Happy to explain - it is essentially an artifact of 'old FFO' we have had to live with.

In 'old FFO' the Europan team based a large strategic bomber force in Israel and Crete without consideration of the logistics requirements of such a move. This became 'Bomber Command Middle East' and it is basically an entire Bomber group-plus: three wings of Stirlings and Wellingtons and a French Wing of B-24. This was written into the structural fabric of the AH and we could not and do not have the resources or desire to rewrite it all.

Ok, then we worked out the logistics demands and they are enormous, and the controlling one is fuel. Just roughly, a Stirling takes about 3 tons of fuel for a sortie. So a single 100-bomber mission takes 300 tons of avgas just for the bomber's fuel. each sortie requires about twice that in operational, training and maintenance flying, then add GSE and motor vehicle support and you get roughly a thousand tons of petrol burned for each sortie equiivalent, then there's the  escorting nightfighters, recce aircraft, local point defence fighters, air transport requirements - the demands are enormous.  Study showed that there's only one place in all the Middle east within range of Rumania (remember, their target's German oil supplies) where the fuel demands can be met, and that's within  pipeline range of the big refinery at Haifa. Crete's right out except as a forward base because it cannot possibly be supplied with the volume of bulk fuel needed.

Oh, and all of that needs a hell of a lot of rural land, and guess who owns that? So no matter what, the Muslim Brotherhood's going to be re-igniting the Revolt (which did not stop in '39, it was just stamped on and operated at a lower level). So damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Haifa port can also handle the equipment and ammo loads after a six month upgrade, but you sure as hell need as many local workers as possible too. And you have to be able to trust 'em - terrorists need not apply. Not when dealing with thousands of tons of ammo a week.

OK, so BCME goes into northern Israel as that's the only place it can go - hundreds of millions of pounds of infrastructure, tens of thousands of men, vast depots, a road net, fuel net, dozens of airfields, port upgrade, a local light gauge rail net for bulk ammo movements, you name it - and huge resumptions of land.

So there's ALREADY an alienation issue to deal with. 

And all of the infrastructure horribly vulnerable to terrorist attack, and that's going to happen real quick. And there's a major and very powerful Allied strategic card in play - the attack on the German oil supplies, plus a secondary card, as BCME is ALSO a strategic warning to Hitler's Ally, Stalin. (Remember Barbarossa is in 1942 in APOD and 'old FFO' and FTL)

And the whole area is chock-a-block with Al Hussayni's Muslim Brotherhood suporters/sympathisers/rebels and is in a state of active if low level revolt. And where's Al Husayni himself? Oh, he's in BERLIN, schmoozing it up with his very good personal friend Heinrich Himmler and recruiting for the SS. The German reaction is an absolute no-brainer, they support and revitalise the Muslim brotherhood's Arab revolt, and they can do that through Turkey with some difficulty it is true.

So now we have northern Israel and parts of Lebanon going up in flames.

So now the Anglo-French have a choice to make in 1941. Their trustworthy local labour forces are Lebanese Christians, specific coastal Arab Muslim clans and Druze (for the AdA) and Israeli Christians, Jews, some specific coastal Muslim clans and Druze for the Imperials. And the Muslim Brotherhood (remember we are talking religious groups here, not ethnic ones, Druze, Muslims and local Christians are all Arabs ethnically) are working for Hitler and Himmler as per historical reality. Only with lots of guns, German advisers (probably including Skorzeny and his hairy crew), financial and logistics support.

It's a terrible situation. And strategic demands in total war trump all local considerations. That's ugly, but it also happens to be true.

The only possible answer is partition on religious lines in Lebanon and Israel, with most of the rural/agricultural Muslim populations relocated into Syria and Trans-Jordan respectively and handsomely paid for the move. A handsome payment defuses things as much as it can be, and it's only going to be the cost of a couple of battleships (say 15-30 million). That's dirt cheap compared to the infrastructure cost alone, let alone the ongoing operational costs for BCME.

An indication of those costs.

1 Lancaster cost £42,000.00 to purchase. (This assumes minimal profits being made by the manufacture.)

 

1 Lancaster required 5,000 tons of hard aluminium or the equivalent of 11 million sauce pans. [mark comment - something wrong here and below in some spots]

 

1 Lancaster required the equivalent manufacturing capability required to build 40 basic automobiles of the period.

 

1 Lancaster absorbed the equivalent man hours as it takes to build one mile (1.61 km’s) of a modern highway (motorway).

 

1 Lancaster carried the equivalent radio and radar equipment to fabricate one million domestic radios of the period. 

 

Each member of a Lancaster crew cost £10,000.00 to train.

 

The average cost for a Lancaster was therefore £70,000 or £80,000 if the crew consisted of 8 crew members.

 

To fuel, bomb, arm and service a single Lancaster required an additional £13,000.00. This also includes an allowance for the cost to train the ground crews.


Therefore, the average cost to the British economy for EACH Lancaster bombing sortie was £100,000.00


Stirling going to be same ballpark.

For comparison, a minesweeper cost about £150,000 to build, a good house in Australia cost £300 to £900 in this era.

Partition, that's a standard, if fairly unpleasant, European Imperial response and it's been used for millennia and is still used today. The Sumerians used partition. It's also about the only one which stands a chance of working in contemporary Anglo-French eyes during a nazi-supported revolt in the middle of a total war when you are building extremely vulnerable and critical military infrastructure at a cost of hundreds of millions.

The responses of the Maronite, Melkite, Samaritan, Assyrian, Jewish and Druze communal and political leaderships to the opportunities offered by this situation in Israel and Lebanon are blindingly obvious and I won't belabour them.

I will add that it also makes an entire and contentious post-war history go away, should we choose to continue APOD post-war. That's not a bad 'storyline' outcome for any AH. Who wants to get their AH a shedload of partisan trolling based on contemporary situations not one troll in a thousand even actually understands above a bumper-sticker level? 

Cheers: Mark





Last Edited By: MarkLBailey Dec 11 14 10:47 PM. Edited 1 times.