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“Thank you for the essay.”
Save for air power, the Great War may have gone differently.
As the German Army’s right wing marched into France from Belgium in late summer 1914, Allied aerial observers (either from Britain’s RFC, or France’s Armee de l’Aire) spotted them approaching the Marne. French troops were rushed forward, including about half a division carried by the taxicabs of Paris (small in total numbers, monumental in propaganda value). The Battle of the Marne ensued; the Germans retreated and dug in, holding the best terrain. Stalemate for four years.
At almost the same moment, German airships (”Zeppelins”) spied two Russian armies entering East Prussia, seeking to merge and strike German forces. German leadership reckoned the Russians could not link up before the Germans could counter the move. German forces scrambled forward and struck first; the Russian defeat was so large and so complete, the field commander - Czar Nicholas’ uncle - committed suicide. Stalemate.
Eleven years after the first flight by the Wright brothers, aircraft had proven indispensable to military endeavor on the planet’s surface. Frantic efforts followed, to prosecute a technological arms race, to develop strategies and concepts of employment, to build up air forces and mesh their operations with everything else. On it went for four years of war and 20 years of peace, then six more years of the next war, during which air power proved decisive, delivering the final blows with a violence and on a scale no one could have possibly imagined mere years earlier. The logic is still working its way out.