Recent content by Merrick

That said, even limited success in Cilicia is likely to turn out better for the Entente than OTL's failure at Gallipoli. But it may not be that much better. Instead of throwing themselves at the Gallipoli ridges, the ANZACs find themselves stuck in a static attritional battle in the Taurus. The...

This has been discussed previously on the forum a few times. The big downside of the Cilicia/Alexandretta plan, as @Disraeli's Ghost pointed out upthread, is that it's not a knockout blow. Suppose everything works as well as possible - the landing is a success, the Entente forces rapidly secure...

One thing I've never been able to find out - were the Antares/Ward reports something new, or had the guardships been attacking suspicious whales, oil slicks and floating logs every other day for the last month? There's nothing like repeated false alarms to dull the response to a real one...

OTL, this convoy was the (in)famous PQ17, where the mere report that the Tirpitz had sortied panicked the Admiralty into ordering the convoy to scatter, with bloody results. As it turned out, there was no surface attack made on the convoy, Tirpitz was just repositioning. TTL with a beefed-up...

And this is the best-case scenario, the one where the equipment is all working, the message is recognised as important, people are available to deal with it, no-one decides to send back to Singapore for confirmation.... Given the way the Ward sighting, not to mention the final warning from...

WWII-era practice was to refine the oil close to the well and then transport the refined products. So the Soviet oil refineries were in the Caucasus, mostly at Baku. Of course, whether they would be still usable after capture is another question.

Marking Iraq - which had a pro-Axis revolt that was put down by the British - as "Allied" is stretching it. I don't think who ever drew up that list had much of a concept of "colonies", let alone the sorta-semi-colonies that were the Middle Eastern Mandates. Note that Syria is on the list, but...

I'll second this. If the (Vichy) French authorities in Tunisia are allowing Allied aircraft to base out of Tunis and warships out of Sfax, then they've de-facto joined the Allies, even if no French forces took part in the operation against the Italian islands. Which has a whole lot of...

Given the location at the bottom, may it should be "California is building solar in Illinois and Missouri is going to pay for it"? Including New Zealand (and Tasmania) while leaving out Australia is stylish and unusual, but the Kirkines-Iskanderun Canal is something genuinely novel. I can't...

If they did, they either: - Didn't speak English ("countrise" and "Not work in UK" suggests bad machine translation) - Didn't know any European geography - Didn't care - All of the above

Another very good update. Nice background on the Shinshu Maru (which I'd never heard of, but it appears that the SNLF were doing a lot of pioneering work on amphibious landing in the 1930s). One question - would a Japanese officer in December 1941 think of the opposition as "the Allies", given...

You do wonder what the characters have been getting up to that led to the creation of the Gulf of Tibet...

Unless there are major strategy changes at high level - yes. OTL British tank production peaked in 1942 and then declined as industrial exhaustion, resource shortages and competing priorities took their toll. I believe exactly one British armoured division in Normandy fielded British designs...

This, very much this. The US pre-war planning for the Philippines was always hopelessly incoherent. The Philippines could not be abandoned - politically unthinkable! - but the US Navy resisted sending ships to what they viewed as an indefensible outpost, the US Army had no units to send...

The US Army - or at least the National Guard - was still finishing the process of motorising its artillery in 1941. Wikipedia claims that the last horse tows were replaced in December, but doesn't say if that was before or after Pearl Harbor. That manual also covers mule transport. Pack mules...