Earlier Allied victory in North Africa?

Yes, there is that. ...& What if it's successful ;)

From what I've read, that's actually quite possible (At least Roundup was... Sledgehammer is a bit more up in the air), in which case you may very well see Vichy defect before Germany can occupy it and throw the Nazi's into panic mode as they have little, if anything, to release in order to shore up the West. Losing France means their key area for retraining/recuperating units bloodied in the East.
 
Just thought of another big one

OpSec - Have the British Commonwealth forces get better at it much earlier and also identify and close the 'Good Source' - that is Col. Bonner Fellers, U.S. military attaché in Cairo who was inadvertently telling the Axis everything the British were doing from Jan 1942 till July 1942 and I do mean everything after they cracked/actual took copies of the US Black Code

This gave Rommel a huge advantage in early 42 - and it also allowed the Axis forces to prepare for some of the large convoy battles during 1942 namely Operations Harpoon and Vigorous - efforts to reinforce malta in June 42 - were comprehensively defeated and the poor radio opsec of British formations pretty much up until June 1942 also allowed German signal intercept units to identify lots of very useful data on individual units - at Gazalla for example 2 Brigade commanders had a half hour chat over the radio discussing the thin almost useless minefields between their Brigade boxes and the inability / difficulty in covering those gaps - at the end of the discussion they decided not to bother trying! Guess where the Axis forces attacked the next day?

Faults in British OpSec included but were not limited to
  • plaintext Radiotelephone and telegraph messages mentioning geographical data
  • Individual names
  • Unit designations
  • Failure to mask such terms properly
  • Extremely simple ciphers
  • Routine call signs
Sort this out earlier and the Axis forces will have a harder time of it.
 
OpSec - Have the British Commonwealth forces get better at it much earlier and also identify and close the 'Good Source' - that is Col. Bonner Fellers, U.S. military attaché in Cairo who was inadvertently telling the Axis everything the British were doing from Jan 1942 till July 1942 and I do mean everything after they cracked/actual took copies of the US Black Code.
Why on earth would they want to close that if they discovered it? Seems like the perfect conduit to feed the Germans exactly the information you want them to have.
 
Why on earth would they want to close that if they discovered it? Seems like the perfect conduit to feed the Germans exactly the information you want them to have.

Asked that same question myself. I've found there was a large 'clean up' of intel problems during 1942, by the Brits. Trawling through the literature theres descriptions of the recognition and correction of many bad practices and poor programs. There was a shake up in SOE leadership, there was a crackdown on bad radio security within 8th Army and other commands in the middle east. The discovery of the compromised US Army Black Code was one of many in latter 1942. In part not using the Fellers messages as a section may have been the Deception Committee did not have the necessary level of control over what went into the messages. They learned the hard way such things had to be carefully crafted and controlled in execution. The Brits had been thru their own 'amateur hour' phase in this 1939-41 and were seeing the Yanks repeat many of the same mistakes.

There may have been a serious degree of urgency in the matter. The successful deception operations took months to develop and the accurate messages had to be gradually salted with the misleading information. Abruptly turning a "good source" into fraud risked being obvious to a enemy intel analysis. The Brits welt under pressure in Africa in 1942 and keeping a dangerous source open to the Axis for months while a deception op was ramped up may not have looked like a good idea. There is also that the US Army was embarrassed and in a hurry to correct the problem and the code changed before anything could be proposed.

So, my best guess is the Deception Committee focused on crafting what looked like the best shots in 1942 and avoided pursing every fleeting opportunity. Thomas Holts 'The Deceivers' is a 800+ page description and analysis of Allied deception ops. The not entirely comprehensive it is still the most complete I've found. A must have been for understanding how the system grew, operated, and how the operations were from 1942 woven into a coordinated whole. Holt lists a large number of major and minor deception ops that are not named in the mainstream histories of WWII. Interestingly the Japanese were relatively unresponsive to Allied deception ops. Sometimes the effort worked. Most examples looked at there was no perceptible result.
 
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Has anyone cast "Summon Coffee-seeking Dragon" yet?
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GarethC

Donor
If the British significantly reinforce Malaya in some way, then will Yamashita not also be reinforced? Perhaps by delaying the Burmese campaign to attach one of those two divisions to the Malayan operation?
 
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If the British significantly reinforce Malaya in some way, then will Yamashita not also be reinforced? Perhaps by delaying the Burmese campaign to attach one of those two divisions to the Malayan operation?

If Britain had concluded the desert campaign we could speculate that it deploys an infantry division plus tank support to Burma, at least one further infantry division plus several tank brigades to Malaya, and additional aircraft, ships and submarines. Japan is facing en enemy without obvious capability gaps in their forces, my view is that this is a campaign the British and Australians are be capable of winning.

My suspicion is that Thailand would not be so willing to capitulate to Japan on the first day, and the Japanese knowing this would then have to plan on a campaign that first subdued Thailand and involved landings only in Thailand. The early fighting might not even be in Malaya.

I think the Japanese could have deployed more than they historically did, but their shipping capacity becomes more of a concern at this point and they likely have to give up on something else in their list of early goals. I think they might gamble in this situation and delay the attack and declaration of war on the US by a month or two.
 
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