Operation Highjump

@DeepDefence:

Check out my new video, tell me what you think, I tried to capture the cold and the desolation of the winter:

http://vimeo.com/89104857

Take a look!

I enjoy your work

@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.

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.

My bad, either way, still a pretty cool find. The plans on the show had both the airborne and amphibious landings. Just thought you might find it interesting.

@Frontovik:

@Hobbes:

@Axistiger13:

Choose your side(axis or allies) and your strategy

Russians - one of the main factors concerning the success of Barbarossa was that Stalin actually believed that the Germans would not attack before 1942 and ignored the reports of the German build-up. The Soviet High Command also made a serious strategic mistake after the Soviet-German Pact by moving its armies from their prepared defensive positions to new areas on their now extended borders (E. Poland, Bessarabia, Baltic States) where they were vulnerable to an attack.
I think it was 3 days before the German attack that a German deserter turned itself to the Soviets at the border and said the date of the German attack. Upon hearing the report, Stalin ordered him shot for spreading false rumours - imagine what could have happened if he had finally listened.

he would have ordered an assault, which the germans could easily counter causing huge damage and many casualties to soviet forces…

Stalin and the Soviet High Command knew that the Red Army in 1941 was in no condition of mounting an assault but it could have started its mobilization earlier and move to protect the airforce and pull back major units from frontier, avoiding their encirclement and destruction at the beginning of the German offensive. By October/November 1941 the Germans started realizing that they had greatly underestimated the number of Soviet divisions that could be deployed, even with the huge Soviet losses during the initial invasion. With those forces alerted and properly deployed against a German invasion, and the Germans could have probably been stopped sooner or forced to focus their advance on a single axis towards Moscow/Leningrad/Kiev. Germans could win an operational victory but would suffer a strategic defeat by failing to bring down the Soviet Union as quickly as possible before it turned into a war of attrition that it couldn’t win.

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.