/his/ it's time for a counterfactual thread. I just finished this dude's book on the battle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zx7M0u76XY
Position: How does history roll forward if Germany wins the Battle of the Marne? If Kluck doesn't create the gap, Paris is captured, and France capitulates?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_the_Marne
Bonus points for coming up with a scenario where we get a third Napoleon.
Germany beats the French at Marne by thickening their ranks.
They beat the French and capture Paris in a 2 week siege.
British land and we get trench warfare again, the lines are just further west.
Because Paris is captured, French cave and sue for peace, British don't want to.
Meanwhile Russia is still getting btfo, nothing changes over there. When Russia is put into an unwinnable situation at the end of 1915, those German troops move to the western front.
This surge of new troops causes the British and French to both call it a day.
No side gains any land, Germany gets reparations from France though
If Germany won the at the Marne, then it would probably be curtains for France. However, if you look at what happened and how quickly the Germans were forced to retreat when they lost, the lack of manpower may have slowed down any further advances.
The BEF would have been destroyed. They had only a small presence and this contained all their best men. The British would not have had the reinforcement numbers to make a substantial impact.
If France and Britain sued for peace, Germany would probably want a peace where they gained all the ground they had already captured.
The fated Russian steamroller was a myth. Once the Germans were free to concentrate on Russia, they would have destroyed them like they did in reality in 1915.
Would the fall of Paris mean France surrendered. That is too difficult to tell. They still had alot of men to throw at the Germans. It depended on how far they were prepared to go to avoid defeat.
It's pretty obvious that the Kaiser's empire would have created spaceships shortly afterwards and would've went on to colonize space
>>900167
I don't think Germany would've annexed any land at all. Maybe a peace that saw heavy German influence over Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, as well as disarmament policies for France. The Kaiser and Bethmann-Hollweg were not stupid, contrary to popular belief. Occupying foreign land at a time when nationalism was at it's peak would've been asking for revanchist uprisings in all those territories.
Maybe exceedingly punitive disarmament/reparation articles in a German-dictated peace treaty would turn France into a Fascist state that would spend the 1930s building up an army to go to war with their erstwhile conquerors? Petain at the head of a natsoc French government?
>>900376
Seeing as they expressed their wishes to outright occupy and annex territory in the September Program, and that they literally had done so to Russia with the treaty of B-L, I think you are wrong.
>>900481
The program was a draft drawn up by staffers in the Chancellor's office, it is hardly an expression of German diplomatic policy.
Germany would march into Paris or surround the entire French army, resulting in their absolute victory on the Western Front. War production and manpower largely undamaged and losing maybe 500,000 out of their 13 million total troop count.
Peace conditions would be favorable enough to get GB out quickly as well as France, taking maybe some colonial territory and cash. Their massive fleet is unleashed and they start blockading Russia and defeat them surprisingly easy.
Since Germany's true fear was an industrialized Russian Empire they'd do something similar to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Poland and Lithuania is annexed.
Ukraine, Belarus is made into independent German ruled satellite states who would rely on German economic, diplomatic and military support.
AH is given whatever territory they want in the Balkans, probably annex Serbia or something like that.
Ottoman Empire doesn't fall apart, manages to keep stability in the Middle East and becomes rich over oil wealth.
No one fucks with Germany ever again, U.S remains isolationist. Germany guaranteed as world's leading superpower for most of the future.
October and Socialist revolution might happen but it would probably be defeated by a German expedition force, leaving a republican Russia indebted to them.
>>900618
but the communists
>read about the Battle of the Frontiers
>holy shit so much must have happened there that is lost to history forever
Not just because it wasn't written down, but because the people who took part in it all died before they could even tell anyone.
>>900618
This would have been a more interesting world to live in
>>900655
This guy is not wrong.
Victorious Germany is the maybe the most likely place for a liberal socialist government to come to power.
Then again, it might have taken four years of solid war to prove to people that their leaders did not have the best interests of the people at heart. People were probably massively conservative (they basically trust the people who rule them) before the war, and the war broke that.
>>900722
People tend to forget (or never learn) that the first 5 months of WWI were the bloodiest on the Western Front. ~250K casualties on both sides just between Sep. 5-12 at the Marne.
>>900804
It's because we don't have that much data on it.
People weren't pausing to write poetry when there were a few million armed men, with no solid lines, fighting each other in Northern France.
It's completely made up but plausible; we could have missed out on fifty thousand horse cavalry charging two dozen machineguns, with /just/ enough making it over their fallen comrades to kill the hundred or so gunners. This exact scenario, and a million other potential fantastic clashes between industry and elan, could have happened, we'll just never know.
