raharris1973
Well-known member
The defeat of various Central Powers' field forces, decisions to sue for peace, internal revolutions, last-minute communications with the Allies and armistice demands, internal revolutions and revolutionary outbreaks, successful and unsuccessful, based on class and ethnic demands, were all a series of complex intertwined events occurring mainly over the course of autumn and early winter 1918, but with events earlier in 1917 and 1918 heavily shaping them, and consequences continuing into 1919, 1920 and long beyond.
If you alter any one player's major decision, you can affect the details of several others. At the same time, broad trends and material factors were grinding down Germany's ability to hold its lines and even maintain a war effort even faster and more surely than it was wearing out the ability of the Entente and Associated Powers ability to persist in keeping its you men in arms and on the attack on the western front and in other theaters.
For this reason, I am pasting in a detailed timeline of OTL's relevant end of war events from 1917-1918 as a reference for all, before I bring up particular PoDs:
What we saw in OTL 1917 and 1918 was Germany and its Central Powers allies under increasing strain and stress at the economic and societal levels and at the leadership/strategic levels. They were immobilized, under attack on all sides and blockaded. The Germans tried the desperate expedient of unrestricted submarine warfare, with looked fairly hopeful through the summer of 1917, and brought America into the war as an additional enemy in spring 1917. Strikes and Parliamentary agitation for peace began to affect Germany and the other Central Powers. Luckily, Russia's even faster decline, punctuated by two revolutions, provided some balancing relief. The armistice and separate peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Bolshevik Russia offered the Germans, and by extension the rest of the CP, one last hope for winning the war through a massed offensive on the western front in spring 1918.
The Germans did their best and held the initiative until July, but lost nearly a million men in the process. Then they were checked, held, and gradually reversed over a few weeks, with hope running out faster. The reversal of fortune, stress, exhaustion, and overwork forced Germany's real working strategist on the command team, Erich Ludendorff, to step away from duty for roughly the month of August while the Central Powers sought to hold their defensive lines on all fronts.
Back at work, superficially more prepared to command from 8 September, Ludendorff resumed direction of German defenses, but bad news kept coming. Continued unrelenting pressure on the western front and loss of ground, led by the British Empire's forces in particular. Then a new problem, literally out of his left field, an Allied Balkan offensive in Macedonia in mid-September that resulted in Bulgarian capitulation by September 27th, exposing Turkish Constantinople and Habsburg Hungary to assault, and requiring little imagination to see southern Germany would be in danger after the collapse/capitulation of those partners.
On September 29th Ludendorff again broke down and forced his nominal boss Hindenburg to go with him to the Kaiser and Chancellor to say the front could not be held for any substantial amount of time and Germany needed to make peace, even on the American terms, presumably the best Germany could get from among its enemies.
Over the following days, Germany's civilian Cabinet and leading civilian politicians learned that the war situation was not going as well or as steadily portrayed by military censors up until then. On October 4th, the government began approaching the Allies for armistice terms, and the next day, began revealing to the public it was talking peace, not victory.
Although the government didn't use the words surrender or capitulation, the shift in government tone was so abrupt that it was crushing to to the credibility of traditional government authorities, and encouraged unrest and agitation, while troops, remaining in order, continued to fall back in the battlefield, and the other Central Powers suffered major defeats while their internal enemies rose up.
There were different permutations as the Germans and Wilson communicated back and forth over the next month, haggling over or clarifying terms more or less, and the other Central Powers continued to be beaten and drop out, but nothing was getting better for Germany. In the early going after the desperate straits were being revealed (October 5th) and clues were already arriving the Americans and Allies might take a hard line, Walter Rathenau of all people advocated in a government meeting (October 7th) that Germany use the uncharacteristically French strategic of Levee En Masse, the nation in arms, to reinforce the depleting professional army and resist unreasonable Allied demands to the last through national total war mobilization to hold the front and conduct guerrilla war/franc-tireur'ism behind it. He actually made the point it was the revival of the Stein strategy of 1814 and the war of liberation against Napoleon. But that day, Ludendorff dismissed Rathenau's concept as hopeless and simply wasteful [Ironically, Rathenau was assassinated about four years later by German right-wing assassins, who probably adored Ludendorff, who scapegoated Rathenau as a Jew-coward who undermined Germany's war effort and national strength and pride]. 17 days later, on October 24th, after receiving Wilson's final note that clarified he would only accept armistice terms rendering Germany militarily helpless, Ludendorff made an astonishing turnabout in front of Hindenburg, the Kaiser and the new Chancellor Max of Baden, insisting the Army was holding out well enough to resist through the winter, the Allied terms were absolutely unacceptable, the Allies might divide and tire out, Germany should resist to the last! It was too late, they didn't take him seriously at all, and he tendered his resignation two days later, blaming politicians for losing their nerve, and fleeing the country in disguise. With an eye to political theatrics, the non-victors of Jutland, Admirals Hipper and Scheer ordered the surface fleet to make one last, glorious assault on the British Grand Fleet, for German Naval "Honor" so that the surface fleet wouldn't be unfunded in the future as a 'cowardly' and useless arm of service. Suspecting they were being used as mere cannon fodder in a hopeless fight, and that it was also a ploy to just ruin armistice discussions that were going on, the sailors of the fleet just were not having it when ordered to make preparations for the naval sortie over the following week. This started with go-slow actions, insubordination, strikes, and then after arrests of sailors, with the Kiel Mutiny, the takeover of Kiel and the nationwide German Revolution.
So obviously German morale was taking a hit at the grassroots level, but in so many ways, the German revolution of November 1918, followed swiftly by armistice, and then held very much in check by Party leaders and old regime elements, was very much a 'revolution by permission', permission implicitly granted by the government when it started to admit in October it was not winning and could not go on with the war and did need to democratize with a government responsible to the Reichstag.
It was only later that when old regime lovers and nostalgics had it confirmed that ending the war meant loss of territory, reparations and internaational prestige, and internally, meant Social Democratic power, Communist riot, and concessions to trade union and worker rights and their fiscal priorities that they retroactively took away their 'permission' for the German revolution and said the Socialists, Communists, and Jews made them do it, not a panicky Ludendorff, who'd strung himself out after blunder the national strategy for too long. People will tell themselves anything.
[Jim Gaffigan under breath voice: Is there gonna be a what-if here?]
What-if #1: Ludendorff's August rest break is more effective, and he masters some deep-breathing or mindfulness techniques to keep stress at bay. When the breaking of the Hindenburg or Siegfried line and the Bulgarian collapse occur in late September, Ludendorff keeps his cool without making any panicked 'confessions' about inability to hold the front for X hours or days. He continues to work on holding actions with his staff and commanders and troops as best he can, and gradually adjust the Kaiser and Chancellor's expectations, and public expectations to Germany fighting a protracted defensive struggle for the defense of the Fatherland. The tone of public messaging dials back on exuberant promises, but is disciplined against defeatist talk, focused on guarding against nefarious Allied plans, and guarding against domestic slacking, corruption, and Bolshevism.
Tactically and operationally, what Ludendorff and Hoffman and others at OHL are trying to do is keep the battlefront west of the German border for as long as possible, while yielding ground to preserve forces intact as necessary as November and December approach. The basic concept, wherever the battle-line ends up precisely, is to survive through the fall and into the winter with an intact western front until winter weather and natural culmination of effort ends the Allied 1918 campaign for the year....and then figure out how to survive 1919. If the intact front can be about as far forward as what turned out to be the OTL November 11th armistice line, roughly through the middle of Belgium, encompassing Luxemburg, a tiny sliver of France, mostly tracking the pre-war border in the Alsace-Lorraine area, a decent sliver of Alsace to the French, that's fantastic. If Allied pressure and firepower is so strong through November and early December that it squeezes the German Army entirely out of Belgium, back to a shorter line that 'hides' behind the 'Maastricht' appendix, follows the German-Belgian border, and either does or does not include Luxemburg, and does or does not still hold Alsace Lorraine in German army hands, so be it. As long as a coherent front hold. If somehow Allied progress by Christmas and New Years is greater, and the Allies get into the Saar, or take the Palatinate, or the central Rhineland, or make a crossing into Baden, well, that's much, much worse. But wherever the line is ending up by New Years. exhaust the Entente as much as possible, and make them pay dearly for any ground they gain.
As for the other fronts, they are bad news, but Germany will have to rely on distance as an ally in place of actual fighting allies. The Germans can only put up scratch formations, and some remaining units pulled back from the east, to guard their southern and eastern borders. They will have to count the L'Armee D'Orient of French, Serbs, and Greeks not really getting to German borders by winter. The Italians are much closer and theoretically can cross soon from Tyrol to Bavaria, but even scratch formations and police can hope to use terrain advantages, and the Germans are mostly counting on the hope that the Italian appetite for high-effort sacrifice will dissipate after the Italian occupation of their desired irredenta territory from Austria, even if they also occupy Vienna, for the bragging rights. The Germans can hope, and estimate without too much unreality that the Italians will allocate their troops after gathering the irredenta most strongly in areas they may dispute with the Yugoslavs rather than in any concentrated offensive that goes all the way beyond Vienna or Tyrol to do an invasion of Bavaria toward Munich in earnest.
Militarily, as the Austro-Hungarian central state crumbles and capitulates at the end of October/early November, the German approach can be to encourage ongoing fighting by Austrian-German and Magyar militias in their home territory and welcoming fleeing ethnic German men to augment German Reich forces with a promise of at least eventually redeeming Austria and Bohemia-Moravia.
Particularly as Germany loses actual possession of any occupation territory, in any diplomatic soundings, it of course yields any claim to such occupied territory in a hypothetical peace, Germany's goals at this point are basically converted to winning Allied acceptance of a status quo peace.
What if # 2 - Things proceeds for a little longer like OTL - Ludendorff still has his OTL breakdown and confession of defeat/hopelessness on September 29th like OTL, the German government begins outreach to the Allies and democratization of structure. However, a more self-possessed, less deep-funked Ludendorff reacts very differently to Rathenau's radical suggestions for levee en masse and people's war. Instead of dismissing Rathenau's ideas, he says, or at least thinks, "Rathenau has a point, we need to prepared, we cannot disarm ourselves in front of the enemy, and we should not underestimate our reserves of national strength. Now that we are broadening the government with more responsibility to Parties, we can and should make the Parties and their leaders more responsible for organizing and rallying the people." Early in the decaying process, and with a coalition from Rathenau to Ludendorff forming from October 7th, settling on a position of national mobilizing and readiness for peace.....but only with honor, on a basis of equality, this stance may sound more reassuring than crazy to other members of OHL, Kaiser, and Cabinet. Within a few days it leads to a stalling and breaking off of correspondence with the Allies, mobilization of the Germans for fall and winter resistance, buttressed by a propaganda campaign, internal and external of 'we were ready for peace, but they want conquest', and for the Allies to continue their offensive saying, 'German notes made us hopeful they'd be willing to give up militarism, but its proven unfortunately untrue, and they compel us to fight on.' And militarily things largely proceed as per what if #1. And in neither scenario, probably, does the German Navy feel the need to try something as stupid as the North Sea death ride. But maybe I am wrong.
Given the developments I am proposing in either what-if #1 or what-if #2, during September, October, and November 1918, what would you see likely happening militarily on the fronts in December 1918, January, February, March, and April 1919, and politically internally in Germany, France, Belgium, Britain and the USA during all this time?
Also, I welcome re-use of the detailed timeline for other potential PoDs for consideration.
If you alter any one player's major decision, you can affect the details of several others. At the same time, broad trends and material factors were grinding down Germany's ability to hold its lines and even maintain a war effort even faster and more surely than it was wearing out the ability of the Entente and Associated Powers ability to persist in keeping its you men in arms and on the attack on the western front and in other theaters.
For this reason, I am pasting in a detailed timeline of OTL's relevant end of war events from 1917-1918 as a reference for all, before I bring up particular PoDs:
What we saw in OTL 1917 and 1918 was Germany and its Central Powers allies under increasing strain and stress at the economic and societal levels and at the leadership/strategic levels. They were immobilized, under attack on all sides and blockaded. The Germans tried the desperate expedient of unrestricted submarine warfare, with looked fairly hopeful through the summer of 1917, and brought America into the war as an additional enemy in spring 1917. Strikes and Parliamentary agitation for peace began to affect Germany and the other Central Powers. Luckily, Russia's even faster decline, punctuated by two revolutions, provided some balancing relief. The armistice and separate peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Bolshevik Russia offered the Germans, and by extension the rest of the CP, one last hope for winning the war through a massed offensive on the western front in spring 1918.
The Germans did their best and held the initiative until July, but lost nearly a million men in the process. Then they were checked, held, and gradually reversed over a few weeks, with hope running out faster. The reversal of fortune, stress, exhaustion, and overwork forced Germany's real working strategist on the command team, Erich Ludendorff, to step away from duty for roughly the month of August while the Central Powers sought to hold their defensive lines on all fronts.
Back at work, superficially more prepared to command from 8 September, Ludendorff resumed direction of German defenses, but bad news kept coming. Continued unrelenting pressure on the western front and loss of ground, led by the British Empire's forces in particular. Then a new problem, literally out of his left field, an Allied Balkan offensive in Macedonia in mid-September that resulted in Bulgarian capitulation by September 27th, exposing Turkish Constantinople and Habsburg Hungary to assault, and requiring little imagination to see southern Germany would be in danger after the collapse/capitulation of those partners.
On September 29th Ludendorff again broke down and forced his nominal boss Hindenburg to go with him to the Kaiser and Chancellor to say the front could not be held for any substantial amount of time and Germany needed to make peace, even on the American terms, presumably the best Germany could get from among its enemies.
Over the following days, Germany's civilian Cabinet and leading civilian politicians learned that the war situation was not going as well or as steadily portrayed by military censors up until then. On October 4th, the government began approaching the Allies for armistice terms, and the next day, began revealing to the public it was talking peace, not victory.
Although the government didn't use the words surrender or capitulation, the shift in government tone was so abrupt that it was crushing to to the credibility of traditional government authorities, and encouraged unrest and agitation, while troops, remaining in order, continued to fall back in the battlefield, and the other Central Powers suffered major defeats while their internal enemies rose up.
There were different permutations as the Germans and Wilson communicated back and forth over the next month, haggling over or clarifying terms more or less, and the other Central Powers continued to be beaten and drop out, but nothing was getting better for Germany. In the early going after the desperate straits were being revealed (October 5th) and clues were already arriving the Americans and Allies might take a hard line, Walter Rathenau of all people advocated in a government meeting (October 7th) that Germany use the uncharacteristically French strategic of Levee En Masse, the nation in arms, to reinforce the depleting professional army and resist unreasonable Allied demands to the last through national total war mobilization to hold the front and conduct guerrilla war/franc-tireur'ism behind it. He actually made the point it was the revival of the Stein strategy of 1814 and the war of liberation against Napoleon. But that day, Ludendorff dismissed Rathenau's concept as hopeless and simply wasteful [Ironically, Rathenau was assassinated about four years later by German right-wing assassins, who probably adored Ludendorff, who scapegoated Rathenau as a Jew-coward who undermined Germany's war effort and national strength and pride]. 17 days later, on October 24th, after receiving Wilson's final note that clarified he would only accept armistice terms rendering Germany militarily helpless, Ludendorff made an astonishing turnabout in front of Hindenburg, the Kaiser and the new Chancellor Max of Baden, insisting the Army was holding out well enough to resist through the winter, the Allied terms were absolutely unacceptable, the Allies might divide and tire out, Germany should resist to the last! It was too late, they didn't take him seriously at all, and he tendered his resignation two days later, blaming politicians for losing their nerve, and fleeing the country in disguise. With an eye to political theatrics, the non-victors of Jutland, Admirals Hipper and Scheer ordered the surface fleet to make one last, glorious assault on the British Grand Fleet, for German Naval "Honor" so that the surface fleet wouldn't be unfunded in the future as a 'cowardly' and useless arm of service. Suspecting they were being used as mere cannon fodder in a hopeless fight, and that it was also a ploy to just ruin armistice discussions that were going on, the sailors of the fleet just were not having it when ordered to make preparations for the naval sortie over the following week. This started with go-slow actions, insubordination, strikes, and then after arrests of sailors, with the Kiel Mutiny, the takeover of Kiel and the nationwide German Revolution.
So obviously German morale was taking a hit at the grassroots level, but in so many ways, the German revolution of November 1918, followed swiftly by armistice, and then held very much in check by Party leaders and old regime elements, was very much a 'revolution by permission', permission implicitly granted by the government when it started to admit in October it was not winning and could not go on with the war and did need to democratize with a government responsible to the Reichstag.
It was only later that when old regime lovers and nostalgics had it confirmed that ending the war meant loss of territory, reparations and internaational prestige, and internally, meant Social Democratic power, Communist riot, and concessions to trade union and worker rights and their fiscal priorities that they retroactively took away their 'permission' for the German revolution and said the Socialists, Communists, and Jews made them do it, not a panicky Ludendorff, who'd strung himself out after blunder the national strategy for too long. People will tell themselves anything.
[Jim Gaffigan under breath voice: Is there gonna be a what-if here?]
What-if #1: Ludendorff's August rest break is more effective, and he masters some deep-breathing or mindfulness techniques to keep stress at bay. When the breaking of the Hindenburg or Siegfried line and the Bulgarian collapse occur in late September, Ludendorff keeps his cool without making any panicked 'confessions' about inability to hold the front for X hours or days. He continues to work on holding actions with his staff and commanders and troops as best he can, and gradually adjust the Kaiser and Chancellor's expectations, and public expectations to Germany fighting a protracted defensive struggle for the defense of the Fatherland. The tone of public messaging dials back on exuberant promises, but is disciplined against defeatist talk, focused on guarding against nefarious Allied plans, and guarding against domestic slacking, corruption, and Bolshevism.
Tactically and operationally, what Ludendorff and Hoffman and others at OHL are trying to do is keep the battlefront west of the German border for as long as possible, while yielding ground to preserve forces intact as necessary as November and December approach. The basic concept, wherever the battle-line ends up precisely, is to survive through the fall and into the winter with an intact western front until winter weather and natural culmination of effort ends the Allied 1918 campaign for the year....and then figure out how to survive 1919. If the intact front can be about as far forward as what turned out to be the OTL November 11th armistice line, roughly through the middle of Belgium, encompassing Luxemburg, a tiny sliver of France, mostly tracking the pre-war border in the Alsace-Lorraine area, a decent sliver of Alsace to the French, that's fantastic. If Allied pressure and firepower is so strong through November and early December that it squeezes the German Army entirely out of Belgium, back to a shorter line that 'hides' behind the 'Maastricht' appendix, follows the German-Belgian border, and either does or does not include Luxemburg, and does or does not still hold Alsace Lorraine in German army hands, so be it. As long as a coherent front hold. If somehow Allied progress by Christmas and New Years is greater, and the Allies get into the Saar, or take the Palatinate, or the central Rhineland, or make a crossing into Baden, well, that's much, much worse. But wherever the line is ending up by New Years. exhaust the Entente as much as possible, and make them pay dearly for any ground they gain.
As for the other fronts, they are bad news, but Germany will have to rely on distance as an ally in place of actual fighting allies. The Germans can only put up scratch formations, and some remaining units pulled back from the east, to guard their southern and eastern borders. They will have to count the L'Armee D'Orient of French, Serbs, and Greeks not really getting to German borders by winter. The Italians are much closer and theoretically can cross soon from Tyrol to Bavaria, but even scratch formations and police can hope to use terrain advantages, and the Germans are mostly counting on the hope that the Italian appetite for high-effort sacrifice will dissipate after the Italian occupation of their desired irredenta territory from Austria, even if they also occupy Vienna, for the bragging rights. The Germans can hope, and estimate without too much unreality that the Italians will allocate their troops after gathering the irredenta most strongly in areas they may dispute with the Yugoslavs rather than in any concentrated offensive that goes all the way beyond Vienna or Tyrol to do an invasion of Bavaria toward Munich in earnest.
Militarily, as the Austro-Hungarian central state crumbles and capitulates at the end of October/early November, the German approach can be to encourage ongoing fighting by Austrian-German and Magyar militias in their home territory and welcoming fleeing ethnic German men to augment German Reich forces with a promise of at least eventually redeeming Austria and Bohemia-Moravia.
Particularly as Germany loses actual possession of any occupation territory, in any diplomatic soundings, it of course yields any claim to such occupied territory in a hypothetical peace, Germany's goals at this point are basically converted to winning Allied acceptance of a status quo peace.
What if # 2 - Things proceeds for a little longer like OTL - Ludendorff still has his OTL breakdown and confession of defeat/hopelessness on September 29th like OTL, the German government begins outreach to the Allies and democratization of structure. However, a more self-possessed, less deep-funked Ludendorff reacts very differently to Rathenau's radical suggestions for levee en masse and people's war. Instead of dismissing Rathenau's ideas, he says, or at least thinks, "Rathenau has a point, we need to prepared, we cannot disarm ourselves in front of the enemy, and we should not underestimate our reserves of national strength. Now that we are broadening the government with more responsibility to Parties, we can and should make the Parties and their leaders more responsible for organizing and rallying the people." Early in the decaying process, and with a coalition from Rathenau to Ludendorff forming from October 7th, settling on a position of national mobilizing and readiness for peace.....but only with honor, on a basis of equality, this stance may sound more reassuring than crazy to other members of OHL, Kaiser, and Cabinet. Within a few days it leads to a stalling and breaking off of correspondence with the Allies, mobilization of the Germans for fall and winter resistance, buttressed by a propaganda campaign, internal and external of 'we were ready for peace, but they want conquest', and for the Allies to continue their offensive saying, 'German notes made us hopeful they'd be willing to give up militarism, but its proven unfortunately untrue, and they compel us to fight on.' And militarily things largely proceed as per what if #1. And in neither scenario, probably, does the German Navy feel the need to try something as stupid as the North Sea death ride. But maybe I am wrong.
Given the developments I am proposing in either what-if #1 or what-if #2, during September, October, and November 1918, what would you see likely happening militarily on the fronts in December 1918, January, February, March, and April 1919, and politically internally in Germany, France, Belgium, Britain and the USA during all this time?
Also, I welcome re-use of the detailed timeline for other potential PoDs for consideration.