Operation Pike in April 1940

If OPERATION PIKE had not been real OTL proposal and somebody on this forum tried to write a TL about it he would get sent to the land of ASB faster than you can say Sea Mammal.
 
April 1941? So in addition to all the other problems endemic to Pike that plagued early war Allied bombing (bad accuracy, bad navigation, poorly trained crews, lack of adequate equipment, underestimation of target resilience and overestimation of damage done among planners) the operation is being executed without even all of the assigned bombers and munitions having arrived? What about the fact that the airfields it was supposed to be conducted from were still under construction? Yeah, damage would definitely be minimal to nonexistent and simple operational attrition from such a hasty effort would have likely forced cancellation quite quickly. A Soviet entry into the war alongside Germany and invasion of Iran and/or Turkey would follow. Depending on the degree of preparation for those invasions and who the Soviets put in charge, it will either be a tragi-comic scene akin to the first half of the Winter War or a reasonably competent affair akin to the second half of the Winter War. Recent Soviet experience means their not liable to half-ass an invasion, so it really comes down to who they pick to run the thing.

Longer-term things get iffy and the butterflies could have severe impact on how the war develops.

Some areas still had wooden derricks and used open air storage of crude. They would dam off one side of a valley, then fill it with crude. Pipelines leaked frequently
Much of the area was soaked to bedrock with spills. It would not take much to set all alight.

Yes, it would take quite a bit. Even the bigger, better prepared, and much more skilled German raids of 1942 couldn't set Baku (or even the smaller Soviet oil fields) all alight. The predictions of total destruction uniformly come from people who had a consistently very poor track record in target selection and damage estimation in 1940 through to 1943. Contemporary assessments of effectiveness from planners mean spit and mean even less if they're for a raid that wasn't even conducted.​
 
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Allied bombing (bad accuracy, bad navigation,

Baku is one of the few places on Earth that wouldn't be hard to find
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And thats without hundreds of flare pipes burning off the (then) unwanted natural gas
 
Good points, but with more countries being invaded by the USSR who is more willing to work with the Axis, I don't think there will be much lend lease for said country once the Axis stab it in the back.

Lend Lease passed in March, 1941

What makes you think that the Turks would be an easy pushover?

When Pike goes off, Baku would ruined, and the USSR now has a POL problem in being able to do logistics far from home.
For the non-Soviet Allies sure, but again not much so for the USSR once the Germans and Italians turn their guns on the Soviets. As for the Turks, I don't know much info on their forces at the time but I will say that they weren't so well armed, quite poorly in fact. And as for the oil damage they may potentially suffer from, they can compensate by seizing the middle east but then again it'd be difficult as you pointed it out (for one the Red Army wasn't as mechanized as the Germans were at the time).
 
As for the Turks, I don't know much info on their forces at the time but I will say that they weren't so well armed, quite poorly in fact. And as for the oil damage they may potentially suffer from, they can compensate by seizing the middle east but then again it'd be difficult as you pointed it out (for one the Red Army wasn't as mechanized as the Germans were at the time).

You will use ridiculous amounts of shipping space to keep horsedrawn armies in the field, each horse has a logistics footprint of 10X of a soldier. 'Let them graze' just doesn't work with post 1850 armies when invading other countries.

Turkey isn't Steppe. And Soviets in the Middle East? Check up on what it took to keep the British supplied with Horses on that front in WWI
You need railroads, and then trucks from railheads, and that means refined petroleum.
 
Baku is one of the few places on Earth that wouldn't be hard to find
9617jnun01.gif


And thats without hundreds of flare pipes burning off the (then) unwanted natural gas

And the British bombers in 1940-41 proved quite unable to find plenty of places that fit that description. A place being supposedly easy to find is not necessarily enough to offset bad navigation skills, to say nothing of all the other problems. All these issues are now being compounded by the hasty launch of Pike described by the OP without any time for real preparations. Fundamentally, PMN1’s right: Baku’ll be scratched, but not remotely destroyed.
 
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And the British bombers in 1940-41 proved quite unable to find plenty of places that fit that description. A place being supposedly easy to find is not necessarily enough to offset bad navigation skills, to say nothing of all the other problems. All these issues are now being compounded by the hasty launch of Pike described by the OP without any time for real preparations. Fundamentally, PMN1’s right: Baku’ll be scratched, but not remotely destroyed.

BC didn't have a problem finding Wilhelmshaven, Kiel Canal and Hamburg early in the war

They had other problems once there.

And they didn't have activities this going on
S9595695A.jpg
Baku did
 
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Any bombing mission done in 1940 is going to be conducted at night and the bomb sights used back then weren't very good in daytime and abysmal at night.
 
BC didn't have a problem finding Wilhelmshaven, Kiel Canal and Hamburg early in the war

Actually they did, quite frequently. In fact, early war bomber command's (and their French counterparts) navigation was so bad they could even have trouble finding Germany at times.

And they didn't have activities this going on
S9595695A.jpg
Baku did

Which requires aircraft to navigate quite close before they can see it at a time when Bomber Command often wound up navigating over the wrong country. And it doesn't do much for aiming: at the relevant altitudes and given the poor quality of available bombsights, it's all going to appear a quite indistinct fuzz to the British air crews. The fact that Baku experiences strong winds all year round is also liable to blow the bulk of bombs well away from the fields.
 
Any bombing mission done in 1940 is going to be conducted at night and the bomb sights used back then weren't very good in daytime and abysmal at night.
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There's a lot hit, even when you miss
That's pools of crude, BTW

Don't need much of a bombsight at nite, you look for the flare pipes, if you couldn't notice the peninsula jutting out into the Caspian
 
Which requires aircraft to navigate quite close before they can see it at a time when Bomber Command often wound up navigating over the wrong country.

What else looks like Baku by the Caspian? there's only one country on the West side with that distinctive beak
 
What else looks like Baku by the Caspian? there's only one country on the West side with that distinctive beak

Great, except the bombers are taking off from Syria (or a few of them are, the majority are either not in place or don't have the munitions or fuel because according to OP this is starting before most of that was sent over). If they want to approach Baku from the east, they have to navigate over Iraq, Iran, and then the Caspian. If they approach from due south, that's again Iraq and Iran. From the west, Turkey then Armenia and the bulk of Azerbaijan. The most direct approach from the southwest is close to a thousand kilometers. The more circular routes I described above would be in excess of that. This at a time when BC aircraft got lost travelling against targets at around half that distance.

No matter how you cut it they have to navigate a massive distance, much further then anything they experienced in Europe up to this point, before they can even lay eyes on Baku. There are a ton of opportunities for them to get lost.
 
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