Quote Originally Posted by Ganpati's Goonerz--AFC's Aboriginal Fertility Cult View Post
Sorry, B, doing an MA in WW1 studies atm. *******s saying that about WW1.

You know about the September Prog, yes? You know that Brest-Litovsk proves they were serious, yes? And you know that the Peace Offer to Fr and Rus said 'The War at Sea continues', yes?

Everyone, every single ****ing historian for the last 50 years since Fritz Fischer, will tell you that had GB not fought, we'd ave been 100% ****ed either way.

10% - Fr/Rus win, we have no allies. 500 years of GB ForPol finished and India and the Med threatened.
90% - Hun win, then use the resources of the Europe to start War 2 vs us, which they talk about all the time in officlal docs.

Thought you'd read Forgotten Victory by Gary Sheffield. He deals with all this in chap.1
Hence 'at least in the short term,'. Of course we'd have had to fight eventually. However, we needn't have done so when we did. Indeed, Germany didn't expect us to do so. Alternatively, we could quite easily have committed on a purely naval basis, blockaded Germany and - as was shown in the course of War itself - there was nothing they could have done about it. However, we didn't. We fought on the basis of principle. Germany had violated Belgian neutrality and on that principle, we went to war.

By the way, not every historian agrees. Niall Ferguson called our decision to intervene 'the biggest error in modern history'. He also points out that the argument that we had to intervene to secure the Channel ports is rather undermined by the fact that we had lived with a similar situation during the Napoleonic Wars whereby Europe was under his sway, the Channel Ports were all in his hands, but we didn't send land forces until we were properly prepared (which we blatantly weren't in 1914). Our navy was immensely powerful and dominant in 1914 - vastly more so, in fact than it was in 1800. We could easily have sat safely behind our navy and let Europe get on with slaughtering one another. We didn't, however, because of principle.