Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"I'm not sure trying to improvise a way through a novel kind of conflict counts as stupid so much as untrained. Maybe there was someone in WWI saying "This is obviously wrong and won't work - we should do this other thing instead.""

There were. Some of the ideas were good, and eventually took off, some were good-ish but needed more development (aircraft and tanks, for example), and some just didn't work. But to this disinterested observer, nothing really worked well enough.

But mostly, the war ended when the governments and economies of the nations fighting could no longer withstand the strain and started collapsing. (Russia is the most obvious example; Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were sketchy going in; Germany and France were the military superpowers but Germany finally fell apart with France about this far > < from large scale mutinies. Oh, and Britain finally paid off its WWI loans in like 2015.)

>>But mostly, the war ended when the governments and economies of the nations fighting could no longer withstand the strain and started collapsing. (Russia is the most obvious example; Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were sketchy going in; Germany and France were the military superpowers but Germany finally fell apart with France about this far > < from large scale mutinies. Oh, and Britain finally paid off its WWI loans in like 2015.)

Huh? Germany lost. It couldn't have defended its territory by the time it surrendered. Britain and France could have easily fielded armies of the same size into 1920 if needed. There was no financial risk for them once America entered the war. The mutinies for germany began once it was clear that the war was hopeless. In comparison, the mutinies the french arm had suffered in the aftermath of the nivelle offensive were long gone by this time.

Germany still occupied part of France and most of Belgium at the time of the armistice. Much of the allied offensives in mid- to late-1918 were recovering ground taken by the German spring offensives of 1918. Whether or not Germany could have militarily defended its borders is kind of irrelevant because the government collapsed (https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/government..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com