Recent content by Cook

When the Americans launched the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, the first act was to classify all of the work of the physicists involved in order to prevent any word of the project from leaking to the Germans and to America's Soviet allies; the project became one of the most closely...

It's not online, but I highly recommend you get your hands on Robert Forczyk's We March Against England.

Kyoto Japan. The city is home to 17 World Heritage listed sites including Nijo Castle, the Kyoto Imperial palace and the exquisite Kinkaku-ji Temple. In 1945 Kyoto was designated as the primary target for the first atomic bomb, being a city of over a million inhabitants that had not as yet been...

Australian war-time Prime Minister John Curtin who literally smoked himself into an early grave in July 1945. Curtin, who took office in October 1941 and lead the country through the darkest days of the Pacific War, was a workaholic and also a chain smoker, with the number of cigarettes he...

An unnecessary deus ex machina; Pétain was in Madrid in 1940, as France's ambassador to Generalissimo Franco's court, and had already turned down one invitation to join the French cabinet (from then Premier Daladier); it would not have been unlikely for him to turn down another offer to join a...

Murrow was in London for the Blitz, so he knew full well the appalling civilian suffering that Operation Rolling Thunder would be inflicting, and he was intelligent and experienced enough to know it wouldn't weaken North Vietnamese resolve to continue fighting in the least; if anything it would...

Toppling Jordan's King Hussein in 1970 would have probably resulted in an immediate Palestinian/Jordanian civil war, with Arafat's nationalist Fatah clashing with the Socialists of the PFLP and DFLP. You would also have seen Syrian and Iraqi intervention and clashes between them in their efforts...

Because the scenario is: Quite obviously if the fleet is not dispatched to Gibraltar to attack Mers-el-Kébir the decisions made by the French cammander there is not relevant. Godfroy's position was in the same postion as the ships in Portsmouth and he simply acquiesced to the inevitable; he...

Britain had demonstrated nothing of the sort; the decision to move (or not) against the French ships in the various anchorages was taken prior to the 3rd of July, when action was taken as near to simultaneously as could be arranged across that expanse of the globe. Besides, as the JIC...

The Royal Navy doesn’t attack the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir On the 3rd of July 1940 the Royal Navy attacked the French fleet in port at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria. Historians have generally regarded this as bold act by Churchill, a clean break from the indecisive policies of the previous...

In 1920 Stalin is arrested and executed for betraying the revolution by disobeying orders when in command of the Southern Front in the Polish-Soviet War of that year. (Down south and on my mobile - will try to add more detail here when I get home in a couple of days.)

Leo Szilard doesn't catch the flu. In 1918, twenty year old Szilard was training with his regiment at Kufstein in Austria when he fell ill with the Spanish Flu and was hospitalised. While he was in hospital recovering, his regiment was sent to the Italian front and completely wiped out at the...

Given the time frame, and the industrial disputes that plagued Britain in the 1970s ('The British disease'), the tunnel probably wouldn't be completed until 1980-81, so it would most probably be opened by Margret Thatcher, who would be able to claim credit for completing what the Callahan...

It's hard to see any advantage in them though. If they are operating from a seaplane tender ship it isn't going to be any smaller than an aircraft carrier, and has the disadvantages that, unlike an aircraft carrier, it has to stop dead in the water to launch and recover the aircraft, and will...

I'm just thinking of the very limited number of sites they could operate from. Seaplanes/flying boats did not normally operate from open waters because they were usually too rough, forcing them to rely on sheltered harbours, and they can be quite limited. For instance, during WW2 there were only...