Best WW2 Videogame you have played!

Saints and Soldiers is really good equipment-wise, the movie itself is mediocre. It’s on Amazon prime instant video. It’s set in the opening days of the battle of the bulge. The only thing I noticed is that the Germans who shoot 70-plus American POW’s at Malmedy are regular Wehrmacht and not SS, but whatever.

@EricTheGreat12:

Although no one in my family fought in the Second World War, my great grandfather was in the Canadian Army during the First World War.

He was a messanger, and unfortunately he got gassed up pretty badly. I don’t remember how long he was in the war, but I do remember records saying that he fought in the battle of Passendale. He later got brought back to Canada after he got shot in the leg   :-(

My grandmother tells me that he never talked about the war; he never even kept any part of his uniform. But at least my grandmother kept his medals and she still has a photo of him in his military uniform :-D

I wished I had asked more questions to my relatives.
I believe one serviced Halifaxs in India though on reflection
I was unaware whether they were based there, others served
in the Merchant navy or in the Fire service etc.

One account I recently read about the gassing in WW1 was
a doctor treating two patients, the Chlorine gas was so strong
on them that he left the room to be sick.

Escaping Montevideo Harbour – possibly.  Getting all the way back to Germany – extremely doubtful.

In terms of getting out of the harbour, Langsdorff would have had two options: heading across the river Plate to Argentina, or making a break for the open sea.  If he’d headed for Argentina, there was no guarantee that he’d be any better off than in Uruguay.  Argentina had some Axis sympathies, I think, but it was still nominally neutral, and the British and French would have put the same diplomatic pressures on it as they had put on Uruguay to respect the Geneva Convention and either intern the ship or force it to leave.  Making a break for the open sea was problematic too.  The British had made sure that the Graf Spee’s departure from Montevideo was in a carefully defined time window by making use of an article in the Geneva Convention that prohibited a warship from sailing from a neutral harbor less than (I think) 24 hours after an enemy merchantman had left the same harbour.  There were British merchant ships in Montevideo at the time of the Spee incident, and the British arranged for one of them to leave the harbour at the right moment to put Langsdorff in a bind between the Geneva Convention and the expiration of the Uruguayan government’s deadline for the Spee to leave.  Harwood’s cruisers were lying in wait nearby, and it’s doubtful that the Spee could have given them the slip.  Moreover, the shallow waters of the Rio de la Plata area were unsuited for combat from Langsdorff’s perspective because his water intakes might have gotten clogged with mud.  Additionally, having the ship sink in combat in shallow water carried the risk that secret equipment and papers would have fallen into Allied hands (this being less of a concern if, as eventually happened, the ship was scuttled under controlled conditions).

Assuming for the sake of argument, however, that Langsdorff had managed to elude Harwood, getting back to Germany would have been very challenging.  Although the Spee was technically still able to sail and fight, the damage she had suffered in the original battle with Harwood had left her in very poor condition to make a long sea voyage.  Harwood, even if he’d initially been eluded, would still have been close by and would have sent his ships (and his scout plane) to look for the Spee; additionally, some British and French naval groups were already converging on the general area following Harwood’s initial battle a few days earlier, so Langsdorff would have had an awful lot of sea power focused on finding him.

The “just sit and wait for the Phony War to end in April 1940” option is a bit perplexing as an answer to “You are the German High Command!  What is your next Combat Movement?” because it seems to imply that the Phony War was operating on a fixed timetable, and that this timetable was in someone else’s hands.  The lack of action on land on the Western Front is certainly due in part to inaction by France and Britain (whose strategy was basically to sit around for a couple of years to built up their strength for a showdown, while simultaneously hoping that the Nazi regime would be overthrown by a coup), but it was also very much a deliberate choice by Germany.  The Wehrmacht needed to analyze the Polish Campaign, fix the tactical and operational elements that hadn’t worked as well as expected, plan the upcoming campaign against France and the Low Countries, rest and replenish its forces, give them more training, provide them with additional equipment, and redeploy them to the west.  Doing this properly took time, but Germany could afford to take the time to do the job right because of the lack of Anglo-French pressure on the western front. ( In other words, by sitting on their collective hindquarters France and Britain surrendered the strategic initiative to Germany, which gave the Wehrmacht the luxury of attacking at the time and place of its own choosing.)  Moreover, the time period during which these activities took place were the fall of 1939 and the winter of 1939-1940, which was conveniently timed because this meant that the Wehrmacht wouldn’t have to fight in the fall (manageable, but rainy and muddy) or in the winter (far less harsh in the West than in Russia, but still potentially nasty as veterans of the Battle of the Bulge will recall).  The late spring / early summer period chosen for the offensive in the West was much more congenial for military operations.

My favorite line from any of them is Hitler saying “I always loss at D-day for some reason”

@KurtGodel7:

As you pointed out, actually capturing the city was unnecessary. But having captured the city, Hitler was very determined to hold onto it. Abandoning it would have presumably meant having to recapture it later; and once again suffering that same 1:1 ratio during the recapture.

One thing I’m wondering: why would Germany have to (or even want to) recapture at great cost a city that it was unnecessary (and indeed counterproductive) to capture in the first place?

@221B:

I had to vote other as I think a good proximity fuse ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze )could have made a tremendous difference in the naval battles the Japanese lost.  It certainly made a difference for the Americans.

There is no doubt that Japanese Anti Aircraft were the poorest of the major nations of WW2. Only Rabaul had any success in air defense, and this was due to the massive amount of Allied bombing missions on that target and the practice the Japanese gunners gained. Rabaul would claim 500 aircraft, mostly singing engine bombers.

The Japanese would use several warship superstructures that were sunk to create " flak towers".

The allies who cleared the sky’s of the south pacific of Japanese planes and bombed at will anything desired dreadful hated missions to bomb Rabaul.

I actually collect bolt-actions as a hobby. I have in my collection a Canadian made Enfield (Mk III type 4 I think) from 1944, I have a French MAS-36 both of which are in amazing condition (which is suprising and not suprising when you think about it  :lol: ). I own 3 Mosin-Nagant rifles, two are full sized rifles from 1942 and 1936 (the 36 has a hex shaped reciever intrestingly) and one is an M38 Nagant carbine (my pride and joy the first gun I ever bought). I have 2 K98’s from 1941 and 1943 respectively. I also have a Chinese made Mauser copy from 1937(ish) that looks like an intresting hybrid of the Gewher88 of WW1 and the K98, bit of an oddity but a fun gun to have all the same.