Chapter 334: The Butterfly Effect Strikes Again!
While the German Homefront was far more stable than in Bruno’s past life, largely because of the fact that their losses had been minimal when compared to what had occurred in the previous timeline. France and Britain were far from okay.
Millions lie dead on both of their ends. And the current offensive was adding to those numbers by the tens of thousands with each passing day. The number of deaths between the two nations was rapidly approaching 3 million, and that would be more than had occurred during the same conflict as it had previously occurred.
The governments tried to hide this reality from the people. But it was not an easy task. Sure, they could lie about those who had died in the field to their families, to prevent them from spreading the news as more and more loved ones failed to return from the front.
But how did they explain it when the scheduled leave of the soldier came? And yet they did not return home? Can you imagine the shit show it would cause if the government lied about your son or brother dying in war, only for it to be revealed when the time came for him to temporarily come home and get some rest?
That was a possibility that fortunately the Allied Powers were at least intelligent enough to understand would single-handedly cause the downfall of the war. Thus, they tried their best to suppress the actual death statistics by tightly controlling the media.
But of course word-of-mouth spread like wildfire. If everyone you knew lost a son, brother, uncle, or cousin in the war it did not take a hyperintelligent mind to begin putting the numbers together in their head.
I mean what were the odds that all the casualties occurring in the war came from the same small town somewhere in the middle of Wales? And thus was the problem. One could not fully conceal this matter with such overwhelming death rates.
And the worst of it all were the millions more wounded in action who returned home bearing stories of their time in the trenches. Of course, there were also prisoners of war to account for which the Germans captured and treated humanely.
At first, the allies tried to blame many of these deaths on the Germans mistreating their prisoners of war. But this was quickly countered by news team from France, Britain, the United States, and any other nation that was interested being allowed into the prisons where these PoWs rested.
The treatment was well above and beyond what the Hague conventions required, and was a way for the Germans to avoid these accusations entirely.
And since a large amount of the press within America was within Bruno’s sphere of influence, they would naturally mass print the stories of German proper treatment of Prisoners of war, as well as openly criticize the British and French Governments for slandering the German Reich with such baseless accusations.
To put it simply, as more men did not return from the front, Britain and France began to feel this sting deeply. Factories remained understaffed, forcing women into the workplace. While farms were starting to become affected as well.
In fact, crop outputs this year were a lot less than they had been in the past. The war was taking its toll on Britain and France alike, and the more the government tried to crackdown on this, the more rebellious the people most affected became.