Questions about noah ark

[Thumpalumpacus]

This is from Ed Davis's account.

"Something happened to me in '43 that's haunted me all my life..
I'm in the 363rd Army Corps of Engineers working out of a base in Hamadan (ancient Ekbatan or Ecbatane), Iran. We're building a Way Station into Russia from Turkey. A supply route.

You can stop right here. The Allies did not do this, because Turkey was not used as a transshipment route for supplies into the USSR. The Trans-Iranian Railway ran from Ahwaz to Bandar Shah, in the north central part of the country, and never got near Turkey. US troops, under the elder General Schwarzkopf, were sent there to guard and maintain it, and to my knowledge were never stationed within a hundred or so miles of the Turkish border.

This is a map of that railway:


[Attribution: "Transiran railway en" by Hhgygy - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:T...way_en.png]

As you can see, Hamadan is about three hundred kilometers from the Turkish border near Ararat, no mean feat of travel in 1943 in Iran. Having lived there in the 1970s and having traveled in the region as far as Tabriz, I can attest to the poor road communications in the area, and that makes me very skeptical that he just got permission to journey 200 miles over a primitive road net in a country that was semi-hostile for having been invaded, only to climb a 16,000-ft peak at the end of said journey, in 1943, when the war was at a turning point, manpower stretched to the limit, and the Iranian Command in particular had its hands full catching up from a 1942 which saw its goals all unmet. It doesn't wash.

But the crucial takeaway was this: Turkey was never used to transit supplies to the USSR. As a neutral, it would not permit its territory to be used in such a manner. And given that it had a common border with the USSR, why would an American be stationed in Iran to build a transshipment route the long way?

Just from the first line, this account is clearly false.

Anyone wishing to read in detail about this aspect of WWII should visit the Hyperwar page on it: http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/p.../index.htm. This is a full-length book hosted on a website whose management includes our own member Gawdzilla, and its value as an online WWII resource is unparalleled. They have troves of official documentation, and no bullshit. Much of my understanding of the Anglo-American deployment to Iran arises from this source.

---

Also, a little about the geology of Ararat, from Wiki:

During the early Eocene and early Miocene, the collision of Arabian platform with Laurasia closed and eliminated the Tethys Ocean from the area of what is now Anatolia. The closure of these masses of continental crust, collapsed this ocean basin by middle Eocene and resulted in a progressively shallowing of the remnant seas, until the end of early Miocene period. Post-collisional tectonic convergence within the collision zone resulted in the total elimination of the remaining seas from East Anatolia, at the end of early Miocene, crustal shortening and thickening across the collision zone, and uplift of the East Anatolian–Iranian plateau. Accompanying this uplift was extensive deformation by faulting and folding, which resulted in the creation of numerous local basins. The north–south compressional deformation continues today as evidenced by ongoing faulting, volcanism, and seismicity.[5][17][19]

Withn Anatolia, regional volcanism started middle-late Miocene. During the late Miocene–Pliocene period, widespread volcanism blanketed the entire East Anatolian–Iranian plateau under thick volcanic rocks. This volcanic activity has continued uninterrupted until historical times. Apparently, it reached a climax during the latest Miocene–Pliocene, 6 to 3 Ma. During the Quaternary, the volcanism became restricted to a few local volcanoes such as Mount Ararat. These volcanoes are typically associated with north–south tensional fractures formed by the continuing the north–south shortening deformation of Anatolia.[5]