How far off base is Conroy's invasion premise? Is it simply a bolt from the blue? The Germans had some awfully ambitious contingency plans relevant to us, but of course all depended on Britain sitting back with folded arms and doing nothing to intervene.
What, then, of Conroy's perception of England's role? The Brits had invested heavily in the US by the end of the 19th century. It is likely that they would have protected their investment. It was the world wars that shattered the British stake on this side of the Atlantic. In the book, they adopt a reverse lend lease favoritism towards the US that sidesteps the neutrality rules. They also provide valuable intelligence to the U.S. and allow American vessels safe haven in Canadian waters. In essence, they replicate FDR's short-of-war policy of 1939-1940.
The actual German "plans" were more like academic staff school exercises, the annual Winterarbeit (winter term papers) that general staff candidates prepared in order to demonstrate their wargaming skills. Several topics for years between 1892 and 1906 involved punitive expeditions against the US Caribbean and mid-Atlantic bases and industrial areas. I don't think anyone really expected a cross-Atlantic "river crossing." Schlieffen made some unrealistic demands for Army logistics for one of the Cuban landing proposals (after ignoring requests for cooperation a number of times) in order to show his contempt for the proposal. On the other hand, alarmist navy and army lobbyists loved to find "evidence" of such German projects, such as the pamphlet von Edelsheim "leaked" around 1905. He had been on the German Great General Staff in the 1890s and his pamphlet demonstrated, inter alia, how an expedition against the American east coast would proceed. The GGS disowned his tract, but some naval lobbyists found it useful (as did the American coastal defense fans) in 1914 when the preparedness movement got going in the US.
It is not hard to imagine how the Vizeadmiral Diedrich vs. Admiral Dewey contretemps in Manila Bay, or the gunboating over Samoa and the Venezuela gambit might have led to war, what with US cockiness after whipping the Spaniards and distractions in the Phillipines "civilizing" the Moros with Krags.
It is doubtful that the Germans actually intended war with the US. The problem was that their actions by no means suggested that they respected American military power nor appreciated the logistical disadvantages. At one point when Dewey was still blockading Manila awaiting the arrival of VIII Corps, German sailors actually landed at Olongopo. Dewey was apprised of this by Aguinaldo, and sent a cruiser. The Germans backed down. There was also the German bombardment of Port-au-Prince, at a time when the US was too involved with Spain to fake a plausible deterrent. There were several such incidents. Any one could have led to shooting.
Be that as it may, this is nonetheless all in the realm of conjecture. Thanks to imaginative and fastidious writers such as Robert Conroy, there is a relatively painless way to discover what might have happened if Kaiser Willie followed up on his urge to tweak the Eagle's beak.
A Long Tradition
Conroy joins the ranks of Hector Bywater, (whose 1925 projection, The Great Pacific War Of 1931-1933 remains an ideal example of the form) Colonel Sir George T. Chesney (the originator of the genre) and a host of others who wrote in the "golden age," 1871-1939. During the interval between the Franco-Prussian conflict and the onset of The Great War, the future war narrative was an exceptionally popular subgenre of fantastic literature. Chesney's The Battle of Dorking, for example, created such a stir at the time in was published (1871) that its account of a Britain invaded by the Germans was even debated in Parliament.
One of the best of these fictions is The Great War of 189-, a serious attempt by the leading military thinkers of its day to forecast the next great European conflagration. In its scope and development it can only be compared to the unpublished efforts of such present day think tanks as the Rand Corporation.
In the book a select writers' panel comprised of the leading strategic authorities of 1893 - - among them, Admiral Philip Colomb, Frederick aurice, and assorted military, naval, economic and diplomatic luminaries tackle the issue of the next war to face Europe.
Prophetically, they hypothesize that the next European war will begin with an attempted assassination of a Balkan leader. It will then quickly spiral outwards to involve all of the major European states within a month. This is inherent in the diplomatic alignment. The web of interlocking treaties dictates that Austria, Germany, Italy and Turkey will combine against France, Russia, Serbia and several of the other minor states. The Germans perforce fight a two-front war that must be a quick one-two knockout blow if they are to survive. Russia's ostensibly formidable mobilization, however, will prove unproductive relatively early in the conflict and the Tsar's minions will suffer heavy losses in Poland.
Belgium, the only unfortified sector of France's border, is the scene of the opening critical engagements on the western front. The Germans initially enjoy great fortune, hammering the French back into seemingly untenable positions. But subsequently the German army's drive will stall just short of Paris, the French will regroup, and the Germans will be hurled back towards the end of the war. The entrance of Britain on one side or the other will prove decisive, because of the British control of the seas. Up to that point, the script seems prophetic. However, unlike the actuality, England backs the Germans in this imaginary war, with the opposing alliance, France and Russia, the losers. The possibility of Britain supporting France is clearly an option at the beginning of the war, with unpredictable incidents determining the outcome — as in life. The book's technique of using correspondents' reports to carry the narrative is highly effective. The idea of gathering a team of experts spanning the whole spectrum of total war planning skills — land strategy & tactics, naval warfare, technology, industry and finance, and diplomacy — was not to be repeated for another 85 years.
In 1886, a curious novella with the intriguing title Bietigheim! appeared in American bookstalls. It was cast in the guise of a 1933 memoir of the (imaginary) campaign of 1890-91, in which an American expeditionary force fought German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian troops on German soil as part of an alliance including France, England, Italy and Turkey. The casus belli was the Prussian practice of seizing visiting naturalized Americans — alleged draft-dodgers—of recent German origin for compulsory military service.
Bietigheim! 's premise may have seemed preposterous to American readers; America was flourishing in splendid isolation at the time and war with our transatlantic Teutonic cousins was not on the horizon. Just three years later insular Yanks would have been thoroughly alarmed to learn that German naval strategists, furious at the impudent American maritime challenge to their efforts to secure coaling facilities in Samoa, were drafting an outline of just such a conflict.
In that case, fact beggared fiction, for the aggressive German scenarists contemplated nothing less than challenging the fledgling American fleet in its own coastal waters. For the next 17 years, German apprentice admirals honed their war planning skills on ambitious projects along the American eastern seaboard, until the reality of probable conflict with First Sea Lord Fisher's dreadnoughts focused attention on the more imminent threat in the North Sea.
Although American opinion was generally piqued at the heavy-handed German posturing during the Samoan episode of 1889, Washington harbored no plan for an armed confrontation similar to the wargaming exercises being concocted in Berlin, where sea charts of the Caribbean, Long Island Sound and Chesapeake Bay were unfurled and gunnery tables on U.S. warships analyzed. Not as yet a war plan, the vizeadmiral in charge of the Admiralty simply requested a memo from his chief-of-staff as to possible shape of a German-American naval encounter. Since the German navy was then little more than a coastal patrol squadron fortified with a handful of light cruisers, not much could be done beyond a "demonstration of force." As of 1889, the hypothetical knuckle-rapping was confined to interdicting American maritime trade along its eastern seaboard, with occasional shore bombardments against undefended coastal cities to create a public demand for appeasement.
German impotence to do anything more decisive, such as invasion and occupation, did not go unnoticed by naval-minded denizens of the Reichstag. In any event, Chancellor Bismark deemed the German-American war jitters to be the product of mercantilist hot-bloods and Mahanite imperialists. It was out of step with Bismark' balancing diplomatic game. The following year, Wilhelm II's "pilot" was to step down, allowing the globe-girdling admirals a free hand.
The speculative/retrospective mode was rarely applied to the field of combat in the aftermath of the First World War. There was a plethora of finger pointing essays in the realistic-didactic vein. The authors showed remarkably little empathy for the real problems that the admittedly unprepared Victorian era commanders faced. Field Marshal Haig-bashing was a favorite theme.
One exemplar from that epoch that stands out is Bernard Newman's The Cavalry Goes Through, published in England in 1930 and in the United States in the following year as The Cavalry Got Through. Instead of methodically dissecting Sir Douglas' flaws, the Newman book offers an alternate scenario wherein Haig was not the designated BEF commander at all but was preempted by a scrambler and bold gambler who had made his mark in mobile campaigns in the Near Eastern and African theaters. It is dressed up as a kind of military memoir of someone who served on the dauntless Duncan's staff. It is replete with footnotes referencing parallel counterfeit accounts. Instead of the straightforward character assassination typical of such polemicists as Liddell Hart, the book simply supposes Haig out of existence and substitutes his presumed converse.
The Third World War
In 1978, the appearance of General Sir John Hackett's acclaimed The Third World War, August 1985 heralded a trend that endures today. TWW, combined with its 1982 revision subtitled "The Inside Story", is an imaginative survey of a war between the Soviet bloc and the West assumed to occur within the decade following publication. As a feigned history of an imagined event, it was viewed as somewhat of a novelty — a tour de force. It was not so much a literary event as a unique experiment in military futurology. As will be seen, TWW was no innovation, but rather a resuscitation of a long-established literary genre originating in the 1870s.
Hackett's portrayal of an anticipated conflict superficially begs comparison with Tom Clancy's 1987 "next war" novel, Red Storm Rising. However, unlike the Clancy novel, TWW is written as if it were an authentic after-action commentary, with excerpts from simulated war diaries, news clippings and official reports. It is dryly matter-of-fact reportage or essay in contrast to Clancy's intense psychodrama, with its shifting perspectives, character interaction, and internal monologues. The book was written by a coalition of experts in international relations, economics, air power, naval strategy, and land warfare. In short, TWW is not a novel at all, but fiction nonetheless.
The Eagle & The Bear
War with the Soviet Union has been addressed in dozens of especially commissioned defense posture briefs and force planning studies. The subcontracted articles and reports are straightforward military contingency appraisals of the type so cleverly lampooned by the notorious literary prank, Report From Iron Mountain, which on it's release in 1967 was taken quite seriously by the instinctive anti-military visionaries . It just came out in an expanded edition explaining the reasons for the hoax and how anal-retentive flower children took the bait. The scenarios deployed by the national security estimates describe several possible grades of near future wars. As such, they are practical applications of the writer's — or his service branch's — doctrinal precepts. The scenarios are written in the present conditional tense for the purpose of touting the sponsor's preferred weapons systems. They are composed by teams or individuals working under the auspices of nongovernmental, separately incorporated policy planning establishments, popularly known as think tanks.
A representative pattern is illustrated by Herman Kahn's much maligned (politically speaking) On Thermonuclear War. Kahn describes a whole series of scenarios portraying the divers levels of escalation to and through nuclear war. The frame of reference is the author's "today". Kahn and colleagues stay firmly anchored in the real-time world while they coolly describe cataclysms so horrifying that they are labeled "unthinkable". The scenarists never let the reader forget the fact that they are merely weighing the pros and cons of a variety of projected probabilities, no matter how precisely portrayed. The aloof manner in which the tracts rattle off inventories of likely deaths and maimings has aroused charges of amoralism and indifference to human suffering. The war forecasts in the imaginative vein have likewise provoked the censure of the politically correct.
By creating an alternate universe in which the unthinkable occurs, General Hackett and his eclectic team of experts took the contingency planning study to a new level. In doing so, his group caused a mild sensation. It was widely reported that both presidents Carter and Reagan savored the doomsday book for its vivid insights. The employment of such an imaginative method of exposition was actually a revival rather than an innovation. The deadpan sham history disguised as reality known as counterfactual history (CFH) has been around for over a century. Future War (FW) literature is a sub-species of CFH. Before exploring the lineage of the genre, we should consider its distinguishing features. The end of the Cold War in 1991 has brought the release of highly selected information from the Russian/ex-Soviet side concerning their plans for war against NATO and the United States. At least one author has been inspired to pen a hypothetical account of the way it might have gone if the Soviet Empire had not collapsed in 1991.
Michael Palmer's The War That Never Was (Vandamere Press, 1994) is fairly close to the methodology employed by General Hackett's team with the exception that Palmer's framework is a memoir seen through the eyes of a participant rather than comprising a history drafted by a detached observer. The prologue and epilogue are rendered in the novelized format as contemporaneous impressions of the protagonists. The core narrated wargame, however, is rendered more closely to the Hackett manner. FW's emphasis is on wars that could soon happen to us —just around the corner. He adapts a principally naval scenario to demonstrate sea power as the fulcrum for global force projection.
In the 1890s and early 1900s, pacifists such as Norman Angell, David Starr Jordan and Bertha Suttner publicly denounced the reckless warmongering of "next war" enthusiasts. One has only to recall the great outcry over ABC TV's winter 1986/87 mini-series, Amerika, — USSR/UN occupying force attempts to suppress the belated American resistance movement — to appreciate the durability of the archetypal hawk versus dove syndrome afflicting the future war genre. In fact, during the height of the Nuclear Freeze movement in the late 1970s, the Left spun out it's own counterpunch to the preparedness tracts in the rash of Nuclear Armageddon thrillers.
The Next Wars
Other examples abound two of the most interesting being - besides the Weinberger projection, James F. Dunnigan and Austin Bay's A Quick and Dirty Guide to War: Briefings on Present and Potential Wars (Third Edition) and the late Col. Trevor N. Dupuy's 1990 Future Wars. This is obviously a growth industry.
With the Cold War balance of terror a nostalgic (yes, I said "nostalgic") memory, the anti-war activists have no more Herman Kahns, Dr. Strangeloves, General Jack D. Rippers, or Curtis Lemays to kick around. The recent spate of intricate historical what-ifs as well as the thoughtful prognostications reflect the new sophistication and academic respectability of military history and war studies generally. Given the complexity of the looming conflict potential, this discernment is a must.
More What If... Next Wars
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© Copyright 1997 by David W. Tschanz.
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