A Blunted Sickle - Thread II

[KACKO]

Which Město? I am presuming Město Albrechtice, Northwest of Ostava. Město Touškov is way to far west, and all three Nové Město X towns are either Central or Western Czechia...

Ideally of course, any advance should go through Brno both due to the fact that they won't be outflanked on the South and fact that it is the capital of Moravia-Selesia, but the Slovaks aren't going to give Ostrava back just because it isn't ideal.

And of course there is light arms factory in Brno - Zbrojovka Brno. Sizing it would allow Czechoslovaks to arm Czech volunteers.

 

[pdf27]

I don’t think it is Stare mesto. It is far from internal Czecho-Slovak border to Prague. I do not think Slovaks had para units at that time. OTL they started to train para company in 1942.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/M...5b7b23c5322af57!8m2!3d49.5475166!4d17.7344441 - it's actually Hranice (na Moravě), but google maps shows Město in bigger letters.

 

[von Mises]

FECK AFF!

St Helena is, I am told, very useful, and not just for Corsicans.

 

[pdf27]

The post war East End is going to be a very different place without all those bomb sites and excuses for construction.

The slum clearances are still going to happen - it was more than just bomb sites driving it. However, they'll probably be done on a smaller scale and the UK will have more money to spend on them thanks to the shorter war and less disrupted international trade system.

And realistically they only need Fr Tiso out of the way for a month or so. If you've got French troops able to walk through Bratislava, he isn't going anywhere. The question is whether the new CS government puts him on Trial or not, and that will be a lovely Political question.

He's just solved a rather knotty political problem for the Entente without knowing it - they neither wanted to fight the Slovaks or acquiescing to Nazi collaborators breaking up Czechoslovakia and benefiting from it. If they accept the solution offered, they have to accept (in public anyway) Tiso as an anti-Nazi patriot who tricked Hitler. If they don't and try to put it on trial, they also risk blowing apart Czechoslovakia and having to deal with a potential civil war. Not happening.

The Germans had good oil burning kits for locos.

Problem is, they'll have been designed to run off heavy oil since that's the cheapest. Burning petrol (all the UK has available) is a very different animal - and likely to be horribly dangerous the first time they try it without a lot of luck. Fuel volatility makes a big difference.

I just like Osusky. Tiso in your TL due to year Nazis started to loose just didn’t managed to get himself to that disgusting mess he was OTL.
But well you really took his political end to level Hasek with his Svejk probably wouldn’t managed. I love it.

It gave me a neat solution to a major headache - the Entente really don't want to have to put the country back together again after the war (occupying Germany is going to tax them more than enough), and if they have to fight the Slovaks then they aren't going to be able to avoid it. Unless they have a very neat way for what is effectively the Tiso government to switch sides, the Beneš government is going to end up in some sort of fight with the Slovaks and it's going to be a horrible mess. Osusky is possibly the only person who could make that happen, and even then only by becoming PM.

Not totally true - German main lines were constructed for a 20-ton axle load, whereas British main lines could handle 22 to 23 tons. Britain tended to have significantly lighter track on secondary routes, though, while Germany allowed for 20 tons across more of the network.

They're unlikely to trust the German tracks much above 10 tons/axle in the circumstances.

 

[b0ned0me]

Ah, so the French/German/Italian trains could run on outdoor open tracks in the UK, but aren't guaranteed to be able to fit through the Tunnels and under the Bridges.

They would also be likely to smash into trackside infrastructure such as platforms, signals, water towers, train sheds as well as trains on adjacent lines, especially on curves. You’d literally have to have a crew walk and measure on every single line you wanted to run on plus do an unknown amount of adjustment work, maybe adjust running to avoid any meeting/parallel trains and be careful about what was standing in sidings.

 

[Bernard Woolley]

Lack of corporate knowledge regarding loading guage is why a lot of trains built for Britain shortly after privatisation were narrower than existing trains. It does take a great deal of work to clear a loco, or MU for a line it is not already cleared to run on.
There have been examples in the past of a new train striking objects during testing - the Deltic prototype scraped a platform, and the APT-P struck a sign hanging from a station canopy.

The only mainline passenger line that can accept European loading gauge at the moment is HS1, although HS2 will be able to. There are some freight lines that are built for European loading guage and the Nene Valley Railway (a preserved line) is as well (it has some Swedish and French stock).

 

[Colonel Grubb]

As for dieselisation, I'm not sure - the much reduced need for submarines/escorts and earlier shift from piston to jet engines means that the UK is less experienced than OTL with high performance diesel engines. In OTL it was a fairly major problem for them to find reasonably high power diesel engines which would fit within the UK loading gauge, and ITTL that is only going to be worse

That’s going to make things a bit more interesting for the post war export loco market, for the likes of English Electric. I don’t know an awful lot about the history of English electric motors themselves, so I don’t know how much wartime experience went into the likes of the 6CSRKT or 12SVT models.

 

[Patg_hnj]

Lack of corporate knowledge regarding loading guage is why a lot of trains built for Britain shortly after privatisation were narrower than existing trains. It does take a great deal of work to clear a loco, or MU for a line it is not already cleared to run on.
There have been examples in the past of a new train striking objects during testing - the Deltic prototype scraped a platform, and the APT-P struck a sign hanging from a station canopy.

The only mainline passenger line that can accept European loading gauge at the moment is HS1, although HS2 will be able to. There are some freight lines that are built for European loading guage and the Nene Valley Railway (a preserved line) is as well (it has some Swedish and French stock).

I understand that the Nene Valley had to make some alterations to its infrastructure to fit the European stock (also the Swedish / Norwegian loading gauge is more generous than the standard European one)

 

[naraht]

https://www.google.com/maps/place/M...5b7b23c5322af57!8m2!3d49.5475166!4d17.7344441 - it's actually Hranice (na Moravě), but google maps shows Město in bigger letters.

From looking at the translation of the Wikipedia entry on the Czech Wikipedia site for Město it literally translates to City or Town. This is in a legal manner that separates it from a Village. It can also refer to the City center of a larger urban area. My suggestion is that you change it to Hranice (na Moravě) in the story.

The Wikipedia page
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Město
includes the phrase
. V Česku je celkem 592 měst, z toho 23 měst se statusem statutárního města.
which translated means
There are a total of 592 cities in the Czech Republic, including 23 cities with statutory city status .

There is even a wikipedia page on the railroad station at Hranice (na Moravě) on the Czech wikipedia page
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hranice_na_Moravě_(nádraží)
which was built in the 1940s.

 

[naraht]

He's just solved a rather knotty political problem for the Entente without knowing it - they neither wanted to fight the Slovaks or acquiescing to Nazi collaborators breaking up Czechoslovakia and benefiting from it. If they accept the solution offered, they have to accept (in public anyway) Tiso as an anti-Nazi patriot who tricked Hitler. If they don't and try to put it on trial, they also risk blowing apart Czechoslovakia and having to deal with a potential civil war. Not happening.

What I don't know is how much Tiso has done iTTL that would warrant "War Crime" prosecution. I don't think you had him shipping Jews to the 3R. The other person who I don't have a feeling for level of War Crimes is Quisling, but with him being stuck in Germany, you could have just about anything happen to him. I don't think the Norwegians risk Civil War by putting him on Trial though.

 

[El Pip]

The other person who I don't have a feeling for level of War Crimes is Quisling, but with him being stuck in Germany, you could have just about anything happen to him. I don't think the Norwegians risk Civil War by putting him on Trial though.

Surely there is a risk of significant public anger and disturbances if you don't put Quisling on trial. He was never that popular and he has committed several blatant acts of treason. He may be spared execution but a trial and then a life in prison surely beckons for him.

 

[Bernard Woolley]

I understand that the Nene Valley had to make some alterations to its infrastructure to fit the European stock (also the Swedish / Norwegian loading gauge is more generous than the standard European one)

I do think that was the case. They do have some French coachins stock and, IIRC, a Polish loco amongst others.

 

[pdf27]

31st December 1941

The German First, Second, Ninth and Sixteenth Armies surrender to the French. This leaves the largest remaining German army as the 3rd, based in East Prussia and mostly consisting of men otherwise too unfit for military service.

The British and French governments formally repudiate the Munich Agreement, and recognise Osuský as the leader of the Czechoslovak Republic. The Beneš government is not pleased by this development.

The first trainload of petrol arrives in Lüneburg, and distribution immediately starts to the forward-most mechanised units. Auchinleck orders his men to prepare to cross the Elbe in the morning and conduct a rapid advance towards the Baltic coast between Lübeck and Wismar.
Meanwhile, the combined efforts of a pair of RE railway construction companies and one operating company have managed to reopen the railway line between Hamburg and Hannover to limited traffic, as well as a single track from Hannover to Brunswick. In support of this, RAF Transport Command fly in over 50 tonnes of coal to the former Luftwaffe airfield at Hannover-Langenhagen, served by a branch off the railway line into Hannover. More is promised in subsequent days as more aircraft are diverted to the role.

Very firm Italian requests to run a over 20 trains between Kikinda and Gorica in the next few days are politely turned down by Yugoslav State Railways, citing problems with a shortage of coal and the wrong kind of snow on the tracks. JDŽ are optimistic that they might be able to run the first train after Orthodox Christmas, but expect to only have the capacity to run one train per day after that.

Stalin is informed that due to damage inflicted to the Red Army's motor transport fleet by “Saboteurs and Wreckers”, the Red Army's attack on Germany cannot be brought forward before the end of February. This answer is not accepted.

 

[sodan]

Four army surrender wow

 

[calvinhobbesliker]

Four army surrender wow

5, in fact!

 

[naraht]

Is this everything in the Ruhr? If so, the French can start pressing East, toward Frankfurt and South up the Rhine, but *only* if it doesn't in the way of the British and at this point, my guess is open cities may be declared in a few of these places.

Hmm. Baltic Coast. nothing can land there via the Sound from the Entente until the Germans have been driven out of Denmark. So this leaves three choices
1) The British intend to use the Kiel Canal. Possible, but very unlikely, too easy to block and the British will be *in* Denmark in the 12 hours it will take to get the Canal working.
2) A Danish uprising has been scheduled to occur within a few days
3) The F/S Union is getting involved. That would be the ideal place for them to land their troops. In some ways the harsh winter has made things easier, this is just about the *worst* time for Stalin to attack Finland.

Now that the British have gotten past the area where the heavy fighting took place, trains can run, they just have to connect...

So where do the Italians want to go, Romania, Hungary or Poland?

By the end of February, the Entente will have defenses built right up to the Soviet Border. If Stalin can't go until the end of February, he can't go at all.

 

[The Red]

Stalin is informed that due to damage inflicted to the Red Army's motor transport fleet by “Saboteurs and Wreckers”, the Red Army's attack on Germany cannot be brought forward before the end of February. This answer is not accepted.

This seems a bit off. I could understand if Stalin, and his famous fear of gambles, would be wary of charging into Poland amidst an Entente-backed uprising but if they’ve crippled themselves to the extent they can’t advance against a skeleton force (if that) then why did they sell so many ZIS trucks to the Germans in the first place?

 

[SsgtC]

Stalin is informed that due to damage inflicted to the Red Army's motor transport fleet by “Saboteurs and Wreckers”, the Red Army's attack on Germany cannot be brought forward before the end of February. This answer is not accepted.

Sounds like someone conveniently "forgot" that they sold Germany all the trucks in their motor pool...

 

[ngf]

The Sixth Army surrendered too? I wasn’t expecting that at this time as they were east of the Rhine and not under particularly hard pressure from the French.

 

[Xgentis]

The Sixth Army surrendered too? I wasn’t expecting that at this time as they were east of the Rhine and not under particularly hard pressure from the French.

They were smart, the war is lost.