- Status
Story 0759
October 2, 1941 Fort Stotsenberg, Luzon
“Maggots are smarter than you. They stay on the ground no matter what. Private Illababaru you are an idiot, I am surprised that your mother ever trusted you with a spoon. You thought. Privates do not think. Sergeants think and officers order. When you are allowed to think, you will be issued a brain and rockers. Do I make myself clear, private”
The young man tried not to swallow hard as he looked at the bantam-weight sergeant in front of him. His company sergeant had seen him left his hips off the ground when the entire company was supposed to be taking cover during an artillery barrage. It had been several weeks since he had to hold the dead cockroach position from his last screw up but Sergeant Ibling saw everything.
“Sergeant, perfectly clear”
“Go run to the barracks and back, one hundred push-ups at the barracks and one hundred more when you get back”
As the private started his jog to the barracks, he did not see his sergeant’s lips curl slightly in what may have been a penumbra of a smile. The company was coming along better than most of the other company of the 11th Infantry Regiment of the Philippine Army Reserve. Each battalion had a platoon of long service Scouts. The non-commissioned officers of the platoon were scattered and over-promoted. Under normal circumstances, Sergeant Ibling would have been receiving his first squad command if he was on a fast track, more often he would be an assistant squad leader. Now he had been promoted twice and made the first sergeant of an infantry company with a fresh from training lieutenant as the company commander and full of recently recalled reservists.
At least they had time. The first reservists had arrived in early August and the last by September first so the past month had been productive. Later on in the week, they would be going to the rifle range for the first time and the reservists would show what they had learned and what they had forgotten since 1939.
Story 0760 Start of Operation Typhoon October 2 1941
October 2, 1941 East of Smolensk
The ground shook again. German artillery started to fire. The peasant woman hugged the ground. Her children had survived the German occupation as their mother engaged in the oldest trade in the world but the German infantrymen and artillerymen had been called back to the front. She worried about the counter-battery fire although her newly trained ear did not hear any big Soviet shells coming towards her collective farm. She worried about the new German troops that had concentrated near her village, they did not know her and they had no reason to protect her or her family. She could not worry about the consequences of being a collaborator, that was a future past the week, past the month, past the winter. She once could dream in years but now she only thought in hours, days and weeks.
Thirty miles south of her, the 1st Panzer Army began to advance. The few working French and Czech light tanks were in the vanguard battle group which was attempting to find the forward Soviet positions and bull through the hasty positions and flow around the strong positions. Behind the advance screen, the German built Panzers with supporting mechanized infantry shielded the trucks from seven nations that would supply the advance. And behind those trucks, the leg infantry was still marching forward with horses and oxen bringing their guns to the front.
The war which had been quiet for a few months was now pushing back towards Moscow.
Story 0761
October 4, 1941 near Lake Baikal, Trans Siberian railroad
East bound trains held factories and refugees including hundreds of Jews who were still being let out into the wider world by a helpful Japanese consul. West bound trains were full of reservists and heavy equipment. The first of several divisions from the Siberia, Far East and Transbaikal military districts had received orders to move west to Moscow. A tank division that had crushed the Japanese at Khalkin Gol had finished loading all of its heavy equipment including the repair workshops for its tanks onto flatbed trains and had started moving west. The men were well trained and their officers actually had the time to learn their jobs. The last of the reservists had filled out their ranks in July and some men who had fought the Germans had arrived three weeks earlier to discuss their lessons.
The tanks were still too light and there were not enough radios but the division could fight as a coherent whole if it could arrive in Moscow in time to defend the capital from the new German onslaught.
Last edited:
Under peacetime conditions in 1941 a fully loaded freight train from east of Baikal to Moscow would take 5-6 days if there were no special problems. IMHO. Given that it will take several trains to move the division with men, machines, and logistics having all of this stuff arrive in the Moscow area under wartime conditions with congestion etc on limited trackage, 10-14 days to arrive before detraining would be best case scenario. Again, best case 2-3 days to detrain and collect everything for further movement to defensive lines. From Moscow to where they will be employed hard to guess - if road march it won't be quick and you'll lose tanks due to breakdowns on the way. If they roll through Moscow and get close to the front on trains it would be quicker, but the detraining process will be longer than they would be in a rail complex like Moscow.
As a best guess, if all goes reasonably well it would be three weeks before this division was online and ready for combat which means roughly October 25. If the fall mud season has begun before this, they will be delayed going west just as the Germans will be delayed going east. Of course if there are glitches, a temporarily blocked line etc, the arrival date of this division on the front could be delayed, perhaps quite some time.
As a best guess, if all goes reasonably well it would be three weeks before this division was online and ready for combat which means roughly October 25. If the fall mud season has begun before this, they will be delayed going west just as the Germans will be delayed going east. Of course if there are glitches, a temporarily blocked line etc, the arrival date of this division on the front could be delayed, perhaps quite some time.
Story 0762
October 4, 1941 Haifa
The harbor was full. It was full of ocean going merchant ships, it was full of small coasters, it was cluttered with work craft. It was full of the normal commerce that it routinely supported as both a peacetime port and a war port in British Palestine. The inner harbor was also closed to commercial traffic. A dozen assault ships were loading a brigade of infantry. This was the third time that this brigade had been loaded. The previous two times had been for training exercises. Equipment that would be immediately needed on the beach was loaded as far to the front and tops of the cargo holds as possible. Sustainment supplies were secondary and stored deeper in the ships’ holds.
The rest of the task force was loading in Alexandria. Two Royal Marine Commandos would be the lead wave as they loaded on the Glen class assault ships. A regiment of older tanks had gone through the workshops one last time before they were driven back into the holds of the converted shallow draft oil tankers. Soon enough, the two brigade groups would be full loaded onto seventeen assault ships and they would be ready for action.
October 5, 1941, Cyprus
The airfields near Nicosia were busy. Two squadrons of Hurricanes had just taken off heavy with fuel tanks hanging underneath their bellies. The twenty one aircraft would fly a fighter sweep against the airfields on Italian controlled Rhodes. As soon as the strike had formed up, the morning raid against Rhodes was getting ready to land. A squadron of Beaufighters had escorted two Blenheim squadrons, one Greek and one Australian manned. They had approached Calato airfield at 500 feet as the sun was rising and dropped a mixture of 40, 250 and 500 pound bombs. The strike commander was claiming numerous secondary explosions and fires on the Italian fighter base. Anti-aircraft defenses claimed one Greek bomber and Italian fighters were able to evade the heavy British escort fighters and splashed two Australian bombers. Parachutes were seen from one of the downed bombers.
Another round of strikes were planned for dusk. The pace of operations was picking up over the past week as several squadrons had been flown in from the Delta to supplement the offensive capacity of the forces on Cyprus.
Going to be a while before Crete has any offensive value, but it looks like Greek Forces are getting stuck in.
this is unfair to McClellan. There is no evidence that McClellan did not care about his troops, or was lazy or a bad organiser. Macarthur was guilty of all these sins and many more.
Story 0763
October 6, 1941 Worcester, Massachusetts
The troop train was leaving the station. An infantry brigade group was aboard the long train. The 182nd Infantry Regiment with the attached battalion of 75 millimeter guns, an engineering company and other support elements were on their way to Pine Camp in upstate New York. There they were scheduled for three weeks of intensive field maneuvers against other national Guard regiments and divisions that were almost due to be certified as ready for deployment.
Sergeant Donohue did not care about the grand plan. He cared that his wife said that she felt different and thought she might be pregnant. They had been trying and if he was tracking her calendar right, she should not know yet, but when he said this to her, Elaine smiled and told him to trust her. He allowed himself another moment for himself before he had to stare at O’Callahan, a draftee and assistant machine gunner as the private looked like he was thinking of playing a joke on another platoon. That would have been fine if O’Callahan was subtle and could cover his tracks, but few eighteen year olds were ever subtle.
Eileen Donohue waved at her husband as the train pulled out of the station. She was smiling and crying. He was leaving but he was coming back at least one more time. The rumors had been that the brigade group was due to deploy somewhere overseas very shortly. They would have one more pass she hoped before nausea dominated her life. As the train went around the bend, she waved one last time and then went to find her uncle who had driven her to the Worcester train station. He was playing cards with a half dozen other men, all veterans of the first war, and they were telling stories about the time that their trains pulled out of the station for the last time.
Story 0763
October 7, 1941 Near Orel
An infantry regiment was in well prepared positions inside of the small village along the main highway to Moscow. Panzergrenediers would bleed and tanks would brew up to take the village from the defenders. However the spearhead was not harmed, they made a seven mile detour into the burned out wheat fields around the defenses. Two Soviet divisions were already in the bag once the leg infantry could catch up with the spearheads. They would eventually need to winkle out the defenders as they would need the road but the defenders could be impotent for several days as the spearheads reached forward to find the main Soviet defensive lines along the road to Moscow.
Even as the spearheads were pushing north, the first tanks were running into their most significant opposition. The fall rains had started to lightly mist along the pathways to central Russia.
There is little to change the Japanese strategic situation. If anything a stronger UK presence in Malaya means the IJN really needs to make sure it is only fighting one enemy at a time.
And narrows the room from error to little (what little it has with the Japanese fixation on Lasanga layer style operational schedules with complex ops) to basically no room for mistakes.
A roll of 6 at one battle IOTL can easily turn into a roll of 2 or 1 ITTL.
It seems like you are hinting that Japan will attack the British only. At least initially.
Or that they will see an even greater need to cripple the US Pacific Fleet, so that they can concentrate on attacking the various SE Asian colonies.
The question OTL, and here ITTL that the Japanese have to ask themselves is "if we seize Indochina/Malaya/DEI/Borneo will the US allow the loot to be sent to Japan as it bypasses the Philippines." This is the key question as it does Japan no good to seize the resources it needs if they can't be brought to Japan. Since OTL the seizure of Indochina triggered the complete US embargo of Japan, certainly seizing the resource areas by force will produce a sever reaction. As I said, this is still something the Japanese have to think about ITTL, and if they decide, like OTL, that counting on the USA to do nothing and allow the stolen resources to flow to Japan is a bad bet, they will feel obliged to attack the US.
- Status