Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · British Crown Colony · Atlantic Convoy Hub

Bermuda - 1939

Bermuda in 1939 is the British Crown Colony - under British administration since the 1684 Crown takeover from the Somers Isles Company that had been administering the post-1609 settlement - and operating as the substantial Royal Navy Atlantic-Caribbean strategic-positioning facility. Population about 30,000. The strategic identity is the British Crown Colony in the North Atlantic with the substantial Royal Navy strategic-positioning at the Bermuda Dockyard, the looming September 1940 Destroyers-for-Bases Agreement (the Roosevelt-Churchill bilateral arrangement that will lease bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, St. Lucia, Trinidad, and British Guiana to the United States in exchange for 50 over-age US Navy destroyers) that will institutionalize the substantial US Naval Operating Base Bermuda and US Army Fort Bell at Kindley Field, and the substantial wartime Atlantic Convoy assembly-and-routing function that the central-Atlantic positioning will support.

Starting position

Bermuda's defense-architecture in 1939 includes the substantial Royal Navy Bermuda Dockyard facilities (the principal Royal Navy North Atlantic-Caribbean base), the British Army Bermuda Garrison formations including the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps and the Bermuda Militia Artillery, and the substantial coastal-artillery and broader colonial-defense architecture. The Bermuda Royal Naval Air Station and broader RAF facilities have been progressively developed across the 1930s. The substantial post-1940 Destroyers-for-Bases Agreement will institutionalize the major US Naval Operating Base Bermuda at the new Naval Operating Base development and the US Army Air Forces Kindley Field that will be the principal US Atlantic-air-transit-and-anti-submarine-warfare facility through the war.

What turns the campaign

What Bermuda in 1939 wants is the British Crown Colony framework preserved through the looming wartime period that will substantially elevate the strategic-positioning, the substantial wartime Atlantic Convoy assembly-and-routing function institutionalized at the operational scale the Battle of the Atlantic requirements demand, the post-1940 Destroyers-for-Bases Agreement implementation managed without producing the kind of bilateral-British-American sovereignty-and-engagement tensions that the substantial US base-development would otherwise generate, and the broader Atlantic strategic-architecture maintained against the substantial U-boat threat. What Bermuda fears is a substantial U-boat operations escalation against the Atlantic Convoy traffic that the central-Atlantic positioning supports, a British strategic-resource-redirection that compresses the colonial-engagement, and a domestic political-economic crisis that the substantial wartime population growth and the broader colonial-administrative pressures will produce.

Signature challenge