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December 2010 Main Page Mexican-American War Mark II
A big bunch of AH Challenges this time. Soviet-Japanese War in 1939
Comments Section Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section. |
Germans
Use Chaff in Battle of Britain What if the Germans
discovered chaff
(reflective strips to spoof radar) early enough to use it in the BOB?
Both sides discovered the technique in 1942, and both sat on it for a
while because they were afraid it would be used against them. The idea
was tossed around in Britain as early as 1937. So, what if the Germans
figured it out early enough to use it against the Brits in the summer
of 1940?
To what extent would the chaff reduce the effectiveness of radar? What
countermeasures would the Brits be able to come up with? How much would
any reduction in radar's effectiveness impact the BOB?
What If The Soviet Union Claimed that control of airspace above a country went all the way up? If you want to really militarize space, have the Soviets insist that nations own the sky above themselves all the way up, something that they had stated in principle but then made indefensible with Sputnik. Thinking about that though, building vehicles that could get into space and stay there any length of time without violating somebody's extended airspace would be extremely difficult. It would have certainly been a different world, but probably not a more military in space one. Still kind of fun to play with though. Challenge: A Better Japanese World War II. The idea isn’t to make them win. That wasn’t going to happen. The idea was to extend the war or make it less lopsided. Here are my contributions: 1. Train more pilots, starting before Pearl Harbor. 2. Build the financial/resource equivalent number of carriers instead of their monster battleships. That gives them probably four more fleet carriers by sometime in 1942. 3. Put resources into anti-submarine warfare. 4. Build a submarine fleet that targets an anti-commerce role rather than one that is designed to go after warships. Add in Japanese commerce-raider subs to the German ones in late 1941/early 1942, and the Allies would have a major problem. 5. Send cruisers into the Indian ocean to raid commerce. 6. Rationalize the use of merchant shipping, and maybe even dial back production of warships to make more of them--maybe even adopting the welding/mass production techniques the US used on Liberty ships. 7. Don't openly withdraw from the Washington Naval Treaty framework. Yes, violate it to the extent that you can get away with, but don't formally renounce it. Let the US debate whether or not the Japanese are breaking out, and maybe gain six months before the US responds. That's potentially a two-edged sword. 8. Rationalize small arms. The Japanese had at least 3 incompatible types of rifle ammo alone. 9. Split the Chinese more than they already were by playing the Nationalists and Communists against one another. Maybe during the period of relatively good relationships with the Soviets (1940-mid-1941) they could go through the Soviets to broker a truce of some kind with the Chinese Communists that would let them go after the Nationalists with forces they were using to contain the Communists. 10. I don't know if this is a good idea or not, and the Japanese would almost certainly not do it, but what if they did air raids solely on the US tanker farms at Pearl? They could make it kamikaze runs by half-a-dozen or a dozen planes, deny it at first, then claim that it was the action of a few people POed by the oil embargo. Apologize profusely, offer to pay damages, etc. The US would probably still declare war, but not without some debate and with less rally-round the flag sentiment. 11. Treat Burmese nationalists and Indian nationalists with a little less arrogance. The British hold on India was wobbly in 1942. Making it more wobbly would have been useful. 12. Discover the Purple decoding machine that the British left behind in the confusion during the fall of Singapore, and realize that their codes were vulnerable. 13. Discover and reverse-engineer US proximity fuse anti-aircraft munitions early on, maybe with German help. 14. Routinely spoof proximity fuses by dropping mylar strips right over US ships so that the proximity fuses explode just above deck level. I believe they pulled that a couple of times late in the war, but maybe they discover the trick early enough to have it make a difference. The US would figure out a counter-measure, but it would work for a while. 15. Keep the US from figuring out that their torpedoes weren't working, maybe even to the point of having a small controlled explosion when a dud hits. 16. Don't take and hold islands they don't have to--like the ones up near Alaska. The main problem they had was shipping. Why make that worse by adding to the burdens? 17. Make an effective coal to gas industry before the war. The Japanese put a lot of effort into this, but with very little results. 18. The Japanese were sitting on top of a monster oil field (Daqing) in Manchuria. They didn't discover it. If they did discover the fields it probably wouldn't solve their oil issues entirely, but might help cushion the period where they were trying to get the DEI oil fields back in operation. 19. A ship full of Japanese oil industry experts got itself sunk in the early going, taking out a goodly hunk of Japan's expertise in the field and delaying their repairs of the DEI oil fields. The sinking was apparently a lucky accident and could easily have not happened. 20. After the Japanese defeat at Nomanham, the Japanese basically purged most of the survivors of the battle, rather than attempting to learn why they got their butts kicked and remedy the problems. This was their first full-fledged fight with a major power since 1905. They needed that expertise, though to be frank they didn't have the industrial resources to remedy the worst defect, which was lack of quality tanks and lack of firepower compared to a modern army. There were a lot of tactical errors in that battle too, though and figuring them out would have probably helped when they stopped romping through opposition that was essentially hopped up colonial police forces and went up against real western armies. 21. The Nationalist Chinese lost most of their German-trained divisions in the aftermath of the battle for Shanghai. This is counter-intuitive, but I suspect that the Japanese would have been better off in the long-term if those guys had escaped to fight again. The Japanese got into bad habits fighting what were essentially warlord armies nominally supporting the Nationalists and their combat experience actually taught them the wrong lessons. If they had been fighting a more competent enemy up through the battles of Nanking and Wuhan, they would have taken more casualties but would have probably been a better army due to having to deal with a more competent opponent. The Chinese German-trained divisions were not bad soldiers, though not equipped to the level of western armies. 22. Coming up with a replacement for the Zero in a timely manner. I believe that a replacement was available but was held up by corruption in the procurement process. (Actually that appears to have been wrong. It was held up by delays in developing both of the engines that might have gone into it) 23. Going to kamikaze tactics earlier in the war. They went for kamikaze tactics only after things were obviously hopeless. What if they had sent a few kamikazes after US carriers in some of the 1942/43 battles when the odds were closer to even? Challenge: Tiananmen Square Turns Into A Successful Revolution The Chinese Communist regime does a fold in 1989. Maybe it ends in a civil war, or a reform communist regime takes power, or maybe the whole edifice comes crashing down. How does it happen? How does it play out? What are the consequences? The US Joins the League of Nations The US in the League of Nations was apparently not politically impossible early on, though Wilson would have had to compromise on some important issues. What would the consequences (if any) have been if the US had been in the League? Challenge: A Workable Red Napoleon Scenario A couple of decades ago I read a novel from the late 1920s called The Red Napoleon. It had Stalin getting assassinated in the then near future--very late 1920s. He is replaced my a military genius, who mobilizes the Soviet Union for war, and in a year or two heads west. Through a combination of military successes and internal subversion he ends up taking all of Europe, including the UK, all of Asia, including Japan, and invades the continental US, before finally failing. (Fun book, by the way. If you see it second hand somewhere it is worth it) Obviously that wasn't something the Soviet Union of the late 1920s could have realistically pulled off. The challenge is to come up with the closest approximation possible. Let's say we begin in say 1926, just to give this challenge some degree of flexibility. You can use an existing Soviet military or political leader or assume some unknown with talent who rises quickly. The goal is to build the Soviet Union into a power capable of seriously threatening Europe at least, and then conquering as much as possible, all within say ten years--so how much can the Soviets have conquered by 1936? Hitler and the Nazis may or may not come to power. There is no restriction on what political ideology the Soviet Union adopts. It can remain communist. It can go fascist in reality while maintaining communist trappings. It can become a military dictatorship while being officially communist. It can go Tsarist if you can figure out a plausible way for that to happen. By the way: Here is a review: http://www.johnreilly.info/rednap.htm Excellent review. My memories of the book are from reading it probably two decades ago, and I didn't remember some of the details of RN's early years and the Asian preliminaries to the invasion of Poland. I remember thinking that the author had an excellent grasp of the military aspects, but that he did the raging plot device thing on the way the UK and Japan got sucked into the Soviet sphere. By the way: The guy who took over was a non-European. I forget the race, but he did play the racial equality card. Certainly Stalin's purges cost the Soviets credibility among potential supporters outside the Soviet Union on a lot of fronts, including that one. I think that the best bet on this might be moving around or stopping some of Stalin's more destructive actions. In the mid-1920s, the Soviet Union was actually going some rather interesting directions, with considerable real cultural and to some extent political autonomy for the non-Russian Soviet Republics, especially the Ukraine, and a considerable amount of economic freedom under the New Economic Plan. The New Economic Plan grew the economy considerably after the destruction from World War I and the Civil War, and set up much of the basis for the later Soviet heavy industrialization. What it didn't do was provide crash industrialization specializing in heavy industry to provide the Soviets with a quick infusion of military/political power. Of course historically the NEP and cultural/political autonomy for the Soviet Republics got shut down, and the Soviets pushed through their series of Five Year plans that built a huge, economically stupid heavy industry sector, starving millions of peasants in the process, and turning many of the rest into potential collaborators with almost any invader (though fortunately the Germans provided an exception to that, for the most part). At the time Red Napoleon was written, none of this was preordained. The New Economic Plan could have continued, giving the Soviets a real industrial economy instead of a bunch of huge factories grafted onto a real economy roughly equivalent to Upper Volta. The question is: would NEP provide an economy capable of supplying/supporting a world class military by the mid-1930s? Would the Soviet economy keep growing when the World went into the Great Depression, or would it slow down? Would a NEP-based economy throw forward rivals to Bolshevik political power? And, of course, would a Red Napoleon even go that route? The most obvious path to military power is the one Stalin took: tear out the beginnings of the real economy and use it as fuel to build a war economy. Was that necessary or even the best course of action in terms of getting the Soviets ready for war in the mid-1930s?
Posted on Jan 3, 2012.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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