Obscure Contengency Warplans

Yeah, but I'm just saying that if they say their doing math on something than they should take some of the factors involved in that thing into account. It's like writing a book that's set in Roman England and not putting anything about Roman England in the book.

Is it even physically possible to do that?
 
They didn't, it was just a subsect of War Plan Red. The US had invasions of Canada, New Zealand, India, and Ireland as part of War Plan Red as well IIRC. Canada was "Crimson".


I know that Prohibition nearly brought the US and Uk to war in the 20s and early 30s. Since Japan was still allied with Britain at that time, and France woudl have also gone to war with the USA, I wonder how a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour would have been carried out in the 1930s.

The British and Canadians allowed alcohol to illegally flow into the USA while the USA let the Fenian Brotherhood launch terrorist attacks on British interests in Canada.

And I would imagine such war plans were developed when there was the possibility of Oswald Mosely become Prime Minsiter, and the British Union of Fascists taking power.

I have seen a few alternate history scenarios on other AH sites of how WWII might have went, if Moseley had come to power, with no realiable ally in Europe. I think the B-36 would have been delvoped earlier, to allow for long range bombing runs launched from bases in the USA.
 
As I understand it, a lot of the reason for planning isn't about the actual operations, its about the mechanisms for carrying them out. You can't just pull weapons out of thin air. Nor troops. Nor uniforms. It takes systems to procure them, & systems to allocate materials for production. (Many of these prove completely useless in the event, but...)

There's also the big issue of solving problems in advance. War Plan Orange wasn't just "somewhat like" OTL events: it was damn near eactly like. About the only things substantially different were the sub war & the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Nobody believed Yarnell when he proved an enemy could pull it off...:rolleyes:) It only took, what, 50yr to get it right...
 
Germany had contingency plans for invading Denmark since 1890 and Norway since at least 1917.
The Danish general staff guessed as early as 1938 the composition sans para's of the German troops invading Denmark but never AFAIK did any contingency planning.
 
Wait...what?

(filler)

I've read before that there was Anglo-American antagonism in the late 1920s, caused by American attempts to match the strength of the Royal Navy. Relations reached a low point around 1927 when the Geneva Naval Conference failed.

Prohibition did cause Anglo-American tensions too because of the effect on trade. The idea that it nearly caused a war is an exaggeration though.
 
Fixed that for you.

Over prohibition, yes, over the fact that the USA was usurping The British Empire's place at the top of the global table, not so much, IMO.

The "possibility of the two nations engaging on opposite sides of a future conflict" was openly discussed at the 1927 Geneva Conference IIRC and for diplomatese, that's a pretty clear-cut threat of war.

Happily, cooler heads prevailed and it had all blown over by the early thirties.

I've always thought an interesting PoD would be what if Britain had followed its traditional policy of organising a coalition of the weaker powers against the strongest power, rather than accepting the rise of the USA.
 
Pretty much, except the Germans notoriously had absolutely no idea that Enigma was ever broken. Right up until the 1970s when the work of ULTRA was declassified, the West Germans never suspected it, and some of them refused to believe it when it did come out. They had an awful lot of confidence in that code machine, to say the least.

(This is a slight simplification--the Kriegsmarine were a bit more sceptical of Enigma's infallibility than the Wehrmacht or the political leadership, hence why they messed around with the code machines more often).

Rommel seemed to be hovering near the idea that German signals communications where compromised (although he was way off track as to why this actually was the case) his lying to, refusing to send to signals to, or ignoring signals from his high command actually played a key part both in the success of his initial sunflower offensive and his rebound offensive at the end of operation crusader (catching the British off guard, since their ultra intercepts indicated that Rommel shouldn't be attacking)

One of his larger boners of the period though was that he thought Italian ciphers where compromised, and made them use Enigma machines... Italian military ciphers where never broken, and used one time disposable pads, of the sort the NSA loved during the 70's and 80's :D
 

HJ Tulp

Donor
Well there was the Dutch plan for a pre-emptive strike on Belgium after WWI when tensions where high over the Dutch support for the Central Powers and the Belgian claims on Dutch Limburg and Zeeuws Vlaanderen.

There was also Operation Black Tulip which was a Dutch plan for intervention in Suriname when it became independent. Alledgely (and I find this pretty likely) Sergeant Desi Bouterse got his hands on it and used it to plan his coup in the '80s.
 

Markus

Banned
The "possibility of the two nations engaging on opposite sides of a future conflict" was openly discussed at the 1927 Geneva Conference IIRC and for diplomatese, that's a pretty clear-cut threat of war.

I've always thought an interesting PoD would be what if Britain had followed its traditional policy of organising a coalition of the weaker powers against the strongest power, rather than accepting the rise of the USA.

The USA had been a rising power since before WW1. They had the 3rd biggest Navy and the UK was not worried at all. Not one bit in spite of the USN and HSF combined being larger than the RN. Aside from the fact that a German-American alliance was a bit unlikely, the UK could not maintain the two-power-standard any more by 1910.

Post WW1 the UK could even less and the US just didn´t want to. The discussions seem to have been purely theoretical.
 
These weird contingency plans aren't really about preparing for whatever might happen. They are for getting your staff officers practice.
 
I'm convinced that I have read before that Winston Churchill, while a student at Harrow, wrote an essay on how an invasion of Afghanistan by the Russian Empire might happen. Come 1979, and his 19th century plan actually influenced the actions of the Soviets. Can't find a reference for this now though, I suspect that if I still have the book it's at my parents.
 
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