Operation Market Garden

Japan had no interest in invading Africa, they knew that UK had that on lockdown and they didn’t have the resources to do it. I am 100% sure that Japanese High Command would of double down on invading Australia over that. The idea behind controlling Indian ocean was to do two jobs. First: Close Burma Road since the Chinese were getting heavy equipment from the US. People forget the bulk of the IJA was in China and China was always the end goal for Japan. Two: Cutting the Persian trade route was more of a request from Germany. People forget that the Battle of Madagascar was the only battle during WWII that had both Germany and Japan in the same battle.

That tea $hit got a lot of allied soldiers killed during WWI though and Germany knew UK would do that.

@CWO:

Apparently one of only two Lancs in the world that still fly.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/news/hamilton-s-lancaster-bomber-marks-25-years-back-in-the-sky-1.1866309

Excellent article Marc. Only just go to read it. The expense is ridiculous, but worth it, I believe. The many accidents and that hangar fire are horrid to read about.
It will be sad indeed when planes like this no longer grace our skies.

LOL, guess I should check to see if somebody else had posted this!  Nice work, going to have to get up a bit earlier me thinks!

I’d never heard of this operation, but it sounds typically Churchillian.  He had great fondness – in both World Wars – for schemes that aimed blows at the outer fringes of enemy territory rather than hitting the enemy head-on (in the Ulysses S. Grant style favoured by the Americans).  In WWI, Churchill dreamed up the Gallipoli operation for this reason; it was poorly planned and badly botched, and his reputation took a hit as a result.  In WWII, Churchill pushed hard for the invasion of Italy; the fallacy of his argument that Italy was the “soft underbelly of Europe” should have been obvious to anyone able to spot mountain ranges on a topographical map.  Churchill’s Baltic operation also has a few echoes of Jacky Fisher’s WWI plan to invade Germany via the Baltic, for which Fisher conceived the misguided Courageous-class battlecruisers – severely unbalanced ships with the armament of a battleship but the armour protection of a light cruiser.

@Fishmoto37:

The tanker “Ohio” was brought to Valletta harbor in Malta flanked by two British destroyers that had passed wire hawsers under the hull of the tanker to keep it afloat. 
It took an hour to make the last mile into the harbor with the aid of local tugs and the destroyers. The cargo of the “Ohio” was 13,000 tons of aviation fuel that kept Malta’s planes in the war. This is an amazing story.

That an aviation fuel carrying tanker could take the damage the Ohio did is truely awesome. But we build things tough in Texas.

so for every 4-5 brigades create 1 vichy infantry unit

I don’t think the operation would have been successful for a number of reasons. There was still the Royal Navy, something that would have made any landing difficult at best, impossible at worst. There were more of them to begin with and were pretty decent ships. I think maybe, from my POV, that one reason would have made any landing very costly for the Germans, and those troops that did survive would have had to deal with resistance of some sort after that.