There is nothing at all secret about the various Allied plans hatched during the Phoney War to attack the Soviet Union. In my small collection of military history books I have been able to find 4 seperate references beyond Alistair Horne in a few minutes. To whit:

1940 The Fall of France General Andre Beaufre, Cassell 1967 (first published in French in 1965) p168-169

But what kind of adventure were we trying to get mixed up in? Under pressure of public opinion, all sorts of extravagant plans were hatched: Baku was to be bombed by aircraft based on Syria;

General Beaufre, a staff officer in 1940, reaches the same conclusion as Mr Unz:

….the payoff came from the Scandanavians who refused to allow our expeditionary forces to cross their territory. It is curious today to think that the eventual defeat of Germany may have descended from this decision that at the time caused such distress in France.

The Collapse of the Third Republic: The Fall of France in 1940 William L Shirer, Pan paperback 1972 (first published 1969) p613-617

Daladier had launched the idea on January 19th, 1940, when he instructed General Gamelin and Admiral Darlan to prepare a study ‘on an eventual intervention to destroy Russian oil’

Mr Shirer relates that Soviet awareness of Anglo-French plans to attack them may have prompted them to make peace with the Finns when they did.

History of the Second World War B.H. Liddell Hart, Book Club Associates ed 1973 (First published Cassell 1970) p33-34

After the fall of France, the Germans captured the files of the French High Command – and published a collection of sensational documents from them.
These showed how the Allied chiefs had spent the winter in comtemplating offensive plans all around the circle – for striking at Germany’s rear flank through Norway, Sweden, and Finland; for striking at the Ruhr through Belgium; for striking at her remote eastern flank through Greece and the Balkans; for cutting off her loan-source of petrol supply by striking at Russia’s great oilfields in the Caucasus. It was a wonderful collection of fantasies – the vain imaginings of Allied leaders, living in a dream-world until the cold douche of Hitler’s own offensive awoke them.

Blood, Tears and Folly Len Deighton, Pimlico ed 1995 (First published 1993) p173

The essence of Anglo-French policy in these days of what an American journalist called a Phoney War, and Chamberlain termed Twilight War, was to go and fight somewhere else. The French proposed schemes for fighting in south-east Europe and wanted to bomb Russian oil wells in the Caucasus. Fortunately these crackpot ideas came to nothing.

The Allied plans to bomb Baku are often mentioned in histories of Operation Barbarossa as British high altitude photo-reconnaissance photos of the Caucasus were also captured by the Germans in 1940. The British methods were a revelation to the Germans and instrumental in their own high altitude photo-reconnaissance efforts in the leadup to Barbarossa.

The reason Baku couldn’t be bombed from Mosul is that the British Mandate and hence control over Iraq had ended in 1932. By treaty the RAF were allowed two bases (used for training) and the British were allowed right of passage in time of war. They were not allowed to use Iraq as a base to start a war with the Soviet Union.

As you can see all of the above books which mention the Allied proposals to attack the Soviet Union are by well known authors and are standard works on the period.

I believe that Mr Unz did in fact read references to these proposals at some stage but the signifigance of what are literally historical footnotes did not occur to him at the time. It is only with his new found skepticism that he has looked at events with a new perspective. I had a similar experience with General Beaufre’s book above. He spends 56 pages describing his part in the “Mission to Moscow” which was the Allied attempt to reach an agreement on a possible anti-Nazi pact with the Soviet Union in the leadup to World War Two. Historically the Nazis swooped in at the last minute and signed the German-Soviet pact which allowed Germany to proceed with the invasion of Poland. What I had not realised until General Beaufre spelled it out for me is that the Allies had no intentions of doing a deal with the Soviet Union. Their whole mission was a cynical attempt to keep the Soviet Union in play as a counterweight to Germany and spin out the negociations until the 1939 campaigning season was over. Thereby preventing an invasion of Poland in 1939.

Mr Unz now that you have pursued Mr Wright to the utmost ends of this thread and administered a sound thrashing to the bounder, might I draw your attention to comment 704.

I provided 4 book references to an air attack on Baku or the Caucausus over a period of 30 years since 1965 with page numbers and quotations. To which I can add, since you seem very sceptical:

To Lose a Battle: France 1940 Alastair Horne, Macmillan 1969, p118

The War in The West: Germany Ascendant 1939-1941 James Holland, Corgi 2016 (First published 2015) p229

Operation Barbarossa Robert Kirchubel, Osprey 2013, pp 24-25

No dastardly Googling was involved in finding these references just my evil finger perusing book indexes. This is just books from my modest collection that refer specifically to an air attack on Baku or the Caucausus by the Western allies. If I were to broaden the scope to include an Allied expedition to Finland which would also have started a war with Russia I have many more books just in my collection. I would hazard a guess that you could find a lot more references in a major collection.

To put it simply if you read general histories of World War 2 such as Liddell Hart (1970), Deighton (1993), or Holland (2015) you will find out about these Allied plans to attack Russia. If you read in depth on the 1940 French campaign and consult standard works like Beaufre, Shirer, or Horne you will find them discussed in some detail.

In relation to your points:

1. It is a stretch to call the proposed air attack on Baku the largest strategic bombing campaign in world history at that time either in conception or likely results. As Horne (p118) asks “How with the absurdly small bomber potential then available to both Britain and France, it was imagined that any raid on the Baku oil-wells could have caused more than a pin-prick is hard to imagine.”

2. Any form of Allied military action that resulted in war with Russia would have been a pretty big deal. An air attack on Baku was less likely at that time than an expeditionary force being sent to Finland. Beaufre, Horne and Shirer all make this point.

3. Plans for an air attack on Baku was not a gigantic story and it was not covered up. As my references show it is an historical footnote that has been in plain view for anyone that cared to look since the German’s first revealed it in 1940. You might legitimately ask why it did not get more attention earlier than Osborn’s specialised monograph Operation Pike in 2000? Well if the key isue is a hypothetical or counter-factual what if war between the Western Allies of 1940 and Russia, then the proposed Allied expeditionary force going to Finland to attack the Russians is a quite sufficient spark. The air attack on Baku is an interesting piece of trivia that has always been overshadowed by Finland as a potential cause of war betwen the Allies and Russia. It belongs in the same category as hypothetical plans by the Germans to invade Switzerland, or the Allies trying to get Turkey to declare war on Germany. The other reason for a lack of attention to the Baku operation is simply historical inertia. Most history books tend to just rehash existing material and existing opinions. It is only the occasional book such as Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction that goes back to the source material and critically re-examines the received wisdom. There has also been a profound aversion on the part of professional historians to consider counterfactual history such as this attack on Baku eg E.H. Carr: ‘counterfactual’ history is a mere ‘parlour game’, a red herring’ And how much attention should one pay to such self-evidently absurd plans as the expeditionary force to Finland or the air attack on Baku? Alistair Horne quotes a Brtish MP Colonel Josiah Wedgwood remarking in the Commons on the Finland expedition: ‘It would have been the maddest military adventure upon which this country had ever embarked. If you look in Hansard, Colonel Wedgwood also remarked, “It is an amazing idea that in the middle of a war with Hitler we should gratuitously take on another war with Russia.” That was the opinion then, and that has been the opnion of every historian who has looked at these plans since. Were they wrong?

4. If you include all the hypothetical military operations that might have led to war between the Allies and Russia, Horne spends 4 pages out of 523 pages of text (hardback edition). Shirer spends 14 pages out of 1092 (paperback). Horne summarises the range of operations and the (mostly) French motivation for them very well. It is hard to see what more he could profitably have added. ‘ Indeed Shirer’s more detailed and rigorous account is more than enough. I was certainly in no hurry to read more French history after finishing The Collapse of the Third Republic!

The canard to end all canards: The Guns of Singapore faced the wrong direction.

The infamous Guns of Singapore were located on the northern side of Singapore Island. They could and did shell land targets eg Wikipedia:

In early 1942, the Johore Battery was employed in the Allied artillery bombardment of Johor Bahru, which at that time was under Japanese military occupation following the retreat of all Allied forces from British Malaya to Singapore

The main problem with the Guns of Singapore is that they were intended for use against ships. Therefore almost all of their ammunition was AP & SAP (Armour Piercing and Semi-Armour Piercing). What they needed and didn’t have much of was HE (High Explosive).

Another Kiwi here.

The old joke about Rob Muldoon was “Rob Muldoon before he robs you”. That was a reference to high taxes eg 40% Sales tax on music sales.

The other major target of opportunist thieves after cigarettes here is petrol stations. They have had bank teller type windows, panic rooms and fog cannons for some time so that has pushed robbers towards softer targets like corner dairies. A lot of the robbers are kids or teenagers hence the lack of armaments. In terms of thwarted robbers targetting random passers by, there are very few people out and about in most NZ suburbs at any hour of the day. The younger robbers are also mostly making their attempts in their own areas so trying to rob the other welfare beneficiaries is not going to net much and also raise the risk of them being recognised.

The area of crime here that sees more guns is, not surprisingly, drugs. Gangs are much more involved both as wholesale suppliers, and retail, running “tinny houses” (drugs wrapped in tinfoil = tinnies).

Convicts were only transported to Australia after the American Revolution removed America as the preferred dumping ground. According to this article on Gizmodo, between 1718 and 1788 up to 10% of migrants to America were British convicts.

https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/britain-sent-thousands-of-its-convicts-to-america-not-1707458418

When caregivers say they have have experience in disarming armed girls there may be some truth in what they are saying. Many years ago at a party at our flat I disarmed a 15 year old girl armed with a large kitchen knife. The girl in question had taken exception to what one of the other 15 year old girls had said to her and sought out our cutlery drawer to arm herself and seek revenge. When I confronted the armed girl I had to make a call: was she full of shit and an ineffectual knife wielder, or was she a real threat? I decided that she was full of shit and took the knife off her (and hid the cutlery drawer) without any problems. It helped that she was a small girl who didn’t look like she knew what she was doing and I knew all our knives were blunt as hell. Everyone involved was white. If she had been a 15 stone girl she may have needed a punch in the face to ensure the upper hand before being disarmed.

I did watch the video. I think the police officer made the right call in this situation.

My point was that Steve rejected the idea of disarming a knife wielder out of hand. I am speaking from a point of reality: I have disarmed a knife wielding “girl”. By the same token the father of a psychotic young woman I worked with tried to take a knife off her to stop her harming herself. He was stabbed to death. Then she stabbed everyone else in her parents house and then went next door and stabbed a neighbour and was on her way to stab more people when she was brought down by a police dog. The other stabbing victims all survived. She wasn’t shot and she is currently residing in the secure wing of a mental hospital. That is the kind of experience that might prompt some people to question the outcome here. If you’ve seen people survive knife attacks, you’ve seen knife armed suspects taken down by dogs and you’ve seen caregivers disarm girls making dramatic gestures with knives you might question why this latest girl had to die. Such people may not be reasonable in their expectations but there is some reality behind their stance.

If Townsville was regarded as a frontline location then the tents would have been erected over dugouts or foxholes. There would probably also be slit trenches in case of air attack. Once the mutineers opened fire the victims would have been able to take cover in these various holes in the ground.

Richard Holmes in his history “Redcoats” has a quote that due to the purchasing of commissions British NCOs were “compelled not only to obey the orders, but to instruct in the way of giving orders, a young gentleman who in the division of battle knows no more than a spinster.”
The British army of the period commissioned a small number of NCOs as officers to be adjutants to handle the paperwork, or to be in charge of drill thereby relieving gentlemen officers of such tiresome work.