I am ok if Europe wants to send troops to Canada to defend against the real enemy—the United States.
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Ukrainians: "the Germans are here to liberate us from the Russian yoke. And they actually mean it this time!"
Tbf Poland would be joining them this time around.
They're allowed to take out one German tank with light cavalry, for old time's sake.
You know...as the battlefield becomes ever more automated, there might be a very brief window where the winged hussars could make a comeback.
Let's say you have a battlefield riddled with smart drones. They have image recognition and immediately attack anything resembling a tank or other military asset. Do you think anyone bothered to program the drones to seek out and attack a unit outfit like 18th century Polish cavalry? A charge on horseback just might be able to ride completely undisturbed through the right kind of drone-controlled battlefield.
THEN THE WINGED HUSSARS ARRIVED
Ukranian drones are already equipped to target the latest Russian logistic vehicles, donkeys.
You guys have the most experience with that sort of thing
Assuming the internet exists in the future...
Ahh polandball. I missed these
These always remind me that I'm a dumb American.
We can stand to be roasted more then a little bit.
That may help us with our fat problem. I hear heat renders fat into liquid grease.....
Poland: "What about attacking Russia alongside with an ally?"
No thank you. Defensive alliance, sure. But not attacking. We're supposed to be the good guys, after all.
Aye, I could do that.
Germany: "i thought these days would never come again. Fighting russia with poland and france like we did late 1700s and early 1800s"
The original band coming back for one more single.
Wouldnt say it was a band. Napoleon forced some of the germans, the others joined because they wanted to be on the winning side, and the poles fought with Bonaparte for their freedom
So like a supergroup. Like the Highwaymen.
🎶"I wore a picklehaube, on the Rhineland I did ride..." 🎶
🎵🎶 I spilled the blood of the Saxon men🎶🎵
I know Charlemagne doesn't fit the definition of a Supergroup, but that's simply because when the term was coined, Christopher Lee hadn't joined any bands yet. So the creators of the term forgot to leave in the loophole that any band with Christopher Lee is also a Supergroup.
If Germany had started with, and stuck to, attacking Russia, I doubt it'd have been a world war. I don't remember who all were Russia's allies at the start, but IIRC only the French were particularly fond of Russia. There weren't a lot of the usual royal contract-through-marriage, were there? Did many nobles have Russian cousins?
Pretty sure that last time they had already taken a couple other countries before heading to Russia. Stopping at Russia was already too late.
I'm afraid you're gonna have to come up with a specific timeframe here.
WW1? The Germany Empire wasn't really the spark for this one. The entire royalty of the continent was effectively cousins. There may be some wiggle room, but most of them were literal cousins, with Wilhelm II and Nicholas II being most notable in this context.
Nobody was 'fond' of Russia in any way. Most European nations then saw it as they do now- large, unpredictable, and territorially aggressive. France and Britain were a part of the Triple Entente not because they trusted each other, but because it was a reasonably sensible counter to the Triple Alliance.
WW2? Royal intermarriage was mostly a moot point after the first go around even in nations that managed to not get their entire lineages deposed. As for the Soviet Union, still wildly unpopular. If your point is that Nazi Germany might have gotten away with things if they'd stayed tied up with Russia instead of trying to diversify their murder portfolio- I'd disagree. They would have gotten the OK from other Western powers for a time, but would still crumple from internal strife, the war was as much a wallpapering of those issues as it was any grand ambitions of Hitler's.
I think the point is more that for WW2 the other nations would have just left them to it more. Maybe profit off the increased demand for materials. However, the war started because of Germany invading Poland, and you kinda need to go through Poland to get to the USSR.
Encourage the USSR to try and take all of Poland first, then attack back when they are getting close? Not sure tbh.
Sure, good point; I assumed we were taking about WWII because - as you point out - Germany wasn't the instigator, and OPs post seemed to imply WWII.
And I disagree about the irrelevance of noble ties at the start of WWII. Yes, most of the countries involved were no longer monarchies, but names still had weight. Take Thurn und Taxis in Germany, for instance.
I grant that by 1930 they weren't the drivers of policy, and even before that Europe's royalty were regularly going to war with their cousins. But few in the hereditary European elite had many ties to Russia.
I didn't say Germany would have won a war with Russia, only that if they had, and has stayed focused on Russia, it wouldn't have become a world war. There'd have been no "Allies".
There's a big caveat there, though, and that's Japan. Germany attacking Russia would have naturally resulted in an alliance with Japan in any case, and once America got involved now the Germans are allied against the Americans. Without the Western front, though, America could have focused all efforts on Japan and might have allied with Russia; the Pacific conflict might have been shorter, and not ended with the Bomb. But once Japan's defeated, does America continue to reinforce Russia against Japan's former allies, the Germans?
I also wonder what role Africa would have played. Germany was always going to need to go after the oil, and what alliances would have resulted from that? I don't think any of the Western countries saw Africa as anything more than a source of natural resources, so it would have been less "coming to their aid" and more "protecting our assets there".
Without an invasion of France, or aggression against the UK directly, would the UK have gotten involved, or would Chamberlain's policy held? I feel as if France, if anything, would have only dug in and fortified their borders, and watched.
The aristocrats of the western empires may have still carried weight to their names, but the Great Depression was really putting strain on the legitimacy and popularity of the established order.
As for Japan: they were already scrapping with the Soviets at the time in Khalkhin Gol. If anything the American entry to the war freed the Soviets to just a single front. American efforts in the European theater I largely take to be more "maintaining market access" to the UK and France than any real desire to be there.
France may have sat back, but I kinda doubt it. A weakened Germany after fighting the Soviets would have tempted them to retake lands east of the Rhine that they'd lost following the Napoleonic campaigns. My take is that none of the powers were peacable or invested in the status quo, just less rabid about expansion than the Nazis.