Except they weren't strong enough to foment a rebellion across 13 colonies. 8 Ulster Scots signing the Declaration isn't much considering their populations in some colonies. And they were strongly resisted in colonies like Pennsylvania. Their behavior leading to the Paxton Boys attacks were widely condemned. It's also the case that elites in Virginia were motivated by much more than Ulster Scot discontent in pushing for Revolution. My position is not urban vs rural so much as power vs periphery. TheRegulators in North Carolina had many of the same complaints that the backwoodsmen of the Revolution had. But the Regulators were put down by a coalition of local militias because they didn't have elite support.

Got another one that came to me.

I have no raw data but I would assume that corraling and murdering millions of people tied up a chunk of personnel and infrastructure on the Nazi side.

Could Germany have swayed the war if Hitler did NOT decide to kill every Jew and "enemy of the state?" With the resources freed up by not guarding and killing millions could those numbers have been brought against Russia in that critical winter of 1941?

Just spitballing but also, public opinion may not have been as bad for them obviously.

I guess another way to phrase it, if the Holocaust had not happened could that have changed the outcome of WW2?

Sonderweg....that would kill one part of the special path, but not all.

aggiewilliford said:

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I wonder what really would have happened to Greece and the Western mindset if they had lost the Battle at Marathon.

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Very easy for me to see them crumbling. Not only would the cream of their forces will have had been destroyed but in those days I think morale was even more a force multiplier than it is today. A massive blow like losing that could have pushed them back to a state of capitulation. Maybe.

Another one I was thinking of in class instead of learning math.

What if France managed to hold onto Vietnam in the '50s? It was the heart of their Indochina empire. Do y'all think we would have seen such a Communist threat in the Far East if that power vacuum did not exist? Could our war in Vietnam have been completely prevented at Dien Bien Phu?

Ya know, we can crunch numbers and tactics and whatnot but I just thought of one other thing....

What if Adolf Hitler simply did not insist on having overall military command? As in let his generals prosecute his war in the manner they best saw fit.

Do the Germans win WW2 before 1944? Possibly '43? Hitler more than any other thing stopped the German blitzkrieg (in Russia that is) IMO. Take that one man out of the military equation and I think we might have a different world today.

Thoughts?

Eliminatus said:

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What if Adolf Hitler simply did not insist on having overall military command? As in let his generals prosecute his war in the manner they best saw fit.

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Probably would have worked better, on land at least. If they didn't defeat the Soviet Union outright on the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht could have staged a strategic retreat that would have inflicted so many casualties on the Red Army that Stalin might have made a separate piece. (Maybe).

OTOH, the Admirals wanted to hold off on hostilities until well into the 1940s in order to (1) build up a surface fleet that could challenge the Royal Navy without suffering grievous losses; and (2) go to war with enough U-boats to choke off the supplies to Britain.

What if the Confederacy won its independence and the US was divided into two countries? Would a continent divided into two nations (plus Canada, of course) born of a bitter civil war have viewed the Axis aggression in WWII in the same light? Would they have had enough political goodwill to present a consistent united front during the long decades of the Cold War?

More to the point, the US was indispensable in winning those wars because it was a huge, united, wealthy, powerful nation which acted as the "arsenal of democracy" and provided the essential leadership that held its often bickering allies together. Could a divided continent have carried the same logistical, military and political weight? Might Germany/Japan or the USSR have outlasted the Allies in this scenario?

SIAP

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West Texan said:
What if after the initial grenade failed, Archduke Franz Ferdinand didn't decide to go visit the wounded, leading him right into Gravilo Princip's lap?

Even if the assassination does happen, what if Russia doesn't stick up for Serbia and leaves the Serbs to Austria-Hungary?

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jay07ag said:


This is the big one in my opinion. If the Archduke escapes Sarajevo alive, we probably do not have the chain reaction that leads to WWI (which means no WW2, no Communist infection spreading across Europe and Asia, etc.). Our world would likely look completely different. But one could probably argue that Europe would have erupted into war at some point given tensions between several nations and the web of treaties tying all of them together. It was already a powderkeg. Gavrilo Princip is just the poor ******* who happened to drop the match. I would bet that if he knew now what would happen as a result of his actions that day, he would have kept his gun in his pocket and let the Archduke's car pass right on by. Crazy thought.

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I think Ferdinand not being assassinated maybe prevents the Austro-Hungarian empire from collapsing before 1920, but large scale conflict was coming to Europe regardless. Schlieffen was already drawing up the plans before the turn of the century. Germany or Russia would have eventually triggered large scale war due Bismarck's alliance webs, IMO.

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War was inevitable; Germany wanted it because they had an idea similar to our manifest destiny (I forget the German term for it) that Germany was meant to dominate the Continent). The French were also itching for a fight as well, following their humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War and to regain the Alsace-Lorraine territories. I think the only Powers who were not looking for a war were Russia and England. England only entered the fight because Germany violated Belgian neutrality.

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How about if Ferdinand isn't assassinated in Sarajevo, but Germany still decides the time for expansion is right and declares war on France anyways. There's no Serbian uprising for Austria-Hungary to over commit themselves to in the first weeks of war. Instead they push their entire army out to the Eastern Front to stall the Russians as long as they can. Maybe then there's no longer a need for von Moltke to divide his troops just before the final breakthrough in France in those opening weeks?

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I think Von Moltke still had to divide his troops. I believe he held the Austria-Hungarian troops in low regard but more importantly, he feared the vast hordes of the Russian Steamroller. Recall that the Schlieffen plan was for the eastern front to be little more than a rearguard, holding off the Russians until the victorious Western forces could be brought to the fight after quickly defeating France.

Much of the German diplomatic efforts were geared around dividing the members of the triple entente so that they would not have to fight on two fronts in the inevitable war.

Don't want this to be a "sore subject" scenario....

What if the United States had fully invaded Mexico and stayed after the Mexican American War? Turned it into a territory and eventually states.

Same for Cuba after the Spanish American War?

Bewildered said:

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Don't want this to be a "sore subject" scenario....

What if the United States had fully invaded Mexico and stayed after the Mexican American War? Turned it into a territory and eventually states.

Same for Cuba after the Spanish American War?

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Very interesting. Not sure either. I can easily see it going different routes.

A counter question that would help I think.

Does Mexico integrate into the existing American culture fully? Or are we left occupying a hostile nation? Fork in the road kinda thing for me. And either way can be valid IMO.

If we start there I think a much better picture of future developments can be imagined.

Also, sidepost here.

After listening, reading, and watching a lot of good stuff this past year, (many recs from this board as well) I am still bewildered at how important WW1 and it's outcomes have shaped our modern history. I have really started to delve even deeper into it and it is incredible. May it be one of the most impactful segment of a few years in human history?

It's definitely up there.

Bewildered said:

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Don't want this to be a "sore subject" scenario....

What if the United States had fully invaded Mexico and stayed after the Mexican American War? Turned it into a territory and eventually states.

Same for Cuba after the Spanish American War?

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The South would have demanded that Congress decide if those new states would be open to slavery or not. It would have fundamentally caused problems with what do you do with a state full of brown people that can't be citizens.

We probably would have defeated France in the War of 1812 versus the Brits.

Even if Napoleon had ambitions in North America his armies were really tied down in Europe. Yes, he was running circles around the coalition armies but he was stretched in Europe and needed his armies there. He also didn't have the naval assets to project to North America. If he had tried, the British would have taken care of them.

BQ78 said:

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We probably would have defeated France in the War of 1812 versus the Brits.

Even if Napoleon had ambitions in North America his armies were really tied down in Europe. Yes, he was running circles around the coalition armies but he was stretched in Europe and needed his armies there. He also didn't have the naval assets to project to North America. If he had tried, the British would have taken care of them.

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Why would we be fighting France instead of Britain in 1812?

To take the Louisiana Territory while Napoleon was busy in Europe. Maybe not 1812, but Manifest Destiny and a French blockade to that would eventually result in a clash of arms at some point.

BQ78 said:

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To take the Louisiana Territory while Napoleon was busy in Europe. Maybe not 1812, but Manifest Destiny and a French blockade to that would eventually result in a clash of arms at some point.

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It's not clear to me whether manifest destiny would have played out the same way without the Louisiana purchase, but I'm also not that strong on US history from 1803-1812.

I think the two scenarios I laid out for no Louisiana purchase might have been very different from the POV of what the French would have been doing in N. America. If it fails due to US politics, Napoleon probably still isn't going to commit much to maintaining a presence on our continent. But if the French reestablished control over Haiti, their interest in staying might have been greater, in part because of the colonial income from sugar and in part from having a base to force the Royal Navy to maintain a greater presence on our side of the Atlantic.

The French attempt to retake Haiti took place at a high point for Napoleon with the Brits pretty isolated after the defeat of the Allies at Austerlitz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Domingue_expedition

The French had largely won there until the Yellow Fever arrived and they lost support when people realized their plan was to reintroduce slavery.

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Little more than 7,000 to 8,000 of the 31,000 soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue survived and over 20 French generals died. On 1 January 1804 Dessalines proclaimed the colony of Saint-Domingue to be the second independent state in the Americas, under the name of Haiti, and was first made governor general for life before (on 6 October 1804) being crowned emperor as Jacques I. He massacred the last French colonists left on Haiti at the 1804 Haiti Massacre and followed a "caporalisme agraire" or serfdom system that did not include slavery per se but was still aimed at maintaining sugar industry profits by force.

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The survivors from that defeat were comparable in number in the US Army at the start of the War of 1812. There were an order of magnitude more US men at arms in the militias, but would they have mobilized to fight an expansionist war vs a European power? I'm guessing that it would depend on how close to home things were happening. In the Canadian front during the war of 1812 there were `3X the number of NY Militia as US regulars in the Battle of Queenston Heights. The quality of the US Militia was questionable at best in the war of 1812.

There might have also been some interesting US domestic political issues wrt fighting France vs Britain, especially if the French had reestablished slavery in Haiti.

We "defeated" the British int he War of 1812 due to their being overextended in North America and Europe, overextending the French would have been easier.

Americans were moving through and living in the Louisiana Territory before the purchase and US policymakers were keen on insuring uninterrupted rights of passage to the Pacific from the earliest days of the Republic. A clash was inevitable without the purchase, IMO.

If the signs and warnings had been heeded and the attack on Pearl Harbor was intercepted and successfully defended against, do we still have the same fervor to oppose Japan. In other words, would the rallying cry of "Remember Pearl Harbor" had never existed, would it have changed anything on our side do ya think? Strategies, goals, pace, etc?


Do we still carry out a battleship first mentality? Does Midway still happen?

Though it would not have been my favorite outcome but as far as what ifs: what if Admiral Keiji Shibazaki had not decided to move out of his original command post so that some 150 wounded Japanese could shelter there and what if some sharp-eyed American (Marine or Navy, I do not recall) had not noticed a group of Japanese (likely dressed differently than their rikusentai were dressed) and had not called one of the destroyers inside the lagoon to fire shells that killed Shibazaki and his senior officers on the first day of the battle? Because if that had not happened, it is almost a certainty that there would have been ordered a nighttime counterattack and the Japanese would have most likely wiped out our Marines on Betio (Tarawa) and we would have lost the battle. And I would not be typing this.

Germany does not declare war on the US, leaving Roosevelt with no chance to help England, which falls in one year. The Russians are defeated by 1944

We defeat the Japanese in three years with all of the might of the US hitting Japan.

The US then enters Siberia and establishes bases to stop German advances and to curb Chinese Communism.

Germany and the US then enter into a "Cold War" as both will then have nuclear weapons and Germany consolidates it "Lebensraum".

What if Japan doesn't attack Pearl Harbor?

We still get drawn into WWII. No way the Japanese would leave the Philippines, Guam, Wake alone.

What if the Germans in WW1 had been able to press the initial attack without stalling out and had taken France.

Not a battle necessarily but I often wondered what the US would have looked like without the Texas Rangers.

What if the right events happened and a powerful leader had managed to fully unite the HRE? How different would Europe look?