As usual, a lot of unpacking.
- Dec 7th, 1941 the Japanese attack as OTL
- Dec 1941, US army troops garrison most of the major islands in the westernmost Aleutians islands, with especial attention paid to Attu and Kiska.
- Dec 1941, Airbase construction the length of the Aleutians are immediately begun.
- Dec 1941, US transfers 100 merchantmen to the Soviet Union, for exclusive use in Alaskan - Siberian supply route.
- Dec 1941, US Congress approves an earlier and much larger Al Can highway.
- Dec 1941, a massive investment in infrastructure commences, with Alaska - Aleutians being brought up to US heartland standards within 2 years.
- Jan, 1942 to May 1942 go pretty much as OTL, but the major changes come in next month.
- June, 1942, the Battle of Midway results is an even more crushingly huge defeat for the Japanese, because of the massive increased defenses in the north. The greatly enlarged and more battle worthy 11th air force, operating from the heretofore unsuspected airbases all along the Aleutians give a through bitch-slapping to the northern force, so the IJN in down 6 carriers rather than the 4 from OTL.
- June 1942 to Dec 1942, the Guadalcanal campaign goes quite a bit better than OTL, due in no small part to the Japanese believing that a huge US buildup in the Aleutians is an obvious prelude to an invasion on Japan from the north. Perhaps they even initially think those landings a a ruse/faint, to draw their forces to the far southeast, when the REAL attack will then come the North.
- Dec 7th, 1942, combined US/Soviet ground offensive commences, driving the Germans back.
- Dec 7th, 1943, unable to stop, or even really slow down the US/Soviet armies, the Germans realize the writing is on the wall, so to speak, and begin seeking terms.
Weather, terrain, weather, terrain.
1. Flying weather with the aviation technology of the day =35% operational losses due to weather effects in the Aleutians.
2. Terrain. Ever try to build runways on permafrost? You have to scrape down to rock and then find something that won't slick up with an ice cover.
So forget 11th Air Force. Stick to what can be done further south.
What can be done?
Pacific.
a. Concentrate on the torpedo problem earlier.
b. Get a long ranged fighter into service FAST. This has knock-ons everywhere (see below.)
c. FIDO is already in the pipeline and will be ready in a year. How about CUTIE for enemy destroyers and cruisers?
d. Speaking of enemy destroyers and cruisers; shortly Badagong and Java Sea will show allied navies are NTG at night surface actions. Better pull some ships and form a trained op-for and rotate USN units into a Pacific Ocean Battle Tactics Exercise Area (POBTEA) to teach the fine art of torpedo and gun.
e. Force Z is another lesson. RIKKOs work. Screw USAAF. The USNAS better start learning how to RIKKO.
f. It will be obvious by January 1942, that Australia is a logistics mess.
a. Build a naval base at Brisbane. Screw the RN. They ran during ABDA. Needs of the war and all that means the USN needs a forward Class II base and Brisbane is nominated.
b. Alice Springs to Darwin railroad and parallel highway. 1,500 km. Seattle to Anchorage 3,000 km. Hello? Do both.
c. Relieve everybody in MacArthur's staff and start over. Might have to jail one of them for dereliction to show FDR is not messing around with this crew of would be fascists, drunks, womanizers, liars, criminals and incompetents. I mean it. This collection of misfits had more warning than Kimmel and Short and look what a mess they made of the Philippine Islands defense.
d. Hold Rabaul whatever the costs. I mean this is critical. Shaves a year off the Pacific war.
Sorry, the thing that Eareckson did was to learn how to go in low, and he had delayed fuses added to his bombs, so that they could go in 'on the deck' instead of dropping from high altitude (which is what was being done all the time at first, and was indeed useless) so that the bombs detonation wouldn't take down the B-17's and B-24's dropping them.
Eareckson was also the guy that got the P-38's their first kills of the war, IIRC, by sending a radar equipped bomber out to act as the 'eyes' for the fighters, and doing this, the fighters got 2 of 3 Japanese flying boats.
Pinpricks. Use parachute retarded fall bombs as anti-ship weapons. This would take a few months development and adopt Sturmovik tactics. That will mean gun-pack bombers going in on the deck. Havocs, Bostons and Baltimores are available. Later on Mitchells and Marauders. The good news is that this is field expedient modification work.
He was an interesting individual, and an innovative thinker, and I really wish he had had 6 months to whip into shape a much enlarger 11th air force. With a proper training budget, and being allowed to actually drop live bombs, I have to wonder if he would have discovered low level bombing was the way to go, in time to achieve the success I gave him in my attempt to shorten the war.
Maybe, but like the PT survivors of the MacArthur debacle, he should be kicked sideways into program development. Let Kenney be Kenney. More goes on than just developing technique. Eareckson like Bissell did not know how to fight an air campaign. Kenney did.
What makes Sardinia attractive is that it was much more lightly defended than Sicily; in fact an invasion could have been launched at least two months earlier than Sicily because Allied planners had no real way to completely seal off the Strait of Messina. An amphibious operation for Sardinia could have been launched in either late spring or early summer of 1943 against only 1 partially formed division and Axis attempts to reinforce a completely blockaded island would also have to run a gauntlet of 100 miles of open sea. After Sardinia fell, Corsica (with much better harbors) becomes untenable and the Allies are now positioned 100 miles north of Rome instead of 100 miles south. This saves U.S. 5th and British 8th Armies a year of slogging up the Italian peninsula and puts the industrial regions of Austria and Southern Germany, and possibly even the Romanian oil fields within bomber range.
THIS is why you need that long ranged fighter. Sicily was chosen because Spitfires could cover HUSKY out of Tunisia. If proper Lightnings had been available in sufficient numbers, that risk could be extended further north to CORSICA. Why fight stupid? Flattops sink. Airfields? Bulldozer, front end loader, compactor and a gravel pile.
Yes, initial air support would have to come from carrier-based aircraft, but it should only have taken a few days to capture 1 or more airfields. Once the Allies plan to invade, they won't have to make two amphibious landings and instead can concentrate on either Anzio or Civitaveccia. While the OTL landings at Anzio were a near-disaster, this way they'd be landing in late summer or early autumn of 1943 instead of January 1944. When the Allies took Sicily, the Germans knew that an Italian invasion was inevitable but would only take place no further north than the operating range of Sicilian-based Allied aircraft, which meant the Naples-Salerno sector. But if the Allies attack from Sardinia and Corsica, the Axis forces will have to be spread across hundreds of miles of coastline in central or northern Italy, and all axis forces south of the invasion site will be trapped. An added bonus means the defensive positions at Cassino will never come to pass.
A week will cost you 2 flattops.
Calgiari is closer to Tunisia than Salerno is to Sicily
Agreed. but:
No, Cagliari is roughly at the same distance from the very northernmost tip of the Tunisian coast as Salerno is from Messina (the very northernmost tip of Sicily).
And Cagliari's port and gulf was the one place in Sardinia that was well defended. The Allies did not land in Sicily in the gulf of Palermo.
Note that before Salerno, the Allies had already landed in Calabria, operation Baytown, and made emergency landing strips available there for Allied aircraft in difficulty already on September 5. The first US fighter group (57th) moved from Sicily to Calabria (at Roccabernarda) on the 12th; that's a few days after Avalanche, but Baytown was a British operation so I might find there were British fighters in Calabria even earlier.
I'd add that the strategic situation had modified radically at Salerno, in comparison with Sicily or a hypothesized Sardinian landing. In July, there was still a significant Luftwaffe contingent in Sicily, as well as the Regia Aeronautica. In September, the former was in full retreat, and the latter surrendered on the day before the Avalanche landings.
I'd add that every month that goes by, more longer-ranged fighters become available and get deployed. The proposal tabled was for Sardinia to be attacked in early July, not in September.
What he said(^^^).
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Europe:
1. Get Churchill a baby sitter and keep him away from maps featuring Italy and the Balkans.
2. Get King a babysitter and keep him drunk, and away from Nimitz's war.
3.
Put Ingersoll into LANTFLT sooner so the U-boat war is won faster.
4. Keep Brereton away from ANYTHING. Send him to Leavenworth.
5. Italy has to be invaded, but not all the way up the boot. Bite off what is needed to
get in range of Ploesti and bomb that oil refinery complex at all costs.
6. It would be nice to have all the gee whiz allied whiz-bang wunderwaffe (M27 tank and HVAP tank rounds, Corsair in Europe etc.) but training, training, training, training, and common sense mods to and uses of what is at hand will beat the Axis faster. Mister 90 mm AAA gun and the troops that go with it as an AT gun, for example, and line officers who know what they are doing count for more to me, than gimmickry or some neat mad idea operation (ANZIO) that results in a bolo.
Finally, anything that gets Stalin killed early has me of 2 minds: it means Russians on the Rhine by 1944 if Stalin dies before February 1942, and that might NOT be a good thing from a Wally point of view. Cause France does not happen before 1944. The means in shipping, equipment and trained manpower simply does not exist.