I was afraid of that. Seemed the most likely reason to mention a random factory....
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This is her endpoint.
She was sent into the meeting to confirm raid targets and scout security. She was cuffed up to make it look to the general public that she was a raid target and not a raid enabler.
Can confirm, NH is always nice. And my grandfather's serving out of Portsmouth at this point in time...
By endpoint, do you mean her story is over? Or just her days being an ad hoc spy being over?
Story 1623
Bizerte, Tunisia November 1, 1942
Minesweepers were clearing the harbor very slowly. The small wooden boats had just arrived that morning as the German and Italian defenders had retreated after covering the engineer’s grim destruction. Most of the dockyard infrastructure had been demolished. Bridges and masts from coasters were poking out of the water like a dinosaur’s armament. The few piers that extended into the harbor were barely recognizable as industrial infrastructure.
A battalion of infantrymen was processing prisoners from Italian quartermaster and repair units. They had tried to hold the city but the experienced American infantrymen had called in artillery and armor every time that they ran into a roadblock held by men who may not have fired a rifle since they had passed through basic training that had occurred immediately after they were drafted. It was ineffectual resistance, it was a token of blood, more Italian than American for a worthless sense of honor. The city would be a worthless entreport for the Allies no matter how long or how short the last few blocks before the docks were held.
Colonel Williamson listened to his battalion commanders report. They were still needing at least another few hours to sort themselves out and resupply before they could get back on the march to pressure Tunis from the west. Other brigades and other divisions of the corps were already heading east, they had time, or at least they had enough time today to sort themselves out.
Story 1624
Crete, November 2, 1942
Dawn rose from the sea. Her pale orange light became red and then yellow as dozens of bombers honed in on the homing beacons. Fighters had taken off an hour earlier to hunt for any German or Italian intruders who were following the bomber streams home. A JU-88 had managed to bomb Heraklion a week ago, claiming a trio of Liberators minutes after they had landed.
Radar technicians identified the scattershot approach of the bombers while handing off the task of corralling all of the aircraft to the controllers. Some bomber needed to merely land on their field while others had wounded men aboard with broken equipment. Controllers talked those Stirlings and Liberators down. Most landed safely even if the mechanics would write some of them off due to flak and fighter damage. A few would never fly again from either combat damage or the chaos of crashes that tilted the bomber over the nose so that the tail ended up in front of the cockpit after tumbling and spinning wildly about as the landing gear collapsed.
Last night’s raid on the Romanian oil distribution network was the fifth one of the current offensive. The squadron and group commanders were claiming success with dozens of secondary explosions and fires against the oil tanks along the Danube port city that they struck. A trio of Mosquitos were now heading north to assess those claims.
Story 1625 Elections of 1942
November 3, 1942 Washington DC
The aide put down the phone.
“Good news, sir, Connecticut is fully reporting.’
“Did we hold?”
“Barely, Downs is going down in the 4th. The rest of the delegation looks like it will be holding on. Not by much, but by enough. We’ll get a recount in at least two districts but we’re ahead going to bed.”
Six more markers were moved on the big board. Four went into the majority’s column, one stayed in the minority while one flipped from the majority to the minority column. By now, the results of the election were becoming clear. The Democratic majority was getting thinner and thinner. Speaker Rayburn had started the day with effectively 282 seats backing him between Democrats and allied, minor parties. He knew that he would be losing some of that majority.
Now as the vote counts were coming in, he was looking at losing thirty seats. Yankee seats were not flipping. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Michigan were holding on, some of them by the thinnest margin for staunch New Dealers while the Midwest was a bloodbath. The Republican core of Ohio saw a seven seat swing to the right while other states in the Ohio-Mississippi Valley swung almost twenty more seats to the Republicans.
The Speaker tipped his whiskey. He probably had a three to five seat working majority even as he had a thirty seat figurative majority.
Looked it up, OTL there was a 45 seat swing to the Republicans while the Dems has fewer seats to start with. Net result seems to be that the New Deal coalition has a small working majority for another term, which, OTL, it did not?
Yep, the New Deal probably has a 5 seat House majority on anything that does not touch racial issues. And on most days of the week, it has +3 or so in the Senate with the same constraint.
The major blockage is that conservative and reactionary Southern Dems are likely to have significant seniority and control several critical path committees in one or both chambers.
The seniority advantage the Southern Democrats had OTL is unchanged here, basically once you got elected as a Democrat in the south you were there until death or retirement unless you pissed off the local political bosses - primaries, even if they existed, were not going to cause a sitting Congressman/Senator to lose his party's nomination unless the aforementioned piss-off had happened. The Southerners can make trouble on certain issues, but they don't want to gum up the works because if those seats outside of the deep south go Republican, they lose their committee chairs which are extremely powerful and on a lot of the issues which matter most to the Southerners if the Republican chairs don't block legislation from coming to the floor of the House or Senate, a combination of Republicans and non-Southern Democrats can get it passed. The power of the chairs and the Speaker of the House and Majority Leader of the Senate is their ability to prevent legislation from even coming to a vote. Fall out of the majority, and that power is lost and the value of the seniority that the Southern Democrats is markedly diminished.
When it comes to anything they consider "racial" the Southern Democrats will fight tooth and nail, and the legislation won't see the light of day. Anything else, they have to be careful not to muck up anything that could cause the Republicans to take control of either chamber.
When it comes to anything they consider "racial" the Southern Democrats will fight tooth and nail, and the legislation won't see the light of day. Anything else, they have to be careful not to muck up anything that could cause the Republicans to take control of either chamber.
Right now the Paris Gestapo CI team does not suspect Anna Marie to be anything more than a pretty horizontal.
The Orleans CI team is fairly sure that there is a medium to highly placed British source in the Railroad section. They've isolated their target set based on interrogations from the captured and now executed couriers to about twenty individuals (almost all men and all older than Anna Marie). They are not looking at German officers who are working with the French. If they dig deep enough, they can probably isolate the leaks to a few individuals by aggressive cross-referencing before any interrogation.
Coulsdon Eagle
Monthly Donor
Yes, seriously. As you state above, you've increased the number of dead or prisoners if Bataan falls - rather against the point of the exercise. And reduced by one the number of ships available to carry a relieving force (troops or their supplies) or risk an evacuation. And yes, the crew will be a drain, not just on food, but vital resources like water, medicine, accommodation.
The smugglers supplying the ship probably won't be on board if they have any sense. Actually, if they have any sense, they insist upon payment in advance and then disappear or sail off to Tahiti by mistake. I'll be honest, I don't know if anyone tried this in Singapore, which would be the best case scenario for comparison, picking up rather than setting down, but the principle of sailing into enemy-infested waters to a besieged "port" remains the same.
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