Three fewer
crosses on Flanders Fields
Literally millions of young men died in World War I. Any one of those millions of men could have played a major role in history if they had lived. I’ve always wondered what kinds of potential were buried under those crosses. Here are three obituaries that are actually AH’s about what might have happened if three of those young men had lived to a ripe old age. All characters names are made up. They represent possibilities rather than specific people that died in World War I. I tried to balance realism with working enough of the time-lines’ histories in that with a certain amount of effort you can see the changes the person supposedly made. I’m really curious. Please let me know if you like this sort of thing or if you prefer your AH’s more straight-forward.
Gregor Romsky (1895-1999): Died in a Turkish hospital on Saturday after a heart attack. Romsky is best known for his role in the death of Russian writer and political activist Nicholai Lenin and several other activists of the "Bolshevik" party, one of the many socialist and anarchist groups that competed for power after the disintegration of Tsarist power during the Great War. Romsky briefly claimed to rule Russia on behalf of that party, but his power never extended beyond St. Petersburg. He kept tenuous control of that city for only a few weeks before the looting of his "Red Guards" and the fighting between various parts of that organization led fed up workers and army units to crush the local "Bolsheviks". Romsky fled the country as other parts of the Bolshevik organization accused him of killing Lenin and other top Bolshevik officials. Lenin and his associates died during the confused period after the Bolsheviks temporarily drove Kerensky and his "Mensheviks" (a competing faction of socialists) out of St. Petersburg.
Historian Peter Nall says that the case for Romsky’s having killed the Bolshevik leaders is circumstantial but fairly strong. Nall alleges that "Whatever he became, Romsky started out as a petty criminal with ambition. He served in one of the Russian army units that was stationed in France during the Great War, was badly wounded, possibly as a result of criminal associations rather than military action, then went back to Russia. There he joined the Red Guards and rose rapidly within the ranks. Diehard Bosheviks contend that he saw the fighting between the various factions inside St. Petersburg as an opportunity to loot the place. Certainly that’s what the forces under his control did, though it is possible to argue over whether or not that was Romsky intention."
If Romsky or someone in his employee did kill Lenin, how Romsky was able to win the trust of the cautious Lenin is still a mystery. Nall says, "It was a time when power was lying on the floor waiting to be picked up. Lenin and Romsky both reached for it. In spite of his intellect and ability at intrigue, Lenin lost."
After the fall of his short-lived government, Romsky lived for many years as an exile in various parts of Europe. The Polish government once accused him of arms smuggling to Mahkno’s Ukrainian anarchist forces in the Ukrainian-speaking part of southeastern Poland. Mussolini accused him of smuggling arms to Ethiopia during the Italian conquest of that country, and is rumored to have put a price on his head. Unproven allegations of other arms-trafficking activities, as well as drug smuggling, and involvement in white slavery surfaced from time-to-time, but Romsky always maintained that they were the invention of die-hard Bolsheviks.
Romsky returned to Russia during the Polish/Japanese invasion of 1934, and commanded a volunteer unit of fellow exiles which he raised to oppose that invasion. That unit fought alongside the western army of the Social Revolutionary party, and was for the most part destroyed along with that army in the Battle of the Crimea. Romsky survived and went back into exile as Russian nationalist conventional forces crumbled in 1935 and 1936. He played a role in Russian nationalist exile politics from 1935 into the mid-1960’s, and claimed to have been courted by the Nazi’s in the late 1930’s as Germany’s attempt to displace Poland as the major power in Western Russia and the Ukraine got underway. Romsky claimed to have rejected German offers of assistance. Nall says, "It may be a matter of 20-20 hindsight, but Romsky claims to have rejected the offer that Dennikin ultimately took on the grounds that the Nazi’s would prove to be worse masters than the Poles could ever be."
Romsky returned to Russia in 1970, and lived there for many years after the violence accompanying the end of the German and Japanese protectorates in the late 1960’s subsided. He returned to western Europe in 1976 after unsuccessfully running for President of Orel Republic. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s he was involved in efforts on the part of nationalist exiles to redraw the boundaries of what used to be Russia in order to make them reflect ethnic and geographical boundaries rather than the decades of Polish and Japanese, then German and Japanese rule. That effort was met by the united opposition of the governments involved, and Romsky was again unwelcome in his homeland until he retired from political life in 1984.
Gregor Romsky is survived by twenty-five children from his six
marriages,
and outlived five more children. His youngest child, Peter, was nine
years old
when Gregor died.
----------------
Kenneth Edwards (1898-1999): Died at his estate in Tasmania Sunday after a short illness. Edwards was best known for his efforts on behalf of the then endangered Tasmanian wolf or Thylacine. In his book Saving Tasmania’s Wolf, Edwards recounts the experience of being severely wounded in World War I and says that the idea of saving the Thylacine came as a belated result of that wound. "I felt that I had been chosen to live rather than to die for a reason, that I needed to justify my life by doing something that no one else was doing, something important."
He found that something that he considered important on a trip to Tasmania in 1922. At that time, the Tasmanian state government was still paying bounties on Tasmanian Wolves, although the large Marsupial predator was rapidly approaching extinction on its island home. Edwards saw a Tasmanian Wolf in the local zoo, became fascinated by it, and gradually came to make saving it from extinction his life’s work. He used income from a substantial estate left to him by his parents to buy the small island now called Wolf Island off the coast of Tasmania and stock it with a population of free-ranging Thylacines.
Edwards’ efforts on the part of the Thylacine left him nearly broke by 1934, but the first of his several books on the Thylacine came out at that time, and caught the imagination of the Australian public and zoo officials world-wide. It was becoming apparent that the Tasmanian Wolf was extinct or nearly so in the wild by 1934, which left one living Thylacine in a Tasmanian zoo and Edwards’ two-dozen animals as the only known survivors of the species.
From that low point, the number of Thylacines has now risen to well over two thousand in zoos worldwide, along with several hundred in private hands. Small populations have been reestablished in Tasmanian national parks since the late 1960’s and the future of the species seems relatively secure. The severe population bottleneck that the species went through has left its mark as various genetic diseases have become more common, but an elaborate exchange program among the major zoos has made that somewhat less of a problem. Recently, Thylacines have become somewhat of a prestige pet among the wealthy, especially in the film industry.
Naturalist Irving Thompson sums up Edwards’ contribution: "Not very many people can claim to have single-handedly saved a species—especially not one as scientifically interesting as this one. Thylacine studies have given us an incredible amount of insight on the energetics and behavior of large, fast running predators. If we had just had dogs, wolves, and the like to look at, we wouldn’t have been able to see a lot of the things we’ve been able to. Raising a wolf and a Thylacine together and studying development and behavior is just incredibly rewarding in terms of really understanding the animals."
Henri Corap: (1890-1987): Died quietly in his home on Saturday after a long illness. Corap was best known for his controversial tank designs in the inter-war period and in the years immediately following World War II. Historian Mark Negelmann says: "Corap’s tank designs represent a major what-if of World War II. If the French government had adopted his C35L and C35M designs in 1935, French armor might have been much more effective against the Germans in 1940."
Corap survived a life-threatening wound on the Western Front of World War I, and went on to dedicate his life to shaping the future of warfare to avoid future trench-dominated stalemates. His tank and other armored vehicle designs emphasized speed, firepower, mechanical reliability, and simplicity at the expense of armor. That emphasis, plus his outspoken disdain for the politics and politicians of inter-war France, made it difficult for his designs to be adopted by the inter-war French army.
Two of Corap’s tank designs did see service in World War II. Three dozen copies of the C37l, an export version of the C35l, were used by Nationalist Chinese forces in their war with Japan. That tank was also exported in small numbers to French allies such as Romania and Yugoslavia. Poland received approximately 60 of an order of 150 of upgraded C37l’s before it fell to the Germans. The Polish C37l’s mounted the excellent French 47mm gun in their turrets and the few that were operational by the time of the German invasion apparently gave a good account of themselves. The remainder of the Polish order was taken over by the French government, along with 30 or 40 additional C37l’s intended for export. Those tanks were spread among the 5 French light cavalry divisions, where they provided a much-needed increase in tank firepower for those divisions, but were too few in number to give the light cavalry significant fighting capability.
Several of those light cavalry divisions were directly in the path of the main German offensive in May 1940, and were badly beaten by the German panzer divisions spearheading that offensive. However, German reports of the time indicate a great deal of respect for the C37l, as does their extensive use of captured vehicles.
A second Corap tank design, the B2c heavy tank, also saw limited service in World War II. The B2c was ordered by the French government in small numbers to supplement the B1 series tanks used in French heavy armored divisions (DCR’s). This was a stopgap prompted by the slow pace of production on the B1-series tanks. However, the Corap design was a considerable advance over the B1-series in reliability and firepower. It had the same 75mm main armament as the B1-series tanks, but that gun was mounted in a two-man turret rather than in the front hull.
A little over 100 B2c’s were produced, and most of them served with the hastily thrown together and poorly trained 4th DCR under Charles DeGaulle. That division provided one of the few clear-cut French victories in the 1940 campaign, though the impact was more psychological than material. As Negelmann says, "4th DCR proved that the Germans could be beaten, and it provided the French with a hero. That made the Free French movement. Without it, even if DeGaulle had tried to fight on he would have found at best a few hundred followers. With it, tens of thousands of Frenchmen were willing to follow him into exile."
Corap’s B2c’s probably made that victory possible, not because they were objectively that much more formidable than a B1bis, but because they were something entirely new to the Germans. German intelligence entirely missed the deployment of the B2c, just as they later missed the deployment of the KV1 and T34 in Russia. Negelmann says, "The Germans were already somewhat unnerved by the speed of their victories over the French, and many of them from Hitler on down to the lowest infantryman suspected a trap. Meeting a previously unknown but very formidable tank in large numbers seemed to confirm that, and resulted in a temporary collapse in German morale at the point of the French attack."
Corap and his design team continued to develop new designs clandestinely through the two and a half years of the Vichy regime. They fled to North Africa when the Germans occupied Vichy in November 1942, then moved to the United States, where they continued small-scale design work until the liberation of France in Autumn of 1944. Corap tried desperately to get a French-designed tank into production before the end of World War II in Europe, but his first new design after liberation did not get into the hands of the French army until July 1945. Corap continued to design tanks after the war, but in 1954 he fell out with the French government over its use of nuclear weapons in French Indo-China.
Corap was a major figure in the French anti-war movement in the late 1950’s and 1960’s. He served three terms in the French parliament, before retiring. He did not always fit well within that movement because of his outspoken support of some types of French military action and because of his support of a strong French defensive force in Europe. Negelmann says, "Henri Corap was very much a French nationalist. He opposed fighting to retain the colonies, and especially using nuclear weapons there, primarily because he felt that it weakened France rather than strengthening it. He saw the future primarily in terms of economic power rather than control over territory, and he felt that if they were administered in a reasonably humane way the colonies were an economic drain which would never pay for themselves, especially after they had been fought over using nuclear weapons."
What do you think these scenarios? Do you like this sort of thing, or do you prefer more conventional scenarios? Comments are very welcome.
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Copyright 1999 By Dale R. Cozort