The World Wars

During the Industrial Revolution, Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century started with the Napoleonic Wars when Industrialization was building up steam in England and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers*. The Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era but was limited to the US, was still fought with muskets and saw about 600-750,000 people dead. The Franco Prussian war was won in six months. Things changed in 1914 when Arch Duke Ferdinand was assassinated, starting the Great War, also known as the First World War. This would be followed up by the Second World War in 1939-45. The World Wars Conflicts which would spread across the world and saw conflict and destruction beyond anything that was ever seen before or since.

There are two important factors in the World Wars: Technology and Nationalism. Technology is the easier of the two to understand, in the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-4 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 meters, was supported by muzzle loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1km was supported by and steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines. In 1914 the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute (which could go through three men and still be deadly) at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by cannons that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air raining a spray of balls over a wide area and machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, Sub Machine Guns and Poison Gas had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were useless on this new battlefield and the book needed to be re-written from page one. Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an Industrial Nation could turn more of it's population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do (Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of it's population, Germany mobilized nearly 20% during the Great War). Through bloody experience generals gradually put together some idea of how to operate in this new battlefield near the end of the Great War and between the wars they'd continue to build on it with experience in small scale wars. Even so people were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich" and so forth (their job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with face to face day to day). If a Civil War happened and they ended up with a new noble house was put in charge, they would not care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties. There was a king and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all good but the specifics of this was not a fact which defined them. This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and had a bit of build up through the Age of Enlightenment as propaganda for the masses took form leading to the Birth of Nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat they were ruled by, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals and (often) ancestry. People that need to band together and set aside their differences and defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their differentness. Public Education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to give these ideals to everyone from the richest businessman to the lowiest begger. When you have two nations which have nationalistic populations and governments and other groups fond of egging nationalism on together it does not take much to get them at each others throats.

Footnote * The Taiping Rebellion in china killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.

The Interwar

Near the end of the first World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclyism. The Spanish Flu, named such because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war, spread rapidly and killed many thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, malnourishment ect.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this Europe spent decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused.

America however was having its best years ever. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. President Harding managed to do the impossible and eliminate the deficit, though some of his appointees trying to sell some government owned rock in the middle of nowhere marred his legacy (looking back historians realize there's a lack of evidence suggesting he had any knowledge or involvement). The American Economy of the time was doing well as unlike that of the other powers of Europe it had not been strained extensively by being in a War Economy for four years which strained productivity, had much of it's prime farmland turned into no mans land like France, had it's economy pushed to the Breaking Point like Germany, was broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungrarian Empire or had all of that and worse, fought a subsequent civil war and was taken over by communists while having basically everyone in Europe owe American Bankers to pay for the war.

After Harding's death during the scandal his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, took over. This was rather sudden and Coolidge was sworn in during the middle of the night by his father on the family Bible, with his first act was to pray to God to bless the American people and give him the strength to lead them. Unlike Harding, Coolidge proved wildly popular despite (or because of) his quiet nature. His economic policies really kicked off the Roaring Twenties and he was popular enough he was elected by a landside in an election he didn't campaign for (having his Vice President candidate do all the work). Coolidge continued Harding's deficit free budgets to the point the US was able to repay most of the national debt. Despite his wild popularity, Coolidge shocked the world with his announcement that "I do not choose to run" for reelection and, true to his nature, did not really explain why (He would later elaborate in his autobiography that he did not wish to break the (then unofficial) rule set by Washington of a max of two terms among other issues). He would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely road on his success. This would change in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.

There had been a series of stock market crashes through the the 19th century in the US every decade or so, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment and a lot of scams which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, transportation and so forth the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country (save for the USSR under Stalin, which had it's own Stalin related problems) which further hindered recovery. The old ways of dealing with things did not work and people turned to new ideas. In the US this was various public works projects and assistance programs called the New Deal to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. In Germany the response was more severe and was seen as a failure of Democracy which contributed to the rise of the Nazi party. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up with war and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising.

The Second World War

The War in the West

See also Nazis

The War in the East

Since at least 1853 when Commadore Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would stomp all over them like they did China. In response they began building up their industrial base importing guns, ships, factory machinery, engineers, textbooks and professors. Some Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off Imperialism was to become Imperialists themselves and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward and they kept doing into the 20th century when general militarism came to power in Japan as the military was not kept on a tight leash. In the 1931 they invaded Manchuria and in in 1937 they invaded China, killing millions as they went. The rest of the world was outraged and cut Japan off from trade, which caused them to dig their heels in and keep it up. Tensions built until eventually the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on Pearl Harbor.

The idea was that if everything went right and Hitler fighting in the pacific the IJN could control the pacific and force the US to the table. The Pearl Harbor attack did work very well and they did overrun a lot of allied holdings around Asia, but the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the Industry that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel. As time went on the Allies were able to roll back the IJA and push back the IJN to the home islands.

The Manhattan Project

At the tale end of the 20th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that you could make an explosive device millions of times as powerful as any conventional chemical bomb. Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare and if the Nazis became able to make first was an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to make enough U-235 and to build a bomb. They were not ready in time to deal with the Nazis, but the first two of them were dropped on Japan to end the war quickly and avoid a long costly slog that would have involved millions dead, instead settling on killing a couple hundred thousand in one go.

The appeal of The World Wars

These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern War was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg.

Of the two wars, World War One gets relatively little media attention. Part of it is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of trench warfare, the other part is that the morality of the war is very very grey. The Great War is largely seen as a great tragedy. Because of some damn fool thing in the Balkans millions of good people in Germany, France, Austria, Russia and England get riled up by the news and propaganda campaigns that they were now at war. Men join the army one way or another, get cheered as they parade down the streets as being righteous heroes in the making going forth to defend hearth, home, family, friend and Nation and are shipped out to battlefields where they get torn apart by rifle fire, machine guns and artillery by the tens of thousands. The survivors dig in, make their trench lines, take pock shots at each other and live in dread of the hour when they'd be sent off on a suicidal charge across no mans land which will achieve nothing but fill a few more graves. There was no clear right side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for any convenient reason. The only motivation the common people had (besides being drafted and having no choice anyway) to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down hard. When it was all over the country blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it. In fact, neither of the original belligerent nations survived the conflict. All told, the First World War was quite possibly the most pointless and wasteful war in all of human history.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs Evil. The Nazis raised up an army and went about conquering Europe with plans on exterminating millions as a key objective while Imperial Japan was out conquering China and being really nasty themselves with the rapes and everything. When even Stalin looks favorable to someone, you know they're bad. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium).

The majority of Alternate History fiction is set in WWII one way or another.

World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings

• A lot of stuff from the Imperium of Man, especially the Death Korps of Krieg.
• Bolt Action, Flames of War and other similar military tabletop games

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Historical Time Periods
Deep Time:	Prehistory
Premodern:	Stone Age - Bronze Age - Classical Period - Dark Age - High Middle Ages - Renaissance
Modern:	Age of Enlightenment - Industrial Revolution - The World Wars - The Cold War - Post-Cold War