Over the Top: Alternative Histories of the First World War

Introduction

The Great War was just that – great beyond all experience. It remained the Great War until madness a generation later forced it to become merely a numbered war. Nevertheless, one must go back 2,400 years to find another such inter-civilisational war that was so devastating to the spirit of the age – to the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). As the flower of Athens died in the quarries of Syracuse or with throats cut on Goat Creek, so did the shining youth of Europe die in the mud of the Somme, the charnel house of Verdun, and across the vast distances of the Eastern Front.

Four great empires were destroyed by the war: the Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Ottoman, and the Russian empires all fell during or shortly after the conflict. The war culled the European peoples of some of their best and brightest. The survivors sought meaning in the conflict and christened it the ‘war to end all wars’, hoping that the sheer cost would dissuade nations from future struggles. But the Great War did not end war; in fact it only seeded monstrous tyrannies in Germany and Russia and laid the foundations for a vaster, even more destructive war between 1939 and 1945. Its name even changed, from the Great War to merely the First World War, the precursor to the Second World War, and so slipped from historical prominence.

Yet history did indeed pivot upon the Great War, setting the stage for all that followed in the twentieth century. Where a spirit of optimism prevailed before the war, the aftermath was a pall of dispiriting, moralesapping despair at the enormous waste. The colonial subjects of even the victors lost much of the awe with which they had beheld their rulers. If not more important, the centre of gravity of Western civilisation had shifted to the United States, along with much of Europe’s wealth, the treasure of empire spent on war. Thus, whilst America enjoyed the ‘Roaring 1920s’, the devastated economies of Europe were wracked by shortages and strikes. At the same time, the war sowed, like dragon’s teeth, the predatory tyrannies of communism, national socialism, and Japanese imperialism that would convulse the rest of the century.

All this need not have happened in just the way it did. Nothing was preordained or inevitable. Europe was not subject to some god curse pronounced from the Oracle of Delphi. History does not roll down some prearranged grove. It rolls all over the place. It is contingency writ large, subject to vast and ever-shifting influences. It most resembles a kaleidoscope in which every turn of the tube presents a new picture, with no two ever alike.

In the years after the First World War there was a degree of public interest in ‘counterfactual’ history that explored the alternative possibilities of war.¹ For example, Winston Churchill’s influential history of the conflict, The World Crisis, offered the reader a tantalising series of potential turning points. With verve so typical of the author, The World Crisis outlined several key moments when greater vision or determination might have swung the war to Britain’s advantage, including a successful Gallipoli operation, a decisive Battle of Jutland or greater ambition in the use of tanks. The idea was carried further in Bernard Newman’s popular novel The Cavalry Went Through, in which a dynamic young British officer rises to command the army on the Western Front and achieves a dramatic breakthrough by employing innovative operational methods.

However, the outbreak of the Second World War abruptly ended interest in First World War alternative history. For a variety of reasons, not least commercial considerations, modern authors have been reluctant to explore the decisions of 1914–18. This is unfortunate, because the history of the Great War especially begs the question: What if? The student of the war cannot help but plead as the drama unfolds, ‘Save yourselves, you fools!’ More importantly, the reader cannot help but notice all the decision nodes where the resolution to take a particular course of action balanced on a knife’s edge and could as easily have gone one way or another. Follow those plausible roads not taken, and history changes exponentially. Suddenly, the war is racing off in different and unexpected directions.

To describe these new directions, the arts of the historian and storyteller must be given full play. Writing alternate history (more accurately ‘alternative history’) must follow rigorous rules to create plausible scenarios. Author, historian, strategist and soldier Ralph Peters has described the ‘Five Pillars of alternative history’, in Frontline’s recent Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History. They are worth summarising here for there is no more perceptive analysis in the requirements of writing for this new genre.² Good alternate history must have:

A compelling, convincing vision. ‘If the alternative-history does not grip us with logic – the recognition that this could have happened – the entire structure falls flat … We have to be captured by the recognition that, yes, but for a few matters of happenstance, the author’s vision might have come to pass, changing history.’

Historical and technical knowledge. The writer must know ‘what has happened down to the sub-atomic details’. He must also grasp ‘why things happened and how slight alterations in events or personal relations might have led to very different outcomes’. He must also ‘know what soldiers can do and won’t do’ and also know ‘not only what political leaders are supposed to do, but what they actually end up doing’.

Grasp of character. ‘Alternative history doesn’t work if the author doesn’t understand the actual personalities of the figures he enlivens on the page – or human complexity in general … [T]he actions men make and the actions they take must be grounded in their actual psychology and mundane circumstances.’ Characters must ‘make credible decisions based on the different developments confronting them’.

Writing ability. ‘In alternative history, the focus should be on events and characters presented in transparent prose that never calls attention to itself. The writing should be so clean and clear that it disappears, leaving only the author’s vision … Even when’ addressing ‘infernally complex situations or arcane technical details, the writing is a spotless window that lures the reader to look deeper inside’.

Storytelling ability. ‘Writing ability and storytelling are often confused with one another, but while related involve separate talents and skill-sets … The novelist/storyteller … is a literary Dr. Frankenstein, struggling bravely to create not only a living being, but an entire living world …’, choosing ‘from an infinite number of possibilities, the unique combination of body parts that will spring to life for the reader. The non-fiction writer declares, It’s a fact. The novelist cries, It’s alive!’

The reader will have to judge whether the contributors to Over the Top have successfully crafted these five pillars to support their stories.

The Great War has always been dominated by images of the Western Front in the popular imagination of the British, French, Germans, and Americans. Yet, numbers of men even greater than those fighting in France and Belgium were fighting in other theatres where the opportunities were more fluid – the Eastern Front, the Balkan Front, and the Arabian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Half of our stories address these theatres and the obscured, yet vital, contributions of the Russians, Austrians, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs. How would the war have changed had the Germans not attacked France but turned their main thrust against Russia; had the Russians thoroughly defeated the Austro-Hungarians; had the Greeks joined the Allies at Gallipoli; or had the British severed the communications of the Ottoman Empire at Alexandretta?

The war in the west is not neglected. The BEF was especially vulnerable at Ypres in 1914; Jutland begged for a more decisive outcome; technological solutions to the stalemate in the trenches were plausible earlier than they were actually realised; and there were alternative plans in place for the Battle of the Somme in 1916 that could have changed the nature and perhaps outcome of the fighting. The possibility of earlier American intervention in the war – entering in 1915 rather than 1917 – is also explored.

Although separated from the modern reader by a full century, the First World War continues to generate controversy and interest as the great event upon which modern history pivoted. It is hoped that the ten scenarios presented in this volume focus the reader upon the immensity of that event and the roads not taken that could have led to a far different world.

1

Der Tag

The German Decision to Go East in 1914

Peter G. Tsouras

If any man represented the genius of the German General Staff system in July 1914 as Europe stumbled toward war, it was General Hermann von Staab, Chief of the Railway Department. Upon his expertise and that of his department depended Germany’s ability to mobilise against its encircling enemies and maximise its advantage of interior lines.

That expertise was superior to that of either France or Russia, Germany’s two main enemies. The Railway Department, upon receipt of mobilisation orders, would prove the worth of the thousands of officers assigned to making sure Germany’s eight wartime armies and over two million men assembled, moved, and deployed faster than the French or Russians.

It was an incredible feat of organization. To move a single army corps – and there were fifty-six of them in the German Army – required 6,010 railway cars: 170 for officers, 965 for the infantry, 2,960 for cavalry (troopers and mounts), and 1,915 for the artillery and support troops. They would be organized into 280 trains, all moving at precisely fixed times at exact intervals. So detailed were the German Army’s mobilization plans that the number of railroad cars that could pass over any given bridge within a given time were, for safety’s sake, determined in advance.¹

The entire mobilisation required eleven thousand trains.

Staab and the rest of the German Army were now aware that Der Tag – ‘the day’ – was approaching with the speed of an out-of-control train. Der Tag was that moment when all the pent-up fears about the encirclement of Germany would be lanced, that everything the German nation had planned and prepared for would be set in motion in one tidal, emotional release. All across Germany every soldier in his garrison and every reservist in his home waited in expectation as the clouds of war gathered over Europe. They waited for the telegrams of Kriegsgefahrzustand – the announcement of imminent danger of war, the trigger for mobilisation. Kriegsgefahrzustand ‘put German railways under full military control; inaugurated martial law and military censorship; cancelled all leaves, returning troops to their garrisons, strengthened frontier defenses; and suspended postal traffic across the border’.² Kriegsgefahrzustand was the cocking of the gun. All that was left was to pull the trigger with the mobilisation order itself, which could be issued two days after the Kriegsgefahrzustand measures had been taken.

All the great powers of Europe were spinning out of control towards war. It had all come out of nowhere. Serbian fanatics had engineered the murder of Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Hapsburg dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary. And now the Austrian government was determined to use that as pretext to destroy the Serbian kingdom and absorb its territory, despite Emperor Franz Joseph’s astute observation that it was a country only of goat droppings, plum trees, and murderous people. Russia, already humiliated by the Austrians in the Bosnian Crisis of 1908, had decided enough was enough and announced its support of fellow Slavs in Serbia. Unwisely then, the Kaiser had declared Germany’s full support of Austria, which in effect subordinated German national security to petty Austrian territorial aggrandisement in a region in which no one’s national interests, except the Serbs, was threatened. The late ‘Iron Chancellor’, Otto von Bismarck, had observed correctly that the entire Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.

Unfortunately, the situation was about trigger an automatic sequence of events that would lead to the war that no one wanted. The problem lay in the organisation for war of the armies of the great European powers, with the exception of Britain. The Napoleonic Wars of a hundred years ago had instilled the concept of a ‘nation in arms’, armies swollen to unprecedented size because they had the entire adult male population as a military resource. Peacetime armies became training vehicles for the large number of men that would be conscripted for short periods and then sent into the reserves. This mass of reservists would then be called up to reinforce and expand the regular armies in times of war.

Germany, with a population of over seventy million, had to call up only 50 per cent of its eligible males to man a peacetime army of 840,000, while France – with only half that population – had to call up 85 per cent to reach a peacetime strength of 770,000. The Austro-Hungarian Empire with fifty million people found that it could support a peacetime army of 450,000 while Russia, with a population approaching two hundred million, put almost two million men in uniform. The mechanism of their wartime expansion, upon which all war plans were based, was a complex mobilisation plan. That in turn relied upon an increasingly dense system of railway lines to transport masses of reservists to their depots where they would be equipped, then transported as organised units to their assembly areas. At the same time formations, both reserve and regular, along with mountains of supplies, would be moved to the frontiers to be prepared to attack or defend as various war plans dictated.

For the Germans, timing would be everything. It was upon this basis that the Chief of the General Staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen (CGS from 1894 to 1905), had devised the plan for war against both France and Russia. The operative assumption was that Russia would take at least six weeks to mobilise, while the French would be much quicker off the mark and be able to amass their armies on the German border within a shorter time. Here, he thought, was the weak joint in the Franco-Russian alliance. He reasoned that if Germany mobilised faster than both France and Russia, it could knock France out of the war quickly and then turn its victorious armies to the east to meet the Russians. It would be a close-run thing, and he devoted his life to creating and honing the plan that would eventually bear his name. It called for the Germans to mass seven of their eight armies to face France. It was to maximise that window that the German Army had poured vast resources into the railway system and the precision of the mobilisation planning and execution. It needed every minute. Franco-Russian joint military planning called for simultaneous attacks on Germany on M+15 (fifteen days after mobilisation).

Yet the Franco-German border offered too little space and bad terrain for such a decisive campaign. Schlieffen then looked beyond those borders to the flat plains of Belgium, which would provide the ground for the crushing manoeuvre, the envelopment of the French left and Paris itself, thereby trapping the French armies against the other German armies along the Franco-German border. There was only one problem with the plan: violation of Belgian neutrality would bring the British immediately into the war to protect the Belgian and French Channel ports, natural points of embarkation for an invasion of England. Schlieffen dismissed the small but lethal British Army as of little account in the manoeuvres of millions and gave no thought to the wider implications of fecklessly making an enemy of the British Empire. The British had been driven from the continent before by Napoleon, only to gather new allies and wear down and finally defeat France. They had lost little of their patient tenacity.

In its final form the Schlieffen Plan was allocated seven of Germany’s eight armies, numbered one through seven; the remaining 8th Army was left to cover the Russian border. The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th armies, numbering 840,000 men, would form the great wheel through Belgium. With supporting and line-of-communication troops, this force numbered over a million men. The remaining 5th, 6th, and 7th armies, numbering another 520,000 men, would defend the Franco-German border against the inevitable strong French attacks to liberate the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. The 9th Army would be maintained as a strategic reserve in central Germany to be assembled from various units around an existing army headquarters to move to either front as necessary.

It was a gamble that the long Russian mobilisation period would allow the Germans to crush the French and then turn their entire army east. It was all based on the calculation of a slow Russian mobilisation. That was a serious German intelligence failure. The Russians had worked diligently to streamline their mobilisation process and, despite a much less dense and efficient railway system, would be able to spring a major surprise on the Germans by being able to invade East Prussia with their 1st and 2nd armies, with over 400,000 men against the 170,000 men of the German 8th Army, long before the Germans expected to finish off the French. The only problem was that, unlike Germany, Russia’s mobilisation would be a phased one. The railway system could not handle the mobilisation of all the Russian reserves at the same time. Formations would be continuously fed forward in waves. That meant that the initial blow would not have the full might of the completely mobilised Russian Army. Dissipating the Russian blow further was the fact that their other four armies in Poland were all facing the Austrians.³

The single-mindedness with which Schlieffen fixed Germany’s fate to this plan was very dangerous. His predecessor, the great Feldmarshal Helmuth von Moltke (1800–91), had said, ‘Plans are nothing; planning is everything.’ The emphasis on planning imbued operations with flexibility at all levels, which fixation on a single plan simply threw away. Despite Schlieffen’s emphasis on this plan, which he was never truly satisfied with, the German General Staff did not allow itself to become brain-dead to the vagaries of fortune. Exercises were conducted that featured events that would throw the railway mobilisation off track, such as accidents and more importantly changes in strategic direction. There was even a war plan for mobilisation solely against Russia which was regularly exercised, though this plan never received the emphasis of the Schlieffen Plan.

So it was that Captain Sigurd von Ilsemann, a junior aide-de-camp to the Kaiser, was surprised to learn of this Russian variant on his advance visit in late 1913 to Staab’s headquarters in preparation for a possible inspection by the Kaiser a few months later. Staab explained that they were about to conduct a staff exercise of the mobilisation plan against Russia. The captain was evidently surprised; he had been aware of only the Schlieffen Plan against France. Staab explained that though the Schlieffen Plan had had priority, there was an equally well-organised and exercised mobilisation plan to point the German armies east.⁴ Tall and handsome, as were all of Wilhelm’s aides, the thirty-year-old Ilsemann was also shrewd and intensely devoted to His Majesty. The Kaiser’s visit would be cancelled, but Ilsemann tucked that piece of information away. His family had estates in East Prussia as well as his native Lüneburg in Lower Saxony, so war against the Russians was of more than professional interest to him.⁵

Ironically it was the Kaiser himself, Wilhelm II, who had reservations about the Schlieffen Plan and war with the British. He was a man of occasional brilliant insight, albeit well hidden by his Anglophobia, bombast, and reckless statements. He was the grandson of Victoria and well acquainted with his British cousins. His determination to match and surpass them had made him all too aware of their power.

Right now, as the war clouds gathered and darkened, his immediate problem was with his current Chief of the General Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, the nephew and namesake of the great field marshal. The man upon whom the Kaiser had depended to command Germany in the life-and-death struggle against its surrounding enemies was a hollow nonentity.

The Kaiser had no one to blame but himself. Wilhelm II was obsessed with the illusion of the power of outward continuity. He had been so alarmed when Alfred Krupp, the founder of the German arms industry and the giant Krupp cannon factories, died with no male issue to carry on the name that he pushed through the Reichstag a single exception law that permitted whomever married his daughter Berta to take the Krupp name. It was not hard to find a broken-down aristocrat to throw away his name for a stake in the Krupp empire.

So it was with the Chief of the General Staff. His fate was to bear the same name as his legendary uncle, the field marshal and military genius who had organised the Prussian Army for its string of victories that created the German Empire. Von Moltke the Younger, as he came to be called, was appalled when the Kaiser announced to him in 1906 that he was to succeed Schlieffen as Chief of the German General Staff. He had worked diligently if unimaginatively as the great man’s assistant as quartermaster general, but the thought of taking all that responsibility unnerved him. He had even told the Kaiser, ‘I do not know how I shall get on in the event of a campaign. I am very critical of myself.’⁶

The Kaiser brushed that aside. He seemed to think the Moltke name alone had a magic quality. That sentiment in this case was not shared by Moltke, who had clearly taken to heart Socrates’ admonition, ‘Know thyself’. Moltke’s constant air of melancholy was so palpable that even Wilhelm dubbed him Der trauige Julius – ‘Sad Julius’.⁷

The Moltke name had been more of a curse, depriving him of the solid military background vital for someone who would direct Germany’s armies in war. He had spent the first ten years of his service as aide-decamp to his illustrious uncle, followed by the same position for the Kaiser himself for another five years, which required him to attend not only to the Kaiser personally but to accompany him on his restless travels. Despite subsequent troop commands from regiment to division (1896–1904), he still remained in close attendance on the Kaiser. His appointment as Schlieffen’s deputy in 1904 ‘was met with incredulity’ in knowledgeable circles.⁸ That impression was echoed by foreign attaché reports which rated him a lightweight, such as the Austrian comment that ‘He is a complete stranger to the activities within the General Staff.’⁹ What really alarmed his contemporaries was his obsession with spiritualism and the occult under the domineering control of his wife. More than anything else they were concerned that ‘he was a religious dreamer [who] believed in guardian angels, faith-healing and similar nonsense.’¹⁰ Instead of taking this to heart, Wilhelm was more concerned with a candidate with whom he was familiar and comfortable, so much so that the addressed him with the familiar du. He said, ‘General von der Goltz has also been recommended to me, whom I don’t want, and also General von Veseler, whom I don’t know. I know you, and I trust you.’¹¹

By 30 July the strain on Moltke’s brittle personality was beginning to tell. It was not a propitious time to lose faith in oneself. Moltke was desperate for proof of Russia’s mobilisation. Over a week ago, the tsar had ordered a partial mobilisation, but still Moltke had no tangible evidence, so well had the Russians kept their mobilisation secret. The same day the French armies were ordered to close on the border, based on misleading information that the Germans had mobilised, and yet the German Army had not even received its premobilisation order.¹² The Reichschancellor, Theobald von Bethmann- Hollweg, refused to authorise the order until there was definite proof that Russia was mobilising. That came from a telegram from Count Frederich Pourtalés, the German ambassador to St Petersburg. He emphatically stated that the Russians had already begun their mobilisation. The same day German Army intelligence had concluded that Russia’s mobilisation was ‘far advanced’. Compounding Moltke’s shock was the news that the Austrians had decided to only pursue their war plan that involved Serbia and not the one that included Russia.¹³ Only twenty Austrian divisions would be facing the four Russian armies along their mutual border. Germany would feel the full brunt of a Russian attack that would be able to divert more forces from the Austrian front. Moltke had pleaded with the Austrians to cancel their campaign against Serbia and concentrate on Russia. Unfortunately, the Austrians fecklessly had become obsessed with the petty spoils in the Balkans.

The chancellor realised that the next step was unavoidable. He then telephoned the Kaiser and read him Pourtalés’s telegram. Wilhelm arrived quickly to sign the Kriegsgefahrzustand order, which was to be operative as of 3 p.m. It would take only two days from that point for mobilisation itself to begin. That same day, with the Kaiser’s approval, Bethmann-Hollweg sent two fateful telegrams. The first was to Russia demanding that it halt its mobilisation or Germany would defend itself. The second was to France demanding that its government clarify its position on its own mobilisation. By noon the next day, when the Russian deadline had passed, the Russians had not responded, and the French reply stated tersely that: ‘France would act according to her interests.’ The French deadline passed at 2 p.m. Berlin time without any further clarification. By 4 p.m. the mobilisation placards were beginning to go up all through France.

Bethmann-Hollweg still shrank from recommending mobilisation to the Kaiser. Nevertheless, he had the day before addressed the Bundesrat and got its unanimous approval, but in a fateful remark stated, ‘If the iron dice must roll, then God help us.’ He had become a prisoner of the Schlieffen Plan, which required that mobilisation be followed immediately by war. Germany must violate the sovereignty of both Luxembourg and Belgium for the right wing of the German armies to envelop the French as well as declaring war against France. At the same time war would have to be declared against Russia.

The German naval minister, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, was aghast at how poorly the plan had been thought out from the diplomatic and international law perspective. He almost shouted at the chancellor, ‘We will be seen as the aggressor in the eyes of the world but more importantly in the eyes of the British, who are the only ones in position to do something about it. And that, Herr Chancellor, is a great deal.’

Moltke came to the chancellor’s defence and said, ‘They have only a contemptible little army that we will easily throw into the Channel.’

Tirpiz glared at him. ‘I will have a little more trouble with the Royal Navy.’ His irony was lost on Moltke. He went on to say that both