He would have been disappointed quite often. For example, the final commander of the army group defending Berlin was General Gotthard Heinrici, who had he earlier sacked from an army command.
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BISMARCK & TIRPITZ cause Germany to lose the Battle of the Atlantic
- Thread starter steel_captain
- Start date
To be fair to the British the French had just in their eyes done a complete 180 and gone from intending to fight to the last man to capitulating to the French, and despite a treaty being in place saying that France was now neutral and its fleet would not be under anyone's control no one with a brain believed a word the Germans signed on paper. For the British, who felt betrayed and very isolated and feared the Germans seizing the MN there was no other choice.
That being said Darlan and the new government would then badly mishandle and misread the situation and leave the British feeling they were being led on and had no other choice than a bombardment of the French fleet to cripple it.
That being said at the end of the day the British did kill many of their former allies.
True of any war unfortunately.
New tidbit of info filed away for later.
You have some sentences here that really fit with POD devisement: "sometimes planners get a dud situation and still have to come up with something workable and don't play is not an option." Good for a manual on how to write alternate history, although there is probably sometimes an option of not playing at all (e.g., the Turks and the Portuguese in World War II). But a small ship and boat navy would come to the attention of the Brits and they would devise ways of using both their traditional navy, the RAF and a Fleet air arm (as well as their own version of a small ships and boats navy as used, many of them on a volunteer basis, to rescue the troops from Dunkirk--Britain had hundreds of years of using such small vessels as well as privateers going back to the attack on the Spanish Armada). Britain in the late 1930s could probably catch up and move ahead in how to destroy the efforts of Germany as a land power to suddenly transform itself in only three years into the fantasy equivalent of the British warrior island with its tradition dating back to Francis Drake and indeed to Alfred the Great. Churchill was prepared to use fire ships and walls of flame against such invaders as was done in part against the Spanish Armada--and over a thousand years earlier by Leo the Isaurian, who successfully used Greek Fire to defend Constantinople against a massive naval attack by Muslim forces.
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Do you have figures to support this - the most recent academic studies suggest otherwise.
They should have done. Harris should have bene told to hand over his older aircraft and more VLR liberators.
Do you have figures to support this statement?
I am very pleased to see the understanding of the difficulties if moving this fabled oil back to Germany starting to be acknowledged, especially by historians. The railway gauge of the USSR was different to that of Germany making effective bulk shipping of oil a massive PITA.
It doesn't work like that - you need quality AND quantity to turn out captains and crews willing and able to press home attacks. You also need enough teachers to teach them!
Doesn't work like that - you need high quality captains to press home attacks. Look at how many poor quality U Boat captains sank nothing. For every Günther Prien there were several "duffers".
TO say triple the losses is one hell of a leap!
They don't have to sink the U-boat - they just have to force it away or under. The U-boat cant maintain contact submerged.
Doesn't work like that
"Paragraph Eleven - Acknowledge"
We did - At Billingham ICI WERE making synthetic fuel from 1935. It wasn't massive but it was a start. Another plant was built at Heysham in 1941
You keep making superficial statement like this. I mean, yeah, we are both island nations but there are quite few important differences!
Please cite any evidence you have from credible sources that Churchill "helped arrange" the assassination of Darlan.
MI6, OSS and de Gaulle were rumored to be involved.
Operation Torch and The Assassination of Admiral Jean Darlan
The assassination of Admiral Jean Darlan during Operation Torch in North Africa unraveled a web of intrigue and deception.
warfarehistorynetwork.com
Admiral Darlan was killed in an operation linked to the super-secret British intelligence group MI-6, also known as the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service), and possibly the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the modern Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), led by William “Wild Bill” Donovan.
"""
Nice long, thorough investigation.
- On the afternoon of 24 December 1942, Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle shot Darlan in his headquarters; Darlan died a few hours later. De La Chapelle was arrested immediately.
- On 25 December 1942, Christmas day, he was tried and convicted.
- On 26 December 1942 executed by firing squad.
"""
The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey, He wrote on November 16, 1942, that at a meeting that day with Churchill and Anthony Eden, “We all agreed that we must get rid of Darlan somehow.” When Darlan was shot on December 24, Harvey wrote in his diary of his relief at seeing “the removal of this horrible quisling.”
""""
Motive: Assassination in Algiers: Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle, and the Murder of Admiral Darlan
"""
The British were shocked to discover that Roosevelt had made a deal with Darlan, promising political leadership in postwar France. When Darlan was assassinated on Christmas Eve, 1942, by a young member of the local Resistance, there was "a notable absence of regret" on the part of the British and Gaullists.
"""
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Having read that, I don't see how you get to Churchill helping arrange his assassination.Operation Torch and The Assassination of Admiral Jean Darlan
The assassination of Admiral Jean Darlan during Operation Torch in North Africa unraveled a web of intrigue and deception.
Not too upset it had happened, but then he was on a long list of those.
One year later De Gaulle held a one minute silence in honour of the assassin, for example.
Roosevelt, Hitler, Mussolini, Petain were also on the list of those who were not unhappy.
Shot by a member of a fringe group of extremists outside anybody's control seems most likely, using Occams razor.
Outside influence/control on that group seems unlikely, and even if it was, UK agency doesn't seem any more likely than US, Free French, Vichy French, or Axis.
A mishmash of conspiracy allegations along with cherry-picked and often seriously distorted facts similar to those in many Kennedy assassination theories. It doesn't come close to proving what you claim about Churchill. And you listed a more outrageous example by Thomas E. Ricks under the headline "Who whacked Admiral Darlan? My guess is that Winston Churchill ordered it." https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/12/1...y-guess-is-that-winston-churchill-ordered-it/Operation Torch and The Assassination of Admiral Jean Darlan
The assassination of Admiral Jean Darlan during Operation Torch in North Africa unraveled a web of intrigue and deception.
"My guess," indeed! Here's samples of Ricks' guesswork:
First, a statement in the "obscure" diaries of a "minor" British political figure who was purportedly in a meeting with Churchill, Anthony Eden and others shortly after Darlan changed sides. "We all agreed that we must get rid of Darlan somehow." Ricks asserts, based on the diary entry: "That is a loaded statement." However, it is not a "statement" but merely a description of general sentiment that could be interpreted in various ways. With the Allies in control of Algeria, removing Darlan from his temporary position could be accomplished without assassination.
And second, Ricks quotes from Churchill: "Darlan's removal, however criminal, relieved the Allies of the embarrassment of working with him." About which Ricks comments: "This is almost a self-justification, no?" I don't see how Churchill's statement (taken from Volume Four of his History of World War Two) provides the slightest evidence that he had Darlan "whacked."
Note: in posting this I mistakenly attributed both the article by Peter Kross, the first one cited by prester.john208, and the second one on the list, by Thomas Ricks, to Ricks. I corrected this within about five minutes of posting.
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Garrison
Donor
That is a radical interpretation of the facts. Mers El Kebir was a legitimate military operation, given that the French had already broken their promise not to seek a separate peace and relying on Darlan being able to prevent the French fleet falling into German or Italian hands would have been an absurd risk. And the idea of De Gaulle as Churchill's catspaw is just mind boggling.
I think the Frisian Islands will soon be the next shiny object... or perhaps an Op Plan that involves the Isle of Wight
Around 60% of the fleet was moved away from France. By tonnage, about 40 % was in Toulon, near Marseilles, 40 % in French North Africa and 20 % in Britain, Alexandria and the French West Indies. Without ASB assistance, the Germans were not getting their hands on it.
The French ships berthed in Plymouth and Portsmouth were boarded without warning on the night of 3 July.
After the attack major fleet elements were moved back to France.
Darlan honored his promise, the fleet was scuttled when the Germans over ran Vichy France.
Churchill was desperate for a cheap win after Dunkirk, the fall of France and the loss of the Lancastria.
Admiral Somerville said that it was "the biggest political blunder of modern times and will rouse the whole world against us ... we all feel thoroughly ashamed..."Smith, C., England's Last War Against France: Fighting Vichy 1940–1942, pp. 86, 88.
What anglophile, FDR said about 2 similar incidents.
de Gaulle was grabbIng French territory as Churchill wanted done. At that point in time he was dependent on British assistance. For some reason FDR was not a big fan of his.
Great book on de Gaulle,
https://www.amazon.com/Gaulle-Julian-Jackson/dp/0674987217
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Superficial statements? Two island nations each heavily industrialized with large navies and air forces but no home based oil resources to keep those forces fueled. Granted that Britain had lots of coal but there were no coal burning warships left by this period and even most of their merchant ships were oil-fueled. Both nations needed their sealanes to remain open so that the crude oil they desperately needed to stay in the war could be delivered. In the case of Britain early in the war Germany was hammering very hard on that and got Britain down to two months reserves which was previous little and of course after 1943 the US Navy started hammering on crude oil going to Japan and we know what that did to them. WWII was the first war fought for oil and the two biggest belligerent nations ended up collapsing because they did not have the oil they needed to prosecute the wars which they started.
There are several books that have been written about this but the one I refer to most is The Prize by Daniel Yergin who went into considerable detail of how both Japan's and Germany's war machines were defeated for no other reason than they could not deploy their forces by not receiving nearly enough crude oil to do so.
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Garrison
Donor
Hardly, had the French dithered after Case Anton or the Germans planned better they could easily have taken some parts of the Fleet and the idea that the British should have relied on the word of Darlan is absurd.
And in this Somerville was wrong, if anything it demonstrated to the Americans that the British had the ruthlessness needed to fight the war and comparing Mers El Kebir to Pearl Harbor is absurd whataboutism. The British offered the force at Mers El Kebir multiple options and it was largely the actions of Admiral Gensoul that led to the bombardment owing to his refusal to pass the full text of the British ultimatum to his superiors.
Garrison
Donor
And there you are wrong right out of the gate, Japan was not heavily industrialized and was crippled as much by the American embargo on scrap metal and loans as oil. You really do seem to have a very superficial level of awareness of the war and the major players.
Japan was industrialized but was more of the smaller workshop based type industry. You had plenty of places making things, the only was they might only make less than 10 to as low 2 or 3 a week on some things. Only on some of the larger items did they are built in large quantity/mass produced items. Even the Zero in someways was made under this type of production with them having to be towed from the factory over roads to get to the airfield to be flown out to the Navy.
You had to import nearly all of the basic resources from coal, oil, iron ore, other metal ores, and such to be used to make even the basic beginnings of any production.
You had to import nearly all of the basic resources from coal, oil, iron ore, other metal ores, and such to be used to make even the basic beginnings of any production.
But they didn't dither. The attacks poisoned relations with France for years. The attack was for PR reasons, Churchill/Britain was riding a losing streak and busy covering up the Lancastria disaster.
Preventive attacks and preventive wars, seem to have gone out of favor recently.
I'll take Somerville in my camp anytime.
So the attack was to demonstrate to the Americans that the British had the ruthlessness needed to fight the war. Perhaps he should have bombed the Louvre and Versailles to really impress the Americans.
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I'm not saying they had the level of heavy industry which the other major Nations had during the war but if they could make the 18" naval rifles and armor plate for the two YAMATOs then I think I can say that they had heavy industry.
Of course not having anywhere close to the industry of the United States and being subject to blockade by sea, even if they had all the oil they wanted until the very end of the war they were going to perish because we were producing an incredibly greater number of warships and aircraft than they were. I have always believed that Japan entering their war with the United States in the way they did with a sneak attack was the worst possible way for them to have started hostilities with us because being attacked as we were gave the people of United States a far greater resolve for revenge than we would have if they had simply just gone to invade the Dutch East Indies and not attack the US directly including not invading the Philippines as they did. You would think they would have known that there would have been a far greater debate in the United States about declaring war on Japan to protect an island group which the United States did not have any strategic interest in. If the US Navy or AAC in the Philippines tried to block crude oil going to Japan that would have forced the United States into firing the first shot and I think it is pretty clear to say that what forces the US had in the Philippines would have been turned into a puddle by the Japanese in pretty short order.
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Garrison
Donor
But not in way shape or form enough to be comparable to Britain, which was your claim. They also didn't have an empire from which they could draw upon for manpower and resources and they didn't have anything like the shipbuilding capacity of the British, nor a potent ally like the USA would could supply them with still more equipment and shipping, including Liberty ships and escort carriers. Comparing the two is not in way shape or form making your original premise any more credible. 19 pages and you still haven't come up with a single thing that validates your idea.
The French had l'Armee de L'Afrique which was all made up of colonials ...not huge but the only French force of any size fighting with the Allies after Torch until the FFI got officially draughted in late 1944