WW1 Alt History Help

[Thanas]

That's actually one thing that has me wondering though - why didn't the Germans make peace with the Allies after the Russians surrendered? Getting most of Poland and Ukraine while giving back the captured French and Belgian territories sounds like a fantastic deal to me.

Because the allies would not have accepted them? They knew they were beginning to have a massive numerical and material superiority on the western front due to USA assistance (which is also why the Germans tried that desperate gamble).

I put it badly. What he meant by breaking trenches is they could assault and take trench lines without massive casulties, more around 1 to 1 or better. It used up lots of shells so it wasn't an immediate war winner. I don't have the book on me, but I believe it was hurricane bombardments combined with just biting off a small part of enemy territory.

The Allies could do this too, up to a point- what made their major campaigns so bloody was that they didn't satisfy themselves with limited campaigns, and kept pressing forward. That took them out of range of their artillery support, gave the Germans more opportunities to regroup and counterattack, and generally made the offensive bloodier.

No, what he is referring to is the system of Artillery refined by Georg Müller (Durchbruchmüller). This was refined to a scale the allies never reached. You can read about it here (scroll down or do a search).

[Zinegata]

I was under the impression that the Germas still wanted to keep Belgium and bits of Frances that they took, which was why the Western allies wouldn't accept a peace deal with them.

By contrast, a more generous peace to the western allies (return to pre-war borders in the west, Germany keeps its winning in the east) coupled with inflicting heavy defeats on the newly arrived US forces by not gambling everything on an offensive may be something the Allies would be willing to take.

[Sea Skimmer]

The British 'bite and hold' attacks were not really the same as the German 1918 offensives. The Germans used significantly different tactics, and succeeded on such a large scale as much as any reason simply because allied defenses were much weaker then what the Germans were building themselves from 1916 onward. When the Germans did attack in really heavily fortified areas, mainly only against the British in Flanders area which had pillboxes in depth, they did not gain nearly as much ground and took very heavy casualties. This was the most important of the 1918 offensives, and failed completely in its objectives.

Now the limited British bite and hold attacks sometimes opened with under an hour of heavy bombardment, but made no attempt to push deeply into the German position at all. The point was to secure a bit of ground, and then wait for the artillery to move up. Infantry would not attempt to exploit confusion or unexpected success at all/ Pretty much nothing Germany could do could stop this sort of attack from gaining some ground; armored vehicles were required to make effective counter attacks in the circumstances and they didn’t exist. But as others have pointed out, it was a very tortuous means of pushing back the Boche.

German attacks in 1918 were trying to do the complete opposite, bypassing as much resistance as possible while getting as deep into the defense system as they could. Against shallow, incomplete defenses this worked brilliantly as it meant small German parties quickly brought battalion and brigade command posts and supporting artillery batteries under ground attack. Against a deep defense it would just have meant the forward parties got wiped out. The British were also basically trying to implement a flawed kind of strongpoint defense at the time, which was incomplete and not totally garrisoned which really didn’t help. German artillery would shoot for four to six hours before the major offensives, which is quick by the standards of earlier battles but actually a fair bit of warning time. German artillery in 1918 did not have the density of allied barrages, but it was spread fairly densely over very wide attack sectors.

So similar, but not the same. Several different kinds of artillery, command and infantry attacks were coming together at the time in different ways. None of them was ideal for everything; which was perhaps the most important concept that no one really got until WW2 was being fought. War did not and could not have a single brilliant solution as so many generals had thought it did rushing into combat in 1914.

[Thanas]

I finally found the review from Wehler. It is published in Volume 15, Iss. 1 (Jan 1997) of German History. It is worth reading and I would seriously suggest all of you track it down and read it. If you do not know where to get it, PM me.

It really is one of those reviews that ends careers in the scientific world.