Posts made by CWO Marc

I was admittedly oversimplifying things when I described Nagumo’s decision as timidity. The situation was more complicated than that. Nagumo went into the Pearl Harbor attack fully anticipating (and, to his credit, being mentally prepared for) the possibility that his task force would suffer heavy losses. When the operation ended up going fantastically well – two successful aircraft waves inflicting heavy damage to the enemy with minimal losses of their own, and with no counterattack against his ships – he found himself in the position (as one author put it) of a man who was running at a door to bash it in with his shoulder and who ended up having the door unexpectedly opened for him at the last moment. He went from being prepared lose a couple of his carriers to wanting to preserve his task force from harm…and indeed, he got all his ships back to Japan without even a scratch in their paint. Unfortunately, it was the wrong call. Nagumo had been chosen for the job because he had seniority, not because he was an aggressive commander; he dutifully did what he’d been ordered to do, but he didn’t go further.

There’s a scene in the movie Tora Tora Tora where Nagumo argues to his air commanders (who were pleading for a third strike, this one targeting Pearl Harbor’s fuel depots and shipyards) that the war is going to be long and hard and that Japan must keep its precious carriers intact for that protracted struggle. I don’t know if the scene is historically factual or not. Nagumo does have a point when he says that in the film, but he’s also missing a counterpoint: even at the risk (which we now know would have been minimal, though he had no way of knowing it) of his task force being found and attacked the the Americans, a strike against the tank farms and dockyards would still have been worth it. The combat-focused Japanese military had a surprisingly poor understanding of the importance of logistics and infrastructure…something that you can get away with in a short local war, but not in a long one (especially against the most industrialized nation on earth) across vast oceanic distances.

Hmm. The flak bursts are fairly uniform in size and seem to occupy a single plane of the image, instead of being of multiple sizes and at multiple locations all over the harbor – which makes me wonder if this picture was doctored for propaganda purposes at the time of its original release, possibly to support the quote about “all the flak that’s up.” It might be a completely authentic picture, or it might have been retouched. The part of the quote which says “Apparently one of the reasons that there wasn’t a third wave was that American antiaircraft fire had greatly improved in effectiveness on the second wave, and that’s when most of the 29 Japanese aircraft were shot down” is something which could reasonably have been believed at the time, though we know in retrospect that Nagumo didn’t launch a third wave out of timidity, even though his officers urged him to do so. But at any rate it’s certainly a great panoramic view, and the colorization was nicely done.

Also of potential interest for the naval side of things are NavWar’s lines of Napoleonic ships:

http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=64
1:3000 SCALE - NAPOLEONIC SHIPS

http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=75
1:1200 SCALE - NAPOLEONIC SHIPS & AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=20
STARTER PACKS - 1:1200 SCALE - NAPOLEONIC

STARTER PACKS - 1:3000 SCALE - NAPOLEONIC
http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=24

Also note that Risk – the plain basic edition, not one of the countless spin-offs – has little plastic Napoleonic sculpts of infantry, cavalry and artillery, in multiple colours. On the minus side, they’re kind of small, but on the plus side the game is cheap and readily available, so its units could perhaps be used to supplement the bigger ones from other games if sheer numbers are needed. For instance, as a variation of the A&A concept of using mini poker chips to represent multiple units, the little Risk units (which are too small to be a good choice to use as the main game pieces) could be used on the board alongside the big ones to represent extra groups of five (or whatever) units.

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.

@MikeF-AusTX said in Napoleonic Wars Axis & Allies Style Game:

@Thequilla98 Patrick and I are glad you like the ships though we cannot take credit for them (at least not the ships of the line). They are produced by Morrison Games (as are many of the land units) and are available via Amazon.

Yes, they’re from a game called Viktory II:
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/207676/viktory-ii

You can find units silhouettes in the Unit Identification Cards I posted here:

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/21626/a-a-unit-identification-charts/10

Each chart can be expanded in size by clicking on it.

Another approach is to use the ANZAC Grey-Brown colour from the two editions of Pacific 1940, by considering that this colour depicts the self-governing Dominions of the Commonwealth which were at war during WWII: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. (Newfoundland is excluded because it was being governed from Britain at the time, and Eire is excluded because it was neutral in WWII.) In my sculpt collection, which is arranged in multiple trays, I use the Pacific 1940.1 ANZAC sculpts (which are British-patterned) to depict Canada, and the Pacific 1940.2 ANZAC sculpts (which are ANZAC-patterned) to depict the southern Commonwealth Dominions (Australia, New Zealand and South Africa). The only cross-tray adaptation I had to make was to loan Canada some of the 1940.2 AAA sculpts, since 1940.1 doesn’t have any.

Interesting – I’d never heard that the French had a WWI-era railway gun that was used by the Germans in WWII. Just from a theoretical viewpoint, however, I doubt that it could have been used to intentionally target Red Navy ships or even shore facilities; guns of that type probably weren’t accurate enough to hit anything specific within a city-sized target. It was probably used for general-purpose shelling during the siege of the city, to add to the overall misery of the population.

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.

Interesting question. One of the basic problems with depicting WWII in a board game is that WWII was a conflict that grew in several major stages, with each stage bringing in one or more major powers who were not previously at war. And each stage, it should be noted, had very roughly the same structure: an initial phase of relatively rapid gains by the aggressor, followed by point where the initial offensive stalled, followed by a long period of grinding attrition warfare (punctuated here and there with major offensives). Japan invaded the main part of China in 1937, made initial rapid gains, then stalled. Germany invaded Poland in 1939 (which brought France and Britain into the war), then conquered continental western Europe in 1940 (taking just six weeks to do so), then stalled. Germany invaded western Russia in mid-1941 (which brought the Soviet Union into the war), got almost all the way to Moscow, then stalled. Between late 1941 and mid-1942, Japan overran Southeast Asia, the Dutch East Indies, and several British and American possessions in Asia and the Pacific (which brought the United States into the war), then stalled. In other words, the global picture of who’s in control of what, and of who the opponents are, looks very different depending on which phase gets chosen as the game’s starting point. This is why many of the global-scale A&A games, over the decades, have used mid-1942 as their starting point: it’s the moment of the war where all the Allied powers are finally in play (though the USSR didn’t go to war against Japan until August 1945), and the point where both sides are, in principle, the most balanced, with no clear indication of who will ultimately win the war.

@GEN-MANSTEIN said in Huge maps:

Possible. I would perfer a slide out drawer of some sort. Then push back in under the dice box. You can make dice box smaller too and have same roll out drawer for sides.

Yes, that’s a good approach too.

Here’s a follow-up thought about table indentations. I note that General Manstein’s table has accessories trays along both the north and south edges of his table, which is convenient but adds to the amount of space over which players need to reach. I have no woodworking skills whatsoever, so I don’t know if this is doable or practical, but I’m wondering: could these types of trays be attached to a hinge of some sort, so that each one could be swung outward temporarily to give room to a player who needs to reach for an awkward area of the map? It could then be swung back into position along the table edge once the sculpt moves have been completed.

@Der-Kuenstler said in Huge maps:

@CWO-Marc Thank you for these insights and links - very helpful!

My pleasure. I’ve had a fondness for big military plotting tables ever since I saw the original 1970s movie Midway, which actually has two such tables: a relatively small one on Yamamoto’s flagship, and a huge one filling a whole room in Nimitz’s headquarters in Hawaii. Both tables use neat little ship-shaped labeled blocks to denote the position of vessels, and flat markers to depict aircraft. There are some funny continuity errors, if you look carefully, where the positions of the ships change from shot to shot within the same scene. My favourite one is the scene where Nimitz asks Spruance – who’s just placed the three American carrier markers near Hawaii – how he plans to position his forces at Midway; as Spruance thinks, the film cuts to a close-up of the three markers, which aren’t in the same configuration as we saw in the long shot. I credit that movie as the source of my eventual interest in A&A maps and sculpts.

“Sink the Bismark” also has a nice plotting table and makes good use of it. Both movies might be worth your looking at as reference sources for table design. Midway’s big table takes the interesting approach of not having fully straight sides; it’s indented in the areas where there’s empty ocean with no nearby land, to allow easier access to the other parts without having to reach over lots of empty space. That’s a bit radical for an A&A map, but in principle some of the southernmost sea zones of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic could be deleted to make room for table indentations.

I suppose it could be argued that a big table gives the players more maneuvering room, and creates less opportunity for collisions than if they were crammed around a small one. The greatest potential for players to keep crashing into each other would actually be if they were all following the advice of that other Chinese sage, Sun Tse: “When we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

Reaching across a big table is admittedly awkward, but a few techniques can help:

• Have a good supply of long-handled croupier sticks, a.k.a. war rakes, to help you reach across the table as needed. See here and here for inspiration:

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/33813/home-made-war-rakes

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plotting_Table.jpg

• Have a good snack table on the other side of the room. That will give people an alternate place to congregate, away from the gaming table.

• A similar trick is to put together a big slideshow of WWII photos and videos and run them on a continuous loop on a computer near the snack table.

• Here’s a deluxe concept that technically would require a split-level room, but which perhaps could be improvised on a more modest scale. The RAF’s plotting rooms had observation galleries…

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Radar_and_Electronic_Warfare_1939-1945_CH13680.jpg

…which gave analysts an elevated view of the plotting tables. Combining that concept with the simpler method of providing an array of chairs (as in the other photo above), what could perhaps be done – given a large enough gaming room – is to get a bunch of sturdy second-hand empty wooden boxes of some sort and use them to set up an improvised slightly elevated observation platform on which observer chairs could be lined up. That might get a few players away from the table itself. The boxes could be removed and stacked in a corner, or a garage, afterwards, to free up the floor space between games.