Quote:
Originally Posted by Chiefspants
What's amazing when looking back at WW1 and WWII is how many opportunities the Germans had to win both. Usually it was a situation where all Germany had to do was press or keep their advantage (Ypres, Dunkirk, The Russian Oil Fields, not moving their men to Sardinia after Operation Mincemeat, etc).
Sometimes when I teach this in the classroom, it feels like time-traveling intervention that kept Germany from winning WWII (Or Hitler doing a lot a lot of coke - that helped too).
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Why pivot away from Paris at all? The damn war could've been over by Fall of 1914. But by pivoting south/Southeast, they created a gap in their lines that made the Miracle of the Marne possible. The Schlieffen Plan gets excoriated by historians but to my eyes the damn thing
worked. The Germans were within a days march of Paris and it had been largely evacuated - take Paris and the War is effectively over (because John French would've gotten the English the hell out of dodge quickly; he wanted no part of a land war on continental Europe). Instead they get sidetracked by a battle they could've easily circled back to clean up and opened up a flank for Joffre to exploit. Suddenly you have the race to the sea, the Schlieffen plan is scrapped and millions of people die for no real reason. Just so very stupid.
I've never had the impression that the Germans
should have won WWII; only that they maybe
could have. Had Stalingrad not gone sideways on them, I guess it's possible. WWI, OTOH, they should've won 3 or 4 times over. They had every conceivable advantage and just shot themselves in the foot several times.