Best posts made by CWO Marc

@Cpl-Hicks said in How long is a turn in real life?:

It keeps me bothering and busy, questioning the real versus game time.

The first 3 Turns seems tot take about 7 months per turn. From turn 4 and following up turns, these turns can be about 4 months per turn. The so called ‘rubber band’ (effect) from Larry.

An analogy to this rubber band concept would be the method for converting a dog’s age into “people years”, the situation being (or so I’ve heard) that you can’t use a single conversion factor; instead, you not only have to make different computations for different dog breeds, you also apparently need to use different conversion factors at different growth stages.

A&A similarly has “springs and rubber bands geography”, with various parts of the world compressed and other parts of the world stretched to allocate more elbow room to the areas where there was the most action during WWII, and to reduce the large-area but low-action parts of the world (such as the south-east corner of the Pacific Ocean). A god example is China on the Pacific 1940 map, where compared to its real-world geography it’s highly compressed in the east-to-west direction compared to its north-to-south dimensions.

A few comments. In terms of A&A as a board game, a complaint I’ve sometimes read is that the problem is actually the opposite one: that games go on forever because the losing side has no reason to quit, especially if it’s only losing by a small margin relative to the winning side.

In terms of actual wars, I can’t think of any examples of a major war in which one side threw up its hands and gave up the fight as soon as it lost a bit of momentum. It’s actually the opposite that tends to happen in major conflicts: the greater the level of death and destruction, the more the participants tend to dig in their heels and press on with the fight – WWI being a classic example of a war that got out of control on a scale never anticipated by the participants, who by 1915 found themselves trapped in a conflict they could neither end nor win. Apart from Russia, which quit in late 1917 because of regime change, all the participants kept slugging it out until late 1918. And in WWII, Germany and Japan both kept fighting long past the point where it was clear to everyone that they were going to lose. It’s not rational, but there are typically a combination of reasons for why it happens anyway:

1. The principle of “don’t throw good money after bad”, whereby you cut your losses in a losing situation before things can get worse, sounds like a rational thing to do in war, but it can easily get overruled by another principle which sometimes gets invoked by generals and politicians: “If we quit now, all our previous losses will have been for nothing.” In WWI, this was often combined with the wishful thinking that “One more big push will bring victory,” which explains the horrendously costly Verdun-style big pushes of 1915…and 1916…and 1917…and 1918, only the last of which (on the Allied side) finally did bring victory.

2. A related point is that total war demands total objectives. To give the example of WWI: when millions of people have died and when the entire economies of nations (and their civilian workers) have been mobilized, you can’t just sit down with your opponents, sort out the obscure Balkan rivalry that started it all, trade a couple of colonies and call it a day. The conflict becomes one of national survival. None of the regimes on the losing side survived WWI, and four empires were destroyed in the process.

3. WWII is an interesting case. Germany kept going until its armies were almost literally fighting back to back down the centre of the country, with the Anglo-Americans on one side and the Russians on the other. Part of the reason, of course, was that Hitler refused to quit and that he still had the power to compel his armies to keep fighting. A less obvious reason was that the Wehrmacht, who knew perfectly well that the game was up, greatly preferred the prospect of surrendering to the Americans and the British rather than the Soviets, and wanted to buy time for that purpose. Japan is a different story. In its case, part of the reason for holding out more and more stubbornly as the Americans got closer and closer to Japan (just look at Iwo Jima and Okinawa) was to convince the Americans that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would be both necessary and horrifically costly in lives, and thereby to somehow convince the Americans to seek the alternatives of a negotiated settlement. That turned out to be a miscalculation: the Americans, who still remembered Pearl Harbor, were determined to defeat Japan at whatever the cost might be…and they had the atomic bomb up their sleeve. The other reason Japan held out was the death-before-dishonour tradition which the Japanese Army had carried over from the days of the Bushido code. In fairness, nobody likes to lose face and nobody likes to lose. One can sympathize on that basis with the careful wording of Hirohito’s rescript (essentially Japan’s declaration of surrender), which said that the war had “not necessarily developed to Japan’s advantage” – probably the biggest understatement in recorded history.

SECTION 5B:
SOVIET UNION BLOCK: Selective Notes

TERRITORIES OCCUPIED BY THE SOVIET UNION

Disputable map situation:

• Baltic States
  The Baltic States (comprising Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) were annexed by the USSR between September 1939 and August 1940, the latter date being two months after the June 1940 starting date of the game.

• Bessarabia
  Bessarabia, which had previously been a part of Romania, was annexed by the USSR in June 1940.  Romania joined the Axis in July 1940 and eventually participated in the Axis war against the Soviet Union which started in June 1941, reappropriating Bessarabia in the process.

• Eastern Poland
  The eastern part of Poland was invaded by the USSR in September 1939 and occupied.

• Vyborg
  The area labeled “Vyborg” on the G40/2 map corresponds more or less to the Karelian Isthmus.  It was originally part of Finland, but it was annexed by the USSR in March 1940 following the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940.  Finland, fighting as an Axis co-belligerent, reappropriated it in June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

@moilami:

I found a profile pic for myself.

Are you referring to the top one or the bottom one?

@Cpl-Hicks
The simulation/realism issue you raise is an interesting one, and in my opinion there are two aspects to the problem. In a narrow sense, there’s the purely mechanical stuff: A&A is very abstracted, and it leaves out (or barely deals with) some crucial elements of WWII, notably logistics. The Battle of the Atlantic, for example, was essentially a multi-year supply battle whose first objective was to keep Britain alive and whose later objective was to build it up as a springboard for the cross-Channel invasion of western Europe. An even better example is the war in the Pacific: the whole point of the war was for Japan to obtain the natural resources it lacked at home (most crucially oil), which meant conquering the Dutch East Indies and nearby areas like Malaysia (where the resources were located) as well as the Philippines (to secure the shipping lanes between the DEI and Japan. Unfortunately for Japan, the Americans understood the importance of logistics better than the Japanese did: they focussed their submarine operations on those shipping lanes with the aim of gradually strangling Japan, and by 1945 they had succeeded in doing so. Japan, for its part, had too few transport ships, used inefficiently the ones it did have, and gave too little attention to convoy protection – all of which is astonishing, given the underlying purpose of the war. Realistically simulating all this in A&A would require a substantial overhaul of the game and would greatly change its nature.

More broadly, though, there’s the problem that simulating WWII as a whole (not just a specific part of it) creates an inherent problem. WWII was a long and complex struggle with all sorts of points at which factors such as strategic decisions could have changed radically all the subsequent events. Hence the following quandry: in order for a game to faithfully reproduce all or most of WWII’s major events, in the correct sequence, would have to be highly scripted, perhaps even to the point where its outcome is predetermined, which potentially isn’t much fun. Conversely, an unscripted game would almost inevitably deviate from history at some point or another…and the earlier the start date (say, 1940 as opposed to 1942), the bigger the deviations tend to be, which runs counter to the aim of having a realistic simulation in the first place. So in general, I tend to see A&A as a board game which is set in WWII rather than a board game which simulates it. An analogy I’ve heard is that there’s a similar difference between Monopoly, which is board game that has real estate transactions as its theme but which is highly abstracted, and the sophisticated financial simulation games or exercises which are sometimes played in business schools for instructional purposes.

In a WWII context, I think that having a draw as a war goal is a concept that would only apply to the Axis, and that would only apply (depending on the game start date) after Germany and Japan had made the territorial gains that were in place by mid-1942: Western Europe, the western part of the USSR, and the Asia/Pacific territories which Japan initially overran. It can be argued that from this point onwards, the Axis could be satisfied by either defeating the Allies entirely (a win) or by simply hanging on indefinitely to what they’d conquered (a draw).

The Allies, on the other hand, could only be satisfied by winning. As Stalin said, the Axis powers weren’t going to jump into the abyss without being pushed. To the Allies, a draw would essentially have meant acknowledging that Germany and Japan has established a “new order” in Europe and Asia. Indeed, Japan’s overall strategy – if you can call it that – was the hopeful idea that the Americans would suffer some costly losses if they tried to attack Japan’s defensive perimeter, would lose their will to fight, and would simply walk away, leaving Japan in possession of its newly acquired marbles. That plan went out the window when Japan, to put it mildly, got the Americans really really angry at them by attacking Pearl Harbor. Germany had a somewhat similar goal of conquering the USSR roughly up to the Urals (the “A-A” line), digging in, and limiting itself from then on to bombing the Asian part of the USSR to keep it from making trouble. That plan went out the window when Germany failed to even get as far as Moscow.

SECTION 6B:
FRANCE BLOCK: Selective Notes (part 1)

The Global 1940 OOB rules do not depict the historical establishment of either the Vichy regime or of the Free French forces after France’s surrender in late June 1940.  Instead, the rules depict an alternate-history scenario in which France continues to fight on the Allied side as a single entity, though in a role which is extremely marginal due to the rule restrictions under which it operates.

Historically, the part of France which is identified on the game map simply as “France” was invaded by Germany in May 1940.  The capitulation of France in June 1940 resulted in the German occupation of this area and of the area identified on the game map as “Normandy / Bordeaux.”  The area identified on the game map as “Southern France” became a so-called “unoccupied zone” in June 1940; this zone was administered by the Vichy regime, whose capital was located there.  The Vichy-controlled zone was occupied by Germany and Italy in November 1942, following the Operation Torch landings by the Allies in North Africa.  France’s homeland territories were liberated between June and August 1944 following the Overlord landings in Normandy and the Anvil-Dragoon landings in southern France.

Historically, most of the territories of the French colonial empire initially came under Vichy control, but some of them joined the Free French side immediately; others joined the Free French later or were captured by the Allies and handed over to Free French control.  With the liberation of France in the summer of 1944, all French territories still nominally under Vichy control came under the jurisdiction of the new provisional French government.

It should be noted that at the time of WWII the New Hebrides were a colonial territory jointly administered by France and Britain as an Anglo-French Condominium.

@DoManMacgee said in 1914 Battle Report:

Thoughts below:

• France was entirely too passive. They need to be more aggressive with Germany to keep them out of France’s IPCs

For a moment, before I saw the context of the post, I thought this was a historical reference to France in the September 1939 - June 1940 period, rather than a gaming post about A&A WWI 1914. :) I’ve been watching a DVD of the two Battlefield series episodes on the Battle of France, so at the moment this subject tends to catch my attention.

@wittmann:

Nice pic. Any idea what unit  and where it was taken?
I recognise the insignia, but cannot place it. I imagine it is attached to IISS Pz Corps. But it could be Wehrmacht.

If you Google “Friedrich Zschackel” you’ll get a bunch of hits for tank pictures, with captions.  I didn’t check them, but one of them may provide the answer.

@midnight_reaper

And to follow up on Midnight Reaper’s question/comment about the flames: if they’re intended to represent smoke issuing from the chimney a functional undamaged facility or ship, an easy and inexpensive trick to achieve this effect is to use a bit of cotton wool (the stuff that’s sometimes found in unopened aspirin bottles), suitably fluffed up and stiffened with a bit of fine wire, or a section of pipe cleaner, or an unbent paperclip.

To expand on what the previous posters have said, playing solo a strategic-level game that covers several years of WWII poses the major problem that such a game involves long-term planning…and you can’t hide each side’s long-term plans from yourself if you’re playing both sides.

There are ways, however, of managing this when you’re playing a regional-level game that focuses on a single large campaign in which one side is basically the attacker, one side is basically the defender, and the game is played as on a “use what you’ve got” basis with no unit purchases.  Something roughly on the scale of the A&A games D-Day or Guadalcanal or Battle of the Bulge, though of course you can use the same technique for other campaigns.

Here’s the basic technique I’d suggest, using as an example the Eastern Front in mid-1942 (and therefore using just part of the Global 1940 map board).  Historically, mid-1942 was a time when the front had more or less stabilized during the fighting over the course of the previous months; the Germans were building up for a summer offensive, but unlike what had been the case during Barbarossa the previous year they were not strong enough to attack along the whole front.  (In real life, they decided to strike towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus region.  We all know how that turned out, but that’s not what this example is about.)  The Russians, for their part, had managed both to halt Barbarossa and to drive it back to a certain extent in late 1941 and early 1942, but by the spring of 1942 had reached pretty much the limit of what they could do with the limited resources they had at the time.

In the scenario I’m using as an example, you’d be playing both the German side and the Russian side.  Both sides know that the Germans are the ones who are going to go on the offensive, and thus that the Russians are going to be in the role of the defender.  (In 1941, 1942 and 1943, the basic pattern was that the German offensives occurred in the summer and the Russian ones in the winter.)  The two questions both sides have to consider are thus: where along the front is Germany going to attack, and therefore where should each side concentrate the bulk of its forces?

Let’s assume, as part of the game scenario, that Germany has three options: launch an offensive against Moscow alone, launch an offensive against Stalingrad alone, or launch simultaneous offensives against both cities.  In the first step of the solo gaming process, you take the role of the German general staff and you basically work out three force-allocation plans, meaning one for each of the three offensive options I’ve described.  Let’s say that Plan A will be the Moscow-only offensive, Plan B will be the Stalingrad-only offensive, and Plan C will be the Moscow-and-Stalingrad dual offensive.  There’s no decision about which plan will be used (we could imagine, for example, that Hitler hasn’t yet made up his mind), but the details of the force allocations for all three plans do get locked down at this stage.  Plan A, for example, might involve placing so many tanks in such-and-such a territory prior to the attack, and so forth.  Once the three plans are drawn up, you’re committed to their details and they can’t be changed.

That’s step one.  For step two, you now switch sides and become the Russian general staff.  Your intelligence services have informed you that the Germans are preparing for an offensive, and they’ve provided you with stolen copies of Plan A, Plan B and Plan C.  You know exactly what the force allocation details are for each of the three plans (because you yourself worked them out in step one when you were playing the German side), but you don’t know which one of the three plans will be implemented (because Hitler hasn’t yet decided which one to use).  As the Russian player, you now have to decide where you will position your own forces in order to meet the upcoming German offensive, whose location you don’t know.  Will you position the bulk of your forces in front of Moscow?  That would be the best possible move if the Germans end up using Plan A, but the worst possible move if the Germans end up using Plan B, and only a partially-good move if the Germans end up using Plan C.  Will you position the bulk of your forces in front of Stalingrad?  Again, the wisdom of that option will ultimately depend on which plan the Germans use.  Will you split your forces between Moscow and Stalingrad?  That’s arguably the best option for countering Plan C (if that’s what the Germans end up using), although a counter-argument would be that if you concentrate on defending either Moscow or Stalingrad you’ll end with a split result if the Germans use Plan C: a more or less guaranteed Russian victory at one city and a more or less guaranteed Russian defeat at the other city.

Anyway, the point is that in step 2 you have to commit yourself, as the Russian side, to one particular defensive strategy, with its force allocation details worked out and locked down ahead of time.

Now we get to the final step before the actual campaigns starts: Germany decides which of its three plans it will actually use.  This has to be done randomly because, if you were given the opportunity to switch back into the German role and make the decision yourself, you couldn’t avoid being influenced by your knowledge of the defensive dispositions to which the Russians committed themselves in step 2.  (You didn’t have that knowledge when you were doing your step 1 planning because step 2 hadn’t taken place yet, but you do have that knowledge now that you’re at step 3.)  Step 3, therefore, simulates (via a dice roll) a situation in which Hitler makes his final decision (implement Plan A or Plan B or Plan C, none of which can be changed) in one of three sets of circumstances

• German intelligence is in the dark about where the Russians have positioned their forces, and therefore Hitler basically takes a guess and makes his decision on the basis of that guess.  A random dice roll which happens to select the perfect plan for the situation would represent a good guess by Hitler, whereas a bad guess by Hitler would correspond to the other dice options.

• German intelligence has good information on the Russian defensive force dispositions and makes a good recommendation to Hitler, and Hitler sensibly chooses the right plan for the situation.  This would be what a good plan-selection dice roll would represent.

• German intelligence has good information on the Russian defensive force dispositions and makes a good recommendation to Hitler, but Hitler dismisses their recommendation and chooses the wrong plan for the situation.  This would be what a bad plan-selection dice roll would represent.

Steps 1, 2 and 3 having been completed, you then set up the opposing forces on the board using the German offensive plan to which you’re committed and the Russian defensive plan to which you’re committed – and then you fight out the campaign and see who wins.  Even before the fighting starts, however, you’ll probably be able to take satisfaction of either having been successful as the German side in setting up an attack where the Russians didn’t expect you, or take satisfaction as the Russian side in having correctly anticipated where the Germans would attack.

@DoManMacgee said in 1914 Battle Report:

Whoops! Totally didn’t realize that it was you @CWO-Marc and not the OP. If France was as lackadaisical in WW1 as they were in WW2’s opening months, the Central Powers would have had it easy.

No problem about the mistaken identity, and good point about the contrast between the WWI and WWII performance of France early in each war. I’m not sure if this is widely known, but France briefly invaded the Saar region of Germany in early September 1940 – taking advantage of the fact that most of the Wehrmacht was in Poland at the time – then withdrew after Poland fell. All that France got out it was some useful propaganda footage. I once saw a British newsreel whose narrator was enthusiastically describing the scenes filmed on German soil, at one point commenting “Here is a captured German railway station!” Quite a change from what General Foch is reputed to have communicated to his superiors during the Battle of the Marne in 1914, as I recall, it was: “My left flank is driven in; my right flank is giving way; the situation is excellent – I attack!”

@ABWorsham:

Had the 15th Army been sent to Normandy and been mauled by Allied vast numbers and airpower little would have been in the way once the breakout occurred.

The case could indeed be made that, if this had happened, the war would have been shortened.  On the other hand, the case could also be made for the opposite scenario: that sending the 15th Army to Normany could have resulted in the Germans mauling the Allies there, thus delaying an Allied victory rather than shortening it.  The Allies devoted considerable resources to making the Germans believe (or more precisely to reinforcing their existing inclination to believe) that the Allies would land at the Pas-de-Calais, so that the Germans would concentrate their strength there (where the Allies weren’t planning to invade) and thus weaken themselves elsewhere (including Normandy, where the Allies were planning to invade).  Invading Normany with the 15th Army there would have been tougher than invading it with the 15th Army elsewhere.  Would it have been a decisive enough difference to cause Overlord to fail?  My guess would be no…but one never knows.  At any rate, I’m sure the Allies considered themselves well-served to see the bulk of the Wehrmacht defending Calais on that particular day.

@DMcLaren said in Custom carriers from OOB's and painted pieces:

When FOlewnik was researching the Taiho & Shinano, he noticed that the sculpt is much closer to the Taiho in it’s layout than it is the Shinano.

Interesting observation; I had never noticed this. Another point of comparison to check would be the hulls of the carrier sculpt and of the battleship sculpt. The scale is too small to allow much detail, and the Yamato sculpt has a few other accuracy problems (notably the stern, whose scallopped shape is too pointy), but technically a difference between the carrier’s hull shape (below the flight deck) and the battleship’s hull shape would further prove that the carrier isn’t the Shinano because the Shinano and the two Yamato-class battleships had identical hulls. Shinano was originally intended to be the third unit of the battleship class, but she was converted into a carrier in mid-construction.

Greenland was occupied by the US is April 1941, to pre-empt any possibility of Germany doing likewise.  In this respect the G40 Map is wrong because the US occupation of Greenland occured ten months after the game’s June 1940 start date.

I’d pick the M26 Pershing.  It was the only American tank of WWII that was in the same league as the Tiger and Panther in terms of firepower (it had a 90mm main gun) and armour protection.  Its biggest problems had to do with mobility and mechanical reliability.  Interestingly, this was a complete reversal from the situation of the Sherman, which was excellent as an automotive vehicle but deficient in firepower and protection.

Another advantage of going into combat with it was that it came into service so late that it only saw a brief period of fighting in Europe before the war ended…so it would have been a pretty safe choice.  :)

Incredible amount of detail; I’m very impressed. As a point of trivia, the portholes about which Harvard3X1 was asking are a feature to look for when comparing cruiser designs because they’re a potential tip-off about how well armoured a particular cruiser is. DMcLaren’s custom paint job correctly shows Indianapolis as having a single row of portholes (also called scuttles) located high on the hull. If you compare photos of Indianapolis with the Deutschland-class heavy cruisers (a.k.a. pocket battleships), you’ll notice that the Deutschlands have two rows of scuttles and that the second row is quite low, about halfway between the waterline and the deck. This showed that the armoured belt of the class did not extend very far up above the waterline.

@taamvan:

Its similar to the victory conditions in Risk.  Ok;  we start with 5 players, 3 are eliminated over the course of 3 hours…then they sit and watch while the last two of us spend ANOTHER 3 hours trying to take EVERY territory to win.

The OOB A&A rules and the total domination variant both actually have something in common: the games can theoretically last forever – or at least for an extremely large number of rounds – and as such they’re unrealistic because a total war between major powers can’t be sustained forever.

Total war, on the scale seen in WWI and WWII, imposes enormous social and economic strains on the participant nations (in addition to the direct casualties and destruction which occur both on the battlefield and in civilian areas that are subjected to military attack).  In many cases (the U.S. in both world wars being a significant exception), the resources and manpower of nations engaged in total war are expended more quickly than they can be replaced (particularly in the case of people, who even if they’re drafted as teenagers take 15 or more years to be replaced from newborns).  The game rules don’t take these factors into account: the players can keep fighting as long as they can collect income, without worrying about running out of civilian workers or draft-age recruits, and without worrying about social breakdown or revolution at home (except in the case of the optional Russian Revolution rule in A&A 1914).

Barbara Tuchman’s book The Zimmermann Telegram describes vividly how nations can eventually crumble under the strain of total war.  Her opening chapter, set in January 1917, says, “Now the French were drained, the Russians dying, Rumania, a late entry on the Alied side, already ruined and overrun.  The enemy was no better off.  Germans were living on a diet of potatoes, conscripting fifteen-year-olds for the army, gumming up the cracks that were beginning to appear in the authority of Kaiserdom with even harsher measures.  The [recent German peace offer] had been a mere pretense, designed to be rejected so that the General Staff could wring from the home front and faltering Austria yet more endurance and more sacrifice.  […] England had fortitude left, but no money and, what was worse, no ideas.  […] No prospect of any end was visible.  […]  It seemed there was nothing that would bring in the Americans before Europe exhausted itself beyond recovery.”  Similarly, Gwynne Dyer’s book war makes the point that none of the regimes on the losing side (or rather sides) of WWI survived: the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were all destroyed, and the latter two were completely dismantled into a patchwork of successor states.  The British and French empires survived on paper, but were greatly weakened and were ultimately finished off by WWII and its aftermath.

If a group of players wanted to prevent A&A games from going on forever (and in fairness, players don’t necessarily want this), one solution might be to create some sort of house rule that tracks the social and economic strain of waging total war, and which has some sort of built-in breaking point for each power depending on the particulars of its situation.  Realistically, though, such a house rule would favour the Allies because of the US’s geographic isolation (which makes it difficult to attack) and its status as a net producer of war goods (unlike the UK, which was a net consumer), and the USSR’s vast manpower reserves.  One factor that would compensate matters to some degree would be for the game to assume improved economic efficiency by Germany than was the case historically.  (Germany in WWII was extremely inefficient at making use of its domestic and captured economic infrastructure, for a variety of reasons.)

Interesting discussion about various hypothetical Singapore scenarios.  Here are a few additional thoughts.

If I’ve followed the thread correctly, the starting assumption is that Britain, under someone other than Churchill, reaches some sort settlement with Germany after the conquest of France, and is then free to carry on with its imperial business-as-usual.  I’m a bit sceptical that Britain could have gotten than good a deal from Hitler (presumably a deal basically saying “Let me have uncontested control of continental Europe and I’ll let you keep Great Britain for yourselves and let you keep uncontested control of non-European waters”), but let’s assume for the moment that such a deal has been worked out.  The next assumption, again if I’m following the thread correctly, is that Britain, now secure at home, sends massive naval and army and air force reinforcements to Singapore, and that these reinforcements end up derailing Japan’s plans to conquer Malaya.  On the surface this seems plausible, but I think there are a few potential flaws with this scenario.

First: Britain’s imperial power was ultimately founded on the (historically) overwheming power of its navy, not of its army.  I’m not saying Britain didn’t have a good army; it did.  But I’m pointing out that Britain, relative to continental powers like France and Germany and Russia, operated on the basis of having a small but highly skilled professional army rather than having a much larger conscript army of uneven quality, and that this comparatively small army used the mobility conferred upon it by the Royal Navy as a force multiplier.  So when we talk about Britain sending a large army force to Singapore, we have to keep in mind that Britain didn’t actually have that large an army in a quantitative sense, even if qualitatively it was a good one.  And also remember that by 1940 Britain’s historically preeminent weapon, the Royal Navy, wasn’t as preeminent as Britain liked to think: between the huge econonic hit that Britain took during WWI and the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the R.N. had suffered much from the effects of budgetery austerity.  (For example: as an economy measure, Britain at one point – I think it was around 1930 – started operating on a so-called “ten-year rule” which assumed that a war would not break out for another ten years and thus that it was safe to limit military spending in the current fiscal year.  The problem is that, as each year passed, the 10-year assumption simply got renewed rather than having one year subtracted from the original figure.)

Second: Although it’s an obvious point of geography, it’s easy to overlook one of the key reasons why Japan was able to “run wild” and overwhelm the Dutch, the British and the Americans in the areas it conquered in just six months from December 1941 to May 1942: because Japan had the advantage of fighting what was essentially a local campaign, whereas the Dutch and the British were operating on the other side of the planet from their own home turf and the Americans, though somewhat better off, were still about 6,000 miles away.  By the end of WWII, the Americans had built up the equipment and the skills to sustain massive naval forces across that much distance, but at the beginning of the war even the Americans didn’t have either of those elements in place…and the British certainly didn’t.

Third: Let’s not forget the “Would you turn you back on this man?” argument.  Let’s assume that Britain and Hitler had reached a deal in the summer or fall of 1940, presumably because Britain had concluded that Hitler was unbeatable in continental Europe and because Hitler had concluded that Britain was un-invadable in the short or medium term due to the combined obstacles of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.  Would any sensible British Prime Minister have concluded from this deal that “it’s now safe to send a large portion of the British Army and the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force to the other side of the planet,” given Hitler’s abysmal track record with regard to compliance with non-aggression treaties?

@shintokamikaze:

how can i get that lovely commonwealth roundel?

The file with my customized roundels is on another computer, so I’ll bring it in tomorrow and post a copy of the picture of the generic (and unofficial) Commonwealth roundel I made.

As with my other customized roundels, I pasted multiple copies of the picture into a Word document, had it laser-printed in colour at a commercial photocopy centre on full-sheet sticky-label paper, cut out the roundels one by one and stuck them on white bingo chips.  Because the white sticky paper was the same colour as the white bingo chips, I didn’t have to worry too much about the slightly jagged edges of the cut-out designs, since they’re not very visible at arm’s length.  If you have your own colour laser printer, however, a neater (and less labour-intensive) method would be to use Imperious Leader’s template for printing roundels on round Avery sticky labels.