Under Atlee, Britain joined NATO, participated in the Berlin Airlift, and sent troops to fight in Korea. There were a few "useful idiots" in the British Left, but Atlee wasn't one of them.
Munich Shuffle: 1938-1942
- Thread starter Garrison
- Start date
In 1945-6 relations with the USSR weren’t as bad as they became during the Cold War. There were arguments over how to treat the occupied zones of Germany and other quarrels. But there was still a naive hope that the Allies could remain partners rather than antagonists. Stalin clearly wanted compliant regimes in what became the Warsaw Pact but not yet ones that were totalitarian police states run by Communist parties. So the Iron Curtain wasn’t as hard or obvious. Worth noting that in the Greek Civil War the support for the Communists came from Tito not Stalin. Who was willing to abide by the “deal“ with Churchill, though at the time this wasn’t clear to the British and Americans.
The nene jet gift could be seen as an attempt to preserve good relations with the USSR. Though the minister who made the decision was I think Stafford Cripps. Who was an odd character and either a ‘fellow traveller’ or a ‘useful idiot’ in Cold War terminology. Also a poor Chancellor whose austerity policies were probably overdone.
OTL immediately Post-War UK was also drowning in debt and desperate for hard currency. That meant exports. Call it selling off the family silver if you like. But silverware isn't much use if you've got nothing to eat with it.
Garrison
Donor
Which is rather the problem, bear in mind some of these events are overlapping so at certain points the idea that the Japanese will surely show some sense comes to the fore, only to be crushed by reality on the battlefield.
However cozy they were or weren't IOTL things are a lot more fraught here with a far clearer picture of Soviet behaviour in Poland and the unwelcome attempts to bully the British at Potsdam. Add in that the Soviets are weaker and the British are stronger than OTL and its not a recipe for a warm relationship.
Garrison
Donor
And again here Britain is in a stronger position and Stalin's anxieties about the Soviet position in Europe has led to him taking a more aggressive tone and alas clamping down harder and faster in those territories that are under Soviet control. There is likely to be a show of strength by Stalin to affirm the Soviet access rights in Germany. Not quite a reverse Berlin airlift but enough to sour relations. In fact now I think of it that might form the basis for an addendum later.
That was Cripps, the one real pro Stalin Cabinet Member
Probably. He could be given a meaningless position where he could do no damage but I think he had a significant power base somewhere in the Labour movement.
So, an accident that ends his political careeer could be in order.
I mean, if he remains as Pro Stalin/Soviet Union as he was OTL, given the differing relationship with the Soviet Union/Stalin ITTL, that could be enough on its own? The British Tabloids, I am sure, would jump at the chance to savage Cripps (and the Labour Party more generally) over it.
15th August – 29th September 1944 - The Liberation of Hong Kong – Part I – Defending the Indefensible
Garrison
Donor
15th August – 29th September 1944 - The Liberation of Hong Kong – Part I – Defending the Indefensible
The fall of Hong Kong had been the single greatest embarrassment of the war in the east for the British, though even before the Japanese attack there had been a broad consensus that the colony could not be held in the event of an attack given that the Japanese controlled Guangzhou (Canton), Hainan and French Indochina. As a result of this Hong Kong had been downgraded to the status of an outpost in the latter part of 1940 with only a token defence force left in place. This sensible decision was almost unravelled when in typical Churchill fashion the Prime Minister had changed his mind in September 1941, swayed by the argument that a strong defence force would act as a deterrent to the Japanese. Fortunately for the troops earmarked for this deployment Montgomery successfully argued, via Alan Brooke, that this would be a mistake and that deploying those troops to far more strategically important and defensible targets would have a far greater deterrent effect, especially since it seemed unlikely the Japanese would attack all their potential targets at once and should Hong Kong fall it could be swiftly liberated once the initial Japanese offensive had been repulsed. How much of this was Montgomery spinning a story for his masters in London that got him what he wanted and how much was genuine underestimation of the Japanese depends on how much faith one places in Montgomery’s memoirs [1].
The decision to reallocate the proposed Hong Kong reinforcements to Malaya and Burma, and then to Java, eliminated any slim chance of defending the colony when the Japanese attacked on the 8th of December. Hong Kong capitulated on the 21st of December and the Japanese had swiftly imposed their usual brutal control and anger at the fact that some units put up unexpectedly stiff resistance before being overwhelmed, combined with the Japanese contempt for any soldier who surrendered, resulted in the execution of captured troops on multiple occasions. The white colonial population of Hong Kong had not believed an attack, let alone a successful one, was likely and there had been no attempts at an organized evacuation or any meaningful civil defence planning prior to the Japanese assault, meaning that they now found themselves living under an increasingly harsh occupation. The only very small crumb of comfort the colonials was that their treatment was less brutal than that experienced by the Chinese populace of Hong Kong and the New Territories. Resistance groups emerged, known as the Gangjiu and Dongjiang, and while they had a very limited impact on the occupying forces the Japanese retaliated with torture, murder and the destruction of whole villages and as many as 8,500 Hong Kong civilians were murdered during the occupation [2].
General Takashi Sakai, who both commanded the invasion of Hong Kong and served as its governor, did nothing to mitigate the harshness of his rule over the colony even as the British and their allies liberated the rest of the territory occupied by the Japanese and isolated Hong Kong. The threat of a Chinese counteroffensive aimed at liberating Guangzhou meant that there would be no reinforcements sent to Hong Kong in 1944, where Sakai now found himself on the other side of the strategic dilemma that the British had faced in 1941, that is he could not defend the colony with the resources at his disposal and other places had a far higher call on the limited resources available to his superiors. Sakai could not even entertain the hope that the British would not attack as Hong Kong was the only corner of the British empire still occupied by an Axis power and thus an inevitable target. The hopelessness of his situation simply hardened Sakai’s resolve to fight to the last man, and he would come very close to achieving this goal [3].
If the Japanese were determined to fight until the bitter end regardless of whether they could hold Hong Kong the British were just as determined to retake the colony, though they were naturally not inclined to be as profligate with the lives of their soldiers as the Japanese. Hong Kong was both the next logical move for the British in advancing north towards the Japanese Home Islands beside being a matter of honour and unlike 1941 there was no need to ration out the resources allocated to the Honk Kong operation. The end of the war in Europe had created some issues for the British, seeking to balance the demands to demobilize troops who had fought their way from Normandy to Berlin against prosecuting the continuing campaign against the Japanese. Despite this the British were able to assemble two full Corps and an armoured division for the landings, and fully equip them with landing craft and the latest amphibious assault vehicles. There was also no shortage of air and naval assets to support the landing. Illustrious, Formidable, Victorious and the fully repaired Ark Royal were all assigned to the operation, codenamed Lighthouse, with half a dozen light carriers acting as ferries to replenish their air wings or to provide air cover while the fleet carriers concentrated their airwings on strike aircraft. The surface fleet was led by King George V, Prince of Wales, Hood, the Lion Class battleship Temeraire and Warspite, recently arrived from the Atlantic. This line of battle was supported by a full battlegroup of cruisers and destroyers, screened by a substantial force of submarines [4].
It was ironic that one of the most powerful formations the British had deployed in the Pacific would face practically no threat from the Imperial Japanese Navy. The remains of the Japanese fleet were restricted to home waters for the time being, conserving their available fuel while expedients to increase the stockpile were explored. The only ‘naval’ assets near Hong Kong were a few patrol boats operated by the Army and a selection of small craft and coastal civilian craft pressed into Japanese service. The IJA had even gone so far as to consider deploying their own aircraft carriers to Hong Kong, which as strange as it seems is not a typographical error, the IJA did indeed possess its own carriers, after a fashion. Akitsu Maru and her sister ship Nigitsu Maru were a mix of landing craft, depot ship and escort aircraft carrier, sometimes described as the first amphibious assault ships. They lacked a proper hanger or indeed such items as arrestor gear, meaning conventional aircraft could launch from their decks but not land. A partial solution to this issue was found in the Kayaba Ka-1 autogyro, an early form of helicopter where the lift rotor was unpowered and depended on the forward motion created by its main propulsion to spin it and generate lift. In a strong wind the autogyro could take off vertically though usually it operated in the short take-off and landing mode (STOL). This made it well suited to the limited flight decks of the army carriers and the Ka-1 was useful in the anti-submarine role, but very little else [5].
These proto assault ships might have made useable kamikaze platforms, launching both suicide aircraft and boats, but in the end nothing came of this because the Akitsu Maru was torpedoed and sunk by a Dutch submarine while escorting a convoy to Formosa in June and the Nigitsu Maru was damaged in another submarine attack in July. Some of the modified fast boats, their engines tuned up and their hulls packed with explosives were dispatched to Hong Kong to operate independently. Efforts to camouflage them from Allied reconnaissance were largely successful. The same however could not be said for the patrol craft watching the coast, which were picked off in a series of engagements by the Royal Navy and Fleet Air Arm. Given the paucity of the IJAAF assets in Hong Kong this meant that Sakai was left with little to no reconnaissance capability and wouldn’t know when the attack was coming or where it was being directed until it began [6].
General Sakai knew he could not prevent a landing even if he had been in possession of comprehensive reconnaissance, nor indeed prevent the British from retaking Hong Kong in the end. Given that the best Sakai could do was hope to slow the British down and in this context, it was possible to claim some military justification in using scorched earth tactics, denying the enemy any local infrastructure or resources they could use to their advantage. What Sakai planned for the battle of Hong Kong went far beyond any military logic, he intended to provide the British with an object lesson as to what they could expect if they dared to attack Japan itself. The white colonials who had survived under three years of Japanese rule and been pressed into service to keep the territories running were now rounded up and interned alongside the remaining POWs who had not succumbed to starvation. Also part of this round up were village headmen, medical professionals, mechanics, and anyone else who was deemed to have some skill that the British could put to use. The orders for dealing with these prisoners were unequivocal, once the British began their invasion, they were all to be put to death. At the same time Sakai had also acquired the services of elements of Unit 731 that had been relocated from China and they were ordered to use their skills to poison wells and water supplies with Cholera and to unleash Bubonic Plague on the Chinese population of the New Territories. Many of these people had already been rendered homeless as the Japanese razed whole villages to prevent them being used by the British. To say that this attempt to intimidate the British backfired is something of an understatement [7].
[1] A bit of both is probably the most reasonable interpretation.
[2] Again this was par for the course for the Japanese, well before World War 2.
[3] This is going to be one of the most vicious battles of the conflict so far, though there is worse to come.
[4] Given her very different history it’s not out of the question that Hood might end up as museum ship, perhaps anchored in place of Belfast on the Thames?
[5] This section was inspired by the discussion in the thread that enlightened me to the existence of these odd army ships.
[6] The British have worked hard to gain some element of surprise for the operation.
[7] It is going to be bad is what I’m saying.
Oof. Before British resolve against Japan was wavering to a degree. Now? Now they're probably going to want their pound of Japanese flesh even more than the Americans.
Sounds like Japan just signed their own death warrant... again
Seems likely Operation Vegetarian is about to get the cobwebs brushed off it
Doubt it, her age and use (wear & tear) would probably meant her getting scrapped like all the WWI (and immediate aftermath) vintage ships. Belfast was basically in use almost continuously (and refit/modernized) until the early 60s, which helps in her preservation as by the time public awareness got around to care about preserving old ships she was still around. Even if a battleship or two gets preserved it'll most likely be one of the newer ones, who just happened to stay in active service a bit longer, and potential scrapping delayed just a bit here and here. And even that's still difficult because the political necessity for battleships is even weaker here than OTL because of the Soviet's weaker position.
Garrison
Donor
That's what I expect would happen to be honest. it would have been nice to have one of the big ships preserved but it just isn't very likely alas.
Good question, both from the point of view of "will she (or Warspite, or Vanguard) fit under the upper span of Tower Bridge" and "how far out does she have to be to avoid grounding at extreme low tide". For that matter, I'd be interested to know if Belfast has to be moved at times when the tide is exceptionally low. Answers from the audience?
I think keeping one of the big ships is plausible, but it really comes down to Vanguard winning the "two cruisers vs one battleship" argument. Besides, as good as it would be to have Warspite parked alongside Warrior and Victory, it would also deprive the Grand Old Lady of her swan-song - that one last act of characteristic defiance in Prussia Cove.
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Coulsdon Eagle
Monthly Donor
I haven't seen the Belfast moved in 40+ years of walking across London Bridge, which is a little strange. She is in a specially-dredged mooring in the Pool of London, which took cargo ships up until the 1950s/60s, but I can't believe that the mud hasn't built up underneath her keel. Still, she isn't moored quayside but a little way out from the South Bank.
Belfast is as has been said in a special deep mooring , its why visiting warships moor alongside her, there is no other mooring of comparable depth that far up. As far as I know , Belfast only needs moving for maintenance as the mooring is maintained.