Japanese logistics specialists are shitting industrial grade diamonds when they talk about fuel supplies at the moment
Keynes' Cruisers Volume 2
- Thread starter fester
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formion
Banned
Oh I just remembered! Some time ago, perhaps in the first thread of Keynes Cruisers, there was a post that had IJN ships fueling with crude oil. If I remember correctly @fester you told us that by the time their engines would be damaged the IJN would be kaput already. Has the time arrived? I guess that not all ships that used crude oil went down in Makassar.
Here is a famous photo of IJN Bettys making a torpedo attack on the US Navy ships at Guadalcanal August,1942 in OTL. One could visualize the ATL torpedo attack that damaged the USS Enterprise looking very similar.
That is astonishingly low flying by the lead and trailing plane. Look at how small the distance is between the belly of the planes and their shadows. 20 feet maybe. Or less.
That guy is so low he must be part British.
formion
Banned
So if it was in May 1942, should we assume this practice continued at least until Makassar where US bases were established in Sulawesi ? If so, with >7 months of using crude oil, all these destroyers should be either rusting somewhere or at the very best are back in the yard to replace engines.
Ian Toll, in his book The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944, discusses them fueling ships with crude direct from the well in the DEI. He talks about problems not just ruining the boilers but actually blowing up the boilers themselves. Navy boilers are designed to use Bunker C, whick needs to be heated to burn, not the crude from the DEI which could burn by just dropping a match in it. You can actually put a match out in Bunker C, if you want to start it burning you need to use something like a flare that will stay burning while it heats the Bunker C up. Imagine asphalt and having to heat it up to even pipe it.
formion
Banned
I have been reading the very interesting thread regarding the british manpower crisis https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...wer-crisis-of-1943-45-and-bevins-boys.475804/
In a senario such as fester's it seems it won't be an issue at all. Just the extra minor Allied that are currently in the UK can cover the mining positions. If I remember correctly @fester had told us that the majority of Belgians evacuated are not in the Free Belgian Army but in rear echelon duty and logistics. Its quite possible that hundreds if not thousands of these Belgians have coal mining experience, judging by the prewar belgian mining industry. I guess various other minor Allies are in such position in TTL.
I had posted in the past various estimations of how many more British, Commonwealth, French and minor Allies exist in TTL's OOB. To these we may have to add the 3 British divisions that were broken up in OTL (1st Armoured, 50th and 59th infantry). Seriously with the massive divergence of this timeline you find extra troops under every rock. Added to the survival of Normandie and a bunch of other big, fast liners, the early victory in the Battle of the Atlantic ... and the major problem is were to deploy all these extra (green) armies and how to get combar experience.
In a senario such as fester's it seems it won't be an issue at all. Just the extra minor Allied that are currently in the UK can cover the mining positions. If I remember correctly @fester had told us that the majority of Belgians evacuated are not in the Free Belgian Army but in rear echelon duty and logistics. Its quite possible that hundreds if not thousands of these Belgians have coal mining experience, judging by the prewar belgian mining industry. I guess various other minor Allies are in such position in TTL.
I had posted in the past various estimations of how many more British, Commonwealth, French and minor Allies exist in TTL's OOB. To these we may have to add the 3 British divisions that were broken up in OTL (1st Armoured, 50th and 59th infantry). Seriously with the massive divergence of this timeline you find extra troops under every rock. Added to the survival of Normandie and a bunch of other big, fast liners, the early victory in the Battle of the Atlantic ... and the major problem is were to deploy all these extra (green) armies and how to get combar experience.
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At which point the question becomes one of keeping the allied forces adequately supplied since there's not much the Germans can ultimately do to stop such a mighty force, which means in all likelihood Hungary and maybe Czechoslovakia alongside larger parts of Germany are probably not going to be in the Soviet sphere of influence in the postwar era which radically alters the cold war
formion
Banned
Regarding the post-war power balance, perhaps the most important places are Berlin and Saxony/Bohemia. The more industrial equipment and scientists the Soviets capture in Berlin and environs, the more powerful they would be. On the other hand, the uranium ore in the Ore Mountains between Saxony and Bohemia was used to produce the first generation of soviet nukes. One should add to the soviet spoils the superb industrial base of Bohemia. A post-war Soviet Union that didn't conquer Berlin and Czechia would be quite different.
The constraint (as almost always) is assault shipping... not infantry divisions.
Oh I'm not expecting such a force to be landed immediately but as a whole in NW Europe
Driftless
Donor
I can imagine there was some very high-level wrangling(Admiral's, General's, Cabinet members) over how many and who's budget is paying for all of those LC's/LST's/etc. The Admiral's probably wouldn't be too keen on diverting as much of their budget to those craft as the General's would like.
Story 2115
South of Rhez, pre-dawn Russia July 4, 1943
The bombardment lightened. Targets had been pounded in a flurry of shells for the past eight minutes. Even as some of the corps and army guns shifted their targets to reserve positions, command posts and crossroads, the first squadron of Jabos went overhead. Pioneers had crawled through no man’s land and they had begun their work on the Soviet barriers and minefields seconds after the first ranging shells had landed. Mortar teams were laying down heavy smoke even as the three heavy tank battalions that were to lead the breakthrough slowly moved forward.
Massive guns barked and machine guns chattered as the first anti-tank shots from a Red bastion landed a dozen yards short of a leading Tiger tank. The counter-fire was effective in forcing another miss before the anti-tank gunners displaced, dragging their gun behind them in a sprint for new cover and a chance at a surprise.
Soon the assaulting infantry battalions were taking advantage of the skinny lanes that the engineers had opened up. Line charges had cleared wire, and mines had been blasted out of the way. Machine guns kept the defenders down while flanking machine gun fire from supportive strong points ripped into the little groups of storm troopers. Within minutes, grenades were being answered with submachine guns, and soon bayonets met knives and fists.
Progress was slow, but steady throughout the morning. Two German corps had pushed forward through the first two kilometers of fixed defenses. Their goal was to create a wedge to invite a counter-attack. Once the two Soviet armies had been committed, the rest of the reinforced 9th Army would slam into the weakened front lines and bag a hundred thousand prisoners to labor for the Reich.
Operation GRABEN had started, a month after it should have kicked off.
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Story 2116
Ambon, Dutch East Indies July 4, 1943
The airfield had a half dozen fires. Thirty three dozen barrels of aviation fuel had been cached half a mile from the nearest revetment but somehow a bomber saw the wheelbarrow trail and dropped every single bomb within fifty yards of the hidden fuel dump. The emergency fuel reserves for the few planes still based at the large airfield complex had become even thinner.
An hour after the two squadrons of American made and financed bombers flown by Dutch crews under Dutch command had turned back to their bases on Timor, a single American Mustang flew over the harbor. The pilot concentrated on keeping the timing right. He was off by half a second in a turn to the west during the three minute recon run. He saw very little in the harbor. That was surprising, as Ambon was one of the major distribution bases for Japanese forces in the Northern Dutch East Indies.
Seventy two miles away, the Dutch submarine 0-22 descended back into the depths of the shallow seas after scoring her first two kills. A dozen merchant ships with a modest escort of patrol craft, minesweepers and second rate destroyers had been heading north by northeast as if they were heading to Palau instead of Davao or any of the other Japanese garrisons. The sighting had been called in and soon two American submarines were being redirected with the hope of an intercept in two days.
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