Recent content by jotheberlock

  1. Legislature Militaries

    The French Revolutionary armies were under control of the National Assembly. It's fairly common in any nominally democratic revolutionary situation, actually; the revolutionary forces in the October Revolution were theoretically under the control of the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary...
  2. WI-Spain joined the Axis

    Spain had also come out of a divisive civil war and was under a fascist dictatorship. You'd probably find a lot of local people who were on the Republican side taking up arms against Franco.
  3. WI the early M4 Sherman was a good tank?

    Actually, that would be the FT-17, way back in World War I. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_FT-17
  4. Atrocities and peace in a CP-victory WWII

    While I'm not saying Britain would necessarily fight on in this scenario, Britain did in fact fight on after all its major allies and its continental forces were beaten in both the Napoleonic War and in World War 2 (recall that after the fall of France, the Russians were allied with the Nazis...
  5. WI West Germany sent combat troops to Vietnam in 1966?

    Article 5 of the NATO treaty is - 'Article 5 The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of...
  6. Challenge: Make UNIX the world's dominant operating system

    Speaking as someone with low-level programming experience in both UNIX and classic MacOS I find this very hard to believe. Even the Lisa was based around cooperative multitasking, for example, and was not Unix-derived as far as I know. Your best bet would probably be Xenix. Actually, Microsoft...
  7. If not in 1914 then when?

    Why? You just pointed out they're a small element of the population. Not to mention that I don't see why they would join the protests - they're doing alright, and it's pretty rare for middle class people as a bloc to be sympathetic to violent working class oiks on strike unless they have some...
  8. AH Challenge: Hollywood is still governed by the Hays Code

    Why do you think there'll be no Life of Brian? It's a British film. Americans might not be able to (legally) watch it, but the rest of the world will do just fine, ta. I suspect in this TL Britain (and probably Europe in general) would have a much larger film industry, actually, in order to...
  9. Can Prohibitoin succed?

    Western societies in general drink way less than they did back in the day, though, including those which never had Prohibition.
  10. No Soviet Autoloaders...

    Certainly. I'd be interested to hear if the Finnish military found they did have to do much fixing-up of the tanks they got before putting them into service. I'd still maintain that we have some evidence here that the basic design was fine, though, which is an important distinction from the...
  11. No Soviet Autoloaders...

    The point he's making is that these were Soviet T-72s, assembled in the Soviet Union and later sold to Finland, not Finnish ones built by Finns with notionally superior quality control. It's quite possible they were better maintained in service, for sure, but I don't see that that affects any...
  12. Italian Fasicm: a global leading force

    I'm not sure I agree with this. It's more that its military modernised prematurely; its equipment was world-leading in the mid-30s, just obsolete by the time the actual war rolled around.
  13. Could one of the V-bombers have become a British B-52?

    Why would Britain want a bomber with intercontinental range in the Cold War? Unlike the US, we were on the same continent as our main prospective opponent.
  14. Japan badly damaged at Pearl Harbor

    On the other hand, if the fleet does get out to sea and is hit by the Japanese anyway, it might actually be worse off, since historically many of the sunk ships were in shallow water and could be repaired whereas now they'll be gone for good.
  15. How long could Nazi Germany have held on?

    Poison gas, especially the most common stuff available in World War 2, isn't nearly as effective as you think it is. It doesn't stick around long and it can be defended against with gasmasks. After all, Britain declared war in 1939 fully expecting gas to be used and issuing gasmasks to...
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