No Zimmerman Note

By early 1917, the Great War was looking like a powder keg that was about to explode in the faces of the British and French leaders from stalemate to disaster. The Germans were beating the Russians and the Tsar looked to be overthrown. Britain was on the verge of starvation, much of France's natural resources were in German hands, and the Germans free to launch new offensives with their best troops, the veterans of the East Front, against the west, when the inevitable Russian surrender comes.

America was not in the war, even with the German submarines sinking thousands of tons of American shipping.

The Germans considered the problem of the United States earnestly seeing as how it could lead the Germans from triumph to humiltiation. One German politian, Arthur Zimmerman, proposed a war on the North American Continent between German-supported Mexico and the United States. The Kaiser rejected this proposal, saying that, despite the small standing military of the United States, an american mobilization would lead to a defeat of Mexico, and a full-scale war on Germany, in which none but the most ambitious German officers saw any hope of victory.

The war carried on with a formally neutral United States sending hundreds of thousands of tons of arms and ammuntion to Britain, a German advance on the Eastern Front, and a stalemate in the West. That is, until the Tsar was overthrown, and the world's first communist state fragily established. In December, 1917, an armistice between the new Red Russia and Germany was signed. After a month of negotiations, the Germans got their way, at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Germans seized Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic Provinces. The Western Allies braced for impact. Hundreds of thousands of the best German troops were about to slam into France.

The Germans, however, were not as comfortable with another offensive in northwestern France, which they believed would end in disaster. It was agreed among the German staff that the new troops must attack somewhere else.

The German leadership moved for an offensive to mirror the French Plan XVII, and strike through Alcases-Lorraine in overwhelming force. Then, they would use their freedom from the trenches and mobility to dash North after taking Vichy, and head to Paris.

While the Allies moved their forces from Northern France and Belgium to contain this breakthrough, the massed forces of the Germans in the North would take the Channel Ports of Dunkirk and Calais, and rush to take the remaining undermanned fortifications of the Allies, and begin slowly moving West on a broad front to press the allies to defend Paris, while the forces from the East Front raced to the coast and take Le Havre by storm, trapping the allies in a pocket around Paris, and forcing their surrender.