I just now read this and am liking the basic concept. One of the factors that sank Germany was that their manpower was limited but Russia’s was seemingly unlimited.
What if each nation started with a stack of chips by their reference card that represented the total infantry they could use in a game? Give Germany a stack of 15 chips and Russia a stack of 40. Any infantry bought would have to be drawn from this stack of chips, and when the stack runs out, your manpower is exhausted and you can only put out 1 infantry per turn from then on.
Thanks DK. I haven’t done much with this as of late. My gaming group has been a bit inactive lately. I saw a few people looked at this but nobody seemed to have been all that keen to the idea.
Thanks for your comment.
This is a sound idea and based in reality - don’t give up on it! You could get each country’s basic historical manpower limits from a PC game like Hearts of Iron and build from there.
Instead of a static number and an agreed upon number, maybe you could go off the population of the countries in question… 1 million citizens = 1 infantry reserve? Â
Maybe just based off the population of the capitol nation so for the Americans that would be W. USA, C. USA and E. USA (Alaska and Hawaii not being states yet.) England would be England, Scotland and perhaps India (as a chief colony.) Maybe to be more fair to Japan you could add in those mainland Asia territories they start with as well as Japan itself. Russia could be limited (so as not to be insane) to everything from Moscow to Odessa and up to St. Petersburg and back.
Or just cheap out and look up census data for 1940?
Russia = 109.3 million
Germany = 80.6 million
England = 46.5 million (includes 500k pop. India)
France = 39.0 million
Italy = 44.5 million
Japan = 73.0 million
China = 0.8 million
Australia = 7.0 million
United States = 132.1 million
So if you went that route, China would get stiffed (so you’d have to buff them somehow, maybe exempt them?) Otherwise you’d have:
Germany - 81 reserves
Russia - 109 reserves
Japan - 73 reserves
USA - 132 reserves
England - 46 reserves
Italy - 45 reserves
ANZAC - 7 reserves
Exempt Minor Powers:
France - 39 reserves
China - 1 reserves
This gives the Allies 95 more reserves than the Axis. Not including France or China.
That data seems a little odd in spots. I know Japan had 1/2 of its forces tied up in China - how could they have that little bit of population compared to Japan? And Russia - smaller than the USA? Germany 80 mil to Russia’s 109 - in my reading the Russians WAY outnumbered Germany.
Italy more than France?
Australia 7 Millions?
China 0.8 Million?
Those number don’t sound realistic to me.
Good job Tobler, might work as a fun alternative game because it changes everything so much… might be fun to try.
I just googled Population of XXX in 1940. Not saying the numbers are 100% accurate, but they are probably pretty close. Well, the US Population I know is accurate since I got it from the United States Census Bureau from 1940.
France/Italy/Germany I am not sure on. But it seems plausible.
China does seem really weak in those numbers…not sure if google was accurate there or not.
Russia is also probably pretty accurate. A lot of Russian soil is uninhabitable in 1940 - cannot farm it, cannot survive temperature extremes, too far from civilization, you name it. I think a lot of your reading here might be left over civilians, most of Germany was involved in the war - unless you literally could not hold a rifle. Even children were pressed into service for the Germans.
Of course, feel free to go find your own numbers. Not overly easy finding accurate ones because you are at the whim of who posts what for numbers, lol. All of my numbers (except the United States of America’s) could be wrong, or dead on…
Did you mean 0.8 billion for China? And 0.5 billion for India? Those numbers would make more sense.
At least Italy seems to be rather correct:
(Wikipedia) 42.994.000 (1936)
This fact surprises me. I did expect less.
I didn’t post figures anywhere but somewhere in my gaming project book I had the service personnel numbers written down. The statisics vary widely depending on the source.
The first post is sort of an outline so you could easily tailor this concept to your group’s needs or preferences.
@Young:
Good job Tobler, might work as a fun alternative game because it changes everything so much… might be fun to try.
Thanks YG!
Did you mean 0.8 billion for China? And 0.5 billion for India? Those numbers would make more sense.
Could be a difference in reporting. If the websites listed it as 0.X of a billion instead of a million I would have missed it.
I should note, I couldn’t find a website with ALL nations listed, I did have to go to multiple sites.
Toblerone - I was listing overall population, not service members. Or I was trying too.
@Cmdr:
Did you mean 0.8 billion for China? And 0.5 billion for India? Those numbers would make more sense.
Could be a difference in reporting. If the websites listed it as 0.X of a billion instead of a million I would have missed it.
I should note, I couldn’t find a website with ALL nations listed, I did have to go to multiple sites.
Toblerone - I was listing overall population, not service members. Or I was trying too.
The reason I was looking for numbers of service personnel is because for the most part that is where you would find the most relevant historical combatant numbers excluding undocumented cases of partisan and unofficial combatants. not everyone in an entire population would necessarily be a combatant.
Nonetheless if you could find the numbers of combatants per country you could use that as a baseline to figure out what each player/power’s infantry threshold would be.
Anyway I will work on this some more. Anyone who has any twists or ideas to this feel free to post.
I still say using manpower is a sound idea - it is on my pencil list of future game upgrades. As suggested earlier, maybe you could look at the manpower listed for the different countries in a grand strategy PC game like Hearts of Iron 3. Somebody already did all the research there.
Here are some Hearts of Iron 3 numbers:
MANPOWER - total + gain each month in December 1941
USA: 2030 + 29.3
USSR: 2815 + 40.6
UK: 1535 + 22.1
Germany: 998 + 24.1
Italy: 573 + 9.2
Japan: 440 + 15.2
A little math could be done to get percentages from these figures. But HOI3 is a lot more detailed - all smaller countries are separate, so countries like Canada, Australia and Finland would have to be added in to increase accuracy.
DK If you come up with something please post. I honestly haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on this. I really appreciate your contributions. If I can find some stats I will post them, as of late my WWII encyclopedias and other books are in storage which happens to be out of town, but that’s another story.
Good work there M.E. - although it looks unbelievable that Germany could have more reserves than the Soviet Union.
@Der:
Good work there M.E. - although it looks unbelievable that Germany could have more reserves than the Soviet Union. Â
Not that hard to imagine when you look at the ecology of most of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (as opposed to Russia itself, which is much smaller!) Much of it is not very habitable for human life.
Also, Germany was a lot bigger before 1945. Believe it was bigger still before WWII actually began, when the world thought Adolf Hitler was just annexing territories stolen after WW1.
It appears we do have corroboration that Italy had more population than France - which is interesting.
So I suppose we could take (10)*(total population / mobilized manpower) and have that be inactive, ready reserves that you could place where you will. Would give the United States 80 reserve infantry. Just for one example.
@Der:
although it looks unbelievable that Germany could have more reserves than the Soviet Union. Â
I’m not sure I believe it either. I’d be interested in knowing what Ellis defines as “mobilized” and I’m also curious about his “peak number” concept for the Soviet Union because it may imply that he’s referring to the highest number of troops who were in service at any given moment, not the total number who fought during the war. Assuming that the USSR hit its peak manpower in the first half of 1945 (when, as I recall, it had something like 300 divisions in Europe), does this figure of 13.2 million in service at that time include the millions of Soviet soldiers who died from 1941 to 1944 and who therefore were no longer on the payroll in 1945?
