Posted on 07/23/2011 6:20:09 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance
http://www.onwar.com/chrono/1941/jul41/f23jul41.htm
Red Army counterattack around Smolensk
Wednesday, July 23, 1941 www.onwar.com
On the Eastern Front... Around Smolensk, the forces of the Soviet 20th Army (Lieutenant General P.A. Kurochkin) counterattack forces of German Panzer Group 2 even though the army flanks are unsecured.
In the Mediterranean... One British destroyer is sunk and one cruiser and three destroyers are hit in Italian air attacks on the Operation Substance forces.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/andrew.etherington/month/thismonth/23.htm
July 23rd, 1941
UNITED KINGDOM: RAF Bomber Command: 2 Group: 21 Sqn. attack a 4,000-ton tanker escorted by four flak ships off Ostend. Four aircraft are shot down by flak and the tanker is undamaged.
Reconnaissance detects that the Scharnhorst has left her consorts Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen in Brest, and has slipped south to the small port of La Pallice. An attempt has been made to conceal her absence by the substitution of a large tanker, covered with camouflage netting. Fearing that she might be about to attempt an Atlantic raid, six Bomber Command Stirlings brave the German defenses in an unsuccessful evening attack; one failed to return.
Corvette FS Aconit commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
GERMANY: Berlin: The German News Bureau announced:
The initial reports about the air assault on Moscow reveal that the German air crews who reached Moscow in the second assault wave, could see the sea of flame in the Russian capital while they were still almost 85 miles from Moscow. One of the pilots reports that the conflagrations were as huge and wide-reaching as those he had already viewed in Manchester or Sheffield. He spoke of the strong air defence and said that the incessant muzzle flashes from the anti-aircraft artillery could be observed amidst the houses even after they had begun to burn.
FINLAND: The defending forces on the Finnish island of Bengtskär are reinforced by a 20 mm Madsen cannon with a crew of three. (Cris Wetton)
U.S.S.R.: Moscow: Following the heavy air attacks, the Communist Party and STAVKA start to evacuate the families of government members and high-ranking military men from Moscow.
General S. M. Shtemenko, the Soviet chief of operations, reports that bombs were frequently dropped near his offices at night, and that consequently the Red Army general staff headquarters was always shifted to the Byelorosskaya subway station in the evening so that the Soviet officers could get on with their work in peace. Later the general staff are moved to the Kirovskaya subway station, which had been specially remodelled for the purpose.
MEDITERRANEAN SEA: One destroyer, HMS Fearless, in the convoy of Operation Substance, from Gibraltar to Malta, is hit aft by an air dropped torpedo and completely disabled. As nothing can be done to save her, the crew are taken off and she is scuttled by HMS Forester, south of Sardinia at 37 40N, 08 20E. There are 27 casualties. (Alex Gordon)(108)One cruiser and three destroyers are also damaged in Italian air attacks.
Andrea Galliano adds: Airplanes from Sardinia attacked the convoy starting from 9.42, they were part of the 283 and 280 Sqd AS (SM79 torpedo bombers), 32 Stormo BT (SM79 level bombers) and 51 Gruppo BT (Cant Z1007).
A plane from the 283 Sqd hit and damaged the cruiser Manchester, while a SM79 of the 280 Sqd badly damaged the DD Fearless, which was later scuttled.
In the afternoon SM79 bombers damaged with a near-miss the DD Firedrake, which is forced to return to Gibraltar.
During the night MAS 532 and MAS 533 hit and damaged the freighter Sidney Star.
EGYPT: Cairo: The Syrian armistice is again changed to allow the Free French to contact Vichy troops; the captured war material was French property and the Syrian and Lebanese troops would be placed under Free French command.
AUSTRALIA: Minesweeper HMAS Mildura commissioned. (Dave Shirlaw)
CANADA: Small craft ordered for RCN: HC 1, HC 2, HC 3 and HC 4. (Dave Shirlaw)
What could possibly go wrong?
“What could possibly go wrong?”
Nothing. “Good” King FDR wanted war because his thieving economic policy worsened the Depression. A couple thousand casualties were acceptable. The ends justify the means when you’re a Democrat.
Creating employment is a straight forward craft
when the nation’s at war and there’s a draft.
If every worker were staffed in the army and fleet
we’d have full employment and nothing to eat.
It was this killing of civilians as reprisals that led Mikhailovich, leader of the Chetniks to become very cautious as to how he conducted his raids, particularly, making certain that he was as far from Serb civilian areas as possible. This would be seen by the British as being too cautious and would lead to them supporting Tito over Mikhailovich. Tito wasn't concerned with reprisals and would attack the Germans anywhere. He would also attack Chetniks as well.
Just as a mental exercise, what would you have done different? I’ll be honest, I haven’t given that question much thought either so I would need to think about that for a bit.
I have given it some thought, as did Herbert Hoover. He wrote a friend on December 8, 1941, words to effect, "I've been saying that if this country kept sticking pins in rattlesnakes, eventually we were going to be bitten."
BTW, Roosevelt, not the Navy, wanted the Pacific Fleet forward based in Pearl Harbor, instead of San Diego, where it had been prior to about 1939. (I am not attributing any bad motives to FDR, just a poor grasp of naval strategy.) I've been an isolationist for years. I don't have any sympathy for the Nazis or the Japanese Empire, but I'm not sure that getting involved with fighting them was necessarily im American interests. What I might have done differently was not get involved in the Spanish-American War, then no U.S. Philippine or other western Pacific interests, no Castro Cuba and Puerto Rico would be another pleasant Caribbean destination instead of a dependent.
I wouldn't have intervened in the First World War and the Europeans would have had to work out their own arrangements, which means that there would have been no Treaty of Versailles, no Nazi Party, no Final Solution, no State of Israel (I am not an antiSemite), probably no Russian occupation of Eastern Europe.
By 1941 things had gotten out of hand. Certainly American leaders should have accounted for the likelihood that the Japanese war cabal, rather than face humiliation, might initiate a war with the United States and if they did so, they would initiate in a manner that would favor them, as they did with the attack on Port Arthur in 1904. Maybe war with Japan and Germany was inevitable by 1941, but I hope I might have found a way to have it begin on terms more favorable to the United States.
I wouldn't have intervened in the First World War and the Europeans would have had to work out their own arrangements, which means that there would have been no Treaty of Versailles, no Nazi Party, no Final Solution, no State of Israel (I am not an antiSemite), probably no Russian occupation of Eastern Europe.
You left out strangling Hitler in his crib. As long as we are rewriting history we can put whatever we want on our wish list.
He asked me what I would have done differently in 1941. If I can change history in 1941, I guess I’m empowered to go back a few more generations ;)
What I would have done differently in 1941? Not move the U.S. fleet to Pearl Harbor. But hindsight is 20/20. If the Japanese had it to do over, they would have seized the Hawaiian Islands in 1941, or early 1942, rather than a mere raid.
Good point. We do have a god-like perspective on these threads.
But seize Japan? I don't think the Japanese ever seriously thought about doing that. Just the hit and run bombing raid was generally considered a very high-risk operation, even by Yamamoto. Along with bombing Pearl Harbor they were also moving on Indonesia, the Philippines, various other U.S.-held Pacific islands and the Malay peninsula. Plus they were still heavily involved on the Chinese mainland. I don't think they had the resources to spare for an invasion of Hawaii.
It would have made more sense to seize Hawaii than a bunch of scattershot attacks across the Western Pacific, including Singapore. The U.S. actually stamped currency used in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor with the word “Hawaii”, intending to demonetarize it if the Japanese took Hawaii.
The Pearl Harbor raid could have been more ambitious, at least. For instance, on December 8, 1941, there was more petroleum in Hawaii than in Japan. U.S. petroleum stores and the storage and handling facilities were both vulnerable and essential to the U.S. recovery after Pearl Harbor.
Apparently I should have been more specific. What would you have done in response to the Japanese occupying southern Indochina. We know what was done lead to the Japanese’s final decision to attack the United States.
I think the Japanese could have made Roosevelt's position more difficult by forgetting about Pearl Harbor and attacking Russia from the east. They would still have had problems coming up with the invasion force but at least it would have made for a shorter supply route. Also, a little invasion would have had a big impact since the reds were busy in the west.
Just to add to that. An attack by the Japanese on Russia could very well have changed the outcome with the Germans in the Soviet Union. The Soviet intelligence in Japan was very good and unlike the intelligence warnings of a German attack that Stalin ignored, he believed the intelligence he received telling him that Japan was looking towards the Dutch East Indies and not Russia for its next area of conquest. As a result, many units from the eastern frontier were shifted to the west to face the Wehrmacht. Had Stalin felt that there was even a possibility that the Japanese would attack them from the other front, he would have had to leave those division in place.
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