Recent content by Merrick

I'll second this. If the (Vichy) French authorities in Tunisia are allowing Allied aircraft to base out of Tunis and warships out of Sfax, then they've de-facto joined the Allies, even if no French forces took part in the operation against the Italian islands. Which has a whole lot of...

Given the location at the bottom, may it should be "California is building solar in Illinois and Missouri is going to pay for it"? Including New Zealand (and Tasmania) while leaving out Australia is stylish and unusual, but the Kirkines-Iskanderun Canal is something genuinely novel. I can't...

If they did, they either: - Didn't speak English ("countrise" and "Not work in UK" suggests bad machine translation) - Didn't know any European geography - Didn't care - All of the above

Another very good update. Nice background on the Shinshu Maru (which I'd never heard of, but it appears that the SNLF were doing a lot of pioneering work on amphibious landing in the 1930s). One question - would a Japanese officer in December 1941 think of the opposition as "the Allies", given...

You do wonder what the characters have been getting up to that led to the creation of the Gulf of Tibet...

Unless there are major strategy changes at high level - yes. OTL British tank production peaked in 1942 and then declined as industrial exhaustion, resource shortages and competing priorities took their toll. I believe exactly one British armoured division in Normandy fielded British designs...

This, very much this. The US pre-war planning for the Philippines was always hopelessly incoherent. The Philippines could not be abandoned - politically unthinkable! - but the US Navy resisted sending ships to what they viewed as an indefensible outpost, the US Army had no units to send...

The US Army - or at least the National Guard - was still finishing the process of motorising its artillery in 1941. Wikipedia claims that the last horse tows were replaced in December, but doesn't say if that was before or after Pearl Harbor. That manual also covers mule transport. Pack mules...

It covered quite a bit more than just the town of Avignon: Comtat Venaissin Though of course Avignon was in the enclave, not just outside it! Also amusing that while the mapmakers realised that the eastern border of France has changed over the centuries, they forgot/didn't know/didn't care that...

There are many things that could be done to improve communications between Burma and China, whether it's improving the Burma Road, building a better road, building a railway or whatever. The issue is that, for the moment, the British are going to be focussing all their infrastructure efforts on...

I've said it before in these sort of threads and I'll say it again - don't oversell the Burma Road. It is a single lane, unsurfaced track, impassable in the monsoon, winding through some extremely tough terrain with minimal infrastructure. And anything sent there has to come through the small...

I've seen canal-widening proposals, but that is ridiculous. No, they've just impartially discarded all the islands (Cuba, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Japan, New Guinea....) as well as Egypt and for some unexplained reason the Malay Peninsula. Also Turkey has gone all Ottoman on Syria and the...

Why not take a leaf from the Soviet book? The USSR did not totally eliminate private car ownership, but it severely restricted it by a combination of low production quotas (leading to years-long waiting lists), crappy build quality, lousy roads, travel restrictions and a general attitude of...

I think that's meant to be Djibouti? Why are all the Central Asian 'stans marked as independent states in 1975? And Lawd that map projection

I doubt this will happen to the Ram/Jumbuck TTL. They'll be too valuable as assault guns. Throwing a 25lb HE shell is one of the things a Victor can't do, and if the Armoured Regiments don't want them, you can bet the RA would be interested in an SP 25-pounder. The tanks I'd expect to see cut...