Shenanigan Sally [Alt-Hist][OF][Nippon '46] Reference Sheet

Requests for information (such as weapons, maps, history, grammar, spelling, outlining, ect) for your writing. Or where to post useful reference sites that you have found useful in writing. Anything from information research to writing guides.

Shenanigan Sally [Alt-Hist][OF][Nippon '46] Reference Sheet

Postby Scooter » Tue Aug 18, 2015 9:11 am

For Shenanigan Sally, the timeline and link to my dA page wherein lie various profiles of the equipment mentioned.

Timeline:
Timeline of Shenanigan Sally

1935- Saar reunited with Nazi Germany

1936- Militarization of the Rhineland
Rome-Berlin Axis
Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan

1937- 2d Sino-Japanese War

1938- Anschluss of Austria
Sudetenland Annexation
Munich Accord
Italy joins Anti-Comintern Pact
Soviet-Japanese Border skirmishes

1939- Occupation of Czechoslovakia
Italian occupation of Albania
Renunciation of Anglo-German Naval Pact
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Invasion of Poland
-Anglo-French Declaration of War
Battle of the Atlantic begins

1940- Tripartite Pact
Battles of Norway, France, Britain

1941- DKM Bismark and Prinz Eugen break through Royal Navy blockade, sink HMS Hood, slip past RN into Brest
Operation Barbarossa
Japanese seizure of NEI, French Indochina, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia
-Tojo overrides Kwangtung Army staff, Cease Fire signed with Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Tse Tung
Attack on Pearl Harbor
-USS Neosho caught with 6 million gallons of high octane av-gas unloaded
-USS Lexington, delayed with an engineering casualty, caught in drydock.

1942-
Battle of the Coral Sea
-Yorktown critically damaged and scuttled; Enterprise received minor damage
Japanese amphibious forces capture Port Moresby, Attu, Kiska
British failed offensive into Burma's Arakan region
Sino-Japanese armistice signed, Japan maintains territorial gains; Chinese Civil War resumes

1943-
Operation Spark- Hitler assassinated by bomb returning from meeting with Army Group Centre
-Conspirators within Germany overthrow the Nazi Regime
--SS, Gestapo and Nazi officials who survive the overthrow of the government flee to Japan in a U-boat flotilla commanded by Admiral Dönitz
--Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany heads interregnum government, orders immediate ceasefire on all fronts; OKW signal in the clear calling for ceasefire and peace negotiations. Germany withdraws from Tripartite Pact.
--Mussolini, having been left in the lurch, declares war on Germany. Vichy France declares neutrality
---German and Italian forces begin fighting in Libya, Greece, Yugoslavia, France; Allied forces uncertain who to aid, partisan forces pull back and assess the situation
Japanese amphibious forces land in Western Australia, IJN cut Australian SLOCs to India and Suez in the Indian Ocean, Japanese forces capture and occupy RAF Station Diego Garcia.
Japanese send intially one division of the Kwangtung Army, to expand the foothold in Alaska, three divisions follow on, eventually expanding the coastal footprint down to British Columbia.
Three Kwangtung Army divisions expand foothold in Western Australia
Negotiations for lasting peace begin in Versailles, France, between the Allies and Germany.
German forces not engaged in fighting Italian forces begin pulling back from occupied nations; Romania, Hungry, Bulgaria maintain their alliance with Germany and declare war on Italy.

1944-
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel killed in his headquarters during an Italian air raid on Tripoli.
Japanese forces consolidate their holds in Western Australia, Alaska and British Columbia. French Indochina, the Netherlands East Indies, the Philippines and eastern China begin pouring their mineral wealth to support the Japanese war machine.
With unanimous consent of the Reichstag, Crown Prince Wilhelm crowned Emperor Wilhelm III; Franz Halder appointed Chancellor, Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
Imperial German Army liberates SS controlled concentration camps; Kaiser Wilhelm repeals all Nazi “purity” laws, requests Allied assistance in creation of a new German constitution, and offers reparations for those imprisoned by the Nazi regime.
The German battleships Bismark, Tirpitz, Gneisnau, Scharnhorst, the carrier Graf Zeppelin, along with destroyer and cruiser escort enter the Mediterranean via Gibraltar and engaged the Italian Navy in the Battle of the Malta Channel. Regia Marina lost three of its four battleships, including the two Littorio-class ships Roma and Vittorio Veneto, along with several cruisers and destroyers, severing supply lines. Bismark and Scharnhorst are damaged during the battle, while Emden and several destroyers are suck by the Italian Navy.
German supply convoys from occupied Western France bring much needed supplies to the Afrika Korps. Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge arrives and assumes command of the DAK.
US Army Air Forces send out RFPs for more advanced airlift assets. Chase, Fairchild and Douglas respond, with become the C-82, C-123s and C-124s. After the initial batch of C-82s, Fairchild continues to advance the design, resulting in the C-119.

Deviantart Gallery here
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Re: Shenanigan Sally [Alt-Hist][OF][Nippon '46] Reference Sh

Postby Spica75 » Tue Aug 18, 2015 4:22 pm

Suggestions for making Japan able to stay alive and be a menace:
Have them build the No.71 experimental submarine a year or two early, and then draw the proper conclusions from it right away instead of 7 years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_No.71
It´s basically a 1937 Type XXI wannabe. Or by some accounts, better.
This can be used to let IJN both start the war with drastically better subs, but also to have that forcing them to realise how poor their sonar operators are(any technical job wasn´t "active enough" in facing the enemy so sonar and radar ops were often the worst of the recruits, sometimes even recruited directly from prisons, just to have the requisite personnel numbers), which in turn could keep USN submarine forces from shredding the Japanese merchant traffic into ittybitty pieces by 1943.

Effective ASW early in the war combined with historical USN technical problems could possibly lead to USN more or less abandoning their sub warfare(not likely completely, but if there´s heavy losses of subs in a short time, along with the complaints of faulty torpedos, delays would be inevitable).
It could also lead to IJN building better light escorts early, offloading their DD forces, allowing a more aggressive stance overall.


Have their bureaucrats NOT be too stubborn about lightweight aircraft, especially for carriers. This forced the dreadful lack of protection that was a key part of the pilot losses which made Japan incapable of serious fighting after 1942 historically.
This can also be alleviated by having them start a realistic training program for pilots BEFORE the war instead of not until 1943 or something.

The insane ruling of "lightweight rules" would for example allow Jiro Horikoshi, Zero designer to get what he intended from the beginning, that the Zero should go into production with an almost 50% stronger engine than it did. A 1300+ HP engine instead of 900HP, makes quite a difference, historically this upgrade didn´t happen until late in the war, despite the engine being available by 1940.
It could also allow several aircraft (historical or near-historical) to start the war with the larger more powerful Kasei engine.

Add to that early manufacture and use of the Type 3 13mm MG and the Type 99-2 20mm cannon, and the first couple of years should be a lot nastier. Have the Zero start with 2 of each instead of 2 Type 99-1 and 2 7.7mm MGs. Switch all defensive guns to 13mm MGs or Type 99 cannons(the H8K2 showed historically that this was highly effective deterrant, earning the nickname among US pilots of the flying porcupine or hedgehog).

Have them find one or more of the oilfields in Manchuria(Jillin and Daqing, the former would be limited to the most shallow parts but the latter would be no problem, 250k-500k bl/day production possible), not the best in the world, but would make a serious difference to Japans ability to wage war.


Other possibles:
Standardisation across the IJA and IJN, historically the waste the lack of that caused was serious.

Switch to welding before the war instead of during would improve production ability noticeably and get past the teething issues before the war.

Either enforce tighter standards on measuring in the existing cottage industries that make up most of the Japanese production capacity, or switch key production over to largescale industry before the war. It was quite insane that due to the highly variable standards used for measuring, liberal use of machine tools were often needed to fit things together, even bolts and screws often had to be machined to fit the individual engine it was meant for, causing an effort penalty for nearly all precision manufacturing of 20-60%.
Basically, teach everyone to measure the same way from the start, and Japanese production can jump by 1/3 for "free" well before the war.

Someone with enough clout might be able to get around the "warrior" style of fighting and leadership, this caused massive issues throughout the war, and ironically, this had only made its comeback with the rise of the political extremeism in the 20s and 30s, before that professionalism was THE order of the day. Get this back to WWI standards and Japanese radars and sonars along with little things like firecontrol are suddenly twice as effective or better.

Ditch the 25mm IJN AA, it sucked.

Standardise, stratify and simplify orders and communications. Japanese is not the best of languages for this, and until post WWII when someone finally fixed it up, uncertainties and interpretable orders were far too common.

Someone might figure out that IJN on-ship damage control wasn´t the best early on.

Navy crew sizes were often needlessly large.

Give the Long Lance torpedos 1st generation wake following seekers. Once USA figures out what happened, they wont be very useful, but until then they can definitely raise the amount of havoc caused.

Add a small amphibious utility aircraft on carriers for picking up downed air crew, subhunting etc etc...

Early adoption of HEAT warheads could have Japan start WWII with Panzerfaust style weapons, cheap, not very effective, but until allies learn to deal with them, potentially VERY problematic as they can be employed en masse fairly easy.

And quite important, set up a communications protocol that isn´t solved faster by US intelligence, than the intended recipient. Japanese communications and encryption was dreadful historically, but can be drastically improved quickly even with simple and very cheap means.

Someone might come up with the angled aircraft carrier flight deck early, almost doubling flight ops capacity.

Towed sonar arrays along with the new focus on ASW and submarines are possible.

Truly push the Japanese advantage of starting the war with good access to powerful aircraft engines, while their abilities with inline engines were poor, their radials in the late 30s competed for the top spot.

Along with the better focus on technical side, early investment in radar and electronics are realistic and at least somewhat likely.

Their historical idea of building a baseline ship that can then be finished in one of several ways, fleet tanker, submarine tender, light carrier etc, could come early and allow a much faster expansion of the IJN carrier force early on. The historical Zuiho was a bit too small to really exploit this advantage, but say that the ship starts out longer, wider and around 15-20kt instead of 11kt, that could make a very good CVL.



And the reason i have such a huge chunk of this(i have more, but the rest isn´t relevant without a throwback), is because i´m working on a crossover between The Foresight War(by Anthony Williams who also runs the Autogun forum(where my friend is a member), and the anime series Konpeki no Kantai ( which throws Yamamoto back to 1904 when he´s killed in 1943 ).
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Re: Shenanigan Sally [Alt-Hist][OF][Nippon '46] Reference Sh

Postby Scooter » Tue Aug 18, 2015 5:00 pm

One thing I was also looking at, and mentioned, is the Neosho getting caught in the Pearl Harbor attack, still loaded to the gills with high octane av-gas; and the Lexington caught in dry-dock, eliminating/severely crippling one carrier already. The Battle of the Coral Sea was pretty much a disaster for both sides, resulting in the capture of Port Moresby, and the invasion of Western Australia.

Adding the cease-fire with the Chinese allows Tokyo to free up the regiments in China, for a more aggressive stance in the Pacific, especially in it's campaign in Western Australia, and consolidation of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere".

And while working on profiles, I decided to give the new Kaiserliche Marine angled decks on both the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenberg class carriers they were working on, and without their pneumatic cradle catapult, but steam cats (yes, a British invention, but this *is* Alt-Hist)
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