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Two WWI PODs

MAC161

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WI, USA
Re-reading Persico's WWI work 11th Month, 11th, Day, 11th Hour, and a couple of random possible PODs jumped out:

1. Schlieffen lives/stays in the army long enough to actually oversee the plan named for him (supposedly a kick from a horse in 1905 made him "incapable of battle" and led him to retire the following year, so maybe call this a different version of the "for want of a nail" scenario? :D). What changes, if anything, in summer-fall 1914 and the war in general with him in charge, even if only for the opening stages of the war?

2. Wilson fails to win California by his narrow OTL margin (Hughes apparently snubbed Gov. Johnson when campaigning in the state, so the latter didn't provide what turned out to be crucial support to the GOP candidate), and thus loses the Presidency. Presuming he follows through with his & VP Marshall's plan to appoint Hughes as SoS and then resign to avoid a lame duck period, what's likeliest to happen next? Does the U.S. still go to war in 1917, and if so, how does the war effort turn out with Hughes at the helm?
 
I suppose if Schlieffen survives then, when his plan fails after too many men are asked the logistically and diplomatically impossible, we’re spared endless decades of endless Kaiserboos explaining how it was all von Moltke’s fault.

Yeah, apart from not stripping troops from the plan's famous (or infamous) "right hook" for East Prussia and Alsace-Lorraine, I don't see how much different the Western Front would've turned out with Schlieffen at the head. Maybe the front gets closer to Paris, or behind it, but something like the Marne still feels possible, leading to another version of the "race to the sea" and of the campaigns that followed. Schlieffen probably wouldn't live much more than a year or two into the war (maybe dying in 1916, at around the same time as Moltke?), at which point Germany's where it was in OTL, just with different casualty levels and perhaps slightly more territory in the west, but still on course to defeat in 1918 or near to it.
 
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Turning to the second scenario, if Hughes wins, does Germany still return to unrestricted submarine warfare, thus leading to the Zimmermann Telegram blunder and U.S. entry into the war? Hughes favored mobilization and castigated Wilson for doing little in the way of preparation; from the German point of view, then, he might seem the closest to a prowar candidate, or at least one more willing to choose that option, and so it would've been wise to avoid any directives that encouraged U.S. entry. On the other hand, the lack of U.S. preparation meant the Germany military didn't consider American entry to be a threat, at least not immediately, so this might lead to a variant of such events anyway, the only real difference in the end being no 14 Points, no League of Nations, no real, enduring concept of "Wilsonian Democracy."

Thoughts?
 
Turning to the second scenario, if Hughes wins, does Germany still return to unrestricted submarine warfare, thus leading to the Zimmermann Telegram blunder and U.S. entry into the war? Hughes favored mobilization and castigated Wilson for doing little in the way of preparation; from the German point of view, then, he might seem the closest to a prowar candidate, or at least one more willing to choose that option, and so it would've been wise to avoid any directives that encouraged U.S. entry. On the other hand, the lack of U.S. preparation meant the Germany military didn't consider American entry to be a threat, at least not immediately, so this might lead to a variant of such events anyway, the only real difference in the end being no 14 Points, no League of Nations, no real, enduring concept of "Wilsonian Democracy."

Thoughts?

The idea of some kind of League of Nations was very popular. Indeed, I think that if Hughes was President, the US would have joined it, as he wouldn't insist on Article X, which the Senate couldn't accept.
 
The idea of some kind of League of Nations was very popular. Indeed, I think that if Hughes was President, the US would have joined it, as he wouldn't insist on Article X, which the Senate couldn't accept.

There's a pretty good short story by Michael Flynn about the possible consequences of Article X being adopted, at least in the U.S.; here's the Uchronia link. Presuming the article wouldn't make it into the Covenant with Hughes in charge, how else might the League of such a TL differ from Wilson's?
 
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Turning to the second scenario, if Hughes wins, does Germany still return to unrestricted submarine warfare, thus leading to the Zimmermann Telegram blunder and U.S. entry into the war? Hughes favored mobilization and castigated Wilson for doing little in the way of preparation; from the German point of view, then, he might seem the closest to a prowar candidate, or at least one more willing to choose that option, and so it would've been wise to avoid any directives that encouraged U.S. entry. On the other hand, the lack of U.S. preparation meant the Germany military didn't consider American entry to be a threat, at least not immediately, so this might lead to a variant of such events anyway, the only real difference in the end being no 14 Points, no League of Nations, no real, enduring concept of "Wilsonian Democracy."

Thoughts?

The Germans seem to have thought quite earnestly that their U-boote could kick the UK out of the war fast enough that the USA joining would not be an issue and so didn't mind antagonising them to the utmost.

No 14 points does make a difference, because that means the German government isn't trying to conform outwardly to it by the end of the war only to be told it's not going to be enough and the national uprisings don't have the perfect script from which to crib to show the Allies that they want them to do business with them. And Versailles probably goes smoother with somebody else negotiating.
 
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