You can take one military base with all associated equipment and personnel back to 1941 to win WW2. Which do you choose?
You can take one military base with all associated equipment and personnel back to 1941 to win WW2. Which do you choose?
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I wouldn't do an airforce or naval base because modern air and sea systems couldn't be repaired and resupplied in 1941. Tanks still run on diesel and can fire the munitions used in WW2 so that's a possibility but they still can't be repaired and transporting them to Europe would be a significant undertaking. Imagine bringing them to the past only to lose half of them to a uboat in the middle of the Atlantic. They also wouldn't be very useful in the Pacific.
I'm going to go with Liberty. It has army special forces command, a Ranger regiment, and a modern medical facility. I think the most valuable thing we could send back to 1941 is knowledge and training. Deploy the Rangers as trainers and advisers, send the medical personnel to teach modern trauma medicine and lead surgical units.
I don't think modern Rangers hold significant advantage over WWII rangers. I think they would actually be a detriment, as the WWII rangers were familiar with the technologies available in that time period. Those modern rangers do carry more radios than the entire invading force had during D-Day. But, any base you send will have plenty of radios to issue.
My first thought was Norfolk. They've got enough ASW assets to stop the U-boats that were decimating the convoys. Yeah, they won't be able to rearm modern weapons or repair/replace certain damaged systems, but with the U-boats out of the way, the original fleet would have been much more successful. Even after the modern weapons are exhausted, the C3/ISR capabilities of the future fleet will greatly enhance the operations of the past.
My second thought is Wright Patterson AFB, home of the US Air Force museum. Designers get to tear apart aircraft that wouldn't be built until after the war, but not so advanced that they exceed the past nation's ability to produce. They get turbine engines 4 years early, and figure out all the transonic effects thet kept them from breaking the sound barrier. Turboprop-powered heavy bombers, flying higher and faster than anything the Axis can throw at them. Turboshaft powered submarines, destroyers, PT boats, helicopters, tanks
Third thought is to skip straight to the endgame and try to accelerate the Manhattan project. It might be a bit of a stretch to call it a "military base", (and it's not on the list above) but we could send them the Savannah River site. They get more plutonium than they know what to do with. With enough plutonium, they can afford to drop demonstration bombs in unpopulated areas of both the Asian and European theaters, possibly without needing to bomb Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We can avoid the need to invade both Japan and Germany.
Any base we send would have modern computers and some programmers. The German Enigma code could be brute-forced in a matter of hours on a modern computer. That alone is going to shorten the war in Europe by months to years.
By my calculations, the most backwards-compatible thing is probably going to be booze. Booze in 1941 and now are pretty much the same thing with minor superficial differences. So I would send all of Camp Pendleton back to 41. Nailed it.
Only concern would be reach. There's only so many personnel at liberty and a whole lot of war front.