Sending in surface ships would be just as hazardous as you say, I'm sure. But a combination of subs and ASV equipped long-range patrol planes might well be able to do significant damage to the the Norway resupply effort. Not cut it, of course, but make it far more costly - especially given how tight Nazi shipping and oil production was.
A Blunted Sickle - Thread II
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Sending in surface ships would be just as hazardous as you say, I'm sure. But a combination of subs and ASV equipped long-range patrol planes might well be able to do significant damage to the the Norway resupply effort. Not cut it, of course, but make it far more costly - especially given how tight Nazi shipping and oil production was.
Yes. Note the changes to the coal rations on the 13th of September - shipping is getting tight, but not bad enough to affect military operations yet.
I don't know if it is your general writing style or simply what works for the Entente given the survival of the French, but there seems to be considerably less use of deception by the Entente iTTL than by the Allies iOTL. Other than the landings to take Dunkirk and that area, there hasn't been much effort to deceive the Germans. (yes, you have the attacks on Coastal Norway by the special forces, but that doesn't seem to fight fit into the same category.
I get the feeling that writing OTL as fiction iTTL, there would be major objections to the amount of deception that took place in Operation Bodyguard to fool the Germans in the leadup to D-Day, much less some of the wierder things like Operation Mincemeat...
I get the feeling that writing OTL as fiction iTTL, there would be major objections to the amount of deception that took place in Operation Bodyguard to fool the Germans in the leadup to D-Day, much less some of the wierder things like Operation Mincemeat...
Did you have a posting that was 13th September, I'm not seeing it. I also looked for Coal
Donald Reaver
Donor
Seems like a lot less opportunity to deceive the Germans where the attacks will be coming from. Anything outside of the frontlines in continental Western Europe is going to be pretty much ignored by the Germans. The only one that will concern will be if they can be convinced of an imminent attack from the S.U.
added comment.
Hmm, perhaps a heavily guarded flight to Moscow, denials to the press that Churchill is on it, and Churchill staying under cover for a week?
added comment.
Hmm, perhaps a heavily guarded flight to Moscow, denials to the press that Churchill is on it, and Churchill staying under cover for a week?
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Umm... the thing to remember here is that amphibious operations are very risky operations with massive opportunities for and benefits from deception - the attacking force is very weak when it first comes ashore but also extremely mobile. With land armies that's much harder - the British and French have managed strategic surprise on a couple of occasions, but the scope for it is much less than OTL.
That isn't to say that they aren't up to some things - ULTRA for instance will have substantially more complete penetration than it did in OTL due to the French still being involved. They are very likely to have cracked the Lorenz cipher by now for instance.
I did, but I inadvertently didn't post it. Some story threads are written a very long time in advance and posted as the story reaches that point, and this was one of them. I'll edit it in to the most recent update.
13th September 1941
With the loss of some of the Belgian coalfields and increasing RAF and AdA interdiction affecting coal deliveries from the rest of the Belgian coalfields as well as those in the Saar and Ruhr, the coal ration in Germany is cut further to 125kg per month. The cuts in the occupied territories are somewhat variable – in Poland the ration varies between 150 kg per month for Volksdeutsche down to nothing for the remaining Jewish population. The situation is even worse in Scandinavia, where the ration is reduced to 50kg per month in Denmark and nothing in Norway, with winter fast approaching.
The first type XIV U-boat, U-459 is launched at Deutsche Werke in Kiel. She is designed to refuel U-boats with up to 600 tonnes of fuel oil in the Atlantic, permitting greatly extended patrols, and to support this can carry additional refrigerated food supplies.
What were the previous coal rations?
And if energy supplies are being reduced at the time when demand is about to rapidly rise ...
What were the coal rations in WWI for comparison.
What is Hitler's strategic plan at the moment.
In September 1944 IOTL he was hoping for things to be changed by 'wonder weapons' or by a split within the Allies.
Is he hoping for anything ITTL?
In September 1944 IOTL he was hoping for things to be changed by 'wonder weapons' or by a split within the Allies.
Is he hoping for anything ITTL?
The most likely hope he's cooked up and clung onto would be that the WAllies will make peace with him because it would be too costly to bring him down and they need him to be a bulwark against Bolshevik Russia. He'd be dead wrong, but then what else is new?
Alternatively, and more humorously if less likely, he's ordered Ribbentrop on a diplomatic drive to get the USSR into the Axis and the war. Stalin's likely reaction would invariably be the same as the OTL 1945 Japanese attempts to get him to mediate peace: pretend to humor them without ever actually committing in order to string out the war as long as possible.
So the new U-Boat seems to have come a bit late in My opinion and I think its fair to ask if Night time bombing raids are viable now with Germany's electricity supply (coal power) being deprived of Coal.
It is exceptionally rare in engineering that there is only one way to skin a cat. Typically there are at least 17, with one of them generally agreed to be the optimum: Teflon would be that one here. It is possible to manufacture all-nickel seals however (expensive and you need very high sealing pressures however), and if you really need to it's possible to go for an all-welded system - it makes maintenance a pig, but if you really need a clean system it's still done today in some very special applications.
Hard to find - people mostly think about food. Best I can find is for occupied Belgium where it was 150 kg/month in WW2 for a family of four (although it was rare to get the full ration), and the UK where it was 760 kg in London & the South East, 1,000 kg in the rest of the country (I assume per year). WW1 coal rations in the UK at least seem to have been rather complicated and beset with shortages - I can't find any hard numbers.
Mostly that he can bleed the British and French enough that they'll sign a compromise peace - given his reading of the runup to war and their willingness to throw say Czechoslovakia under the bus, this isn't necessarily that batty a plan. Unfortunately, the political consensus in France and the UK has changed - they want peace, but don't think it's possible without Germany being occupied.
Pretty much.
I'm really not sure. He might even be sending out peace feelers via Stockholm or the Vatican to the Entente. Von Brickendrop is clearly the ideal candidate for sensitive negotiations like those...
The launch date for the first type XIV is historical - it is a bit late, but it's really hard to cook up plausible reasons it would happen any earlier ITTL. Up until summer 1940 the U-boats in OTL operated at even greater distances from port than they currently are ITTL without feeling the need for tankers to support them - it was only really when they realised that the IXs were rather too vulnerable against defended convoys that they started building the tankers to let the VIIs operate at long range. Given the even stricter resource constraints than OTL, speeding up the construction feels implausible.
The problem with night bombing is a simple one of finding the target - if Germany is short of electricity (which they aren't really - the rationing effects the civilian population in order to ensure that the military and industry don't run short) then all that really does to the bombers at this stage is makes the blackout slightly more effective and so makes their job of finding the target harder.
Fair enough, I think its fair to add that many German innovations in the War did seem to come too late to change its corse.
I see and without any Soviet advancement into Czechoslovakia there might be fewer shortages in other areas as well.
Decius00009
Banned
I realise that this thread is Anglocentric, and for very good reasons, it's much easier to tweak that aspect of the timeline because one only has to change from what actually happened; by this stage OTL, the French are gone, so one is starting almost from scratch. I assume, though, the French are basically following the same path regarding most doctrine as the British, and drawing the same conclusions about area bombing.
One question I should have asked already, why do the British and the French not have one Supreme Commander à la Foch in 1918? The situation as Paris was taken is at least if not more serious than the Allies faced in 1918 as the Kaiserschlacht hammered the Allied lines, so was it never considered optimal to have one man in charge, regardless of how well GQG and IGS actually liaise? OTL they never had the time, but here they did. Not saying it would work more efficiently, just odd that they didn't consider it
One question I should have asked already, why do the British and the French not have one Supreme Commander à la Foch in 1918? The situation as Paris was taken is at least if not more serious than the Allies faced in 1918 as the Kaiserschlacht hammered the Allied lines, so was it never considered optimal to have one man in charge, regardless of how well GQG and IGS actually liaise? OTL they never had the time, but here they did. Not saying it would work more efficiently, just odd that they didn't consider it
That goes doubly this time around, with a much shorter war. Oddly the Entente are much less badly affected by this - the British gain something like 18 months due to the 1940 invasion panic not happening, while the French didn't come to a crashing halt in June 1940.
For some things, yes. Others not so much.
Yes, with the caveat that the French were always much more army-centric than the British: that means that it's really hard to construct a timeline whereby the British would be pulling back from "strategic" bombing but the French would be pushing ahead with it. The AdA is also a bit of a problem child ITTL - their sortie rate was abysmal in the OTL Battle of France, with senior leadership apparently more interested in making sure their best units were preserved from the battle then safely evacuated to North Africa than in supporting the army. That led to a former WW1 ace being pulled back into service and promoted to head the AdA - and with that will come a mentality much more focussed on air dominance over the battlefield and supporting the army rather than justifying their existence as an independent air force. In the circumstances it's quite hard to see the AdA carrying out more than pinprick raids, although with the Luftwaffe in dire straits and a force of B-24 Liberators on order we are likely to see an increased number of daylight raids on long-range targets.
Good question which doesn't have a very good answer. It's a mixture of the WW1 model (where they eventually appointed a Generalissimo in 1918 - but not during the battles of the Marne in 1914: an awful lot of fighting plus a desperate situation was needed before they did so), the fact that despite the WW1 experience they didn't feel the need to in OTL WW2, and the fact that during the critical days around Paris events really weren't under the control of anybody - Brooke and Prioux accidentally found themselves in the right place at the right time, talked to each other and did the right thing without orders from their higher command: the communications situation was so bad in fact that Prioux told Reynaud via London what was going on. In the circumstances attempts to impose some sort of Generalissimo aren't just implausible but absurd - any such commander could only be French, and GQG couldn't talk to their own armies reliably at the time let alone the British. After the kerfuffle dies down, you're back to a 1915 situation where informal cooperation seems good enough and avoids bruising a lot of egos, and we've yet to have 1918 levels of desperation again.
16th September 1941
Aircraft for the first squadron of Miles Marlin fighters are handed over to 803 Naval Air Squadron at HMS Hornbill in Norfolk. In view of the increasingly aggressive posture of Japan in the Far East their training has been accelerated and they are scheduled to ferry their aircraft out to Singapore in only four weeks’ time from where they will join their carrier.
For the same reason, Miles have cut back on production of their Master and Magister trainers to allow increased production of the Marlin. Miles are now producing 5 aircraft per week, and plans are afoot to increase production substantially. To make up the shortfall in training aircraft a contract is placed with Fokker for 300 S.X trainers, with the first to be delivered in December.
After a major fright when HMS Wolverine (trials ship for the Fairlie Mortar) ran over her own bombs - which fortunately were being fired with very much reduced charges for the trials - the Admiralty asks the team at the Anti-Submarine Branch under A.S. Smith to work on major modifications to the weapon. While the concept of an ahead-throwing depth charge projector is generally liked, the aerodynamic properties of the charges used are very poor, the sink rate is far too low and the weapons are an utter pig to reload.
17th September 1941
Dr Merritt from the tank branch of Woolwich Arsenal meets with senior civil servants and RAC officers to discuss the progress of the Churchill and Black Prince projects. Overall his report is that both tanks are at almost the same state of readiness for production, somewhat to their surprise. The Black Prince tank is a little bigger, more expensive and more complicated than the Churchill design, but clearly outmatches the latest German tanks (the Churchill is considered to be broadly equivalent to them).
The engine issue is a thorny one. The Lion engine is easier to produce and lighter, while the Rootes-Coatalen engine is a little heavier but significantly more compact. Both engines in their current form require non-standard fuels and will be damaged if used with pool petrol, and when de-tuned to a level suitable for service produce about the same amount of power. The real joker in the pack is the fact that the Ford GAA engine is now becoming available in quantity, can use pool petrol and is both lighter and more compact than the other engines. This hadn't been predicted at the start of the development process, but all present agree that given its advantages over the alternative engines (and the fact that it is already being produced in quantity, while the others would need a new production line setting up) mean it is the obvious choice and could be adopted for both tanks.
In the end it is decided to standardise on the Black Prince design fitted with the Ford GAA engine, the final clincher being that the 6pdr is considered just a little bit too anaemic to face the rumoured new German tanks and the Churchill cannot easily be upgraded to take the bigger gun. The 6pdr Valentine is generally considered good enough until the new Black Prince becomes available, particularly given that the Archer self-propelled gun armed with the same 77mm HV gun as the Black Prince will very soon be entering service in quantity and will give armoured units sufficient firepower to stop any of the new German tanks.
18th September 1941
U-67 is sunk 250 miles WNW of Cape Finisterre by a Liberator of Aéronavale Escadrille 7S.
Aircraft for the first squadron of Miles Marlin fighters are handed over to 803 Naval Air Squadron at HMS Hornbill in Norfolk. In view of the increasingly aggressive posture of Japan in the Far East their training has been accelerated and they are scheduled to ferry their aircraft out to Singapore in only four weeks’ time from where they will join their carrier.
For the same reason, Miles have cut back on production of their Master and Magister trainers to allow increased production of the Marlin. Miles are now producing 5 aircraft per week, and plans are afoot to increase production substantially. To make up the shortfall in training aircraft a contract is placed with Fokker for 300 S.X trainers, with the first to be delivered in December.
After a major fright when HMS Wolverine (trials ship for the Fairlie Mortar) ran over her own bombs - which fortunately were being fired with very much reduced charges for the trials - the Admiralty asks the team at the Anti-Submarine Branch under A.S. Smith to work on major modifications to the weapon. While the concept of an ahead-throwing depth charge projector is generally liked, the aerodynamic properties of the charges used are very poor, the sink rate is far too low and the weapons are an utter pig to reload.
17th September 1941
Dr Merritt from the tank branch of Woolwich Arsenal meets with senior civil servants and RAC officers to discuss the progress of the Churchill and Black Prince projects. Overall his report is that both tanks are at almost the same state of readiness for production, somewhat to their surprise. The Black Prince tank is a little bigger, more expensive and more complicated than the Churchill design, but clearly outmatches the latest German tanks (the Churchill is considered to be broadly equivalent to them).
The engine issue is a thorny one. The Lion engine is easier to produce and lighter, while the Rootes-Coatalen engine is a little heavier but significantly more compact. Both engines in their current form require non-standard fuels and will be damaged if used with pool petrol, and when de-tuned to a level suitable for service produce about the same amount of power. The real joker in the pack is the fact that the Ford GAA engine is now becoming available in quantity, can use pool petrol and is both lighter and more compact than the other engines. This hadn't been predicted at the start of the development process, but all present agree that given its advantages over the alternative engines (and the fact that it is already being produced in quantity, while the others would need a new production line setting up) mean it is the obvious choice and could be adopted for both tanks.
In the end it is decided to standardise on the Black Prince design fitted with the Ford GAA engine, the final clincher being that the 6pdr is considered just a little bit too anaemic to face the rumoured new German tanks and the Churchill cannot easily be upgraded to take the bigger gun. The 6pdr Valentine is generally considered good enough until the new Black Prince becomes available, particularly given that the Archer self-propelled gun armed with the same 77mm HV gun as the Black Prince will very soon be entering service in quantity and will give armoured units sufficient firepower to stop any of the new German tanks.
18th September 1941
U-67 is sunk 250 miles WNW of Cape Finisterre by a Liberator of Aéronavale Escadrille 7S.
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Saphroneth
Banned
It looks like we'll only see the Black Prince. Though it'd be cool to see the Churchill hulls being used for the OTL "odd jobs".
As Marc Bloch's book could tell, the fact that they managed to have communications at all marks a significant improvement over OTL.
With the British moving their attention and focal point to Rotterdam, there's even less need for a unified Supreme Command as well, I imagine.