At the end of World War I, US naval planners assessed the naval operations of that conflict and came to the conclusion that a fleet lost 10% of its combat capability for every 1,000 miles (1600 km) it operated away from its base. The implications of this assessment were then compounded by the fortifications clause …
Category Archives: Military History
The Japanese conquest of Timor (II)
Switch to guerrilla tactics By the end of February, the Japanese were in control of most of Dutch Timor and the area round Dili in the north-east. The Australians remained in the island’s south and east, however. The 2/2nd Independent Company was trained for stay-behind operations and had its own engineers and signallers, although it …
The Japanese conquest of Timor (I)
The Battle of Timor resulted in the Japanese seizure of the island of Timor, on which the colonial powers were the Netherlands and Portugal, to the north-west of Darwin in the Australian Northern Territory. The Japanese invaded the island on 20 February 1942 and were resisted by a small Allied force. This Sparrow Force comprised …
The Japanese conquest of Hong Kong
At the beginning of World War II, Hong Kong was a British possession on the south-west coast of China to the south-east of Canton in the Pearl River estuary. The Chinese had ceded Victoria island to the UK at the end of the 1st Opium War (1839/42), and the New Territories on the mainland were …
Japan’s greatest Pacific base – Truk atoll
The US geographical (rather than operational) codename for Truk atoll in the Caroline islands group of the central Pacific between 1941 and 1945 was originally ‘Anaconda’ and then ‘Panhandle’. A group of hilly islands, the tips of drowned mountain peaks, surrounded by a large barrier reef with five passes, Truk is a large atoll lying …
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‘Fathead’ – A Far-Eastern ‘Mincemeat’?
The head of ‘GSI(d)’, one of the the British organisations responsible for deception activities in the Far East in World War II and which was merged in January 1944 with the Special Planning Section to create the ‘D’ Division, was Peter Fleming, a well known writer and brother of Ian Fleming, the creator of James …
A successful British deception of WWII – the ‘Cyprus Defence Plan’
The ‘Cyprus Defence Plan’ was a pioneering and very effective British deception plan, created in the aftermath of the German seizure of Crete in ‘Merkur’. The plan suggested that Cyprus, which could have been Germany’s next target for airborne assault and would offer the Axis powers considerable strategic advantages, was held by forces considerably stronger …
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Operation ‘Tabarin’ – a far flung British undertaking of World War II
In 1938/39 Germany undertook its third Antarctic expedition. Led by Kapitän Alfred Ritscher of the German Navy, the expedition was to find part of Antarctica on which a German whaling station could be established as a way to increase Germany’s production of fat. Whale oil was then the most important raw material for the production …
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Operation ‘Longshanks’
Operation ‘Longshanks’, which was otherwise known as ‘Boarding Party’ and ‘Creek’, was a peculiar British operation against a German merchant ship moored, as a neutral, in the Portuguese enclave of Goa in western India, and took place on 9 March 1943. The operation was undertaken by members of the Calcutta Light Horse, a reserve unit …
Operation ‘Postmaster’
Occurring on 13 January 1942, this was a British seizure of Axis shipping in Santa Isabel harbour on the neutral Spanish island of Fernando Pó (now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea) in the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa. The operation was undertaken by the Special Operations Executive’s ‘Maid Honor’ Force, so-named for …