Posts made by CWO Marc

@KurtGodel7:

There was a great deal of anti-British sentiment throughout the Middle East. Middle Easterners were tired of being colonies of Britain and France. Initially, that sentiment would have allowed Hitler to recruit men for war against Britain. Later, those same recruits (and others) could be informed about the Soviet Union’s persecution of all religions (including Islam), and its repression of Muslims in the southern Soviet Union. A large force of Muslim men could invade the Soviet Union from the south, creating an additional front for it to have to deal with; not to mention entire armies that it simply didn’t have to face in WWII. Germany could supply this force with some jets and other modern weapons to improve its morale and military effectiveness.

If Germany had occupied the Middle East, I’m not sure Germany would have been able to recruit the local population to its cause (assuming Germany was inclined to try doing so in the first place).  During the early days of Operation Barbarossa, some of the population groups in the western Soviet Union briefly entertained the hope that the Germans might prove to be more agreeable rulers than Joseph Stalin.  The SS and the Gestapo soon came along and dispelled that particular notion.  Germany was able to raise a certain number of troops in the various countries it occupied, but even with the help of collaborationist governments like those of Vichy France the forces asssembled in this manner were relatively small.

Similarly, the Japanese were never able to capitalize very much on the anti-British (and anti-French and anti-Dutch) sentiments that existed in the Far East.  When Japan marched into one country after another in 1941-1942, it tried to market its conquests as a campaign for the liberation of Asia from white European colonial oppression.  The conquered locals soon realized that they’d simply traded one kind of foreign imperialism for another, and that life under Japanese occupation was no picnic.  Even Thailand, which was nominally an ally of Japan, was squeezed in a way which convinced pretty much everyone except the country’s top leadership that the proper response was to resist rather than collaborate.  Japan also made efforts to cultivate the Indian nationalist movement, but apart from getting some support here and there from people like Subhas Chandra Bose it never got anywhere near to provoking a serious uprising against British rule.

@MrMalachiCrunch:

You can make many claims about what wins a battle, but wars are won on logistics.  Boring things like efficient routing algorithms and transports/trucks ensures the army gets its beans and bullets.

Perhaps even more so than Germany, Japan didn’t pay proper attention to this critical issue.  For example, it made inefficient use of its sea transport capacity.  The Army and the Navy apparently has separate fleets of transport vessels under their control, and did not coordinate their use.  So for instance, a transport vessel belonging to one service might deliver its cargo and then sail back empty in the other direction rather than using its return trip to do a needed transportation job for the other service.

Another problem along these lines was that the Japanese Navy felt that the correct mission of its warships was to sink enemy combat vessels, and thus that they shouldn’t waste their time or ammunition on anything that wasn’t a fighting ship.  As a result, Japanese submarines encountering American transport ships would tend to save their torpedoes for what they considered to be more important targets like carriers and battleships.  Japan likewise did not give a high priority to providing its own transport ships (including its valuable oil tankers) with enough escort vessels to defend them adequately.  This made the job easier for the American submarines which operated against the Japanese convoy routes.  American subs became so effective in this role that, by the end of the war, they were starting to run out of targets and Japan was facing economic strangulation (the goal which German U-boats tried but failed to achieve against Britain).  Japan’s inadequate handling of maritime logistics is particularly ironic given that the main purpose of its Pacific offensive in 1941 was to secure access to the foreign natural resources (particularly oil) which Japan lacked domestically and which it had to import to sustain its economy.

A quote attributed to Eisenhower (I’ve seen several different versions of it, but containing the same elements) states that he considered the following four items to be the key war-winning weapons of the Allies: The bazooka, the jeep, the atom bomb and the C-47 Dakota transport plane.  The jeep and the C-47 might seem surprising choices at first glance – and indeed might not even be considered weapons in the strict sense – but they gave the Allies tremendous battlefield mobility and logistical capacity.  Both these things are critical in modern warfare.  Richard Overy, in his book Why The Allies Won, makes the same point.  He notes that during the war, Germany produced highly advanced next-generation weapon systems like cruise missiles (the V1), ballistic missiles (the V2) and jet fighters (the Me262), but neglected to pay much attention to such unglamorous basics as providing its army with enough trucks to break free of its continued large-scale use of horses.

Another factor Overy mentions is the technical fussiness of the Wehrmacht.  Its weapon specifications and quality-control standards were so exacting that they got in the way of efficient mass production.  The Panther, for example, was an adaptation of (an in some respects an improvement over) the T-34, but it was more complex and time-consuming to build, so the Germans never had enough of them.  The Russians stuck to the philosophy of “make it simple, make it work, and make more of it.”  The British applied the same approach to manufacturing the early versions of the Sten gun, which was intended to be a simple, cheap weapon which could be produced in vast quantities to meet the emergency Britain faced after Dunkirk.  The Sten Mark III, which looked like a piece of scrap iron, was probably the ugliest gun ever used by the British Army, but it got the job done, and the British were sensible enough to realize that the second half of 1940 was not the time to get sentimental about having to give up finely polished walnut rifle stocks and carefully blued gun barrels.

People interested in this general topic might like to read a sci-fi short story by Arthur C. Clarke called “Superiority,” the inspiration of which he said would be clear to anyone familiar with the Second World War.  It describes how a galactic war takes an unexpected turn when one side becomes obsessed with developing fancy new high-tech weapons, while the other side sticks to producing huge numbers of good old-fashioned “primitive” ones.

One thing that might need to be considered in designing a realistic (as opposed to an abstract) A&A-style Napoleonic wargame is the fact that battles of that period (and of earlier periods) generally weren’t structured in the same way as those of the Second World War.  Generally speaking, the combat phases of pre-twentieth century wars tended to be concentrated into a very small number of decisive engagements occurring on a single primary battlefield and lasting for just a day or so – Waterloo being a good example.  The outcome of a war would often depend on what amounted to a single roll of the dice by the opposing forces, and most of the direct combat casualties of the war would take place during that single engagement.  Apart from those concentrated battles, serious fighting tended to be limited or nonexistent the rest of the year; armies engaged in a war spent a lot of time marching, maneuvering, training and so forth, but spent comparatively little time in outright combat.  Ditto for naval forces: battles like Trafalgar were decisive and produced many casualties, but they were rare events within the overall course of a war, with much of the rest of the time spent on operations like blockades.

In the First and Second World Wars, the structure of armies, fronts and battles changed radically, owing to such factors as scientific and technological progress (which led to the creation of weapons which could deliver ever-increasing volumes of increasingly lethal fire, like the machine gun), industrialization (which allowed the mass production of these improved weapons) and urbanization (which allowed the conscription and/or recruitment of millions more soldiers than could be supported by the primarily agricultural societies of earlier times).  These factors produced continuous fronts hundreds or even thousands of miles long.  Rather than being concentrated in location and in duration, fighting became stretched out: major battles might last days, weeks or even months, and lesser battles were taking place in multiple places more or less continuously (an example being the bomber offensive against Germany, which saw almost daily combat over the course of several years).

The A&A gaming system used in the various global editions, and in the AA Europe /  AA Pacific games, works well in the context of a war in which there is more or less continuous fighting on multiple fronts.  I think the problem it runs into when transplanted into the Napoleonic period is that combat in the Napoleonic wars didn’t involve continuous fighting on multiple fronts.  (Allboxcars mentioned some points along these lines in his original post, for instance when he talked about whether a diplomatic phase might be used to fill in parts of the game taking place during the long intervals between battles.)

@allboxcars:

OK the problem that I can foresee quickly arising in this thread is that it depends on how one defines what is an A&A style game.

What constitutes an A&A-type game is an interesting question.  The first idea that came to my mind was the criterion that such a game is driven by the basic four-cycle mechanism of “Income buys units / Units fight battles / Battles win territory / Territory generates income”.  But exceptions in both directions are easy to spot: there are several non-A&A games which use it (for example Risk, which pre-dates A&A by many years), and the mechanism isn’t used in the three A&A local campaign games (D-Day, Bulge and Guadalcanal) in which there’s no industrial production as such.  So yes, a lot depends on the definition that’s being used.

There was a movie called Shock Waves made in the 1970s about SS zombies (http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1259773184/tt0076704), so it might provide a bit of inspiration for this proposed A&A variant.

I’ve noticed that the way in which the global map is divided between A&A Pacific 1940 and Europe 1940 resembles the way in which the world was divided in the secret military agreement reached between Japan, Germany and Italy on 18 January 1942.  A translation of the text of the agreement is given in Appendix D of the book Reluctant Allies: German-Japanese Naval Relations in World War II (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2001).  The section of the agreement concerning the division of zones of operations reads:

–-

The German and Italian armed forces, as well as the Japanese army and navy, will, within the framework of the zones allocated to them hereinafter, carry out the required operations.

1. Japan

a. The waters to the east of approximately 70 degrees east longitude up to the west coast of the American Continent, as well as the continents and islands located in these waters (Australia, Dutch East Indies, New Zealand, etc.).

b. The Continent of Asia, east of approximately 70 degrees east longitude.

2. Germany and Italy

a. The waters to the west of approximately 70 degrees east longitude up to the east coast of the American Continent, as well as the continents and island located in these waters (Africa, Iceland, etc.).

b. The Near East, the Middle East, and Europe west of approximately 70 degrees east longitude.

3. In the Indian Ocean, each side may carry out operations across the above-agreed boundary according to the situation.

In the A&A 1940 games, the division between the two sets of boards is located slightly to the west of Ceylon.  That works out to be about 80 degrees east longitude, which is a difference of 10 degrees from the line separating the two zones of operation described in the agreement.  (It’s interesting that the agreement defines Asia as being east of 70 degrees east longitude and Europe as being west of it.  A good part of the traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia is formed by the Urals, and they’re located at about 60 degrees east longitude, 10 degrees west of the line used in the agreement.)

@Keredrex:

@CWO:

……  So in my personal notes about the games, I call the MB global game AA1, the 1986 (2nd edition) global game AA2, and the 2009 (Spring 1942) global game AA3.  …

What about Axis & Allies Revised (2004)?  wouldnt that Global game be AA3 and the 2009 Spring 1942 be AA4

Oops, I wrote too fast.  In my original post, I should actually have written “I call the MB (1986 2nd edition) global game AA1, the Revised (2004) global game AA2, and the 2009 (Spring 1942) global game AA3.”  Thanks for catching that.

@Yoper:

There are always going to be people who have certain names that they call the game or came into the game series mid-stream.  That name may not be what you call it.
Just like in other threads where people talk about the abbreviations for the different units in the game.  Different people use different abbreviations.

True.  The systems different people use partly reflect the way they look at the various games and editions.  In my case, for instance, I’m only interested in the games having plastic micro-miniatures, so I disregard the original Nova Games version, the computer game versions, and the large-scale collectable A&A miniature lines of products.  And I don’t bother distinguishing between rule revisions of the same game.  So in my personal notes about the games, I call the MB global game AA1, the 1986 (2nd edition) global game AA2, and the 2009 (Spring 1942) global game AA3.  The Anniversary Edition was a special limited-edition release, so I don’t number it like the core global games; instead, I call it AAAE.  I likewise don’t use numbers for D-Day, Bulge or Guadalcanal, which I simply call AAD, AAB and AAG.  My original designations for the original Europe (1999) and Pacific (2001) games were AAE and AAP, but I guess I’ll have to revise that to AAE1 and AAP1 because the names I’ve been using for Pacific 1940 and Europe 1940 are AAP2 and AAE2.  I don’t have a designation for the Global 1940 game because I just regard it as a combination of AAP2 and AAE2, not a separate game that comes in its own box.  It’s interesting to see in this thread the other approaches that other people have used to identify the different games, based on their particular needs and preferences.

I’d be interested in the flag tokens, but not in the other ones.  Perhaps they could be sold as separate product lines.  That could make them more attractive to, for example, customers who want or need lots of flags (and might order multiple copies) but few or none of the auxiliary tokens.

It’s hard to tell from the picture, but it looks as though Norway goes all the way to the top of the map, without any sea space connecting the Norwegian Sea to the Barents Sea, which would mean no possibility of naval movement between Britain and Russia.

One way of looking at this question is to compare A&A Europe 1940 and Pacific 1940 with the original separate releases of Attack! and Attack! Expansion, by Eagle Games.  The map in Attack! corresponds roughly to the half of the world that’s in Europe 1940.  The map in Attack! Expansion covers the other half of the world (roughly the area that’s in Pacific 1940), and the two maps can be combined (in either direction) to form a single very large map of the whole world.  The key difference between the two Attack! games and the two A&A games, however, is that the Attack! base game can be played without the expansion, but the expansion can’t be played without the base game. The base game includes plastic ground and air sculpts, and provides a card-based naval combat system to partially make up for the lack of ship sculpts in the box.  The expansion provides plastic ship sculpts which replace the base game’s naval cards, but it lacks any substitute for the base game’s ground and air sculpts, and so it can’t be played on its own.  So it’s a true expansion, rather than (as in the case with Europe 1940 and Pacific 1940) two freestanding games which can be either played independenly or combined to create what could be described as a third game.

Germany had more army divisions than Japan, and was viewed as the greater of the two threats by the Allies – hence the “Germany first” overall strategy which they pretty much followed.  So in that respect, Europe was indeed the priority theatre, as Tralis said.  But in terms of game design, I agree with I.L. that the fact that Europe 1940 and Pacific 1940 can each be played on their own means that the “expansion” concept doesn’t really apply in their case.

@Dylan:

These are the territories

France
Paris- 10
Southern France- 3
Atlantic Wall- 2
Central France- 4

Hitler is the fellow who had an Atlantic Wall, not Napoleon.

@Dylan:

The units will be, Shot Gun Infantry, Swordmen, Calvary, Cannons, Sail ships, Warships, Supplies Ships, Flag ships.

The terminology might need to be revised a bit.  During the Napoleonic Wars, all ships were sailing ships, regardless of their functions, and all flag officers used warships as their flagships.  Infantry used weapons called muskets, not shotguns.  Cavalry forces were armed with swords (specifically, with sabers), and the officers of the ground forces usually carried swords, but there were no swordsmen in the sense of infantrymen troops armed just with swords.

The text on the WotC page describes the combined Pacific 1940 / Europe 1940 as “the most outrageous global World War II game ever published.”  Outrageous?

@balungaloaf:

i heard on a show lately that the german army lost 1/4 of all supplies and material that the germans ever produced in the ENTIRE SECOND WAR!

i was like whaaaaaaa?!

is this accurate?  it makes sense of a lot of things for me.  by number losses of troops alone i always thought that the germans should be able to recoup their losses by their volunteer campaigns in occupied territories, or by forcing human labor in the territories occupied to free up more german men to be put into the wehrmacht.

1/4 of all supplies produced lost is staggering.

makes you wonder why in the hell Hitler didnt allow a tactical retreat from the area after the soviets counterattacked en masse.

the question is this. is the 1/4 loss number accurate?

I think this may be be reference to a line in the “Stalingrad” episode of “The World at War”.  Towards the end of the episode, as the narrator describes the German losses in men and equipment at Stalingrad, he says that enough equipment was lost to equip one-quarter of the German army.  So it’s not a reference to one-quarter of the equipment produced, which would be a much larger number.

@LHoffman:

As for Germany, swastikas etc… I obviously did not consider the game’s sales world wide. I agree that in Germany, certain subjects in World War II are way beyond taboo. And I realize why swastikas and the like will not be appearing on Axis and Allies products. While I disagree with the censorship, I also do not and have not lived in Germany, so I don’t know what kind of pain-shame-embarassment still resides there. Due to this lack of knowledge, I cannot say “put swastikas in the game and hope it sells”. Perhaps in Germany it is common sense to not have swastikas on merchandise. Perhaps it is a wise business decision based on the social restrictions in that country.

Germany has strict laws concerning Nazi-related materials, which would make it illegal for the swastika to be depicted on a commercial game.

@Make_It_Round:

Can anybody recognize the generals on the box cover?

I see Rommel, Patton, Zhukov… but who is that in the foreground?

George C. Marshall

It looks as though there’s a red Cross of Lorraine in the middle of the French flag, so the box appears to be showing a Free French flag.

I think the game being discussed here is Capt. Rick’s Superpowers game, which has been discussed in other threads (such as http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=17524.0).  It’s not related to the Supremacy game that was published twenty-odd years ago.