Keynes' Cruisers

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Story 0485
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    • fester

    February 22, 1941 2322 east of Tripoli

    Seven men stayed low to the ground. They had another two miles to cover in three more hours before HMS Unbeaten was due to surface near a beach. They would be picked up by a boat team and then smuggled back to Malta and flown to Alexandria. They brought good and bad news.

    Teams could infiltrate German and Italian positions. They had been watching the coastal road for four days. They had seen the bad news. At least an entire Panzer division had started to move down the road early that morning. More importantly, several hundred trucks had gone down the road the day before and returned this morning. They were building up supply caches along the march from Tripoli to Cyrenaica. The Germans looked professional, they looked motivated, and they looked absolutely miserable in the midday sun. They were Northern European troops not used to the desert unlike both the Italian and Commonwealth forces.

    Four hours later, the seven men were asleep in the crew section of Unbeaten.
     
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    • fester

    kaymay said:
    Interesting the plot thickens hopefully the powers that be see sence and do not send troops to Greece.
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    Reminder, in this timeline, there is already a UK infantry brigade on Crete and several squadrons of the RAF based near Corinth. They will continue to get involved. I'm tilting the table to the allies but I am not tipping it over.

    Well there is one thing that tilts the tables significantly to the Axis which should be guessable but not yet stated.
     
    Story 0486
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    • fester

    February 23, 1941 0800 Salamis, Greece

    The four raiders were now escorts again. Leon was the guardship for the naval base while the cruiser and two modern destroyers were off again to Alexandria to cover a convoy of ships that had arrived from America. The raid had been successful enough. Every mine had been laid, and the destroyer Vasilissa Olga sank a 300 ton Italian patrol boat with gun fire. The Italian response was slow, half a dozen level bombers scared but did not harm the flotilla. A pair of fast cruisers gave chase, but a Royal Navy force of three Leander light cruisers and four destroyers was spotted by Italian scouts. The Italian pursuers retired rather than seek battle with their technological equals.
     
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    • Story 0487
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    • fester

    February 25, 1941 Los Angeles California

    Dozens of ships were being loaded. Dozens of ships were disgorging themselves. MV Malayan Princess was empty and idle. Normally she would have been loaded with American shells or American food or American trucks to take back to the expanding army that was tasked to defend Malaya. But the British consul had asked her captain to hold in port and see if he could find a charter in the Americas that could paid in specie or dollars.

    A year ago, there would have been a trip to Japan with steel and scrap in her holds. That option was no longer valid. Perhaps a trip to Colombia or Venezuela could be arranged. The captain started to think through his contacts and more importantly the contacts of his contacts as someone would need to owe him a favor.
     
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    • Story 0488
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    • fester

    February 26, 1941 Inglewood, California

    “What do you mean, you can’t order any more?”

    “We’re almost out of dollars and everything that we have is already committed. The RAF loves the Mustang, and thinks they could be special but we can’t pay for it now. We’re stuck. The original two batches for the end of this year and early next year plus the prototypes is the line.”

    “Anything we can do?”

    “Take payment in sterling”

    “We can’t do that…”

    “Well then, we’re at an unfortunate impasse, we look forward to the Mustang in front line service but funds are tight so we will adapt to our less opulent circumstances….”

    “Wait… I have an idea.” The general manager of North American Aviation paused a moment as he looked at his Scottish project representative. The two men had become close over the course of the Mustang project. They knew they had something special, a thoroughbred that could fly forever. He looked down on the factory floor. The first batch of production Mustangs were almost complete. Four women were installing the propeller on one plane. Another plane had several men connecting hoses to the Allison engine while a third team had the frame open as they wired the cockpit to the wings and fuselage.

    “Go on”

    “Engines… they are the most expensive part of the plane, right?”

    “Of course….”

    “We tested two prototypes with Merlins and the pilots loved them. The Mustang is a different plane with them. Why don’t we sell you the air frames and you install a Merlin as an engine? That makes this plane much cheaper in dollars. We could get at least one more batch out for the same dollars”

    “Get the engineers to go through the details.. I will see if we have spare Merlins, but I think we have something”
     
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    • Peg Leg Pom

    fester said:
    The scuttlebutt had been clear that they would be fighting Germans somewhere, either in Libya or Greece. The men who had survived the evacuation of the BEF were ready to get their revenge.
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    In the British Military that would be The Buzz or The Gen.

    Not a criticisim by the way, just something you may want to remember later.
     

    fester

    Anarch King of Dipsodes said:
    Women on an aircraft factory floor in early 1941? Unemployment is still pretty high, and no one is thinking about Rosie the Riveter yet, AFAIK.
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    Knock off about 1% point US OTL unemployment rate due to shallower 1938 recession and another point due to earlier mobilization plus better UK export stream. Labor is not scarce but white male labor is getting tight.
     
    Story 0489 First contact Afrika Korps and XIII Corps
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    • fester

    February 17, 1941 Marsa Al Brega

    One armored car was on fire. A 37 millimeter shell tore through the engine block when the inexperienced driver got stuck in his hide and had go in reverse to wiggle his way out. The screen for the 2nd Armoured Division was in front of the entire XIII Corps. They had two weeks to push ahead of the main defensive lines. The Germans were coming, the Germans were coming. They were coming by land and not be sea, but the Germans were coming. The RAF’s light bombers were harassing the advancing German columns, but the scouts had not seen any action yet.

    And this morning, they had finally arrived. It was not much. Four light tanks and a dozen scout cars along with a few mortars. A company of infantry riding in Italian trucks backed the lightly armored spearhead. The gray clothed wraiths would have been out of place in the desert but the uniforms blended in well enough in the city.

    The young officer commanding the patrol had to be reminded by the platoon sergeant that his first job was information, his second job was communication and his third job was killing Germans. He had wanted to open fire as soon as possible until the older man jogged his elbow. A radio message was sent back to headquarters, and then two scout cars had been dispatched to make sure the message was received.

    The patrol was down to two thirds its strength before they were even spotted. A sharp eyed German scout who had fought in Poland, Belgium and France saw a thin straight line in a place where nothing was quite straight. His eyes tracked downwards and saw the scout car hiding behind a stall. And then the light tank thirty meters to his right fired, destroying the car.

    Contact was made between the Afrika Korps and the XIII Corps. The young men in command, none older than twenty four did not care for history. They cared to make sense of the sudden bursts of confusion, the chaos of fire, the movement of unseen enemies, the location of their hidden escape routes. They cared about their men screaming, they cared about their ability to run, they cared about surviving the next fifteen minutes.

    And most of the men did survive the next fifteen minutes as the light British patrol threw dozens of smoke grenades to mask their withdrawal. They left the single scout car and its crew. No prisoners were left behind as the men in that car were dead or were in the active process of dying.

    Contact had been made.
     
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    • Paulo the Limey

    The Germans have an awful lot of coastal roads to travel to get to the front line. Wouldn't be surprised to see the RN drop off some raiding forces to conduct ambushes on the supply convoys, that's if the LRDG doesn't get to them first.
     

    fester

    Paulo the Limey said:
    The Germans have an awful lot of coastal roads to travel to get to the front line. Wouldn't be surprised to see the RN drop off some raiding forces to conduct ambushes on the supply convoys, that's if the LRDG doesn't get to them first.
    Click to expand...
    The critical question will be how aggressive will the DAK be? Their mission is to stiffen the Italians and hold onto Tripoli. General Funke will follow those orders. He has leeway for aggression but his fundamental mission is defensive. The objective is to hold Libya not to take Cairo.

    And from there, the supply chain for DAK and the Italians has a much easier/shorter pathway for success. So raiding elements might not be as valuable for the RN and LRDG
     

    Anarch King of Dipsodes

    fester said:
    The critical question will be how aggressive will the DAK be? Their mission is to stiffen the Italians and hold onto Tripoli. General Funke will follow those orders. He has leeway for aggression but his fundamental mission is defensive. The objective is to hold Libya not to take Cairo.

    And from there, the supply chain for DAK and the Italians has a much easier/shorter pathway for success. So raiding elements might not be as valuable for the RN and LRDG
    Click to expand...

    But if the British hold Benghazi, Axis supply across the Med is trickier, with a very strong British base fairly close to Tripoli.
     
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    fester

    I will be taking a few days off on this as I need to plot the next three months as the world gets bigger really fast. The butterflies will be hitting the gym hard
     
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