Posts made by CWO Marc

A very similar 1942 photo (though taken from the reverse angle) of a troop-laden Panzer III can be seen in the Wikipedia article on Tank Desant, a tactic (which varied from being improvised on the spot to formalized in doctrine) which involved using the outside of tanks as crude infantry carriers. This was fundamentally different from the concept of a true armoured personnel carriers because in the case of an APC the troops are inside the armour (and hence protected), whereas in the case of tank desant the troops are outside the armour (and hence dangerously exposed to enemy fire).

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

@captainwalker Stukas: now I am excited!

And on that subject, note that the photo correctly shows (for the spring 1942 period) conventional Stukas, not the Ju 87G Kanonenvogel tankbuster version which entered service about a year later and first went into combat at Kursk. The Ju 87G is easily recognizable by its large underwing 37mm cannon pods. To put things in perspective, this was the same caliber gun which was the main weapon of the early versions of the Panzer III.

It’s ironic that Friedrich Paulus was sent (as an OKH staff officer) to consult with Rommel in April 1941 with regard to the Tobruk operation because a couple of years later there was another overlap between the two officers. The Stalingrad campaign was on its last legs in early 1943, with Paulus and his staff surrendering on January 31st. At the same time, the North Africa campaign was winding down: Tripoli fell to the Allies on January 23; the Allies entered Tunisia in March, and Rommel left for Germany on March 9. Both defeats were bad news for the Axis side.

As a footnote: I once read a book on the Doolittle Raid in which the author commented that James Doolittle’s family name was somewhat ironic because, on the contrary to “doing little,” the man was actually a powerhouse with a long list of accomplishments in various aviation-related fields, both theoretical and applied. He was, among other things, a test pilot and an aeronautical engineer, a record-setter and a prize winner, with many of these accomplishments pre-dating the outbreak of WWII in 1939 (at which time he was a reserve officer in the Air Corps, having resigned his regular commission in 1930; he returned to active duty in the Air Corps in 1940). WWII added more items to his C.V., the Doolittle Raid being the most famous example but by no means the only one.

Last of WW2 ‘Doolittle Raiders’ Dick Cole dies aged 103

10 April 2019

Dick Cole, the last veteran of a World War Two bombing raid on Japan in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor, has died. He was 103 years old.

The famed Doolittle raid was named for then Lt Col Jimmy Doolittle, who led the first US strikes against Japan during the war in 1942.

Retired Lt Cole was Lt Col Doolittle’s co-pilot in the lead plane.

The raid, which included 16 B-25 bombers and 80 crew members, helped boost morale after Pearl Harbor.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47875466

If I’m not mistaken, the original edition of the Milton Bradley version of A&A was published in 1984 and the one with the rulebook modification / addition was published a couple of years later. Check the date printed on the box; if it says 1984, it’s presumably the original version.

@Trenacker said in Older Battleships:

! Can you remind me of the scale of A&A warships? If I remember correctly, some Panzerschiffe stuff is too large by comparison, no?

According to knp7765, who once looked into the question of scale, “Ships = Varies from capital ships to the smaller vessels. Battleships and Carriers are smaller than 1/2400. It’s closer to 1/3000 or maybe even 1/3500. I’m not sure about the smaller vessels but they are bigger in scale. If Destroyers and Submarines were at the same scale as the Battleships, we would barely be able to see them, much less play with them on the board.”

I haven’t checked their catalogues specifically for what you’re looking for, but these two sources might work nicely. I’ve bought stuff from them and was happy with my purchases.

http://www.panzerschiffe.com/

http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/

@taamvan said in British and French aid the Confederate States:

Interesting hypothetical. My research on “King Cotton” and the abolition of the slave trade indicates that England would have been very unlikely to intervene on behalf of the south. Southern media and propaganda lobbied for this, but I don’t sense the European powers were watching developments with an eye to intervene if the South did well–they had their own entanglements. They may have been rooting for the Union to lose or at least take some knocks (divide and conquer, retard a future rival), but the risks of a failed intervention were two-fold; eventual defeat of the South anyways PLUS alienating the presumptive victor.

Agreed. The leadership of Britian and France wasn’t unanimous on the subject, but for the most part Britain and France didn’t much care to get into a war with the USA to support the CSA; they had no pressing reasons to do it, and good reasons not to do it. They had no objections to making money from the conflict (e.g. by building blockade runners for the CSA), so non-intervention from a military standpoint was commercially a good strategy.

@axis_roll said in Simplified Bombers, Flak Guns, and Submarines:

Are ‘flak guns’ the same as AAA guns?

Yes. “Flak” is the Anglicized version of the German acronym “FlaK”, which stands for “FliegerabwehrKanone”, which means “aircraft defence cannon”, often also referred to in English as anti-aircraft artillery (AAA).

I think that one of the potentially most interesting applications of the pre-1939 time period isn’t to start the actual game prior to 1940 but rather to set up an alternate starting situation for the 1940 game, in order to introduce variety from game to game (or possibly as a different type of bid from the customary IPC-based ones). The idea would be to look at the chronology of the historical pre-1940 territorial changes and to say, “Let’s assume that instead of X happening, Y happened instead,” and to alter the look of the 1940 map accordingly so that the players are starting from a different geopolitical situation. This could be done either in small, modest ways, or on a more ambitious scale. An example of a “small and modest” change would be, let’s say, assuming that the USSR never annexed the Baltic States and Bessarabia to create a buffer zone between itself and Germany. Examples of more radical changes might include: what if Franco had lost the Spanish Civil War? What if China had never seized Manchuria in 1931 and Jehol and in 1933, and had never invaded China proper in 1937?

@SS-GEN said in [House Rules] The Cruiser:

Ok. Thank you very much. Then I have those 2 correct in my game

My pleasure.

And just to add a clarification: destroyers were versatile, but they were not “small and cheap” in the same sense that a tiny plywood PT boat was cheap. Destroyers were high-powered (both in terms of speed and armaments), fully-fledged, ocean-going surface-combat vessels. They may have been smaller and cheaper and faster to build than a cruiser (to say nothing of a battleship), but they were still substantial pieces of naval construction…actual “ships”, as opposed to “craft” and “boats”, which is what “small and cheap” refers to in absolute terms rather than just relative terms.

@SS-GEN said in [House Rules] The Cruiser:

So CWO your saying Destroyers cannot do a shoreshot and carry Inf for amphibious assaults
Correct ?

I’m saying PT boats can’t conduct shore bombardment (because they carry machine guns rather than artillery) and can’t land troops in meaningful enough numbers to be considered amphibious assault troop carriers. WWII destroyers, which carried 5-inch artillery, most certainly could – and did – conduct shore bombardment in support of amphibious landings; as an example, look up the USS Corry (DD-463), which was sunk off the Normandy beaches on D-Day. And some WWII destroyers did carry small numbers of troops and put them ashore, though as far as I know this was an anomalous situation limited to the Tokyo Express at Guadalcanal (an operation, which, incidentally, has been criticized as counterproductive because it cost Japan some valuable destroyers which could have been used for more useful purposes…such as convoy escorting, a task to which Japan paid far too little attention until it realized that US subs were demolishing its vital merchant fleet).

@Argothair said in [House Rules] The Cruiser:

I have a premonition that CWO_Marc is going to weigh in to tell me I’ve got the wrong name, so feel free to call it an assault boat, or a landing craft, or a PT or AS or DE or whatever you like – the point is that it’s a small, slow, cheap, multi-purpose ship that can help lend a sense of scale and dimension to the naval wars.

It’s not so much the name that I’m wondering about, but the concept. You refer to a “small, slow, cheap, multi-purpose ship” that can “be used by countries that are small or broke or both to keep their enemies honest,” which has the ability to conduct bombardment and to grab islands. I’m not aware of any such thing existing in WWII, nor even really today. The problem isn’t with the (perfectly valid) concept of a multi-mission ship in and of itself; WWII destroyers, in my opinion, were the quintessential “maids of all work” of the war, and today’s modern frigates occupy a similar niche. The problem is the notion that a highly effective multi-mission ship could be small and cheap. Multi-mission implies multi-capability, and those capabilities have to come from somewhere, which means that they necessarily translate into physical components of a ship: weapons, engines and so forth. Adding components means adding weight and size, which means more contruction time and costs (basically, parts and labour).

A small, cheap WWII-era ship could not have capabilities which were both diverse in nature and all high in effectiveness. The best you could have is a small, cheap WWII ship which was very good at one specialized thing and had a few useful minor capabilities in other areas, but which had severe limitations outside of its specialized context. One example would be flat-bottomed landing craft, which were sometimes fitted with rocket launchers; this made them very useful for amphibious landings, but pretty useless for other applications, given their low speed, minimal range and terrible seakeeping abilities. Another example would be the fast attack craft, of which the American PT boat is a classic example: very fast, packing a considerable punch in terms of torpedoes, and carrying machine guns as auxiliary weapons. Conceptually, you can think of them as the very poor cousins of destroyers (the latter originally having been conceived in the role of “torpedo-boat destroyers”), with most of the destroyers’s capabilities jettisoned. They did carry torpedoes and sometimes depth charges, but they carried no anti-surface or anti-air guns other than .50 cal machine guns (in contrast with destroyers, which typically had 5-inch guns), their range was limited (even when fitted with lots of extra gas canisters, as was done for the MacArthur evacuation), and they were only suitable for use in coastal waters. They could not “bombard” (firing a machine gun at a shore target doesn’t count) and they couldn’t conduct amphibious landings in the same sense that landing craft could (a Higgins boat could carry 36 fully-equiped troops, in addition to its own crew, whereas PT boats typically carried a crew of about 15 people, with little room to spare).

A reference source which you might find useful to consult is the Global 1940 map analysis I posted here…

https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/26161/global-1940-2nd-edition-map-analysis?page=1

…because it indicates the pre-war status of the various map territories back to about 1931.

@Patchman123 said in Infantry Pieces and Numeration/Nomenclature:

Is one color for Europe 1940 and the other color for Pacific 1940?

I have no idea beyond the guess I previously made, which evidently was wrong. My primary interest is the A&A sculpts, so I’ve never paid close attention to the cardboard chips; somewone more knowledgable about A&A game history than me will have to provide an answer to your question.

@Patchman123 said in Infantry Pieces and Numeration/Nomenclature:

What do the black and white colors on the back of the A&A Facilities (A&A G40), such as Major Industrial Complexes and Minor Industrial Complexes? Also for AA guns?

What’s the difference between the two? The whites ones and the black ones?

I think they come from different editions of the game (white =1st ed, black =2nd ed, if I’m not mistaken. Note also the front of the chips in your first picture are slightly different shades of gray.

@655321 said in My trouble with dice - and are casino dice the answer?:

Does anyone here use casino dice, and what are your thoughts on their performance?

I don’t use casino precision dice, but in case this option might be useful to you note that there’s another type of precision dice which might be more suitable for A&A: precision backgammon dice. They’re smaller and they have rounded edges/corners, which makes them less destructive if they land on the game map (which can happen even when you’re using a dice tray, if you get a bad bounce).

@Intrepid said in Introduce or Re-Introduce Yourself (Feb. 2019):
for the last three years given more time to A&A games […] > I have a huge interest in customizations such as map-making and other printed resources, as my professional background is as a graphic designer. My other hobbies include WW2 history and carpentry/woodworking/fabrication.

Sounds to me like the perfect combination of interests and skills! Welcome to the forum, and looking forward to seeing pictures of your eventual war room.