Posted on 02/06/2026 4:58:14 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
World War I not only toppled empires and redrew borders—it remade the modern world, with few nations feeling the effects as profoundly as Great Britain. The country’s deadliest war—from which 6 percent of its men never returned—accelerated sweeping social, economic and political changes that fractured the rigid British class system and weakened the aristocracy.
For centuries, hereditary landowners exercised a near feudal dominance of the British countryside. As late as 1873, fewer than 5 percent of Britons owned all of England’s property. But an agricultural depression in the late 1800s had already begun to erode their dominance as the First World War loomed.
The Great War hastened their decline. While working-class voices grew louder in politics, aristocratic estates hemorrhaged money. Heirs and laborers alike perished in the trenches, domestic servants abandoned their posts for new opportunities, and punishing new taxes further crippled landowners’ finances.
Below, find five ways the British aristocracy lost its grip on the old social order before and during World War I.
1. Aristocratic Families Sustained Heavy Combat Losses
When World War I erupted in 1914, young aristocrats—many heirs to vast estates—rushed to enlist. Although officers no longer purchased commissions, the British gentry still dominated their ranks.
Trained to lead from the front, junior officers embraced tactics that had worked in earlier wars but proved catastrophic in a newly mechanized era of warfare. “The officers led the charges out of the trenches and into no man’s land because that’s the tactic they’d been trained to do,” says Christopher Warren, vice president and chief curator of the National World War I Museum and Memorial. “But leading from the front was a terrible tactic based on the weaponry being used against them.”
(Excerpt) Read more at history.com ...
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“It has always been the calm leadership of the Officer class that has made the British Army what it is.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFvkxK4Qsis
I wasn’t aware that the British aristocracy had been “broken”. It seems as strong as ever, now allied with EU globalism.
Other than the 5 reasons listed, another major contribution was the Spanish Flu.
Returning soldiers, already weakened from the macabre conditions of trench warfare, were easy marks for the virulent disease.
An entire generation of young men were wiped out.
Europe and the United Kingdom have yet to fully recover.
The article lists 5 major points. I would summarize: Society gave a lot more power to women, and the government taxed the rich a lot more. And it was all downhill after that.
Look at us in 2026. We have a lot of AWFULs and a lot of people want to “tax the billionaires” which just means tax anyone who is successful. We are on the same path.
Britain was always known for its navy, not its army. Although it never was as bad as France, as far as reputation goes, it needed Colonial troops or Germans to make a good showing on the battlefield, and in the 20th Century, America to bail it out.
Although America threw in with the French in the Naopoleonic wars, the French lost but the Americans still managed to beat the British.
WWI also put an end to the Gilded Age in the United States.
I’ve heard that the Spanish Flu was one of the reasons the Germans signed the Armistace, it decimated them to the point where they simply could not get enough troops.
America needed The Royal Navy, since we acquired Hawaii and The Philippines, we had to beef up The Pacific Fleet. When Pearl Harbor happened, at that time, we were still far from being a “Two-Ocean Navy”. The Royal Navy basically protected the Atlantic. Only the mobilization that came with WWII allowed us to get there.

This is probably the best map I can find. This is what Europe will look like by 2050. I'll expect most of Western Europe to fall to Islam.
In December, 1941 (before Pearl Harbor), the Atlantic Fleet had 6 Battleship, the Pacific fleet 9. Atlantic 3 Carriers, Pacific 3 Carriers. Atlantic 13 Cruisers, Pacific 20 Cruisers
The Atlantic probably had a higher density per 1000 square miles than did the Pacific. The US was running anti-submarine operations to help the British in the Atlantic from the spring of 1941.
From DANFS:
“Texas began operating on the Neutrality Patrol in May 1941, established to keep the war out of the western hemisphere, principally basing on Narragansett Bay, making three extended cruises, in May, June, and July, into the North Atlantic. During the second of those patrols, on 20 June, Texas, in company with the destroyers Mayrant (DD-402), Trippe (DD-403) and Rhind (DD-404), was sighted by the German submarine U-203 (Kapitänleutnant Rolf Mützelburg, commanding), on her first war patrol, within what the Kriegsmarine considered the war, or “blockade” zone in the Atlantic. The U.S. ships, unaware of U-203’s being in proximity, outdistanced the U-boat and frustrated any attack plans. Consequently, Grössadmiral Erich Raeder, the Commander in Chief of the Kriegsmarine, sent orders to his deployed U-boats that U.S. ships could only be attacked if they ventured across the western boundary of the blockade zone by 20 miles or more, or within a 20-mile strip along that western boundary.”
Had to do a bit more digging, but the US first attacked a German warship in the Atlantic on Spetember 4, 1941, and the Germans torpedoed US destroyers on October 17, 1941 and October 31, 1941. The US was responsible for protecting convoys from Canada as far as Iceland at that point. So instead of the Americans needing the British, the British needed the American navy.
They needed each other, but losing the Royal Navy would have put us in peril. Which is why it was crucial to aid Britain.
And after Pearl Harbor, it only would have taken one US Ship to be sunk by a U-Boat to be the Casus Belli for declaring War on Germany.
So either way, we would have been at war with Germany by the end of 1941.
What a stupid, stupid war.
Most British soldiers in WWI had no right to vote. Almost all Germans soldiers could.
That, in the war to make the world “safe for democracy”.’
WWI and WWII Germany were very different critters.
The world would have been a better place if England allied with Germany, instead of France, after 1871.
Germany could never threaten the British Empire.
Interesting thought....
And you’d think the Brits would ally with the King’s German cousin instead of France.
Especially considering it was France that tried to take over the entire continent, just a few decades before.
All bad things that happened since, are directly because of the French.
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