BA in History? Well done that man - that's where I started off. I also used to play rugby, head injuries are absolutely no fun, it's good you have recovered.

Yep, I know the issue with libraries too. My wife gave me the 50th anniversary edition of Shirer's 'The Rise and fall of the Third Reich' for our 30th wedding anniversary recently, cyrrently re-reading that in my copious free time. It's odd how perspectives alter. Now knowing much more than when I first read it, it's very odd to pick out the glaring flaws in Shirer's analysis. How can he say 'Hitler absorbed all his political theory from two socialist political parties in pre-war Vienna, absorbed his Germanic nationalist-supremacist views from a Germanic supremacist group in the same city and learned his rabid anti-semitism on the streets of Vienna, adopted a populist socialist party platform, took Drexler's socialist-rooted German Worker's Party and named it the National Socialist German Worker's party, and personally designed the flag with the red representing socialism, the white circle gemanic nationalisn, and the hooked cross for 'Aryan' visual impact, Hitler was right wing...'

That sort of 'analysis' is fall-about laughing. (The 'National Socialism was capitalist meme was actually an invention of Stalin's NKVD in 1946.) But in first generation history that sort of silly error's OK even where there's a lot of them, Shirer was not a historian but a journalist, the book is wonderfully written, he burrowed deep into the captured archives and found many historical treasures, it's highly readable and above all evocative of what it was actually like to see it all unfold from someone who was there.  First-generation history is always riddled with errors, yet it's also extremely valuable as it's written by those who were there. I like Shirer a lot.

Wildlife - you guys have freaking bears! Mind you, if given the choice of tackling a bear armed only with a knife or getting stung by the little monster below, I'd take the bear any day of the week. Just as good a chance of survival and recovering from a bear-mauling's infinitely less painful. People stay the hell out of the sea in north Queensland for very good reason.

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Singapore

A lot of reasons for this. Firstly it was in 'old FFO' and Geoff Mowbray took it over. He's deeply knowledgeable about the Malaya Campaign  and it represents an entirely independent body of work within both APOD and  FTL. Secondly doing it that way has driven a lot of research into 'the Singapore Strategy', which (as Christopher Bell notes in his war-plan based approach) was much, much more complex than normally thought. I have added to this myself in my own studies on trade protection. 'The Singapore Strategy'  was part - and a lesser part - of the solution to a global infrastructure problem to solve a global mobility problem the RN faced from 1919. That was the regaining of strategic mobility by the RN, now oil fired (so the global coaling base network was obsolete) with much bigger ships (so the global base network was obsolete). And teh reason to update the infrastructure was to enable the fleet to protect trade.

it's also led to a lot of research into 'what now' after Singapore falls because the Fleet was there, won its battles, but got forced out anyway. And that's been valuable research indeed, revealing a hell of a lot about the whys and wherefores of Imperial responses east of Suez in WWII.

So it's both an FFO thing continued with and a bit more complicated than that. One of the things which makes it plausible is the demand on shipping that BCME makes as their infrastructure builds up in the eastern basin of the Med. There's not much difference in tonnage demand from Western Desert in OTL. However, we have a bit more available tonnage in the long-haul fast reefer category, because of the French Navy - we have less need for AMC, losses to U-boats are lower and weather losses are way down as we can put old, slow tramps servicing the Plate grain trade into convoy mostly under air cover from the Plate to Recifc then via calm seas to Dakar then north. At one point in 1941, 25% of british dry cargo tonnage was out of action due to weather damage. In APOD, that just does not happen, there's no need to expose the small and/or old ships to the North Atlantic. 

That saves enough tonnage to get some reinforcements to Malaya, just not enough. And the campaign and seige Geoff wrote up is just epic.

Cheers: mark