Always difficult to speculate what would have happened in “The Great War” without US intervention. I have read the books “Foch: Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War” and “Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism” (with William Astore as co-author) and still got to read the one on Haig, but – if I remember well – it seems that if the US had not checked in, the Germans might well have succeeded in reaching Paris.

Maréchal Foch, coalition leader, seems to have depended critically on the moral support provided by the US, both on the field and in the political arena, and later – after the US troops had managed the deadly learning curve of European battlefields – on their military support. Even so, he just managed to hold the German lines at terrible losses (i.e. with crazy disregard for the cost of his ‘hold every meter’ orders). Then, in the war’s later stages Germans went full out, basically invented the Total War concept (Hindenburg harnessed the full economy into the war effort, sucking it dry) and then managed to actually break through the static lines southwards in 1918. What a victorious but by then thoroughly nastified Wilhelminian Germany would have led to is difficult to guess at. Maybe one would have had Tsarist and Kaiser constitutional monarchies, the UK an enfeebled also-ran, the Japanese a major power, and de-colonialisation delayed by 50 years? Better? Worse? For whom? And who knows?