Keynes' Cruisers

[Donald Reaver]

To consolidate my thoughts and others my proposal is this. A single tramp freighter is sent out, with a cargo of mostly canned goods and packed on top some rice. False flagged as Japanese with a partial Asian crew, with a backup of Navy personal in the background. If intercepted by patrol craft, tell them they were contracted to bring American supplies to Singapore, but decided selling the cargo to the Japanese would bring much greater profits. Pass out the rice and some canned goods as a bribe. Time arrival close to passing Bataan late in the evening. Head to shore at what a good beaching point but not close to a harbour. Make sure you discharge any excess bunker fuel at that point. Hopefully less likely to encounter a mine. Beach the ship, blow or cut open the sides and pull out the supplies. Have engineers ready with ramps and what they can improvise. Have as many troops on hand to haul off supplies so that not in each others way. Do not try to move them far that night to reduce turnaround time of the troops hauling supplies. 1/4, half mile from ship with camouflage ready for the day. Coordination greatly required to be planned for, least of which making no Allied sub sinks the ship.

Fanciful probably, not likely to be authorized, but still seems like a low cost effort with great potential compared to any other choice they have.

Advantage of canned goods even if bombed much will survive for another day to salvage.

Would not give this great odds, but any comments?

 

[Driftless]

Some powdered or dried nutritionally dense foods might be candidate for transport by seaplane. Eggs, Split Peas (for soup), dried fruit. Not a lot of volume to spread across 60,000 plus warriors, but they would provide alternative nutrients probably lacking in the standard rations.

 

[Viper91]

To consolidate my thoughts and others my proposal is this. A single tramp freighter is sent out, with a cargo of mostly canned goods and packed on top some rice. False flagged as Japanese with a partial Asian crew, with a backup of Navy personal in the background. If intercepted by patrol craft, tell them they were contracted to bring American supplies to Singapore, but decided selling the cargo to the Japanese would bring much greater profits. Pass out the rice and some canned goods as a bribe. Time arrival close to passing Bataan late in the evening. Head to shore at what a good beaching point but not close to a harbour. Make sure you discharge any excess bunker fuel at that point. Hopefully less likely to encounter a mine. Beach the ship, blow or cut open the sides and pull out the supplies. Have engineers ready with ramps and what they can improvise. Have as many troops on hand to haul off supplies so that not in each others way. Do not try to move them far that night to reduce turnaround time of the troops hauling supplies. 1/4, half mile from ship with camouflage ready for the day. Coordination greatly required to be planned for, least of which making no Allied sub sinks the ship.

Fanciful probably, not likely to be authorized, but still seems like a low cost effort with great potential compared to any other choice they have.

Advantage of canned goods even if bombed much will survive for another day to salvage.

Would not give this great odds, but any comments?

What if the best place they can manage to beach at is somewhere where they run aground 100 yards from the shoreline, where it's too shallow go physically make it to the beach, but still several feet deep.

Two or three guys carrying a 50lb or 100lb crate of food is hard enough. Two or three guys carrying a 50lb or 100lb crate of food 100 yards through water up to 4 or 5 feet deep if not deeper is a good way to loose a ton of stuff or risk having a lot of people drown. It might be doable, but it doesn't sound practical.

 

[Donald Reaver]

What if the best place they can manage to beach at is somewhere where they run aground 100 yards from the shoreline, where it's too shallow go physically make it to the beach, but still several feet deep.

Two or three guys carrying a 50lb or 100lb crate of food is hard enough. Two or three guys carrying a 50lb or 100lb crate of food 100 yards through water up to 4 or 5 feet deep if not deeper is a good way to loose a ton of stuff or risk having a lot of people drown. It might be doable, but it doesn't sound practical.

One of the reasons it is a gamble, but when you are hungry I would be surprised if there are not divers days afterwards trying for food.

 

[Butchpfd]

Plan B. It's not resupply, the facilities don't exist. The stripped-down transports are to evacuate the defenders.

I said 12 destroyers originally, but I pulled that out of my arse, the quote was a "squadron", which is eight.
So we have 63k defenders on two cruisers and eight destroyers.
If a destroyer can take 500 tons of men and a cruiser 2000 tons, and a man weighs 200 pounds, then the flotilla can handle 80k men.

This means 5000 men per destroyer, and 20k per cruiser, which is why that topweight needs to go.

Now, do they make the dash in at night and load at day while being sitting ducks before leaving at night, or reverse it, exchanging vulnerability while loading for two days' vulnerability close to Bataan. I suspect... the latter?

APD'S normaly carried160 to 200 men. double that is 400 men..you could get more on a Dunkirk run or to one of the closer Southern Islands, but to Singaporeor DEI, more is imo not practical.

 

[Major Major]

At the risk of being a spoilsport, all this is desperate scuttlebutt, on the same level as proposals to have the entire available Allied armed forces dispatched on an invasion of Italy in the summer of 1942, under the command of General de Gaulle, to knock out the props from the Axis alliance. Or sending the entire American armed forces to the Maritime Provinces of Siberia, where they can serve as the Allied mass of maneuver, striking at either the Japanese or the Germans as needed.

(I have seen WWII era books that put forward seriously both of those proposals; in other words I Am Not Making This Up.)

Much as we admire the heroism and desperate valor of the United States Forces in the Philippines, they are not going to be able to hold out forever. And they are just too isolated to be relieved, barring some amazing and improbable collapse of Japanese resistance.


How will the Japanese handle the inevitable surrender? Will they make an even worse Death March?

And on the other side, how badly will people blame the Administration(s) for having "let this happen"?

Everyone will want the gallant heroes to be rescued. But it just can't happen. The Relief, that mile-long convoy of supplies and reinforcements, led by Negro cavalrymen on white horses, is a desperate daydream.

 

[Viper91]

One of the reasons it is a gamble, but when you are hungry I would be surprised if there are not divers days afterwards trying for food.

If you mean scuba divers, no there will not be.

Keep in mind, this is 1942 we're talking about. Most if not all diving in those days was still done with the bulky suits with the cast iron or metal diving helmets and several people on the surface on a large enough boat, or a suitable pier or boat dock operating the air pumps and stuff. A lot of the personal scuba tanks and rebreather systems and wetsuits and drysuits that we take for granted today either outright didn't exist back then, or where extremely rare.

A great deal of scuba technology was invented or entered mass production only during or towards the end of the war, and while some stuff might exist right now, it will either be in the testing and prototype phase right now, or assigned to CONUS or Hawaii based units or something, probably not laying around for use in Bataan. Even if the equipment was available, given all the stuff that the garrison could use or needs, such equipment would probably be at the bottom of their priority list right now.

 

[Donald Reaver]

Rather more thinking freediving if close to shore, again really depends if it beaches it or not.

 

[alspug]

Unless you can remove the Japanese Navy and Air Force's in the Philippines no resupply by surface ships is possible.

 

[dmg86]

It's a conundrum militarily they might not be able to do much but Politically it would be impossible not to try something to help.

 

[sonofpegasus]

If you want a political gesture something like these could be tried, using modified PT boats.

This is an Operation 'Bidford' conversion of a Vosper MTB used to carry 40 tons of ball bearings from Sweden to England by making a passage through the German Held Skagerrak, They had a range o 1200miles. Volunteers only one way run!

 

[AlanJWhite]

If you want a political gesture something like these could be tried, using modified PT boats.

This is an Operation 'Bidford' conversion of a Vosper MTB used to carry 40 tons of ball bearings from Sweden to England by making a passage through the German Held Skagerrak, They had a range o 1200miles. Volunteers only one way run!

Could hardly be one way since the ships were built in Britain and went to and fro

In fact 5 vessels were converted as cargo carriers and some made as many as 3 round trips

BTW not a Vosper design. The class was derived from 8 ships ordered for Turkey from Camper and Nicholson before the war.
They had Paxman diesel engines which gave them potentially a long range (2000nm at cruising speed)
but were very unreliable in practice.

 

[sonofpegasus]

You are of course quite right they were built by Cam and when fully loaded had a top speed of 23knots and could cruise at 20. What I have been trying to illustrate in this series of posts the myriad different options the USN/Army could be looking at. Where there is a Political will there is normally a way however impractical it might be in reality.
Her are details of the boats from the Paxman diesel engine history site. what is really interesting is the last line with the Packard engines unfortunetly no range is given for this engine set up.

CAMPER AND NICHOLSON MGBs 502 - 509
Length, o.a. 117 ft 0 in.
Beam 20 ft 3 in.
Draught, mean 4 ft 1 in.
Displacement 95 tons
Propulsion* 3 x Paxman VRB engines
Total output* 3000 bhp
Speed* 28 knots (max)
25 knots (continuous)
Complement 21
Endurance 2000 miles at 11 knots
*MGB 509 was powered by three Packard supercharged petrol engines giving a total output of 4050 bhp and speeds of 31 knots (max), 27 knots

 

[fester]

Near the Vistula River October 27, 1942

Cheap coal burned. Thick smoke wafted through the passenger compartments of the troop train. A fresh regiment of draftees from Austria was aboard. Several hundred replacements for the fairly quiet sector of the front near Moscow were also needed as quiet did not mean safe, it just meant slightly less deadly than the fighting on the way to Grozny or north of Stalingrad.

Nineteen year old eyes looked out the window. The private had never been far from home before he was called up for the army. Training over the past year had transformed his figure from boyish and slightly chubby to lean and testosterone defined. His eyes glanced over at the factory along the river bank. It was a major installation and it looked new. Smoke stacks poked the sky near the AG Farben works, and black and gray puffs of smoke mixed with the moist sky to produce a low lying fog. He wondered what was being made in that factory. His curiosity lasted all of a mile as the train had crossed the Vistula and one of the platoon's machine gunners pulled out a deck of cards to kill the monotony of their journey to the front.

 

[fester]

Govan, Scotland October 28, 1942

The hull of HMS Implacable entered the water. She still would need at least another fifteen months before she would be ready to join the fleet. Her slip would soon be taken over by almost automobile style production of landing ships which would be scheduled to launch every seventy days for the next year.

 

[fester]

Orleans, October 29, 1942

Jean offered his wrists readily through the cell door. This was a formality, an acknowledgement of his situation as a prisoner, but his friend, the German he talked to every day, had always quickly removed the handcuffs as soon as he was out of sight of the general population of the prison. He walked with a pep in his step and a pack of good American cigarettes in his back pocket. His guards held his arm, more presence than security until they walked past the doorway that led to the roof. As he stepped right, his shoulder was wrenched by a strong hand pulling him back into the hallway.

He turned his head. The guards were not smiling at him. Panic welled up inside of him. He did not know what was happening. A wooden club slammed into his kidneys. He doubled over and tried to breathe as pain swept up and down from his torso.

“Move scum”

Both guards picked up the limp man by the shoulders and frogged marched him forward. They shoved him down the stairs, not caring that he hit his head on the wall at the mid-floor landing. As he was forced through the door into a courtyard he had never seen, a cloth hood was placed over his head. Claustrophobia and confusion competed against each other as his lungs could not process any of the air rushing in and out of them. He wanted to run. His legs would not respond.

Muffled voices could be heard through the hood. His head turned, and he tried to place the woman’s voice in his mind. He had no idea who she was. And as he was trying to place the voice, another set of rough hands pushed him forward. Another pair spun him around while more hands looped ropes around his arms and chest, securing him tightly to a well anchored wooden pole. One of the Germans rifled through his pockets and stole the pack of good cigarettes.

Panic was setting in. He knew he was being lined up to be shot. It was not fair, he had spilled his guts to the Germans. He was a friend and an occupier, the implied trade was not being honored.

His laments against the unfairness of it all went unanswered. A sharp voice called out for the firing squad to load and then to raise their rifles. Underneath the hood, tears were streaking down the courier’s face, his weakness and his willingness to look out just for himself had left him empty and it would not even save him. He tried to collect himself as a dozen men squeezed triggers. Four bullets struck him, five bullets struck one of the women whom he had betrayed.

 

[sloreck]

That Farbenwerks is one of the subcamps of Auschwitz. What is being manufactured as the main product of the the complex (not that one installation) - death. The young private glimpsed the initial production runs of the greatest industrial death factory to be created...

 

[Cryhavoc101]

That Farbenwerks is one of the subcamps of Auschwitz. What is being manufactured as the main product of the the complex (not that one installation) - death. The young private glimpsed the initial production runs of the greatest industrial death factory to be created...

Like that young private I didn't even realise!

 

[allanpcameron]

Goven, Scotland October 28, 1942.

Sorry to nit-pick an excellent TL but Govan not Goven.
Allan.

 

[fester]

Sorry to nit-pick an excellent TL but Govan not Goven.
Allan.

tweaked, and changed the language a chunk for clarity