I've updated the post and now have the Poles landing in Sardinia. The Free French will be used elsewhere, shortly.
Keynes' Cruisers Volume 2
- Thread starter fester
- Start date
- Status
Story 2105
Providence, Rhode Island June 26, 1943
Thirteen thousand workers were busy. The busiest of them were in a small building at the edge of the recently erected shipyard. There the scheduling team led by a recent Kaiser transfer were moving wooden cut-outs of ships between slots and stations, day by day. The yard had already launched twelve Liberty ship.
Six more Liberty Ships were in various stages of completion. They would be taking the products of America to the ends of the earth where they would be fired out of cannons, smashed into hard points, or eaten by hungry locals. The shipyard had received a tentative alert order in January to switch production over to a modified frigate for the Royal Navy, but that order had been cancelled a week ago before any steel had been cut and after half a dozen boilers had been delivered. Instead, the navy was upping their order of assault transports from thirty two to forty. Some of those ships would be expedited with the newly delivered boilers but the additional orders on the same time line was breaking up the workflow.
Another hour into the planning session, a break was called for coffee and smokes. Too many people were sweating and swearing as the last pathway which had looked promising had been broken. During the break, the Kaiser team made a call to the War Production Board to see if there was anyway to get another pair of dock side cranes to throw at the current bottleneck.
I've been slow a bit as another flurry of revise and resubmits have been coming in and going back out. As a mid-career person in the middle of a career switch to academia and out of industry, the unpredictability of work flow is probably the most jarring thing I have found. A paper goes out, it goes under review for some indeterminate amount of time, it goes back to the editor for some time, and then it comes back to the authors with a request for 5 minor and 3 major changes that all need to be done in 20 days or less. Extensions are possible but getting a reputation of being a "difficult" author is not a good thing in a small world which is most academic worlds. So when you're working in two or three related fields and have four manuscripts out at three different journals that don't talk nor coordinate with each other and they all come back to you within a two week window where the editor expects to be your #1 priority, other things slip. And then throw in random expectations of review committments where a request to review shows up randomly....
Wouldn't that be the I polish Corps (which was in the UK OTL)?
The II polish Corps was raised in the Middle East from (mostly) ex-prisoners expeled from the USSR.
The yard was a great success after Kaiser took it over early in the year. Were the Liberty boilers compatible with the Artemis-class ships, which were turbo-electric?
Story 2106
Corpus Christi, Texas June 27, 1943
Sweat hung on her face. The heat in the office building sat like a sleeping baby pressed against her chest, ever present, often moving, never leaving and forever hungry. Margaret Jaroschek had returned to the office just weeks ago. Edna and Stephan were with a dozen other neighborhood children who were being watched by a trio of black girls. Five of the other mothers were working somewhere in the massive training complex and another two had jobs in the factories near the gates.
Two hundred more freshly shaven, clean cut young men had been processed this morning. Almost all of them looked like they shaved for practice instead of need. She had been Ma’amed too many times, as they looked at her as a matron instead of their older brother’s girlfriend’s friend. Her back hurt and her calves were cramping. She stretched, arms overhead and every single vertebrae popped back into place, aligned and feeling better a moment later.
“Mrs. J, the Commander needs to see you in the office.” Seaman Roberts was a good boy, he could file, he could type and he could barely hide his obvious disqualifications for moral turpitude. The Navy would never put him aboard anything that floated but he had freed up a man for the fleet, and the Navy would keep using him until they no longer needed him. No questions would be asked until peacetime. He handed her a folder with a list of problems before heading down the hall to the cluster of desks where the intake group sat when the steady stream of raw, human, material was turned off.
A lot of policies have their origins in prior institutional or cultural “blindness,” or the like. Deliberate blindness. The biggest difference being a movement from feudal-paternal discretion to liberal-institutional equality and liberty.
SsgtC
Banned
Actually, the first mechanical/electrical air conditioner was invented in 1902. It just wasn't common yet.
Regardless of it's effect on the environment, air conditioning is one of the better inventions in history; I doubt the South and West would have such a high population without it...
When my mom was a teenager, and my uncle was home on leave from the army in the early 1960s, my mom's family decided to go to the Grand Canyon. In the summertime (to quote Mungo Jerry, although the song wouldn't come out until 1970). In a car that had no air-conditioning...
Story 2107
South China Sea, June 28, 1943
The call to battle stations sent men scrambling. Most of the crew aboard the attack transport had gone to the mess stations with their helmets and life jackets on. Snoopers had found the convoy last night and the half sane half dozen pilots who claimed that they could be night fighters had failed to shoot down the flying boats after midnight. At least one had been driven off but no kills had been seen.
Lt. Kennedy paused as a gun crew slid down a ladder and ran to their position on the port side of the quarterdeck. He ascended quickly to the bridge. Organized chaos was the scene as loud talkers were repeating messages and the readiness of the ship was confirmed. An air attack was coming in and within seven minutes, the ship had been made ready. Now they could only wait as several air battles had to be fought before the Japanese bombers could swoop in on the eleven transports. A submarine had sunk an LST the night before.
Thirty seven miles away and eighteen thousand feet above the center of the vital convoy, half a dozen Hellcats made their combat debut in the Pacific theatre. The heavy fighters tipped over in a dive and ripped into the two closest shotais of escorting Zeros. Three lightweight fighters were ripped apart by concentrated streams of fifty caliber slugs. One pilot was able to jump to safety. Seven thousand feet lower than from where they started their attack, the six Hellcats began to pull and sought to regain their altitude, trading speed for potential energy again.
Other squadrons were now being vectored into the tightly clustered raid and the fighter squadrons that were trying to keep the Hellcats, Seafires, and Wildcats away from the torpedo bombers. The newest Grummans were flown by some of the least experienced pilots as only their section and squadron leaders had seen combat, but they had a simple mission, tangle with the escorts. The Seafires were mostly flown by combat veterans. One squadron tangled with the escorts while the other cleared the way for the veteran American pilots in the least capable machines to make a nearly uncontested pass on a dozen Betty bombers.
Squadrons slashed in and then retreated. Defensive circles were formed and then broken. Calls for help and calls of aid were flying over the fleet fighter radio channels. Oily fires were being lit on the calm sea’s surface. A few men could descend from parachutes and others were climbing out of the cockpits before their mounts sank beneath the two foot high waves.
And then the roiling chaos of the outer air battle ceased. The heavy anti-aircraft guns aboard the close convoy escort led by USS Juneau and USS San Diego began to boom. Moments later, USS Arizona and her division mates added their weight of fire. Ugly black shell bursts littered the eastern horizon. Lt. Kennedy braced himself as two minutes later, the guns just dozens of yards away from him began to bang away at torpedo bombers beginning their attack phase. Every transport had accelerated to their own best speed and wild maneuvering would soon start. The Bofors started to stutter and two bombers crashed into the sea before half a dozen torpedoes entered the water.
They all missed, but one bomber, left engine aflame and trailing burning fuel crashed into the forward third of his ship. Fuel sprayed up on the bridge and soon a dozen conflagrations started. He had no station, and in the confusion, he began to organize a team of stunned sailors into a fire crew. Soon a hose was spraying against a particularly vigorous fire and the fight to save the ship was being joined by the men who had been held in reserve for precisely this moment of damage control.
SsgtC
Banned
JFK is gonna be listing to one side with all the medals he gets, isn't he? If he wants it, I get the feeling that his spot on the Flag Officers list in 15-20 years is practically guaranteed
- Status