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One of the things that struck me whilst doing some reading over the past couple of days seems to of been the rather surprising shortages of landing craft the Western Allies faced at various times, with possible operations having to be curtailed or called off when other priorities came up. Cases in point being landing craft being sent to the UK in preparation for D-Day from the Far East and Mediterranean. A little bit of searching also turns up that there appears to have been some construction issues and a gap between the first production program and the second. For the sake of argument lets say that landing craft are much more plentiful. Maybe the stars are simply right and the bureaucracy works perfectly, someone in the military really drives things, or one idea I had was that Britain uses the insanely generous terms for Lend-Lease to request as massive amount of landing craft as they see that they're going to need them in various theatres and it also sends the right signal about bot just sitting on the defensive but preparing to attack. Whatever happens, we have lots of them.

So what would the Allies do with them? In the Mediterranean it would probably help keep Eisenhower from developing an ulcer since their numbers were always a worry when planning Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, maybe they land more troops or perhaps even try for a third one on the toe of Italy or near-ish Messina to attempt to cut off the defenders and keep them from evacuating. Later on it provides more opportunities to leapfrog up the peninsula perhaps, or would Churchill try and sidetrack into the Balkans? Being able to launch Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, at the same time as D-Day as originally planned could throw up some interesting changes but I don't know enough to say what. Speaking of D-Day, how about another landing beach? I seem to recall that one idea being vaguely mooted was another American landing site on the western side of the Cotentin peninsula.

In the Far East the only proposed amphibious operations I can really think of were Operation Dracula, the proposed attack on Rangoon that was called off since they didn't have enough landing craft whilst Europe was going on, and follow on Operation Zipper which was the invasion of Malaya and the capture ports to act as staging areas for the invasion of Singapore as Operation Tiderace that was nixed by the Japanese surrendering. I'm sure there were plenty of other things the Americans or Australians could have tried doing as well. What do people think they would have done with an increased supply of landing craft in either theatre and what kind of changes they might have caused?
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