What if the Americans start sending troops to Egypt in January 1942?

[Zheng He]

He still screwed it up.

Actually no, the HALPRO mission was on 11 June, Brereton did not arrive in Egypt from India until 25 June, he had nothing to do with that mission.

 

[Zheng He]

Back to the OP I could easily see this happening. After PH is attacked, FDR is concerned that pressure to go after Japan will undermine the Germany First strategy and he decides he needs American ground troops in action as soon as possible. He then orders Marshall to get Patton’s 2nd Armored Division to Egypt as quickly as they can get there.

No way Churchill turns that down.

 

[Dilvish]

Yes. I'd refer you to Stauntons 'Order of Battle for the US Army in WWII for a 620 page outline of the subject. The eighteen National Guard divisions had been mobilized in the autumn of 1940, reequipped, retrained, purged of political appointees, reorganized into the new triangular structure, retrained to the new doctrine again, & in Jan-March 1942 most were about as ready as any unit without combat experience could be. Note how the majority of the divisions and separate battalions or regiments sent overseas in 1942 were former NG units.


Separate Inf Regiments

3rd: Jan 41 to Newfoundland (Yes I cross checked the date)

4th: Jan 41 Alaska

24th: May 42 New Hebrides

33d: Dec 41 Trinidad

37th: July 41 Alaska

53d: June 42 Alaska

58th: June 42 Alaska

89th: Scattered across Caribbean 41-42

102d: Jan 42 Bora Bora

118th: Aug 42 Iceland

132d: Feb 42 Australia; May New Caledonia; Dec Guadalcanal Americal Div

138th: May 42 Alaska

147th: May 42 Fiji; Nov Guadalcanal Americal Div

150th: Panama

153d: Alaska

156th: Oct 42 UK

164th: Mar 42 New Caledonia

182d: Mar 42 Australia; Dec Guadalcanal Americal Div

201st: Sept 41 Alaska

295th: Puerto Rico

296th: Antilles, Panama, Puerto Rico...

297th: Alaska

298th: Hawaii

367th: April Liberia

434th: Caribbean

503 Parachute: Oct 42 Australia

509th Para: Nov 42 UK; Op TORCH

Point here is in the Separate Regiments & independent support battalions the US Army had the equivalent of another division or two available Jan 42.

The chaos of Allied cargo shipping in 1942 had more to do with the strategic or operational constraints. The rapid escalation of events & the the Pacific 1941 left cargo ship allocation planning useless, and wrong footed for much of 1942. Then there are things like the eight separate regiments in Alaska. Add in all the affiliated artillery, engineer, & support units & there a Arctic corps of three divisions equivalent sucking up cargo shipping for 1942. One can find all sorts of missteps like that as Allied planning adjusted to the new circumstances.

Amphibious Forces Atlantic Fleet were conducting corps size exercises by Jan 1942, so there was that minimal expeditionary capability.

I snipped a lot of Carl's post.

the 3rd Infantry Regiment to Newfoundland in January of 1941? That is interesting. There has to be a story there, both OTL and ATL.

Unrelated, if the US Army does go to Egypt, does the Navy follow in a significant way? I'm thinking of major units from the Atlantic Fleet.

 

[McPherson]

Actually no, the HALPRO mission was on 11 June, Brereton did not arrive in Egypt from India until 25 June, he had nothing to do with that mission.

https://www.historynet.com/ploesti-anatomy-disaster.htm

Sure he didn't.

McP.

 

[Zheng He]

Unrelated, if the US Army does go to Egypt, does the Navy follow in a significant way? I'm thinking of major units from the Atlantic Fleet.

Why? What's the major naval threat in the area? Following the defeat of the Italian Red Sea Flotilla in 1941, that area was declared a non-combat zone and US flagged merchant ships were then allowed to sail directly to the Suez Canal.

 

[Zheng He]

https://www.historynet.com/ploesti-anatomy-disaster.htm

Sure he didn't.

McP.

I recommend a more careful reading the article you linked. The article you linked is talking about a raid in July 1943. The HALPRO raid was on 11 June 1942, two weeks before Brereton arrived in Egypt. He had nothing to do with the HALPRO mission which is what Carl's post was talking about. Did he have a role in making a mess of the raid in 1943? Sure he did along with a lot of other people but he nothing to do with the June 1942 raid.

 

[McPherson]

And?

I recommend a more careful reading the article you linked. The article you linked is talking about a raid in July 1943. The HALPRO raid was on 11 June 1942, two weeks before Brereton arrived in Egypt. He had nothing to do with the HALPRO mission which is what Carl's post was talking about. Did he have a role in making a mess of the raid in 1943? Sure he did along with a lot of other people but he nothing to do with the June 1942 raid.

Here is where it gets "interesting".

HALPRO

Halpro (The Halverson Project ) was planned in January 1942, within a month of the attack at Pearl Harbor. Initially, it was designed to be a SEQUEL to the most famous bombing mission of World War II, the Doolittle raid over Tokyo. The rapid movement of the Japanese offensive in China however, changed Halpro's mission and through a strange series of circumstances, the project would become the PREQUEL to what might well have been the second most famous bombing raid of the war.

In the first month after the United States entered World War II, the Air War Plans Division put forth a plan to establish a major fighting air command in Burma to turn back the Japanese' sweeping advance into China. That new command was to be designated the 10th Air Force, and in mid-January Operation Aquila was employed to begin the initial buildup necessary to establish that command.

Operation Aquila was a 5-point program designed to provide fighters, bombers, and a supply chain to the theater. The first three points established the fighter command and logistics:

• The supply requisite was to take the form of thirty-five DC-3 transports flown into the region.
  
  
• Fighters to augment Claire Chennault's AVG Flying Tigers were to be sent in the form of fifty-one P40Es to be assembled in West Africa and flown to China.
  
  
• Thirty-three factory-fresh A-20 attack planes under the command of Colonel Leo H. Dawson were to be transported to the Chinese air force under the lend-lease agreement, after which the pilots were to be assigned to the 10th Air Force.

The bomber element of the new 10th Air Force was to originate from two separate, highly secret projects.

• The first was a volunteer group of B-25 pilots under command of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. The twenty-six medium range bombers were tasked with making a carrier-borne assault on Tokyo in what would become Doolittle's famous Tokyo Raid. Theirs was a two-part mission. After making the historic attack on the Japanese capitol, the raiders were to fly to China where pilots, crews and their B-25s were to be absorbed by the 10th Air Force. (It was the loss of all 26 bombers that distressed Doolittle to the belief that he would be court-martialed, despite the success of the first part of his mission.)
  
  
• Long-range bombing missions in the China-Burma theater would be carried out by a group of twenty-three B-24s under the command of Colonel Halvor "Hurry-up Harry" Halverson. This was the element that became known, by those few planners aware of its existence, as the Halpro Group (Halverson Project.) The group was tasked with flying EAST to reach China after completion of the Doolittle Raid. From their airfields in China, the Liberators would be within bombing range of Tokyo and able to continue the work from the west of Japan, that Doolittle's men started from an aircraft carrier east of the islands.

On February 12 while Doolittle was putting together his own volunteer crew, the 10th Air Force was activated at Patterson Field, Fairfield, Ohio. Five days later Colonel Harry A. Halverson was appointed the first Commanding Officer of the 10th Air Force. During March the Headquarters of the 10th was shifted from the U.S. to India after Major General Lewis H. Brereton, who had arrived in India from the Netherlands East Indies, assumed command. The move began on March 8th and was expected to take a month. At the time of the change of command the 10th had eight tactical aircraft at its disposal, all of them B-17s.

Meanwhile, Colonel Halverson began putting together his own unusual crew of airmen to pilot the twenty-three, factory-fresh B-24s to China. Only weeks after Doolittle's April 16 mission, the pilots of Halpro flew out of Florida. Their secretive sojourn to China took them south to Brazil before an eastward leg across the South Atlantic to Africa. From there the bombers flew to the Sudanese capitol of Khartoum, just beyond the range of the daily Axis raids on R.A.F. bases in Egypt. Halpro's last leg was to have been the flight into Chekiang, China, from which they hoped to bomb Tokyo. On May 11 the Japanese launched a major offensive in Chekiang. By the time Halpro reached the Sudan the airfield in their intended area of operation had fallen. With nowhere to go Colonel Halverson put his pilots and crews into a series of training missions, while awaiting further orders.

PLOESTI

When Hitler began his blitzkrieg in Europe the small nation of Romania found itself precariously perched between German advances in Poland and Hungary, and Soviet advances from the Ukraine. The small country, not even as large as the state of Oregon, found itself besieged on two fronts despite attempts at neutrality.

By ultimatum notes, on June 26 and 28, 1940, the Soviet Union forced Romania to cede Bessarbia, which had shaken off the Russian yoke in 1918, as well as Northern Bucovina (which had never belonged to Russia). Under the Vienna Diktat of August 30 that same year and after a German-Italia ultimatum, Romania was forced to give Hungary the north-western part of Transylvania. Under the Treaty of Craiova on September 7, 1940, Romania surrendered the southern part of Dobrudja. The loss of about one-third of the country's area and population caused a serious crisis which resulted in the abdication of King Carol II in favor of his son Mihai and the subsequent rise to power of General Ion Antonescu.

In June 1941 Romania abandoned neutrality and joined the Axis, primarily in hopes of regaining Basarabia and Northern Bucovina. Ironically, Romania had been allied AGAINST Germany in the First World War. In desperation now, she joined the Axis for reasons of self-preservation. Britain declared war on Romania (along with Finland and Hungary) on December 5, 1941.

The United States left its own initial policy of non-belligerency in the European war on December 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor and three days after declaring war on Japan. It was not however, until June 5, 1942, that the United States expanded that declaration of war on Germany and Italy to include Romania (along with Hungary and Bulgaria.) It was fateful timing, with Halpro impatiently awaiting new orders after the loss of its primary mission. When that order came it was almost as unbelievable as the circumstances that had brought Hurry-Up Harry Halverson's airmen to this point. Halpro's new orders were to bomb Ploesti.

Ploesti was an oil boom city in the plains below the Transylvanian Alps in the North, and the Romanian capitol of Bucharest in the south. Commercial refinement of oil began in Ploesti in 1857, making it the first city in the world to tap the riches of the earth that would become critical to feeding advancing technology including automobiles and then aircraft. By 1942 the refineries at Ploesti were producing nearly a million tons of oil a month, accounting for 40 per cent of Romania's total exports. Most of that oil, as well as the highest-quality 90-octane aviation fuel in Europe, went to the Axis war effort. Ploesti provided nearly a third of the petrol that fueled Hitler's tanks, battleships, submarines, and aircraft. In return, Germany occupied Romania and protected her natural resources--more specifically, German gunners guarded the multiple refining and storage plants that ringed Ploesti.

Unlike the sequel to the first mission over Ploesti, an August 1943 raid that was planned for nearly a year and practiced for months, Halpro's mission was a target of opportunity raid afforded by the week-old declaration of war on Romania. The pre-mission briefing was short, simple, and laid out an impossible task. Halverson's B-24s were to fly out of Egypt in the dark of night, cross the Mediterranean to a point on the Turkish coast, and then circle that neutral nation to come in over German occupied Greece. "You are not--I repeat not," advised the mission briefing officer from the R.A.F., "to enter neutral Turkish territory." This unpopular restriction pushed the round-trip flight to more than 2,600 miles, far beyond the range of any bombing mission in history. The pilots were instructed to drop their bombs from an altitude of 30,000 feet.

Recalled Captain John Payne, pilot of Black Mariah, "To us the briefing was straight out of 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.' Many of our ships could never make thirty thousand feet with an extra bomb bay tank and six five-hundred-pound bombs. And range....!"

When the 'official' briefing concluded and the briefing officers had left the room, the Halpro navigators broke into a steady buzz of discontent and disbelief in the mission they had been delegated. The unhappiness was broken only by the entrance of Colonel Halverson. The Halpro commander produced a worn map that had been provided for the mission, a map heavily creased on what would be a direct line from Egypt through Turkey and the Black Sea. To his men he announced, "Can we help it if the National Geographic put this line through Turkey?" For the first time, the navigators smiled. "Furthermore," Hurry-Up Harry continued, "I suggest that we bomb at fourteen thousand feet."

The first American bombing mission over Europe began when thirteen Halpro B-24s took off from an R.A.F. airstrip at Fayid, Egypt, at ten thirty on the night of June 11, 1942. As a night flight, destined to put the bombers over Ploesti with the first rays of dawn, it was impossible to maintain a flight formation. Each pilot was on his own, navigating through the dark skies over the Mediterranean, while hoping to find his comrades when the morning sun rose over the Black Sea.

One of the thirteen bombers was forced to turn back to Egypt when frozen fuel transfer lines cut power to three engines. The remaining twelve continued on towards Ploesti where they dropped their bombs on what was believed to be the large Astra Romana refinery.

In fact, the first raid on Ploesti was unremarkable and inflicted only minimal damage to the Romanian refineries and German oil supply. The mission however, represented a significant step for American air power. Not only were these the first bombs dropped over Europe by Americans, it was a demonstration of the great range the B-24 afforded for Allied operations. Of the twelve Liberators that reached Ploesti, six landed safely in Iraq (the designated recovery point for the mission) and two landed in Syria. Four bombers were forced to land in Turkey where the aircraft were seized and the crews interned. The only injuries were minor, and not a single man was lost or killed in action.

Few people beyond the crews that flew the mission and the enemy soldiers in the targets below them, ever knew that the mission had been launched. Three days after the raid the New York Times reported on Turkish dispatches under a headline that read: U.S. BOMBERS STRIKE BLACK SEA AREA -- BASE IS MYSTERY. Had the target been identified, the mission would probably still have remained a mystery. Few Americans beyond Allied war planners had ever heard of Ploesti.

Nine days after taking off to bomb Ploesti the Halverson Project was dissolved and its assets renamed the First Provisional Bombardment Group of the Middle East Air Force (MEAF) under command of Lieutenant General Lewis H. Brereton. In the months that followed the crews (minus the men held in Turkey) conducted regular combat operations in the Mediterranean. Most missions were flown against Italian shipping in North African ports that provided the enemy supply line to General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Corps. In the four months before the British breakthrough at El Alamein, the bomb group rarely had more than two dozen planes in the air. Nevertheless, the determined air-warriors attacked targets in the harbors of Tobruk and Benghazi, Navarrino Bay (Greece) and throughout the Mediterranean. They destroyed 60% of the fuel, food, and ammunition being shipped to Axis forces in North Africa.

On October 31, 1942, the First Provisional Bombardment Group became part of the newly activated 376th Heavy Bombardment Group. As the first heavy bombardment group to operate in the Middle East Theater, the 376th took great pride in its status and history, adopting the nickname "LIBERANDOS" after their B-24 Liberators. Throughout the winter, Halpro crews escaping from Turkey slowly made their way back to join the Liberandos. (By April 1943, all had returned to duty.)

On November 12 following the successful American invasion of North Africa code named Operation Torch, the Middle East Air Force was re-designated. It became the 9th Air Force.

Every person on the HALPRO mission was decorated with the Silver Star Medal or higher.

IOW... Yup, Brereton was involved. Maybe peripherally, but he was involved.

 

[Zheng He]

No, he wasn't, Halverson and Brereton never crossed paths prior to the mission being executed because Halverson never went to India with 10th Air Force, he stayed in the US and flew his bombers to Africa and flew the mission from Africa prior to Brereton arriving in Africa while the planning for 10th Air Force to bomb Japan took place before Brereton ever took command.

You are now just trying to split hairs as finely as possible because you don't want to admit you were wrong. It's not really a big deal, Brereton was involved in the disastrous July 1943 raid against Ploesti, of that there is no doubt but he clearly had nothing to do with the rather small June 1942 raid. You got your facts wrong on a couple of points, it happens to all of us, and like I said it's really not a big deal. You know, I've long suspected that you and Glenn239 are the same person and now I am sure of it.

 

[McPherson]

No, he wasn't, Halverson and Brereton never crossed paths prior to the mission being executed because Halverson never went to India with 10th Air Force, he stayed in the US and flew his bombers to Africa and flew the mission from Africa prior to Brereton arriving in Africa while the planning for 10th Air Force to bomb Japan took place before Brereton ever took command.

You are now just trying to split hairs as finely as possible because you don't want to admit you were wrong. It's not really a big deal, Brereton was involved in the disastrous July 1943 raid against Ploesti, of that there is no doubt but he clearly had nothing to do with the rather small June 1942 raid. You got your facts wrong on a couple of points, it happens to all of us, and like I said it's really not a big deal. You know, I've long suspected that you and Glenn239 are the same person and now I am sure of it.

Where did Brereton wind up? Where did the Halpro flyers wind up? Same pickle barrel. That is not splitting hairs and that is not coincidence. From start to finish they were planned to meet together. I don't believe in coincidences. And no matter how you slice it, when the pickles all came finally together we find it is Brereton who finally sours the deal.

 

[Look More Closely Later]

From the Nigel Hamilton biography of B. Montgomery (in Montgomery's own words, recorded in his 'war diary' in the summer of 1942):

...The condition of Eighth Army as described above is not overpainted; it was almost unbelievable. From what I know now it was quite clear that the reverses we had suffered at GAZALA and East of it, which finally forced us back to within 60 miles of ALEXANDRIA, should never have happened.
Gross mis-management, faulty command, and bad staff work, had been the cause of the whole thing.
But the final blame must rest on General AUCHINLECK for allowing an inexperienced General like RITCHIE to mishandle grossly a fine fighting Army, and for allowing a policy of dispersion to rule.
Divisions were split up into bits and pieces all over the desert; the armour was not concentrated; the gunners had forgotten the art of employing artillery in a concentrated form.
If changes in the higher command had not been made early in August, we could have lost EGYPT.
Actually, they were made only just in time.
A clean sweep was required in the Middle East, and new Commanders had to be brought in; Commanders who would NOT be influenced by past events, but who would take each situation on its merits and decide on a method suitable to the occasion and to local conditions...

- From MONTY The making of a General 1887-1942 by Nigel Hamilton (1984 coronet paperback edition)

Okay: It's Monty, who rarely exuded an impression of lacking in self-belief (and who himself needed handling tactfully by subordinates when they thought he was overlooking something), but his view seems to have been that General Ritchie was the problem (and Auchinleck for putting Ritchie in charge of things).

Edit
I'm not clear to what extent Monty may have been aware at the time he wrote the above criticism of the Axis intelligence successes which had been taking place in Libya with the broken American codes and the radio intercepts...

 

[marathag]

I'm not clear to what extent Monty may have been aware at the time he wrote the above criticism of the Axis intelligence successes which had been taking place in Libya with the broken American codes and the radio intercepts...

Having the Free French at Bir Hakeim, with those legionnaires trying to make a real life stand at Fort Zinderneuf, was not the sign of an Axis intelligence coup, but an idiot at Auks HQ for having that strongpoint(and was it strong) only having one brigade nearby in the North, and then the 150th Brigade had their own problems once the DAK attacked

 

[McPherson]

I'm not clear to what extent Monty may have been aware at the time he wrote the above criticism of the Axis intelligence successes which had been taking place in Libya with the broken American codes and the radio intercepts...

• The most widely used pre-war British Naval code.
• The British and Allied Merchants Ships (BAMS) code.
• US Navy codes (until 1942). (Sigaba II came into service and was not penetrated.)
• British "Naval Cypher No.3" for Allied radio communication and convoy coordination in the Atlantic.
• British "Naval Cypher No.5".
• Various low-grade British Naval and Air codes.
• The US M209 field cipher machine (This one hurt.)
• Reichpost tapped the US to UK undersea cable and descrambled the phone calls between Churchill and FDR. That one really hurt, too.^1
• ^1

  Page 245, "David Sarnoff", a biography, by Eugene Lyons, Harper & Row, 1966.
  
  "The suspicion that underseas cables could be tapped by an enemy was not born in Sarnoff's mind. It had been raised by electronics experts as far back as 1920 but somehow had failed to register in the military establishment. Once aware of the possibly, however, Sarnoff never forgot it. Meanwhile the refinement of electronic powers tended to raise the suspicion to a near certainty.
  
  "The Atlantic was swarming with German submarines. The geographical pattern of ship sinkings showed the enemy hunted close to trans-ocean cable. Why, then, did he refrain from cutting the cables, as the Germans had done promptly in World War I and were expected by the Allies to in the new war? Colonel Sarnoff's answer was simple and starling--President Roosevelt, who was briefed on the subject, was among those startled.
  
  "If Hitler's U-boats were siphoning off valuable information by tapping and decoding cable messages, Sarnoff pointed out, they would scarcely wish to interrupt their flow...".

Research not mine. Belongs to a once 12-4 Watch, Navy Research Lab's, USNS Mizar, T-AGOR 11, O/S helmsman. No I don't know his name.

This prompted Bell Labs to develop a white noise scrambler in 1943 which seems to have put the Reichpost out of business.

 

[Carl Schwamberger]

...
Edit
I'm not clear to what extent Monty may have been aware at the time he wrote the above criticism of the Axis intelligence successes which had been taking place in Libya with the broken American codes and the radio intercepts...

The signals intel problem had the close attention of very important people in London. SOE in the UK had gone through a embarrassing situation, actually multiple embarrassments in 1941-early 42 whilst operating in Europe. Cleaning up that mess led attention directly to Egypt & the Med/ME in general. Several people involved in that clean up were sent to Egypt & other locations in 1942 on a audit & reform of signals intel there. This is approximately the same period a artillery officer or two from the UK with license to kill were mucking about 8th Armys artillery regiments & senior HQ. From these & similar tales I suspect Monty was not sent to reform 8th Army, he was one part of a larger ongoing effort to fix all the problems & reform it & ME command in general.

I'm not a slavish fan or either Churchill or Brooke, but the pair were at their best in 1942 allowing a large number of much needed changes to be hammered through as 1941 devolved into winter 1942 & then on into summer & autumn..