The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)

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The_Red_Star_Rising said:
And as a note to anyone curious; Katyushas or perhaps rather; Katyusha type vehicles are also used in South America to great effect.

"Young Katyusha went strolling by river..."

I'm trying to think of a portuguese nickname for them from the Brazilians as they rain rockets like a rain of steel and fire from above.
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Obergruppenführer Smith said:
Ganza?
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The_Red_Star_Rising said:
That works, I'll go with that.
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I think you mean Ganzá.
Ganza is usually a generic name for drugs.
 
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Archangel

traveller76 said:
Church Organs (Órganos de la Iglesia/Órgãos da Igreja) or Funeral Organs (Órgano fúnebre/Órgão fúnebre)?

WARNING: I used Google Translate for this so if I mess up I apologize.
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"Funeral Organs" (plural) in a literal translation would be Órganos fúnebres/Órgãos fúnebres, but it is more commonly used in the singular, like the result you got from Google Translate, and I think "Órgão fúnebre" is a very fit name for a type of rocket launcher.
 
Battle of Western Mediterranean Cont'd
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    • Aelita

    Aelita

    Excerpts from the AH.com thread “Battle of West Med: Last Decisive Fleet Battle?”

    Ubermunch said:
    So I’ve been reading the oft recommended Naval Warfare in the European Theater, and I’ve just finished his (lengthy) chapter on the Battle of the Western Mediterranean. The authors describe it quite unambiguously as “the last decisive fleet battle” but fail to elaborate on their reasoning for this claim.

    Now, I don’t know if I agree with this assessment. Naval history isn’t my forté, but it seems to ignore that the war went on for nearly three years afterwards, and there were major fleet engagements in the Pacific Theater right up until the very end.
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    Ritterstahl said:
    Personally, I don’t see what the big attraction to the Battle of the Western Med. The number one and number two most powerful navies in the world team up to destroy the fourth and fifth most powerful navies.

    In spite of the lack of dramatic potential in this match up, we’re getting yet another historical drama coming out this summer about it.
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    LeninsBeard said:
    Well yeah, we have the benefit of hindsight, but I can imagine it would be terrifying to be a participant at the time. Was it really as one-sided as Ritter suggests?
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    Ma’at said:
    The questions keep piling up and I haven’t even had my morning tea yet! I swear, you write one naval TL and then everyone pings you to answer questions everytime something bigger than a rubber dinghy comes up.

    To answer the OP, I can see the case for it. The WFRN has, as a matter of doctrine, preferred to shun the idea of decisive battles and instead they killed their foes mostly through a thousand cuts. It was an attitude well suited to the reality of submarine warfare, and it frustrated the Imperial Japanese Navy to no end. By the time of Operation Ten-Go, they were a shadow of their former self, and their last-ditch effort to stop the juggernaut could have never amounted to anything.

    The Mediterranean Strategic Offensive was pretty much the only time they ever went out of their way to cajole the enemy into a decisive fleet engagement. As for the chance of success, it was a stupendously complicated operation that relied upon maskirovka and psychological warfare to set up.

    As they said at Annapolis, battle is too small of a word. That’s why we prefer to call it a “strategic offensive”.
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    Cheka said:
    One thing that always stood out for me was how much of the battle was decided ship to ship, and not by planes. More than half of the French/Italian capital ships were sunk by other battleships working in concert with cruisers/destroyers.

    Yet in the same naval histories I’ve read (Great Patriotic War at Sea comes to mind, though I believe it was officially published in English as Naval Warfare 1940-46), the authors very clearly state that the battleship had already been eclipsed by the aircraft carrier. I’m not sure how they reconcile this; we sank a lot of Nazi-Fascist ships by battleship guns.
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    AdmiralSanders said:
    Those battleship duels were made possible by Naval Aviation, so it’s fairly easy to reconcile. In each of the major engagements in the Battle of the Western Med, the enemy was softened up by the use of massed carriers, and that also included achieving air superiority to conceal the movement of ships from enemy aircraft. They also sank a lot of pickets and escorts, and did major damage to a number of battleships.

    And honestly, if the weather had been fairer, airpower might have sunk the majority of enemy ships. All weather aviation really wasn’t a thing in WW2, and there were some fairly serious storms that April that limited visibility, and even hampered carrier launches. It’s telling that with clear skies and good weather, airpower managed to sink three of Italy’s best near the Strait of Bonifacio.
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    RuleBritannia said:
    I’m in general agreement with Ma’at and AdmSanders. I’d add that it was a decisive campaign due to the stakes for Italy, and to a lesser extent Petain. While triumphing would not have turned the tide of the war, it made it abundantly clear to everyone except maybe Mussolini’s inner circle and the diehards in the army that Italy was going to lose the war. After annihilating their naval strength, the United Nations dropped any considerations for a separate peace with Italy. Italy was repeatedly crushed on every theater in which they fought.

    A month after putting the First Squadron at the bottom of the Mediterranean, the Entente Eighth Army pushed across the Suez Canal. The Italian Sixth Army, whittled down as it had been to support the disastrous war in the East, was routed, and much of it encircled at Cairo. They’d lose Libya and its precious oil within six weeks, though much of the production was already bottlenecked due to the relentless cruiser and submarine anti-shipping campaign that followed the fleet action.
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    Ma’at said:
    Field Marshal Harold Alexander shaking hands in Tunis with General of the Army David Bellamy is one of those feel good moments of the Second World War.

    Regarding the eclipse of the battleship, it’s important to remember that it’s something that happened slowly, with the occasional backtrack. Bill Mitchell sank an old German dreadnought sitting motionless, and the Navy started increasing anti-aircraft protection and correctly insisted it wasn’t a good demonstration of a ship maneuvering at general quarters. Still, the US Navy did a lot of pioneering work on carriers, though as a matter of doctrine they were “aviation cruisers”, and this is preserved to this day in the hull classification CV, standing for Cruiser, aViation.

    Kitty Hawk demonstrated during the Battle of the Straits of Florida that modern aircraft could bomb and torpedo a battleship at sea, though her target, the Idaho, was old and hadn’t been modernized. It was still enough for the WFRN to reclassify carriers as capital ships and pull them from the scouting wings, though the official designation would remain until after WW2. Pretty much all the major naval powers took notice of the event, and put more research into carriers.

    Carrier planes got a lot bigger and more capable by 1940, but so did the cutting edge of battleships. Like, the first post Straits of Florida battleship design, the Monitor, had more AA throw weight than the pre-civil war battleline combined, and all the surviving ships were basically reconstructed, adding greater torpedo and deck protection. Orthodoxy might get a bloody nose, but it usually doesn’t go down after a single punch.

    And some of the inter-war squabbles in the WFRN were just plain silly. Like, the Boatsheviks wanted to demote new battleships to being battlecruisers, and assign them CC hull designation, to put them at parity with their aviation cruisers. They almost succeeded with the Wat Tyler-class, which was originally ordered with the hull number CC-14 before the old Admirals revolted.

    Of course, what you call it says something about what it’s intended to be used for, not what it actually is. The Toledo-class had CC hull numbers, but they were used as battleships because they had the armor and firepower of one. The older Lexingtons may have officially been battlecruisers, but their actual usage in the war was as cruiser-killers. A 200mm belt is not enough to stand up to capital ship guns, and yet she was well over 40,000 tonnes standard displacement. They might have been decommissioned were it not for the war, and they spent the war guzzling oil in their old lower pressure boilers to keep up with CV task forces.

    The CC hull designation got redesignated “supercruiser” and the Biennio Rosso, the actual CC-14, was designed for role of a fast, cruiser-killer fleet escort. I know Bjorn hates them with a white-hot passion, but they did a decent job in the Pacific.
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    EmpireOfEndlessMonologues said:
    I think part of the campaign’s reputation is inflated by how news and film reel coverage was massaged during the war, and how it became almost mythic in post-war historical discussions. I’d call it by its proper term, propaganda, but that’s become such a pejorative term in the Entente, and it’s used as a term of dismissal.

    But I digress; the battle was built up in popular consciousness for morale reasons. Particularly here in Britain, we needed a morale boost, some real victories to make herculean task before us seem more manageable. And in that regard, it was a very important victory. Sinking enemy ships is a powerful image, and we had plenty of photographers and film cameras to catch it. Watching Littorio, named after the symbol of the Italian Fascists, who’d chased us out of the Mediterranean two years prior, founder under the guns of HMS Lion was beautiful.

    Of course, there’s been a lot of research since. The Mediterranean isn’t too deep, and most of the wrecks are in a diveable condition with the right equipment. I know Annapolis and Dartmouth recently collaborated on a full 3D computer recreation of the battle based on new data; they can pretty much tell which shot hit where, thanks to the excellent record keeping and the scans from the wrecks.

    There was always a lot of guesswork about these large and expensive weapons, particular back then. And we military men are generally a cautious bunch; it’s better to miss an opportunity than to invite disaster. So the Italians and French seemed more formidable than they actually turned out to be; and the projected casualty estimates (something like 3 lost CVs, 8-9 lost BBs) turned out to be wildly pessimistic.

    The reconstruction proved that the Italian and French battleships had very limited protection against 16-inch super heavy shells, and absolutely none against 18-inch shells. This wouldn’t have been a problem had the pre-war strategic thinking prevailed, and those British super heavies squared off against the American ones. I’m guessing they just thought they could tank the damage and still overwhelm the anyway. Furthermore, they revealed some serious deficiencies in the torpedo protection systems, particularly of the Italian carriers. It was going to be a slaughter; as Ritter put it, the first and second most powerful navies teaming up to beat up the fourth and fifth.

    I think part of the problem with the decisive battle framework is that the consequences for defeat are not symmetric. In the Mediterranean, victory by the Axis only would have delayed the inevitable, and any losses they took in ships would be permanent. Even if the Allies suffered a disastrous defeat, they could and would replace those losses.

    In this respect, it’s similar to Jutland in WWI. The Grand Fleet and High Seas Fleet had wildly different consequences for failure. If Reinhard Scheer got his whole fleet shot out from under him, the course of the war would not significantly change for Germany, because Germany was a continental power and its small colonial empire was basically unimportant and already lost. But Sir John Jellicoe was the only person who could lose the war in a single afternoon. If the German Navy delivered a crippling defeat to the Royal Navy, it was game over. The Imperial Navy would break the blockade, and the British would lose their dominion over the sea. Now, you can argue whether or not that was a plausible outcome (unlikely, IMO), but it was such an important threat that Jellicoe did not attempted to press the engagement and inflict greater losses. Meanwhile, Germany didn’t have much to lose by being more aggressive than they were.

    The stakes were similar for Italy. Losing meant losing Africa, and giving the Allies the means to begin bombarding the homeland. Without Libyan oil, the Axis were in serious trouble, and the morale defeat to Mussolini’s boisterous public presence forced an escalation of disastrous and demoralizing repressive measures on the home front, including the arrest and murder of King Vittorio Emanuele III. The Kingdom under the Fascist period was pretty bad, but the new Italian Social Republic was a totalitarian nightmare state falling apart at the seams.
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    • traveller76

    traveller76

    There is mentions of the Allies superior fire control and radar systems during the naval war. Will this lead to earlier computer/electronic developments post war?
     

    QueerSpear

    Banned
    Mussolini kills the King? Does that mean that the Italian Social Republic is an italian construct rather than a German puppet?
     
    Aelita

    Aelita

    QueerSpear said:
    Mussolini kills the King? Does that mean that the Italian Social Republic is an italian construct rather than a German puppet?
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    Mr.E said:
    Talk about the biting the hands that fed you.
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    Well, like IOTL, the King was trying to depose Mussolini and find a way out of the war. But ITTL, Mussolini is in a stronger political position, and the Fascist security service is able to break up the plot early enough to prevent any public announcement. Mussolini is able to to paint these men as traitors and defeatists, and use the ensuing purges of the military and civil service to solidify control.

    But the military comes out of the process institutionally compromised. Military acumen matters less than loyalty to the regime. Increased civil resistance saps morale and production, leading to crackdowns, which reduces morale, leading to more civil resistance...

    But yes, at least at the start this "Social Republic" is a native Fascist construct, though they are increasingly the junior partner in the Axis.
     
    Aelita

    Aelita

    Knightmare said:
    As opposed to before, when they were what, the senior partners?
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    There was at least the pretense of formal equality between Hitler and Mussolini ITTL. This was sustained by them acquitting themselves fairly well on the Eastern Front, and by giving Britain some major defeats in 1942. Losing the Mediterranean and Suez was a calamity for the British militarily and economically, and under less able leadership they might have opted for a negotiated settlement.
     
    Guildencrantz

    Guildencrantz

    So the post about the end of the SA theater said that the sigma has a fascist stigma ittl like the swastika iotl. So what's used to represent summation in math?
     
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