not solving the problem of German power and restoring the equilibrium of Europe, Britain "had failed in her main purpose in taking part in the Great War".[37]
Regardless of modern strategic or economic analysis, resentment caused by the treaty sowed fertile psychological ground for the eventual rise of the Nazi party. Indeed, on Nazi Germany's rise to power, Adolf Hitler resolved to overturn the remaining military and territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. Military buildup began almost immediately in direct defiance of the Treaty, which, by then, had been destroyed by Hitler in front of a cheering crowd. "It was this treaty which caused a chain reaction leading to World War II," claimed historian Dan Rowling (1951). Various references to the treaty are found in many of Hitler's speeches and in pre-war Nazi propaganda.[citation needed]
French historian Raymond Cartier points out that millions of Germans in the Sudetenland and in Posen-West Prussia were placed under foreign rule in a hostile environment, where harassment and violation of rights by authorities are documented.[38] Cartier asserts that, out of 1,058,000 Germans in Posen-West Prussia in 1921, 758,867 fled their homelands within five years due to Polish harassment.[38] In 1926, the Polish Ministry of the Interior estimated the remaining number of Germans at less than 300,000.[citation needed] These sharpening ethnic conflicts would lead to public demands of reattaching the annexed territory in 1938 and become a pretext for Hitler's annexations of Czechoslovakia and parts of Poland.[38]" Wk
Comment from Margo Barotta on Facebook: the german and french had a long history of wars from the prussian empire until adolf hitler regime.and if paris was captured by the german army in 1914 i think she will had the same destiny of alsace &loraine region .
Comment from Arlena Arteaga Kelly on Facebook: The Americans would have hustled earlier than 1917, the war would certainly be more of a legacy at least for the Americans than a mere forgotten war, and perhaps Germany's attention would have been focused more on political unity post WWI.
© Today in Alternate History, 2013-. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
