Comments by "" (@BobSmith-dk8nw) on "Alternate History Special 001" video.

  1. On the question of the Japanese invading Hawaii - the Americans had a full division there - there's no way the Japanese could have hauled enough guys there with their fleet to take the island. .
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  2. Castles of Steel https://www.amazon.com/Castles-Steel-Britain-Germany-Winning/dp/0345408780/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Castles+of+steel&qid=1582391797&sr=8-1 has a good discussion of the Gallipoli Campaign. As at Gallipoli there would have been serious mine field problems. The thing is - they couldn't just clear them once - they would have had to keep doing it. And they could find themselves bottled up with mine fields behind them. One of the problems at Gallipoli was that the mine sweepers had civilian crews. The RN tried to force the channel several times and each time the civilian mine sweepers - ran away. They had replaced the civilian crews and were going to go again - when the Army said they would participate and the Navy called off it's show. The basic idea behind Gallipoli - came from what the Germans had done - with the Goeben sitting off their capital - the Turks had done what the Germans wanted them to. The British felt that with some British battleships sitting off the the coast of Istanbul - they could knock the Turks out of the war. The original plan was to land the army at the base of the Gallipoli peninsula - cut it off - and then go down it taking the forts. The Army refused so the Navy tried to do it on their own. They were going to use old battleships that were going to be scrapped anyway so - if they lost some it wouldn't matter. They'd have done it - but the Civilian Mine Sweeper crews kept running away, despite the fact that they took NO casualties. Once they'd replaced them with RN personnel they just might have pulled it off. When the Army said it would participate - by then the Turks had realized the danger and fortified the beaches at the base of the peninsula so they couldn't land there. The places they did land were going up the peninsula - with the Turks supplied and able to get reinforcements - and it was like the western front all over again and they couldn't advance - so they eventually just gave up. At that point the Army was calling the shots and the Navy was just helping out. If they had reverted to the Navy's plan it still might have worked but by then the Turks had had the chance to increase their defenses and they didn't try the Navy plan again so we'll never know. .
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  3. On the question of fighting the last scenario out. This is a year and a half on so - I'd imagine anything anyone came up with has long been done. But - me and my buddies DID do something like this. As to a simulator for the DKM / RN fight - the old Great Naval Battles games which could be used by teams - would have done that. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Great+Naval+Battles+Game&ref=nb_sb_noss your biggest problem here is that these are DOS games ... and I just don't know how well you could get them to run. I have no doubt that some dedicated people could do it though. I did set up a game where me and two of my buddies did a fight like this (I had a LAN in my house) - but with the Americans and the Germans. We were running DOS so that gives you some idea about how long ago we did this. The main German ships were of course Bismarck, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau. The main American ships were Colorado, Maryland, West Virginia and a 12 gun 14" ship. Each side also had a set of cruisers but I don't remember if there were destroyers. The guy who was supposed to help me run the Americans - didn't show up ... so I was a very, very busy boy. I was so busy trying to manage ships I had no idea how the battle was going until the Germans conceded. Here - the REASON the Germans lost - was that Tirpitz took a steering hit early on ... and that pinned the German Fleet to trying to defend her - and all those 16" guns just tore them apart. Now - in addition to this - one of the guys in our group (the one who didn't show up above ...) had developed his own set of Naval Warfare Rules. This was something that had been inspired by the Avalon Hill Game - Jutland and you played with little pieces of card board on the floor. This guy owned a military hobbies shop at the time (in the same strip mall where we drank beer Friday Nights) - and we would sometimes gather there after it closed for the day Saturday Night and play war games - or - at some house where some of the guys were room mates. We did stuff like that all the time ...like ... weekly, though with different games, board games like SSI stuff and miniatures. So - using this guys rules (which were really good - though *I* (he said pridefully) made a contribution to the torpedo rules) - we fought a round robin of battles between the different navies. French vs. Italian -> Italy Italian vs. British -> Britain British vs. German -> German German vs. American - > America American vs. Japanese -> America So - we did actually fight this out - and it would have been similar ships though I don't remember which ones (this was before computers - hence crawling around on the floor with rulers and turning gauges ...). We would typically have 4-8 guys playing on two teams with each guy assigned responsibility for a specific group of ships but with one guy on each side designated the fleet admiral. The thing with all these fights - was they really could have gone either way. There was some match making done in the order of the fights so you didn't have the Italians fighting the Japanese or the Americans. The Italians and the French had specifically designed their navies to fight each other - and so - were a close match and the British and Italians did fight each other a few times. But - equally as important for the outcomes - were the decisions the teams fighting the battles made - and - Random Chance - like Tirpitz taking that steering hit in our computer game fight - or Hood at the Denmark Straits ... .
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