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Old 05-07-16, 08:40 PM   #4448
Oberon
Lucky Jack
 
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October 1918



1918, the year of peace. The Soviet Union now faced opposition from both at home and abroad, as infighting begins in what would become the Russian civil war, with two large adversaries arrayed against them, the Soviet government first refused a generous peace offer from Germany...and then in desperation signed a more stringent one. The nation of Finland sprang into being from the treaty of Brest-Litvosk, as the Soviet Union left the war to fight its own battle for survival.


(dat compression)

With the Soviet Union out of the fight, and the USA seemingly missing, it was down to France, Australia, Canada, Belgium and Great Britain to continue the fight, although in fairness to the Americas, nations from South America were spotted in western Germany in 1918.
In April 1918 the first of the armoured goliaths crashed through the German lines at the Sixth Battle of Liege, although many of these craft (now referred to as tanks due to their boxy shape reminding troops of water storage tanks, not to mention their habit of collecting rain-water in all the wrong places) broke down whilst attacking the German lines, enough got through to give the Germans a shock, a shock that they did not recover from until the Fourth Battle of Aachen a month later when most of the tanks failed to even reach the German lines and had to be abandoned during the counterattack.




No 'tanks' were lost to the enemy in the Sixth Battle of Liege, but more than a few were lost to the terrain.

At this point the writing was fairly clearly on the wall for Imperial Germany, as the summer months rolled around, desperate attempts were undertaken by the German forces to halt the advance of the Triple Ententé. However it was all for naught, when British forces captured the docks at Wilhelmshaven, it must have been the final demoralising blow to the Kaiser who had lost his namesake city to the enemy.
In early October, diplomats from Germany arrived in Paris seeking an end to hostilities, and on the 24th October 1918 the guns across the Western front fell silent after four long bloody years.

The cost of the war was catastrophic for nearly all it touched, but few more so than Germany, the Soviet Union and France.








Authors note:
Wowie, ouch...that casualty rate for Germany! I didn't think that it was possible to make WWI even more bloody than OTL...but it seems I was wrong, and yet Germany didn't even manage to advance as far into Belgium and France as OTL.
I just hope I can persuade France not to go all Versailles on Germany, lest a certain mustached Corporal appear in a couple of decades.
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