The War Planners

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It was in mid-March 1943 that Freddie Morgan began planning the Allied assault on Northwest Europe, and it was April 26 before he was given his responsibilities from the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the official designation of COSSAC (taken from the initials of his new title). He was told that the Allies intended to “defeat the German fighting forces in Northwest Europe” and that he was to prepare plans for a full-scale assault on the European mainland at the earliest possible date in 1944, followed by a death blow delivered at the heart of Nazi Germany with a force of 100 Allied divisions. Nazi-occupied Russia would have seen millions of people executed or enslaved – including Russians, Ukrainians and any other Slavs. Sluice gates around the city on the Volga-Moscow Canal would have been opened and water would have flowed over the rubble of the Kremlin and Red Square. In May 1943, when Prime Minister Churchill sailed aboard the liner Queen Mary to the Trident Conference in Washington, he was accompanied by Brigadier K.G. McLean and two other COSSAC officers. One morning during the voyage, as Churchill lay in bed in his spacious cabin, the three officers set up a large map and “explained in a tense and cogent tale the plan which had been prepared for the cross-Channel descent upon France,” the Prime Minister reported later. Said Churchill, “General Morgan and his advisers recommended the Normandy coast (over the Pas de Calais)…. There can be no doubt now that this decision was sound. Normandy gave us the greatest hope. The defenses were not so strong as in the Pas de Calais.”

While these schemes are sometimes held up as a Philistine attempt to destroy the material heritage of the past, a reflection of the thoughts of post-war planners such as Charles Holden suggests a slightly different view. In 1957, Holden said that “I don’t seek for a style, either ancient or modern … I want an architecture which is through and through a good building; a building planned for specific purpose, constructed in the method and use of materials, old or new, most appropriate to the purpose the building has to serve”. His Plan for Canterbury did not go down very well with the locals, but many of Holden’s buildings around the country came to be strongly supported by preservation lobbyists and practitioners alike. For instance, many of his London Underground stations are now protected under heritage law, as is Charles Holden’s most famous building, the University of London’s Senate House. As his writings make clear, Holden did not seek to ‘destroy the past’. Rather, his attitude towards ‘heritage’ was more focussed on use and meaning than on tangible constructions. This is a heritage of function rather than one of built form. The considerable public debate and conflict over the post-war plan for Canterbury, therefore, was not simply about the ‘preservation’ and ‘destruction’ of heritage, but was rather focussed on what heritage was; how the past is presenced in the built landscape of the city; a heritage of function, and the function (or purpose) of heritage; and of the ‘future heritage’ that people in post-war Canterbury desired to pass on. COSSAC was also able to draw on British staff studies of the ill-fated Dieppe raid and on knowledge and experience built up from a series of raids on the enemy-held coasts. Lord Mountbatten’s Combined Operations forces— primarily the Commandos and elite Royal Navy units such as the Special Boat Squadron—had, by mid-1943, amassed considerable skill and experience in small-scale seaborne assaults, had produced appropriate training manuals, had set up specialized training depots, and had developed landing craft that could be used in a major cross-Channel assault. When an undercover Mossad agent is killed on a private Caribbean island, the death sets off alarm bells in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Moscow. The island is owned by Guy Hawkinson, the controversial CEO of Hawk Enterprises, and member of one of America’s most powerful family dynasties. Watts imputes a lot of the ideas in his books to his own adventures in the military. The author believes that his books are able to create such a strong reaction in his readers because his words provide an accurate picture of the chaos that manifests when things go wrong and bullets start to fly.The Americans are preparing. David Manning is now one of the top members of a secretive CIA-Pentagon team tasked with finding a winning strategy. His brother Chase is working with American special forces and CIA teams in Chinese-contested hot spots around the world. Victoria Manning is the commanding officer of a navy helicopter squadron in the eastern pacific. And Lena Chou is held prisoner on an American military base. The War planner, is the massive update that adds dozens of important features some coming from Command Professional Edition, hundreds of improvements and myriad changes and bug fixes, adding unprecedented power and flexibility in the organization and automation of complex operations. The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to conduct in-depth, nonpartisan research to improve policy and governance at local, national, and global levels. Donate

All across the USA, people are showing up dead. The deaths don't appear to be connected in any way until one particular death occurs and gets the Secretary of Defense's attention. He arranges for a task force to investigate. With the Chinese fleet advancing, Admiral Manning commands the USS FORD carrier strike group near Midway. CIA operative Chase Manning is sent home to the US to fight a lethal unit of Chinese special forces. LCDR Victoria Manning hunts submarines off the coast of Guam. And intelligence analyst David Manning tries to decipher Chinese plans. A graduate of the US Naval Academy, class of 2003, Watts served as a naval officer and helicopter pilot until 2013.

Now they want Colt to use his past relationship with Pax AI executive Ava Klein to penetrate the company’s inner circle, and uncover the mole. Because U.S. troops would eventually outnumber the British and Canadians in the Overlord ground forces, Morgan suggested that the supreme commander be an American. By the autumn of 1943, rumors were circulating that the post would go to General Marshall, who had done a phenomenal job of building up U.S. Army strength. The dour Marshall, a World War I staff officer with no combat experience, badly wanted command of the Normandy invasion. He was recommended by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, but President Roosevelt considered Marshall indispensable and kept him in Washington. FDR told him, “Well, I didn’t feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.” Soon after the tattered British Expeditionary Force was miraculously rescued from Dunkirk in June 1940, planners at the War Office in London began dreaming of returning to the German-occupied European continent.

Russia was to be utterly dissolved as a country – and ruled by six Reichskommissars who would have been answerable only to Hitler. Your contribution covers hosting and licensing costs, bug fixes and new features, and Gathering Storm/ Storm over Asia development.

One key parameter will be absent from this diminished future partnership: the personal ties between Putin and Xi, which could hardly be described as “ friendship”, a feeling entirely foreign for both hard-nosed autocrats, but still amounted to an important positive driver in the historically difficult relationship. Xi missed the opportunity to warn Putin against the fateful invasion and he may not be able to prevent Putin’s downfall. Nobody among the few dozen of Putin’s possible successors has a useful rapport with Beijing. Their prime aspirations, centered on regaining access to the ill-gotten assets frozen by Western sanctions, will hardly endear them to the Chinese elites, who have just pledged anew their far-from-sincere commitment to the anti-corruption campaign at the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Party Congress. Chinese President Jinshan is not long for this earth. With cancer giving him only a few months left to live, he is ready for his final move. A massive Chinese military transit across the Pacific, and eventually onto American soil. Double-flame” time acceleration: “I wish my simulation runs had executed more slowly, I had time to spare”– said no-one on their deathbed. Aside from an array of general sim-speed improvements, this update brings a brand-new exclusive (and optional) time accel mode: “Double Flame”. This cranks up the virtual timeslice to 5 seconds, massively speeding up simulation execution. “Hold on”, we hear you say, “bad things start to happen when you get so coarse in your timeslice”. You bet they do. So how did we solve it? Find out in one of our follow-ups.

This is a taut techno-thriller similar to what Tom Clancy used to write. While the premise may be a little hard to swallow if you think too much about it, the pace is fast and when you think it's coming to a resolution there's another twist around the corner. The author knows enough about the Internet and other electronic things that he's able to make many of the cyber-threats believable. The vestiges of this heritage of future heritage can be seen today in the buildings and streetscapes of the city. Along Northgate, for instance, the ‘ghost’ of a planned-for wide boulevard can still be seen next to St John’s Hospital, where a Veterinary practice and a William Hill Bookmakers were built during the 1950s(?) to sit along the side of a widened street that was never built (see photos below). Had this street been built, then the St John’s Hospital would have been demolished – indeed, the older buildings actually overlap very slightly with the footprint of 1950s re-build. Max needs to figure out how he fits into the picture and why the CIA has a file on him that even the FBI has been barred from seeing. If Max wants to get answers, he must join forces with an old flame. From USA Today bestselling author and former US Navy pilot Andrew Watts comes a series made for fans of Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn. ____________________________ Book 5: Overwhelming Force When the Chinese mil...A CIA operative in Shanghai sends a message to Langley, and then goes missing. An inner-circle of Chinese government officials has set in motion plans to do the unthinkable - to invade the United States of America. The part of the Russian nuclear arsenal that has attracted unprecedented Western attention and concerns during the Ukraine war is the non-strategic warheads, on which no reliable data exists. If that wasn’t bad enough, there are parties in China’s leadership who want to use these spies to initiate a plan that will see China invade the United States.