U. S. Airbases in Siberia during 1942 or 1943

TxCoatl1970

@ Dathi-- AlCan Highway was a boondoggle. Folks planned it in the 1920's, and dusted it off figuring that with a wide open finding spigot and bodies sent to make it happen during WWII, it would.
Barring a new gold rush, it wasn't happening. Even when the Alaskan oil pipeline was built in the 1970's, no Al-Can highway happened b/c nothing changed the basic cost structure of getting gear or people to Alaska.

Outside of a more serious Japanese effort in the Aleutians, Al-Can highway ranks with the Frisian invasion plans for gross waste of resources. IMO there's next to no reasons to build roads to nowhere when seaports and airports get the job done with a lot less investment, footprint, etc.

Back to the OP of Siberian airbases, IDK if they'd be more than relay stations for L-L aircraft, not springboards for attacks on Japan. USSR would have to come off the fence vs Japan and they had enough fish to fry fighting the Nazis in 1942. Plus, the weather sucks up there for sustained air and naval ops. Also, the Kamchatka Peninsula's a very seismically and volcanically active area.
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

TxCoatl1970 said:
@ Dathi-- AlCan Highway was a boondoggle. Folks planned it in the 1920's, and dusted it off figuring that with a wide open finding spigot and bodies sent to make it happen during WWII, it would.
Barring a new gold rush, it wasn't happening. Even when the Alaskan oil pipeline was built in the 1970's, no Al-Can highway happened b/c nothing changed the basic cost structure of getting gear or people to Alaska.

Outside of a more serious Japanese effort in the Aleutians, Al-Can highway ranks with the Frisian invasion plans for gross waste of resources. IMO there's next to no reasons to build roads to nowhere when seaports and airports get the job done with a lot less investment, footprint, etc.

Back to the OP of Siberian airbases, IDK if they'd be more than relay stations for L-L aircraft, not springboards for attacks on Japan. USSR would have to come off the fence vs Japan and they had enough fish to fry fighting the Nazis in 1942. Plus, the weather sucks up there for sustained air and naval ops. Also, the Kamchatka Peninsula's a very seismically and volcanically active area.
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Actually, i agree with most of that. But with the canadian side mostly in place, built over almost a decade, the panic that set in iotl could go a lot further.

That panic wasnt terribly rational iotl, and would lead to even stupider decisions ittl, but ... i think those stupid decisions are possible. And one way to fill the op's request.
 

katchen

Banned
The Alcan Highway was basically a bulldozer track; something like an early Ho Chi Minh Trail that could be used to supply resistance fighters if the Japanese were stupid enough to try to take over Alaska. As such, it served it's purpose. It kept Alaska from being a sitting duck for the Japanese.

For Alaska to actually fulfull it's potential and contribute to the American economy as well as be a true forward base against Japan was lost during the Great Depression. If an Alaska Territory Authority similar to the Tennessee Valey Authority had been launched in 1933 with an aim of building several paved road links to the Lower 48 as well as extending the Federallly owned Alaska Railroad to the Lower 48 as a stimulus project, the infrastructure for military bases would have been in place by 1941 and Americans would have been migrating to the Alaska frontier in large numbers over the completed Alaska Highways just as they had to western frontiers in previous economic downturns.
Arable land in Alaska would have been in the process of being homesteaded by farmers who lost their land in the dust bowls and mineral deposits such as the Kobuk copper deposits and the Prudhoe Bay oil deposits would be in the process of being developed with refineries starting to be built. There would be roads and railroads all the way to Nome and Wales at the tip of the Bering Strait and Port Heiden, Chignik and Port Moller, ice free anchorages on the end of the Alaska Peninsula. And Alaska would be one or more states, closer to Japan than Hawaii and well nigh impregnable.

Then the US could think about building up forces on Kiska Island (which has an excellent anchorage, which is why the Japanese captured it) and assaulting one of the Kuril Islands, (maybe Paramushir, the Northernmost of them) , then Etorofu, then Hokkaido, directly into the Japanese home islands, wile Japense forces were tied up in the South Pacific.
 

Major Major

Alaska: Somebody's been reading Alexander P. de Seversky's Victory Through Air Power (1942) with the lurid illustration on "Air Power Strikes at the Heart", showing a Japanese octopus with tentacles spreading across the Pacific, but long-range American bombers flying from Alaska to bomb the Home Islands. As has been pointed out upthread, no infrastructure, and I don't think the POD given will really work. There's also weather to consider.

Siberia: I haven't seen any comments anywhere on what the Soviets did with the pilots and ground crew of the Normandie-Niemen Squadron. They didn't want anyone seeing sensitive things in the USSR, or the locals associating with foreigners and getting un-Soviet ideas.

USAAF air bases in the Maritime Provinces should have problems of that sort. And if a plane has to touch down near Kolyma . . . "It just disappeared."

Recall that until the daring revolutionary about-turn, all American pilots and aircrew diverting to the Soviet Union were interned, from Ski York and his Doolittle Raiders on.

(Incidentally, the current Doolittle Tokyo Raiders Reunion will be the last one. Too old to do public relations.)
 

Color-Copycat

Major Major said:
Siberia: I haven't seen any comments anywhere on what the Soviets did with the pilots and ground crew of the Normandie-Niemen Squadron. They didn't want anyone seeing sensitive things in the USSR, or the locals associating with foreigners and getting un-Soviet ideas.

USAAF air bases in the Maritime Provinces should have problems of that sort. And if a plane has to touch down near Kolyma . . . "It just disappeared."

Recall that until the daring revolutionary about-turn, all American pilots and aircrew diverting to the Soviet Union were interned, from Ski York and his Doolittle Raiders on.

(Incidentally, the current Doolittle Tokyo Raiders Reunion will be the last one. Too old to do public relations.)
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The Normandie-Niemen pilots were assigned Soviet ground crews. They supposedly got on rather famously despite the language barrier, with the French pilots even giving the Soviet mechanics lifts when their unit was moved to a different airfield.

And the NKVD was pretty good about transporting interned American aircrews to the Iranian border and looking the other way as the Americans "escaped". Of course, this was after they'd had the opportunity to extensively debrief the American aircrews and wring every last bit of useful military intelligence out of them.
 
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