Alternative History WWII

@abworsham4

I read that, and is one of my sources. Funny enough, KaLeu put a link to Quora asking the same question, and one of the answers just copied and pasted the article you sent me.

Still in the middle of listening to it (about an hour and a half in).

I’m a fan of hardcore history, but it takes me forever to get through his podcasts because they’re just so long. I’d just have them on in the background as noise while I do other things, but what he says is interesting enough to demand my full attention most of the time.

The Siege of Tobruk lasted for 241 days in 1941, after Axis forces advanced through Cyrenaica from El Agheila in Operation Sonnenblume against the British Western Desert Force (WDF) in Libya, during the Western Desert Campaign (1940–1943) of the Second World War. In late 1940, the British had defeated the Italian 10th Army during Operation Compass (9 December 1940 – 9 February 1941) and trapped the remnants at Beda Fomm. German troops and Italian reinforcements reached Libya, while much of the WDF was sent to Greece and replaced by a skeleton force, short of equipment and supplies.

Operation Sonnenblume (6 February – 25 May 1941), forced the British into a retreat to the Egyptian border. A garrison was left behind at Tobruk, to deny the port to the Axis, while the WDF reorganised and prepared a counter-offensive. The Axis siege of Tobruk began on 10 April, when the port was attacked by a force under Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel and continued during three relief attempts, Operation Brevity (15–16 May), Operation Battleaxe (15–17 June) and Operation Crusader (18 November – 30 December). The occupation of Tobruk deprived the Axis of a supply port closer to the Egypt-Libya border than Benghazi, 900 miles (1,400 km) west of the Egyptian frontier, which was within the range of RAF bombers; Tripoli was 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) to the west in Tripolitania.

The siege diverted Axis troops from the frontier and the Tobruk garrison repulsed several attacks. The port was frequently bombarded by artillery, dive-bombers and medium bombers, as the RAF flew defensive sorties from airfields far away in Egypt. British Mediterranean Fleet and Inshore Squadron ships ran the blockade, to carry reinforcements and supplies in and wounded and prisoners out. On 27 November, Tobruk was relieved by the 8th Army (the name of British, Commonwealth, Imperial and Allied forces in the Western Desert since September 1941), during Operation Crusader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tobruk

I have decided to no longer post polls, but instead post questions for discussion instead.
Might make your answers to my questions easier to give an opinion on.

The Siege of Tobruk began in April 75 years ago.
Rommel was tenacious, and the British certainly did not want to give up this important port to the Axis powers.
History says that this was one of Rommel’s greatest victories when Tobruk finally fell.
History also says that this one of Britain’s finest hours, holding out as long as they did.
Tell me your impressions as we now enter the heart of the Western Desert Campaign in North Africa.

You had lots of Hitler puzzles. That explains alot to us in these forums.

@barnee

Well, the battle takes place during daytime, the most favourable conditions. I read the article in my research, and the battle really was tough to decide. Many people point to Leyte Gulf as proof of how bad Japanese battleships are. But one of the reasons for the Japanese failure off Samar was because of the Japanese using armour piercing shells, which often flew right through the unarmored American ships without exploding. Mistakes in commanding the Japanese ships was another reason for why the American fleet was not destroyed. As I said, it was really hard to decide, and it was very close. As you noted though, the Japanese has inferior radar and sighting, the Japanese had superior armour and had just so many guns that it would have eventually have hit several times, especially if the Missouri went to point blank range, like how I thought the battle would have worked out. It honestly could have gone either way.

@strategic:

I may would have been a proponent of continuing the war to Moscow to obliterate Stalin after 1945, so communism would be nothing but a fad and dead.

If I remember correctly, the USSR had something like 300 divisions in Eastern Europe at the time of the Potsdam Conference – a rather large figure compared to what the Anglo-Americans had in Western Europe.  I doubt the Americans and the British could have beaten those kinds of numbers.  I also don’t imagine that a radical move like expending one of America’s rare and priceless A-bombs on Moscow would have done anything other than get those 300 veteran Soviet divisions (who had just helped whip the Wehrmacht) really, really angry at them.  The US and the UK being democracies, they would have also found it a trifle hard to convince their war-weary voters and servicemen to start a whole new war against the country which had just helped them defeat Nazi Germany, and which was getting ready to help them finish off militarist Japan.

At any rate, if you exclude Cuba and China and North Korea, Communism today is in fact pretty much a dying fad…espcially when you consider the amount of free-market capitalism with which China has been flirting for the past decade or so.

@ABWorsham:

My grandfather landed in France on D+4 with the U.S 2nd Inf.

I had the best memories listening to him discuss the War.

Man, tell me those stories! I would have loved to be there with you hearing them. Those poor guys in the first wave. Man. That’s what I’d call a sacrafice to our country.