Ghastly Victories: The United States in the World Wars

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Jim Smitty

Jim Smitty

So the British backs are up against the wall and the Italians are punching above their weight. Malta falling could have some fairly big butterflies.
 

generalurist

Dang. Sorry to hear about your father.

Turns out the Lorenz system is an OTL creation, surprised I never heard of it- sound like that thing insufferable wehraboos would harp about non-stop if nothing else. Anyways, Britain though herculean effort and damaging long-term aircraft development have won the battle of britain. Now the fight for the colonies is ramping way up.
 

HistLover

RamscoopRaider said:
…The British had been aware of the German Lorenz bombing gear since fairly early in the war, when a damaged German bomber on a mining mission made a relatively soft crashlanding in Kent. The Lorenz Gear, typically used for bad weather landing, was far more powerful than needed for that purpose and the British determined that it was a bomb aiming system fairly quickly. However they made one mistake, in that they determined that it was purely a short ranged tactical bombing system, meant for use in close proximity to the frontlines in coordination with ground troops. This was due to an oversight, knowing that the frequencies used were suitable only for near line of sight use, and not realizing that with elevated transmitters aircraft at 20,000 feet were effectively line of site even at a distance of over 400 miles. By using two beams, one projected from the Ruhr and one from the Danish border, bombers could follow one and then release when encountering the other beam, which intersected in an area approximately a hundred yards across right over their target.

The first raid with the device occurred on October 30th with 50 bombers attacking an aircraft factory in the Midlands in concert with a larger raid on London and several smaller raids on other targets. The attack was a success, with the factory in question knocked out for 8 months, but poor intelligence meant that the factory they targeted was only producing trainers and not fighters or bombers. Furthermore the choice of a factory for a target at all clashed with the goal of the Luftwaffe’s campaign as it stood at the end of October. Von Richthofen wanted to combine nighttime bomber attacks with daytime fighter attacks to cripple the British transportation net, and thus the British economy. However by the end of October he was busy planning the air portions of Otto and organizing the defense of the Reich, leaving the Battle of Britain to subordinates. This meant he did not notice that the Lorenz bombing team continued to target factories in accordance with early directives that it was meant for use against point targets, with area targets to be handled with conventional bombing and not shifting to the revised definition that included railway marshalling yards as point targets for night bombers.

Four additional Lorenz guided attacks occurred in the first week of November, impacting bomber production and knocking out a plant for tank engines, before the British noticed that the German night attacks were too accurate for conventional navigation. A modified bomber was set up and noticed the presence of powerful Lorenz beams, converging over an aircraft factory making transports, thanks to the German practice of turning on the beams twelve hours before the mission.

Three more factories were knocked out before the British successfully managed a method of interfering with the German system by using local transmitters to mimic the crossbeams on the 15th, effectively providing many possible target points and no way to differentiate save by minute timing differences in the signals. Accuracy plummeted and became worse than even conventional night bombing, which was lucky to hit London. Despite this the Germans kept attempting to use the system, even as the British improved their jamming within a weak to be precisely synchronized to the German signal and thus totally indistinguishable.

In the daylight the Germans continued with coastal and Channel attacks by dive bombers, nuisance raids with heavy fighters and massed attacks by single engine fighters on the British transport system. The Germans did not attempt to press harder in order to begin conserving aircraft for Otto, but continued at a low enough pace to be sustainable.

On November 26th the British received a lucky break in the form of forewarning about a raid on Portsmouth thanks to an agent in occupied France. Fighter Command was massed and able to intercept the Germans over the channel and inflict dreadful losses, shooting down 38 fighters for the loss of 8. The loss of multiple squadrons in a single day came at the same time as high command began reducing replacements to prepare for Otto. Already needing to reduce operations to match the reduced pace of replacement aircraft the severe losses led to a temporary halt to operations over Britian and a reduction in operations over the channel. The British quickly filled the gap and increased patrols of their own.

By December 5th the Luftwaffe was unable to conduct daylight operations with dive bombers over the British coast and was forced to curtail operations over the Channel, while their nuisance raids were cut in half. Luftwaffe planners considered taking the offensive again once they recovered but an audacious British raid that destroyed 21 fighters on the ground on the 7th made that impractical for the moment.

At night things continued to get worse as the British began to be able to do more than jam but effectively manipulate the German Lorenz beams, allowing them to cause them to drop their bombs in open wasteland and to interfere with their navigation so that they could not find their way home properly. Bomber losses climbed precipitously and it became clear that the twin beam Lorenz Bombing System was useless. On the 10th Von Richthofen temporarily called off all bombing of Britian outside of retaliation missions on London while he attempted to crate a strategy to defeat Britain with the resources available in the west.

Very quickly he found that his only option was to wait for the more advanced and difficult to jam Multi Beam Lorenz system, which would not be available until January. Between the cessation of directed night bombing and the pulling back of German fighters the British were thus given a reprieve of a month, during which they were able to vastly improve their position. December 9th is thus considered the end of the Battle of Britian…

…The Primary German failure in the Battle of Britian was Hitler’s retaliation against London, wasting resources on a symbolic target that could have been used to degrade British air defenses and production. The second failure was the division between attacking British industry and attacking transport targets, had the latter been focused exclusively on, as the former could not be, the results would have been significantly greater. The third was the failure of Luftwaffe intelligence to properly identify and prioritize targeting amongst the categories so that what they did have could be applied to maximum effect.

As it was the Battle of Britian can only be considered a partial failure, as it did keep Britian’s air assets pinned to the British isles for all of 1941 and had a significant impact on British production at a time when it was most significant…

…The British lost about 2400 aircraft, 1700 fighters, 500 bombers and 200 other types, while the Germans lost 2500, 1200 fighters, 1200 bombers and 100 other types. In aircrew losses were 2150 British dead and 50 POW and 3200 German dead with 1300 POW. As British aircraft production overtook German the loss ratio broadly favored the British, while in aircrew the losses were even more favorable to the British with their superior aircrew training system. British aircrew quality increased over the course of the battle while German quality fell somewhat…

…With the end of the Battle of Britian initiative in the air shifted from the Luftwaffe to the RAF, with Bomber Command eager to avenge Britain’s suffering on Germany, once they had the resources to do a proper job of it…

-Excerpt from Airpower!, Dewitt Publishing, Los Angeles, 2010

…On November 3rd the water pipe to the Egyptian frontier was complete and Sanna was ready to take the offensive in North Africa once again. He had reinforced his troops in the theater to 4 infantry, 2 motorized and 2 armored divisions, though only two of the infantry divisions were combat capable, with heavy air support. Against this the British had one armored and one Indian infantry division present in the field, with an additional British infantry division split between the Suez canal zone and Cairo and an Australian infantry division in the process of unloading at Port Suez.

Sanna’s goal was to destroy the two British divisions at the front, which would force the British to divert troops from Kenya and protect Italian East Africa by proxy. He planned to use his foot infantry divisions backed by one motorized and one armored division to occupy the British while sweeping around behind them with his other divisions in a shallow flanking maneuver.

The operation began on November 15th with a sharp hurricane bombardment, followed by a massed air attack. The British lacked the ability to contest the skies and Italian air supremacy meant that their artillery could not respond effectively. Despite that the British were well dug in with properly sited defenses, and the generally inadequate nature of the Italian artillery park was felt here, with the Italian assault made only tentative progress on the first day. During the night the British artillery responded with a vengeance, inflicting moderate casualties on the exposed Italians, but not risking the assault.

On the 16th the diversionary assault continued while the Italians launched the flanking maneuver. They were constrained by the escarpment to their south, which made it easy for the British to spot the maneuver. Many small skirmishes were fought between the Italian vanguard and the British scouts on their flank, with the more aggressive and motivated British performing better despite their numerical disadvantage.

On the 17th fighting on the front began to reduce as the British infantry began a phased fall back while the British armor attempted to counter attack the Italian flanking attack. The British tanks were better handled but most of them were machine gun armed lights, with relatively few 2pdr armed units. The Italians had proportionally more of their 47mm armed tanks in their force and more tanks in total. Losses were mostly equal, which favored the more numerous Italians, who were also able to hold the field and recover their disabled tanks while the British could not.

Seeing the writing on the wall the British began a withdrawal to Sidi Barrani on the 18th. The Italians harassed them every step of the way with armored cars and air power. On the 20th after several skirmishes went badly the British decided to withdraw to El Tarfaya about 10 miles further east, completing the withdrawal on the 23rd. The Italians captured Sidi Barrani on the 24th and made no further attempt to pursue, preferring to let their logistics catch up before resuming with a planned offensive…

…Following the battle for Sidi Barrani the British received a large amount of equipment sent from the British isles after the invasion scare ended that served to replace their losses.
In terms of tanks and armored cars they were back to full strength while in terms of artillery and anti-aircraft weapons they were actually stronger, with the only deficiency being in towed AT guns.

Additional aircraft would take slightly longer, with Headsman squadrons being stood up at the beginning of January and finally reducing Italian Air Supremacy to mere superiority…

…Despite the success of Operation Palimpsest the Italians managed to once more neutralize Malta’s airpower by the 6th of August and were from then on able to once more bomb the island with impunity. The British, whose carrier wings had been depleted in the course of Palimpsest were unable to repeat the performance and the Italians were able to steadily degrade the island’s defenses.

After 4 months of preparatory bombing and naval bombardments they were finally ready to eliminate the potential threat to their supply line in January…

…By the end of the year the British had been able to mass enough forces in Kenya from their African colonies and Dominion to launch an invasion of Italian Somalia…

-Excerpt from The Desert War, Harper & Brothers, New York, 2001






A/N Okay I won't say I've really recovered from my father's untimely passing, but I am ready to start writing again, as a return to some semblance of normalcy
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Sometimes work is the best way to distract yourself from thinking upsetting thoughts in my opinion
 
Kalga

Kalga

The meta issue with Germany doing better (but still not outright winning) is that there won't be anyone strong/relevant enough to stir shit up on a large scale by the 1960s (unless the plot twist is that it isn't going to be a WWIII but something else entirely).
 

HistLover

Kalga said:
The meta issue with Germany doing better (but still not outright winning) is that there won't be anyone strong/relevant enough to stir shit up on a large scale by the 1960s (unless the plot twist is that it isn't going to be a WWIII but something else entirely).
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Maybe a situation like in Weber’s Germany (god it’s a shame it was never finished and we only got the authors notes for how it would have ended) in that Germany does the same militarily and through diplomatic efforts gets a ceasefire, one that everyone knows will be broken in the near future, with Germany taking most of European Russia but USSR suffering far less casualties enabling them to counterattack once the tide turns against Germany with the Allies?
 
Pax_Nihil

Pax_Nihil

HistLover said:
Maybe a situation like in Weber’s Germany (god it’s a shame it was never finished and we only got the authors notes for how it would have ended) in that Germany does the same militarily and through diplomatic efforts gets a ceasefire, one that everyone knows will be broken in the near future, with Germany taking most of European Russia but USSR suffering far less casualties enabling them to counterattack once the tide turns against Germany with the Allies?
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The Soviets will have to be able to hold on defensively at least along the Dnieper in Ukraine losing too much more than that in the southwestern USSR with Stalin in charge could have drastic consequences for the future of the Soviet Union but Stalin is notoriously a wildcard that muddles the strategic possibilities for how it'll go.

Also ditto on Weber's Germany (I think it is continued elsewhere online though I only read AH here personally)
 

HistLover

Pax_Nihil said:
The Soviets will have to be able to hold on defensively at least along the Dnieper in Ukraine losing too much more than that in the southwestern USSR with Stalin in charge could have drastic consequences for the future of the Soviet Union but Stalin is notoriously a wildcard that muddles the strategic possibilities for how it'll go.

Also ditto on Weber's Germany (I think it is continued elsewhere online though I only read AH here personally)
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Wait elsewhere?
 
Part 6-59 Before the Storm, Naval History
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    • RamscoopRaider

    Donor
    …While various stopgap measures to support the British had been passed by the end of 1941 it was clear to President McNutt and his advisers that these would not be sufficient to keep Britain in the war long enough to secure a white peace, as was believed to be the best possible outcome at the time. A comprehensive aid program to provide Britain with American arms she could not otherwise afford was needed to ensure that she could protect her convoys and airspace, hold onto Egypt, erode the French and Italian positions in Africa and put pressure on Germany.

    McNutt’s advisers, primarily former President Roosevelt, proposed offering to lend Britain such equipment as she needed to fight the war. Roosevelt simply suggested that the British would return any remaining equipment after the end of the war, with destroyed equipment and damage being written off. He however was overruled by the rest of the President’s advisers who felt that was more of a gift than a loan, and that there was no mood for an outright gift among the American people rather than a loan. No for it to be a loan then the United States would have to receive back all that it had sent, and with interest at that.

    Furthermore given that the British had previously defaulted on war loans made by the United States, loans made from a stronger financial position at that, there would need to be some security that the British would pay them back, rather than default on them when convenient…

    …Securing the Wartime Material Support Loan Act was difficult. Almost all of the British owned assets within the United States were already encumbered from previous loans, and even if they were not would not suffice to fully collateralize a loan of this magnitude, which was estimated to exceed 5 billion dollars at a minimum. Even adding British assets in friendly countries did not sufficiently shift the needle to make it practical.

    One suggestion was to have parts of the British empire be used as collateral, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Ascension Island and others. While sufficiently valuable this presented the problem that Britain could not be compelled to hand them over in case of a default save by force. A modified version of this was suggested instead. Rather than hold the land as collateral, it would be the resource rights. Trinidad’s oil, Jamaica’s Aluminum, South Georgia’s sealing and more.

    Britain would be required to transfer ownership of those rights for the duration of the loan to British government owned but New York listed corporations, whose shares would serve as collateral. This proposal received much more support, both as it was easier to enforce, that it would be more profitable in the event of default as few of Britain’s colonies were actually profitable to administer, and that it would not lead to any more nonwhites entering the US.

    Of course Britain could still use physical control over the territory to circumvent the effects of a default, even if having to completely reorient the money flows would reduce potential profits. To further ensure that Britain would not default it would be required that Britain return to the Gold Standard within 5 years of the wars end, and to keep no less than 95% of the gold reserves backing the Pound within the United States, where they would serve as additional security, while not directly stated as collateral they could be seized if Britain did attempt to renege on its collateral obligations. These provisions would very severely punish any British default…

    …The main problem that the passage of the Wartime Material Support Loan Act faced was that Britain had few fanatical partisans in the United States. American sympathy was on the British side, but there was relatively limited will to make sacrifices for them and much of that had been taken up by the limited relief acts that preceded them. If Britain wanted further American help then the prevailing mood was that Britain would have to do something for the United States to earn it…

    …To win over sufficient votes to pass it was made a requirement that to be eligible for the Wartime Material Support Loan Act that Britain would be required to prove her total commitment to the war. Britain would need to demonstrate that she was applying her full resources to the war effort by converting her remaining export industries to war production, something that would allow American industry to fill the gap…

    …When the first draft of the Wartime Material Support Loan Act was shown to the British in late March the British War Cabinet was appalled. They needed the resources, but having to almost literally mortgage the profitable parts of the Empire and the Pound itself to get them was too much for many to bear.

    Lord Halifax got in touch with Roosevelt through back channels and found that McNutt and his cabinet wanted to adjust the terms to be more favorable to Britain when the opportunity presented, as they realized that a strong Britain was in American security interests. He thus advised caution on the matter, to accept the deal and have the foreign office work through back channels to alter the deal after it had passed.

    The Prime Minister however decided to take matters into his own hands with a public appeal to the American people, trying to shame them to pressure their congressmen into offering more generous terms. It was a well written appeal, and was very popular in the Commonwealth and many neutral countries. It was not however popular in the United States outside of those who were already pro-British and to most fence sitters it came off as condescending. It produced no outcry in favor of offering more lenient terms, and it offended a number of Congressmen who did not like Churchill attempting to do an end run around them.

    As a result an even stricter version of the Act was passed in late April, as the non-sequentially numbered House Resolution 1776, with two major changes. The first change was that it was specified that any equipment returned be returned to a location of American designation at British expense. The second was that as a condition for receiving the loaned material Britain would agree to pay back every penny of the loans she had defaulted on during the Great Depression, with interest and penalties, secured by the same collateral as the rest of the Act….

    …The final Wartime Material Support Loan Act was found to be even more outrageous by the British Cabinet than the preliminary version. However they were well aware that they had no choice but to accept, not after the recent losses they had taken. Their hope was that the McNutt administration would follow through on its promises to do what it could to revise the Act to be more favorable to Britain.

    That the McNutt administration was stretching the previous relief acts as far as they could go in order to favor Britain was taken as evidence that McNutt and his administration were serious in their desire to do so…

    …Almost immediately after the implementation of the Wartime Material Support Loan Act the McNutt administration began working on how to loosen the terms of the agreement, reducing interest, providing a longer interest free grace period, manipulating values, anything to leave Britain in a better position postwar. A weak Britain would need continuous propping up and cost more in the long run than forgoing the chance to squeeze blood from a stone. However major changes to the Act would require Congressional approval, which would require a change of circumstances…

    -Excerpt From Before the Storm: American Neutrality in WWII, Harper & Brothers, New York, 2000


    …In the last 6 months of 1941 British merchant losses averaged at 700,000 GRT, which when placed against British construction resulted in a reduction of available shipping by 2.4 million GRT. Over the first six months of 1942 this average dropped to 450,000 GRT, with a total reduction of 900,000 GRT.

    This drop in sinkings by the Germans could be attributed to many factors. Among the first was the shift in the Air Battle. With the Battle of Britain over and the British gaining parity, if not superiority over the channel, losses there to air attack were markedly reduced. Furthermore the effectiveness of German MPAs was reduced thanks to Gunshark patrols forcing them to dogleg south, reducing time on station significantly. The presence of MACs beginning in March also hampered the MPAs, preventing them from directly attacking British merchantmen and being restricted to vectoring in U-Boats. Greater activity from Coastal Command further hindered the actions of U-Boats.

    An increased number of escorts, the Corvettes, refitted destroyers and the former American vessels allowed greater coverage of convoys. Improved tactics made this increased number of ships even more effective than simple numbers suggested.

    Among the most dramatic changes however was the German decision to withdraw many of their Type IX boats for transport duty. Operating in distant waters where the British could not run convoys or patrols they had managed impressive per boat totals with minimal losses. However with the British blockade once more growing effective in early 1942 and the plans for Otto making reliance on the Soviet Union for resources unlikely it was decided that a repeat of the WWI merchant sub program on a larger scale was needed. The Type IX’s were thus taken off a combat duty to be reassigned to the merchant marine and carry cargoes of rubber, copper, tin, nickel and cotton amongst other materials. This deprived the U-boat arm of some of its most potent weapons.

    The result of these measures was that by July 1942 Britain was building merchant ships faster than she was losing them…

    …A number of lessons were learned in the early phases of the Battle of the Atlantic by the British. Of their current escorts only the sloops were truly satisfactory, with the converted destroyers lacking in seaworthiness, and the corvettes being both unseaworthy and too slow to catch up to convoys. A ship as seaworthy, long ranged and fast as a sloop that could also be mass produced was needed. It would not need the heavy AA armament array of the prewar sloops, but it would need some heavy AA to provide some protection against German MPAs. By mid-1942 precise requirements were laid out both for domestic and empire built vessels and for a design from the United States…

    …A major problem with attacking submarines with depth charges was that early sonars had a minimum range that produced a blind spot near the ship, and depth charge attacks needed to be conducted from roughly on top of the submarine. Furthermore successful or not a depth charge attack would temporarily blind sonar systems, making it very easy to lose contact after an unsuccessful attack.

    A system that could engage a submarine outside of the minimum range of sonar and that would not produce sonar interference from a miss was desired. By mid-1942 the British had multiple prototypes that promised to do just that…

    …A key weakness of German U-Boat operations was the requirement that U-Boats make constant status reports back to Germany by radio, often multiple times a day. These reports were limited in duration using a special short code order to avoid detection by radio direction finding. Unfortunately for the Germans the 20 seconds of their typical reports, while adequate against the Bellino-Tossi system in common use that required a minute for direction fix, was more than long enough for the Cathode-Ray Direction Finding system the British had developed for lightning location, which could detect a U-Boat transmission in under 5 seconds. By mid-1942 the system was beginning to see wide deployment…

    …In December 1941 with their carrier air wings rebuilt the Royal Navy moved to begin neutralizing the Vichy French Navy. The first target was Dakar where the Ark Royal, three battleships and a battlecruiser were dispatched to neutralize the French forces there. The light battleship Strasbourg, heavy cruiser Tourville, light cruisers Primauguet and Montcalm, 7 destroyers, 2 Avisos and 4 submarines were there waiting for them.

    The French fleet was given four options. The first was to join the Free French, the second was to sail to a French colony in the Americas and stay there, the third was to sail to a neutral country in the Americas and be interned and the fourth was to be destroyed. With a tremendous disparity of force against him the French commander made the decision to accept the second option and sailed for Martinique to join the handful of warships already there.

    The British fleet saw the French off to Martinique and then joined reinforcements at Gibraltar to make their next move, neutralizing the larger French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir…

    …The Free French Navy conducted its first operation on December 27th when its single Aviso, the Bethune and the Typhon, one of its three destroyers, supported a coup on the island of Reunion. 110 men were landed and quickly captured the capital of Saint-Denis in a bloodless coup. The governor quickly surrendered the island the next day upon learning the invaders were fellow Frenchmen. The Reunion operation is notable in that in addition to being the first naval operation of the Free French, the primary radio operated involved in coordinating the operation was none other than Emperor of Vietnam in exile Duy Tan…

    Excerpt From A Naval History of the European War, Harper & Brothers, New York, 2008
     
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    • Jim Smitty

    Jim Smitty

    That explains why the British will be rationing for so long that they have to keep rationing till the start of WWIII. Christ those terms are brutal.

    Well at least some of the French when to the new world. Why to I get the bad feeling given how this TL has gone that whatever happens at Mers-el-Kebir will see Vichy French join the Axis and on D-Day instead of facing Germans, the allies will be facing the French.

    Something is happening in Vietnam...
     
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