What would have happened if the German High Command decided to

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>>2881800
You could at least have the decency to post an anime girl relevant to the topic at hand

>>2881797

We know for a fact that the Schlieffen plan doesn't work so trying almost anything else makes sense. Invading Belgium was a mistake because it brought Britain, and by extension the USA, into the war. If it had just been Germany fighting Russia, I'm not sure that anybody would have been willing to intervene on Russia's behalf. Russia has always kind of had a bad reputation. Another factor to consider is that WW1 was a war that definitely favored the defender, so I'd rather be defending against a potential French attack rather than invading France. But then again, same applies to Russia. Much better to be defending than invading.

>>2881828
why doesn't the plan work? It nearly did save for the weighting back towards Lorraine by molke, and even then it was fucked up by Bulow in particular

You fags fail to realize how significant the german early win was

>>2881853

>why doesn't the plan work?

Because it basically led to the downfall of Imperial Germany. The entire war was a disaster of unprecedented proportions.

>>2881828
>If it had just been Germany fighting Russia, I'm not sure that anybody would have been willing to intervene on Russia's behalf. Russia has always kind of had a bad reputation.

The British would have come in on the side of the loser to fuck up everything. The whole point of the Great Game was to keep the Russians away from India. That work would have been undone with the Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul alliance and the construction of the planned Berlin-Baghdad railway. Only a small foreign invasion, or at the very least the threat of one, could have then set off a chain of events leading to a second Sepoy uprising. At Gallipoli they faced Turkish troops with German advisors. Had the battleship Osman I been delivered to the Ottomans prewar, it would have been a major headache for the British. The fact that the Germans tried in WWI to enlist the Afghans, Persians and other muslims to fight the British as part of a holy war is reason enough to assume that they would have had a conflict sooner or later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Agincourt_(1913)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Berlin-Baghdad_Express

>>2881797
>prolonged two-front war against france and russia
>only this time it's being fought on german soil

Germany loses, probably even faster.

>>2881853

John Keegan goes into this in "The First World War." It was literally impossible to move that many men along the roads and meet the time table by marching.

>>2881862

Yes but there's a difference between 'didn't work' and 'doesn't work'. The fact that it failed doesn't inherently mean it couldn't have succeeded.

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>>2881797
Better question:
What would have happened if instead of invading Serbia, the Austro-Hungarian empire was instead dissolved into two, the German speak territories including Austria, cisleithania and Croatia were annexed to Germany, a puppet state in Hungary was set up, and then Germany let Russia fall to communism after which it invaded and annexed huge territories?

Germany would probably be more powerful than the US today.

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>>2881797
It would be too difficult to defeat Russia. They would need constant Tannenberg size victories.

>>2882509
that is a good nonvictory

>>2882509
>Near Allenstein/Olsztyn
>Battle of Tannerberg
That's a hell of the butthurt, if you try that hard to overwrite a medieval battle.

>>2882382
How much difference would the industrial capacity of Northen France really have made to their war effort? Because that's the only thing favoring them if the Schlieffen plan was abandoned. Their Plan XVII would never have worked much like the Schlieffen plan was pretty much doomed to failure. So what is France going to do if Germany just decides to dig in and defend right from the very start? Going through Belgium themselves? Would've been interesting to see Britain's reaction to that.

>>2883212
64% of france's pig iron, 24% of its steel-making and 40% of its coal mining were in the zone Germany occupied.

Plan XVII probably doesn't work but it can get French guns close enough to shell Metz, which hurts Germany a lot.

>>2882509
Russia was not prepared for a war in WWI's scale though. They were literally sending men to the from lines equipped with lances because they didn't have enough rifles for them. That was facing a minority of the German Army, imagine the clusterfuck if the numbers Germany sent against France were sent Into Russia instead.

>>2883227
Holy shit. You'd think after Franco-Prussia they'd have moved some of that stuff south and/or west from there.

Obviously coal deposits can't be moved (before mining), but it seems like that manufacturing should have been moved.

>>2882409
What goofy borders are those?

>>2882409

The US has three times as many people and was already more industrialized than Germany in 1900. It'd be a larger nation but not the size of the US. The entire EU with just under 200 million more people than the US barely has a larger economy.

>>2881797
>Could Germany have won WWI if only it wasn't for the Schlieffen plan?
Yes.

However, this is pure hindsight. The whole reason for the Schlieffen plan was that Germany was afraid of the two-fronts war against France and Russia - Russia in particular (France was seen as the weaker of the two, and in the end it turned out to be the other way around). So what you propose goes against all what people believed back then.

However, the Schlieffen plan could also have worked (albeit it most definitely was un-clausewitzian in terms of schedule): Had the Bavarians done their job and withdrawn during the frontier battles, baiting a French advance, then Joffre couldn't have relocated the troops in time.

>>2881797
either side would have won if they realized the futility of attacking the western front early on.

>>2883736
yeah but the closer your manufacturing is to the mineral deposits the better as you save costs on transportation. Besides, Paris is in northern France so its all or nothing anyways.

France was all about the attack, so it was probably better for their supply lines to have the manufactures close to the border.

>>2881828
>We know for a fact that the Schlieffen plan doesn't work
But it did work 25 years later?

>>2883890
Fall Gelb wasn't anything like the Sclieffen plan, you dunce.

>>2883769
this is the only real answer here, the french and german generals forgot that humans are a resource and not infinite.