Posts made by CWO Marc

The link came out strange in my above post; here’s another try:

https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/world-war-ii/1944/exercise-tiger.html#

@aequitas-et-veritas said in Is This Alleged D-Day Footage Authentic?:

@CWO-Marc you may want to double check the boats name/number.
As far as i can see it says lct 15230 or something like that.
Do the US have archives on what, when and who for WWII?
Did they record anything?
This would be my first thing to go after.

A good place to start when doing archival research into this sort of thing would be the US Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command, which used to be called the Naval Historical Center. I’ve had a quick look (it’s all I have time for) at their website, and it turns out they have a page on Exercise Tiger…

https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/world-war-ii/1944/exercise-tiger.html

…which you might want to look at. I haven’t read it, but it has a few photos plus lots of footnoted sources.

Yes, the 1941 game is a gold mine for sculpt enthusiasts, even allowing for the fact that each non-infantry unit type for the Allies and for the Axis is a nation-specific piece of equipment which is correct for only one of the nations on each side. In addition to plugging the holes mentioned by Midnight Reaper, it also provides China in Pacific 1940 with a P-40 Warhawk which perfectly fits the bill as a Flying Tiger fighter.

I used to think that the A&A franchise overall was progressively moving towards giving each nation its own distinctive sculpt for every unit type, meaning that wrong-nation sculpts from the early days would gradually be superseded by right-nation sculpts as they got introduced by new games, but based on some of the sculpts we’ve seen in the Anniversary reprint and in the zombies game and in Global 1940.2 that doesn’t seem to always be the case. But in fairness, Global 1940.2 comes close to that ideal, and it can be supplemented to a great degree by throwing in all the other A&A incarnations (like the original Pacific game, which provides two different US fighters, and the Bulge game, whose American and German trucks could – for example – be used in 1940 as depicting motorized infantry rather than mechanized infantry, if one chooses to make that distinction).

Very good points taamvan.

@Midnight_Reaper said in D-Day Special Tank Variants:

@CWO-Marc
I like how the article glosses over the fact that the U.S. Army, in its infinite wisdom, turned down the use of any of the funnies other than the DD Shermans - most of which sank to the bottom on the American beaches. I suppose you can’t have every decision be the right one…

-Midnight_Reaper

Yes, that was a bad decision, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that the DD Shermans were launched into the water at a greater distance from the beaches than the British did in their own invasion sector. As Barnee notes, the Americans made more good decisions overall than bad ones during the course of the war, but it’s regretable that some of those bad decisions were avoidable because they were partially driven in part by stubborness and pride and (in the case of officers like Admiral Ernest J. King) a certain amount of Anglophobia. The US entered the war two years after Great Britain, which was good in one sense (they were fresh – in contrast with the British, who had taken quite a beating for the past two years) but bad in another sense (they were novices – in contrast with the British, who had a lot of hard-won experience under their belts). Armies and navies, unfortunately, sometimes have to make their own mistakes in order to learn from them, rather than believing what their allies tell them. Human nature, I guess.

@taamvan said in Axis & Allies 1941 Trivia:

@CWO-Marc Have you seen the downfall rant for varied armor pricing across editions?

I even have an expression “to go a-ranting like H in his bunker…” to mean that you’re about to lose and make some bad decisions in the process of losing

No, I’d never heard about the armour-pricing one.

I like the expression you quoted, and it makes me wonder what would happen in an A&A game if the Germany player were to apply the order which Hitler started issuing more and more often in the 1943-1945 period, which was basically his “not one step back” approach to fighting a war that was more or less already lost: German troops were to stand their ground and fight to the death rather than retreating. In fairness, the Soviet leadership issued the same order to their troops at Stalingrad – but in their case, it was to buy time while they built up the strength to go from the defensive to the offensive, which they ultimately did. In Germany’s case, it was basically an attempt to delay the inevitable, or to buy time until Germany could be saved by a hypothetical miracle (such as the wonder-weapons it was developing, or a hoped-for collapse of the uneasy alliance between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets).

Here’s a BBC article – which includes drawing and/or photographs – about Hobart’s Funnies, the modified Churchill and Sherman tanks which were used in specialist roles on D-Day: the AVRE, DD, Crab (a.k.a. Flail), Bobbin, Fascine, Ark and Crocodile.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160603-the-strange-tanks-that-helped-win-d-day

@taamvan said in Axis & Allies 1941 Trivia:

Both purposes were not achieved when my toddler ripped the board in half

A video of that event would have made a great sequel to the notorious A&A Hitler Rant video (a subtitle re-edit of the scene in Downfall in which he throws a monumental tantrum) in which the Fuhrer denounces the lack of sufficient Japanese bomber sculpts in Pacific 1940. His generals try to calm him down by saying he can always use poker chips instead, to which Hitler replies by shouting that if he wanted to use poker chips he’d play freaking poker. It’s too bad that video was eventually taken down; it was hilarious.

@SS-GEN said in On this day during W.W. 2:

Remembering all that died and served on this day in history.

Yes indeed. Towards the end of Cornelius Ryan’s classic D-day book The Longest Day, as Rommel walks into his office and closes the door just as the clock strikes midnight and June 6th becomes June 7th, there’s a sentence which quietly makes the point that the Third Reich had less than a year left to its existence.

A news story about some of the secret behind-the-scenes work (signals intelligence and radio navigation) done by the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (the Wrens) during WWII.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/d-day-code-breakers-women-1.5159789

@Midnight_Reaper said in Axis and Alies Jedko Games version:

The Nova Games / JEDKO edition of A&A predated the Milton Bradley edition and is wildly different. You can’t use the setup cards for Milton Bradley in the JEDKO game, there are too many differences.

Yes, the colors are wildly different. When I say the Nova Games / JEDKO editions are different from what came after, I’m not kidding.

-Midnight_Reaper

I think of that version of the game as the “pre-sculpt” version, to distinguish it from all the later incarnations.

I started by checking my own Global 1940 map analysis document…

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/26161/global-1940-2nd-edition-map-analysis/33?page=2&lang=en-GB

…and the entry for Chile says “Chile, a country with close trading ties with Germany, initially chose to remain neutral (in contrast with many South American countries which, although technically neutral, tilted slightly towards the Allied side early in the war). Chile only started to distance itself from the Axis powers in 1943, when it broke diplomatic relations with them.”

According to this page…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allies_of_World_War_II

the “Declaration by United Nations”, originally signed by 26 nations in January 1942, was signed by Chile in early 1945. Chile was also one of the original 51 signatories of the 1945 Charter of the United Nations, and Chile also apparently declared war on Japan in April 1945. This page…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarations_of_war_during_World_War_II

…similarly notes the same declaration of war against Japan and similarly mentions none against Germany.

All in all, it sounds as if Chile was one of the countries (there were several, notably in Latin America) which spent much of WWII playing their cards close to their vest, and which only committeed themselves to the Allied bandwagon once it was clear that a) the war was nearly over and b) the Allies were going to win. Based on the other entries in my map analysis document, it looks as if, basically, the Latin American countries whose real inclination was to be pro-Axis spent the war pretending they were neutral; the Latin American countries whose real inclination was to be neutral spent the war pretending they were pro-Allied; and the Latin American / Caribbean countries whose inclination was to be pro-Allied jumped onto the Allied bandwagon right after Pearl Harbor. The reason for all of these positions (nuanced or overt) isn’t hard to guess: they were all in the western hemisphere, i.e. in the backyard of the United States, so they had to be careful about the public stance they took, even in those countries with right-wing governements and/or significantly large numbers of residents of German ancestry.

@dan-hamilton said in Introduce or Re-Introduce Yourself (Current):

Hi everyone. I am new to this forum :relaxed:

Welcome aboard!

@barnee said in WWII Mohawk Code-Talkers:

@CWO-Marc

On a side note, the Tlingit’s were/are badasses. They kicked ass on the russians and were hired to pack 200lb packs up the chilkoot trail. They all seem to be naturally strong. Probably weeded out the weak genes long ago : )

I saw something similar in a 1950s US Army film about the Korean War, part of which showed UN troops employing locals as porters to haul impressively large loads of supplies and equipment up steep trails to hilltop positions.

Another example of a simple-yet-sophisticated solution which the Americans used to address a WWII problem was the Marston Mat, which was conceptually similar to those Meccano construction sets for kids. It required heavy industry to manufacture it in the required huge quantities, but the device itself was mechanically straightforward: standardized sheets of steel mesh which could be laid down in an interlocking pattern, at whatever length and width was desired, to construct runways for aircraft in places where they were needed in a hurry, or in remote locations like Alaska and the Pacific Islands. The Marston Mat, combined with the use of heavy equipment like backhoes and bulldozers – which were commonplace in the US civilian construction industry – and chainsaws, allowed the Navy’s SeaBees (in the Pacific) and the Army’s Corps of Engineers (in Alaska) to turn an area of wilderness into an operational runway in just a few days.

@SS-GEN said in WWII Mohawk Code-Talkers:

@CWO-Marc

Just love these ww2 stories and learning about all the good and bad hardships during this war !

Me too. One of the things I like about the code-talkers concept is that, in my opinion, it’s an example of the flair which the Allies sometimes showed for coming up with clever, practical, and sometimes deceptively simple solutions to wartime problems. Some of those solutions involved large-scale efforts, but some of them were small-scale nuts-and-bolts devices and practices which required relatively few resources yet produced a big payoff. An example of the large-scale type is the solution the Americans devised to meeting the Battle of the Atlantic’s huge demand for shipping capacity, a demand which could not possibly be met by traditional shipbuilding practices and by existing shipyard capacity. The solution was to design a standard, simple cargo vessel (the Liberty Ship) which could be prefabricated in pieces at inland factories, then sent to the coast for final assembly; this greatly reduced the amount of worktime at the shipyards themselves, and meant that even small shipyards could handle the work. On the small scale, several examples come to mind. When the Allies started running into the new German high-tech (for the time period) acoustic torpedo, for example, they soon devised a low-tech countermeasure: simple mechanical noisemakers (as I recall, bunches of metal bars trailed in the water at the end of a steel cable, which would clang against each other under the influence of the flowing water) to draw the torpedoes away from the ships. When the Allies experienced trouble with Normandy’s dense hengerows, which tended to make tanks go belly-up, a U.S. Army sergeant come up with the answer: welding some steel “teeth” (initially improvised with cut-up railway track sections) to the front of a tank so that it could plow into a hedgerow and crash through it rather being tilted upward by it. These “can do” practical solutions, even when they were small-scale ways of dealing with a local problem, could potentially add up, and they also had the virtue of having an excellent cost/benefit ratio (in contrast, let’s say, with the impractical and wasteful Maus super-tank, which never even saw combat).

An interesting article which mentions that Navajo, which is perhaps the best-known example, was one among many Indigeneous languages – notably Mohawk, on which this story focuses – used in WWII to send hard-to-crack coded messages.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/louis-levi-oakes-code-talker-obituary-1.5153816

@Midnight_Reaper said in On this day during W.W. 2:

HMS Prince of Wales holds the distinction of being the only British capital ship to face both the Kriegsmarine and the Imperial Japanese Navy in the first half of WW2. Unfortunately, she did not give a good account of herself, with her main guns jamming in her engagement against Bismarck and a lack of air cover and effective anti-aircraft gunnery leading to the IJN’s bombers sinking her.

HMS Prince of Wales was in commission for less than one full year, from 19 January to 10 December 1941. A tragic fate for what might have otherwise been a fine vessel.

-Midnight_Reaper

On a brighter note, HMS Prince of Wales was one of the two ships – the other being the heavy cruiser USS Augusta – on which Churchill and Roosevelt held their first summit meeting in August 1941 at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. The eight-point statement issued from the conference, which came to be known as the Atlantic Charter, presented the joint vision of the two leaders for the post-war world; it later inspired the United Nations Declaration which was signed by the Allied powers, which in turn later inspired the United Nations Charter. The Atlantic Conference, to which Churchill travelled aboard POW, has an partial connection to POW’s engagements with both the Germans and the Japanese. On the German side: POW’s journey to Newfoundland was her first mission after the refit which had repaired her battle damage she had suffered in her battle with Bismarck. On the Japanese side: if I’m not mistaken, one of the topics discussed by Roosevelt and Churchill was the strategic question (which the US and the UK had already been discussing for about a year) of how to reinforce British naval strength in Southeast Asia (and specifically at Singapore) against possible Japanese aggression. The general idea was that the Americans would take some of the load off the Royal Navy in the Atlantic, which would free Britain to redeploy some of its naval assets to Singapore; this ultimately evolved into the concept of Force Z, of which POW was part.

@barnee said in On this day during W.W. 2:

@captainwalker
nice hadn’t heard of POWs guns jamming before

There’s a kind of tragic irony to the fact that POW’s jammed in an action in which Britain’s last battlecruiser, HMS Hood, was destroyed by a spectacular explosion of its magazines. The cause of those jams can be traced back to the Battle of Jutland in 1916, in which several British battlecruisers were lost…including HMS Invincible, which also suffered a magazine explosion, and which was commanded by Admiral Horace Hood, a great-great-grandson of Admiral Samuel Hood (after which HMS Hood was named). Britain in 1916 had the world’s largest fleet of battleships and battlecruisers, but Jutland revealed a number of quality-control weaknesses on the British side. One of the problems was that ammunition and propellant hoists in the turret complexes lacked (or only had minimal; I can’t remember which) anti-flash shutters. On the plus side, this increased the rate at which the guns could fire; on the negative side, this made it possible for the blast effects of an enemy hit on a turret to propagate themselves down into the ammunition magazines. Jutland was a shock to the R.N., and it led to a number of changes. One change was that HMS Hood, then under construction, was redesigned and rebuilt, in part to give her more armour (which ultimately proved inadequate in her action against the Bismarck). Another change, however, is that the R.N. started taking anti-flash shutters more seriously. The subsequent irony is that The R.N. overcompensated: POW’s anti-flash shutters were so elaborate that they were finicky and prone to jamming. (It didn’t help that POW was a very new ship and had not fully worked up.)

@SS-GEN said in G40 Historial Beta:

Thanks Marc. Ha ha now it’s pro allies.
I read where yes to what your saying but then I maybe wrong but I thought I read that there were 150,000 guerilla resistance people that just kept causing havoc for Japan ?

I’m not familiar enough about the subject to know if Siam had an appreciable guerilla movement or not. There are all sorts of things which were peculiar about Siam; I believe that, pre-war, it was the only genuinely independent nation in Southeast Asia, and I think that Japan technically “asked” Siam (more or less at gunpoint) to give it right of passage through its territory so that Japan could send forces from Vichy French Indo-China (where Japan had a presence) to Burma. Germany similarly wanted to traverse Spanish territory to attack Gibraltar from Vichy France, but opted to negotiate with Franco – ultimately unsuccessfully – rather than marching in first and asking for permission second (which is what I think happened in Siam). A further complication was that Siam had its own regional ambitions, as shown by the Franco-Thai War of 1940-1941.

@SS-GEN said in G40 Historial Beta:

History wise Japan did Attack Siam for 2 days on Dec 8 1941. Then on Dec 27 41 signed treaty so they were allowed to go thur and attack maylay and other country.
I believe there was a ton of guerilla inf resistances. I could add a event card where they could pop up like they did in Philippines had. I do have an event card for US for that action.

James Dunnigan’s book Victory at Sea: World War II in the Pacific has an interesting section on Siam/Thailand’s odd and complicated situation in WWII. As I recall (I don’t have the book in front of me right now), Siam had an authoritarian leader who was was willing to collaborate with Japan, but there were also pro-Allied elements in the government, in the population at large, and in the diplomatic service abroad. If I remember correctly, for example, Siam technically declared war on the US and/or the UK, but the US and the UK ignored the declaration, either because the Siamese ambassabors refused to pass the declaration along to them or because the US and the UK refused to receive it. And the Allies supposedly got a lot of intelligence during the war from the pro-Allied Siamese factions.