Just for the fun of it, and because counter-factual history is now so popular in the movies, let’s consider an outrageous proposal: Would we be well blessed if Germany had won the first World War?
It could have happened this way. General Alfred von Schlieffen conceived a plan whereby his nation could defeat the French and British armies. By going through Belgium, the major German thrust would bypass forts along the French border, fight westward north of Paris and then swing south to envelop the French capital and force surrender.
The war thus might have ended only six weeks later in the year it started, 1914. There would have been no Western Front, no nearly five years of battle, no trench warfare, no poison gas. It would have been a war with casualties but nothing approaching the agonizing 20 million deaths actually suffered. The United States, which did not declare war until 1917, would never have been involved.
Unimpeded by the Western allies, the winning Germans could then have forced a quick surrender of Russia on the Eastern Front. That would have left Czar Nicholas’ army mostly intact to fend off a revolution and give Russians a chance for a constitutional monarchy like Britain’s. Thus, they might have avoided nearly 80 years of brutal Communist rule.
There would have been no harsh Versailles Treaty to inflame German anger, no populist Adolf Hitler screaming against Jews and other minorities to fan that rage into a new conflict — appropriately called World War II as a simple extension of the first war. No Holocaust, no 75 million deaths in the 1939-1945 war, no half-century-long Cold War between the Western powers and the Soviet Union.
The worst of the catastrophe could have been avoided had the French army not foiled von Schlieffen’s plan by winning the First Battle of the Marne. Of course, a quick victory by the Western allies over Germany would have been even better. Many millions of lives saved in the first war and no World War II to follow.
I admit there are occasional good wars, necessary wars. After Hitler came to power, there was no avoiding the second war.
If you doubt me about the stupidity of the first conflict, visit Kansas City’s great World War I Museum at the Liberty Memorial and see its video presentation. It’s easy to detect futility as you watch the pompous monarchs and diplomats of Germany, England, Russia, and France preen and bloviate their way into war with their insane arms race, dreadnought battleships and cruisers by the score.
All this at a time when humans were achieving great things in science, the arts, education, and medical care. And we were making progress against poverty. You can see that creativity stalled and diverted in the museum’s exhibits of countless machine guns, rifles, pistols, hand grenades, combat knives, and cannons. All that human genius marshaled to kill people on the other side.
On a bedroom wall in our Shawnee home hangs a frame of family photos, including my two Missouri uncles, Bud and Daly Andrews, in their U.S. Army artillery uniforms, and my German uncle (my father’s older brother) wearing his weird Deutsches Heer helmet, one hand hooked into his belt near the brass buckle inscribed, Gott mit uns (God with us). As a kid I went fishing with those Missouri uncles, helped eat a snapping turtle they caught, then served up like fried chicken.
My dad, who immigrated to America in 1928, was so much younger he barely remembered his older brother. God, after all, was not with that uncle of mine. He was killed in an artillery barrage that could have been fired by my American uncles.
(Source: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/community/joco-913/joco-diversions/article243640352.html)
