What If World War One Hadn’t Happened

What would the world be like today?

Photo by Stijn Swinnen on Unsplash

July 28th slipped by quietly without any body reminding us that it was 111th anniversary of the start of the First World War.

This war is now part of history.

But has anybody wondered what the world would be like today if that war had not happened?

I have written down some of my thoughts on the subject, nothing to profound, just a few ideas of what life would have been like for Great Britain and the world if we had moved into the 20th century without that hideous conflagration and loss of life.

The figures for the casualties vary, but it is possible that 750,000 British men were killed in that war; and the majority of those were young men. What would the population have been like if those young men had lived?

How many children would they have fathered? And those offspring would have had gone on to have families of their own. I imagine the demographic of Great Britain would have been vastly different today.

Without the movement of millions of troops across the world; there probably would not have been the horrific outbreak of Spanish flu that killed a further 200’000 people in the UK alone, and an estimated 25,000,000 to 100,000,000 worldwide.

Without the demand for their labour in munitions factories and other industries, it is unlikely the women folk of the UK would have gained their vote when they did.

Although the suffragettes, who suspended their campaign during the war years, may have some effect on that issue, which is another unwritten page of history.

Photo by Nationaal Archief on Unsplash

War is a great driver of technical advances, and without war, the invention of the tank, which made its first clumsy, lumbering appearance in 1917, would have been delayed for years without the demand for a trench busting technique.

Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Air craft, that were little more than a ramshackle collection of string and wire with primitive engines in 1914, made huge technological advances in the four years of the First World War.

From clumsy ungainly and relatively harmless butterflies, they had turned into fast and agile wasps with a deadly sting. Without that shot in the arm, the aviation industry would never have developed as it did in the years between the two wars.

Photo by Andrew Palmer on Unsplash

And it is universally accepted that the First World War took us directly into the Second World War. The scientific and technical advances made in that conflict out- stripped the ones made in its predecessor.

The race for the jet-propelled engine and rocket propulsion had a profound effect on the future. Without the premature development of the jet engine, I think air travel today would have just reached the level it was in 1980.

The same could be said for space exploration. The rockets that propelled the V2 missiles that almost brought London to its knees; provided the prototype for the rockets the Americans and Russians developed for their space programmes.

Photo by Anshu A on Unsplash

It is highly unlikely that a manned moon landing would have happened in 1969, and certainly no unmanned expeditions to the red planet would have been possible. Man might still be totally Earth bound.

What would Europe be like today if the two wars had not happened? Perhaps the Russian revolution may not have happened, or certainly not in 1917/18.

Millions who died in the Second War would have lived and perhaps shaped a different world.

Without the destruction wreaked upon it as a result of the Second World War, there may not have been any demand for any form of unification among the western nations; and therefore, no EU.

Without two wars to sap the wealth and energy from the British people, the empire may have lasted until the late 1960s before the demand for independence finally brought it to a natural end.

And what of the leaders we look back in history as giants of their era.

Hitler would have remained an insignificant house painter.

Stalin may have gone into the priest hood as planned.

And what would be our memories, if any, of Winston Churchill?

With no war cabinet to lead and no enemy to rally the nation against, he would have been no more than a footnote on the pages of history.

He would never have been prime minister of a peace time government, I think he would have been all but forgotten.

I am sure many of you could think of other scenarios for an alternative version of history.

These are just some dreamed up by my wandering mind. 🙂

Thanks for reading.

©Barry Robinson 2025. All rights reserved.