Posts made by KurtGodel7

In 1939 the Soviet Union seized the eastern half of Poland. In 1940 it followed that up by annexing Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and part of Romania. In addition it launched a war of aggression against Finland, seizing about 10% of Finland’s total land area. Inhabitants in conquered territories were treated brutally. For example in the east half of Poland 10% of the population was lost due to deportation or outright liquidation.

FDR did not meaningfully pressure the Soviets to renounce their strategy of territorial aggression. Moreover, he did not put serious pressure on Japan to abandon its policy of expansion in China–at least not in 1937 when the wave of expansion in question had been released. FDR’s hard line stance against Japanese expansion did not manifest itself until 1941.

FDR’s warlike opposition to Japanese aggression in China was not the result of a universalist policy of opposing aggressive territorial expansion in general. If it had been, he would have been equally assertive in opposing Soviet expansion. Nor was his opposition driven by a particularist concern for the Chinese: he waited four years between the start of the Japanese offensive in China before initiating his efforts to provoke war with Japan. Those efforts started in 1941, shortly after Germany had invaded the Soviet Union.

Prior to Barbarossa, German military planners had anticipated having to deal with 200 Soviet divisions. By the mid to late fall of '41 they had already encountered nearly double that number. During the winter of '41 - '42, the Soviets shipped an additional 100 divisions west across the Trans-Siberian railway. Prior to Pearl Harbor, Stalin had held those divisions in reserve on his eastern front, to defend against possible Japanese aggression. With Japan going to war against the United States, Stalin knew that Japan would be too preoccupied elsewhere to launch much of an attack against the U.S.S.R. The hundred divisions in question could therefore be used on the German front.

None of the above could have been accomplished, had the U.S. and Japan signed a mutually acceptable peace agreement. That is why FDR’s administration ignored Japan’s various peace proposals, while pursuing a policy of deliberately provoking Japan into doing what it ultimately did.

@RJL518:

The attack on Pearl Harbor, also known as the Battle of Pearl Harbor, the Hawaii Operation or Operation AI by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters, and Operation Z during planning, was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, on the morning of December 7, 1941. The attack led to the United States’ entry into World War II.

Japan intended the attack as a preventive action to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with military actions the Empire of Japan planned in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. Over the next seven hours there were coordinated Japanese attacks on the U.S.-held Philippines, Guam and Wake Island and on the British Empire in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.[13]

The attack commenced at 7:48 a.m. Hawaiian Time.The base was attacked by 353 Imperial Japanese fighter planes, bombers, and torpedo planes in two waves, launched from six aircraft carriers. All eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four sunk. All but the USS Arizona (BB-39) were later raised, and six were returned to service and went on to fight in the war. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship,[nb 4] and one minelayer. 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,403 Americans were killed and 1,178 others were wounded.Important base installations such as the power station, shipyard, maintenance, and fuel and torpedo storage facilities, as well as the submarine piers and headquarters building (also home of the intelligence section) were not attacked. Japanese losses were light: 29 aircraft and five midget submarines lost, and 64 servicemen killed. One Japanese sailor, Kazuo Sakamaki, was captured.

The attack came as a profound shock to the American people and led directly to the American entry into World War II in both the Pacific and European theaters. The following day, December 8, the United States declared war on Japan. Domestic support for non-interventionism, which had been fading since the Fall of France in 1940, disappeared. Clandestine support of the United Kingdom (e.g., the Neutrality Patrol) was replaced by active alliance. Subsequent operations by the U.S. prompted Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to declare war on the U.S. on December 11, which was reciprocated by the U.S. the same day.

There were numerous historical precedents for unannounced military action by Japan. However, the lack of any formal warning, particularly while negotiations were still apparently ongoing, led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proclaim December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy”. Because the attack happened without a declaration of war and without explicit warning, the attack on Pearl Harbor was judged by the Tokyo Trials to be a war crime.

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

TORA TORA TORA!!!
The 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.� One of the most important days in all of American History not just WWII.� It ended American Isolationism and turned the USA into the massive military power it is now.
There are so many questions that i could ask.
Did Roosevelt really know about the attack?
Should VADM Chuichi Nagumo have launched a third wave?
Why didnt the Japanese target the fuel depots which historians say would have done more damage to the American war effort than sinking every ship in the harbor?
Was Admiral Husband Kimmel really to blame?
Why wasn’t the US better prepared for the attack?
Could Yamamoto have formed a better plan of attack?
Did Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Germany and Italy really have to declare war on the USA with the news of the attack?
What do you guys think would have happened if they didnt?
There are so many theories about Pearl Harbor so feel free to answer or pose other questions that i haven’t thought of.
This was a “Day of Infamy” when it happened.
But it turned out to be a day of reckoning when the USA finally geared up and went to war.
The “Sleeping Giant” had awoken!!!

Did Roosevelt really know about the attack?

We had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes well before Pearl, so we knew an attack was coming somewhere, and more or less knew when Japan would go to war against us. Whether we knew that Pearl Harbor would be among the targets is more than I can say.

Should VADM Chuichi Nagumo have launched a third wave?

Yes, definitely. His rationale for not launching the third wave was that they had lost the advantage of surprise. He was correct to say that. However, the targets in question could still have been destroyed even without the advantage of surprise. Moreover, the benefit of surprise would prove rather fleeting for Japan for the entire rest of the war.

Was Admiral Husband Kimmel really to blame?

No. He made a convenient scapegoat.

Did Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Germany and Italy really have to declare war on the USA with the news of the attack?

This is a tricky question. Hitler believed, probably correctly, that 1942 was a pivotal year for the Axis. And that Germany would need to achieve substantial victories in the Soviet Union during 1942 if the Axis was to win or tie the war. Germany’s summer offensive in 1942 did result in substantial territorial gains, and the capture of large numbers of Soviet soldiers. However, Germany failed to seize the critical Caucasus oilfields. (A goal which was overly ambitious, considering the sheer scale of Soviet military strength.)

In the weeks leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack, a U.S. government memo had been leaked. The leaked memo stated that the U.S. did not have the naval strength for a two ocean war, and would lead one to conclude that if Japan went to war against the U.S., the American navy would be too preoccupied dealing with that to provide much protection for the U.S. transports in the Atlantic. Those transports were flooding the Soviet Union with Lend-Lease aid. Tanks, artillery, military aircraft. All of which would prove very important to the Soviets as they worked to thwart the German summer offensive of 1942. Moreover, the U.S. government memo had implied that the United States would be at war against Germany in two years or less; and that when it did go to war its primary target would be Germany.

If war between the U.S. and Germany was inevitable (as the memo had implied, and as may have actually been the case), and if German sub warfare in 1942 could seriously impede the United States’ ability to send Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union and Britain, then an argument could be made that Germany’s declaration of war against the U.S. was its best available option.

In hindsight, it’s easy to point out that Germany didn’t get the decisive breakthrough it needed against the Soviets even with that declaration of war. And that the American army began distracting Germany from its eastern front starting in late 1942, with Operation Torch. (The invasion of northwest Africa.) With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear (maybe?) that Germany should not have declared war. The “maybe” is because, if FDR had managed to get the U.S. into the European war within six - nine months of Pearl Harbor anyway, even without a German DoW, then Hitler’s decision to not declare war would not have yielded much.

@Wicked:

Don’t forget, unlike France or Norway surrender was no survivable option for the Russian population. Hitler made very clear quite early that he considered them “subhuman” and GeStaPo and SS did their deadly job in notorious german thouroughness in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. So I’m not sure if taking the capital would have ended the war in Russia - perhaps the regular war, but not the need for massive amount of troops there. I’m pretty sure the long term need and lack of administrational staff and police for this vast area with millions of deads causing disobeyance and riots would have been more than a pain in the a… for the Reich.
The Nazi dictature based on nationalism including/featuring hatred towards Jews and Slaws, denunciation and a powerful police - that wouldn’t have worked there. But on second thought, they might have been able to get some russians to help and give some incentives like surviving a month longer… It would have been hell on earth.

In the end Hitler had not enough of his beloved true blood Germans to realize his megalomaniac ideas - you don’t make many friends by hating them constitutionally.

An important part of German planning for the postwar period included the intention of forcibly relocating 30 - 50 million Poles eastward, to make room for German expansion. Had the Allied food blockade still been in effect, the deaths of large numbers of Poles along the way would have been considered an acceptable way of relieving pressure on Germany’s food supply; thereby preventing the starvation of an equal number of non-Poles.

During the war, the combination of the Allied food blockade and Stalin’s scorched earth tactics made it impossible for Germany to feed all the people within the lands it had conquered from the Soviet Union. The physical impossibility of Germany feeding those people proved a boon for Soviet propagandists; who took advantage of the situation by claiming that Germany planned to starve or kill all the people of the conquered Soviet Union. Soviet propagandists were not normally considered a highly reliable source of information. In this instance, however, the fact that large numbers of people in German-occupied portions of the Soviet Union were actually starving seemed to lend a hint of credibility to these claims.

As the war in Europe became increasingly less favorable for Germany, large numbers of Soviet civilians fled west into Germany. The westward flight of many Soviet civilians demonstrates that not all Soviet citizens believed Soviet wartime propaganda.

I’d like to address the first of the two points you’ve raised. Below is material from Herbert Hoover’s book Freedom Betrayed, p. 846.

The third wrong turning was the imposition of the economic sanctions in July. That was undeclared war on Japan by which starvation and ruin stared her in the face and if continued would soon be war, for the simple reason that no people of dignity would run up the white flag under such provocation. It could effect no strategic purpose in the protection of the United States or China or even the British Empire. The fourth wrong turning was certainly the rejection of the Konoye proposals of September and the Emperor’s proposals of November. . . . Konoye had begun his negotiations two months before the sanctions. . . . It can never be forgotten that three times during 1941 Japan made overtures for peace negotiation. America never made one unless a futile proposal to the Emperor the day before Pearl Harbor could be called peace.

Page 833:

[MacArthur] said that Roosevelt could have made peace with Konoye in September 1941 and could have obtained all of the American objectives in the Pacific and the freedom of China and probably Manchuria. He said Konoye was authorized by the Emperor to agree to complete withdrawal.

If Japanese withdrawal from China could have been achieved through negotiation, then why did the FDR administration refuse to negotiate? Why did FDR want to provoke a Japanese attack?

War with Japan was intended to achieve two important strategic objectives. The immediate objective was to tie down the bulk of Japanese military strength in a war against the U.S.; thereby preventing Japan from launching an invasion of the Soviet Union. This would allow the Soviets to concentrate their strength on their western front, while avoiding a two front war. The second objective was to get Germany to declare war on the U.S. By the end of 1941 FDR had achieved both these objectives.

Some quotes by Winston Churchill:

“[Mahatma Gandhi] ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.”

“I hate Indians . . . They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

Churchill’s blunt refusal to supply food to Bengal arguably led to the deaths of 3 million people.

British officials in the Indian region begged the Prime Minister to send aid to the Indian region, which was hit by wide-spread famine in 1943. Churchill said it was their own fault for ‘breeding like rabbits’. He said the plague was ‘merrily’ culling the population.

“This movement among the Jews is not new. . . . this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century.”

Attached is a map of most of Africa. Note the French factories in north Africa, the British factory in Cairo, and the German factory in eastern Africa. You can’t see it on the map, but there is also a British factory in Cape Town (worth 2). Normally, it is possible for a nation to control the territory physically near his African factories. Taking an African factory is a big deal. After Turkey conquers Arabia, it will often target the British factory in Cairo. The British player will often respond by making a strong effort to defend that Cairo factory.

The German player would love to conquer as much of Africa as possible. But too much German spending in Africa could distract it from vital tasks in Europe. That’s why it’s rare to see the German player buy a second factory for Africa. If the German player does decide to buy a second factory, it would normally be placed in German East Africa or Ethiopia. Ethiopia is worth 3. Because it doesn’t border the coast of the Indian Ocean, you don’t have to be overly worried about Britain’s Indian Ocean transport fleet.

@Imperious:

So this is a world map? The picture just shows Europe, so Japan is a minor player, etc?

It is a world map. Japan starts off as neutral. There are no diplomatic or other penalties for invading a neutral nation. You just have to fight the neutrals physically present in whatever territory you’re invading. Japan is lightly defended in relation to its income, making it an excellent candidate for neutral farming. Typically, the Entente is more likely than the Centrals to be able to neutral farm Japan.

The attached map shows eastern Russia and most of Japan. As you can see, there are several Japanese territories worth 6. Tokyo is worth 12.

You can see that eastern Russia starts off under (white) Russian czarist control, except for the (red) communist capital. Russia has some unit placement capacity in eastern Russia, but not a whole lot. It is often possible for communists to expand at Russian expense. That is especially true if Russia is forced to spend the bulk of its resources on its western front, against the non-communist Central powers.

It is also possible for Russia to wipe out the communists. Suppose for example that Germany and Austria launch a major offensive in the west. An expensive enough offensive that they have no choice but to adopt a defensive posture in the east, against Russia. If that happens, Russia will be able to go on the offensive against the communists, and eventually eliminate them.

@Karl7:

Interesting points, but not sure what this has to do with international warfare.  I guess if you are saying war is all an “inside job” meant to sustain elites… well, that isn’t true by a long shot.  The empires of central Europe were swept away by WWI. The Nazis were liquidated. The Japanese militarists were eliminated. The Soviet communist party (although its members changed hats) is gone. Etc…  War is something beyond the “control” of the powerful, because at the end of the day the outcome of the war is determined by factors unrelated to the ruling class’s position within its own country.  Elites may unleash war to secure their position, but that doesn’t mean they will inevitably win the war and survive.

Not to get personal, but I always laugh when people, especially liberals, get hyped up about the “conspiracy of the elites” nonsense. Yes, people with power can abuse it and get sweat heart, inside deals, but the reality–a reality confirmed by my 14 years practicing law and suing or defending such people or companies-- is that the elites are actually more often then not fairly incompetent.  Many people in power are not there because of their diabolical intelligence or scheming, but because they “lasted” the longest. Indeed, I am not so afraid of the evil machinations of some international elite as by their actual stupidity.  Just read “The Big Short” by Micheal Lewis. It tells the tale. Stupidity from top to bottom in such institutions as Goldman Sacks et al reigned, and they blew themselves up. Their only strategy at the end was to cry to the government.  Not smart, or brilliant, just begging.

if you want to talk about US domestic politics and economics, I am game. But that would be another thread all together.  Indeed, I think a thread that would be banned?  :-P

The more familiar one becomes with the Establishment, the more it becomes clear that Establishment is actively hostile to the nations it rules. That’s as true in the U.S. as it is in Canada or the EU. The Establishment should be regarded as a hostile foreign occupier.

If media ownership is consolidated among a small number of companies, the Establishment will have virtually unlimited opportunities to lie to the people. Even in the Internet age, when people have access to non-Establishment media, there is still a strong tendency among the Establishment to use the mainstream media they do control to promote a fundamentally dishonest, malignant political agenda. Such tactics can be surprisingly effective, at least among those who get most of their news from Establishment-controlled sources.

Media consolidation was also an important theme in America’s past. During the first half of the 20th century, the typical pattern was for anti-war newspapers to get bought up by pro-war newspapers. We now know that the Establishment’s history of lying to the American people is not a new thing. Lies were used to get America involved in both world wars.

There is this idea that the world wars were fought to serve American interests. That, however, is not the case. They were fought to serve the Establishment’s best interests.

WWII represented a power grab by the Establishment. As a result of the Nazi defeat, the Establishment gained power over Western and part of Central Europe. Even more importantly (from the Establishment’s perspective), a potential alternative to Establishment rule was extinguished. During the first four years of Hitler’s rule, he greatly increased wages for German workers, expanded vacation time, transformed the German economy, improved work safety standards, implemented clean air and clean water measures, and ended the malnutrition/near starvation which had existed in the Weimar Republic. (And which was also a problem for the lower classes in other nations, such as Britain.) Later, the Nazis would implement a fairly successful anti-smoking program. The Establishment did not want their own, lackluster results compared against all that.

The Establishment could probably have achieved most of those things too, had its rule been benign. Instead, its typical policy has been to give the people just enough to create the illusion of benign rule, and no more than that. Creating the illusion of benign intent takes work, and recently the Establishment’s willingness to do that work appears to have waned. The Omnibus Spending Bill, the decision to flood Europe with migrants, and unlimited electronic surveillance against the people are all evidence that the Establishment is no longer all that interested in maintaining the illusion of benign intent.

@Imperious:

Kurt i like what i see in terms of how the territories are carved up. Is this your invention or some game you found on Triple A?

If it’s yours, i think you have a great skill in game design.

One thing however, i would l prefer a bit more out of the box thinking in terms of the unit values ( they are too similar to WW2 AA).

Perhaps conversion to a D10 or D12 system, or having the units rolling D6-D12 depending on type ( like in fortress America)

Also, consider some units rolling before others to model entrenched infantry, or Artillery before other units.

These are part of what will become my own game coming out soon, which have all the pieces you brought up and more.

Check out the Great War thread in Variants. Good to finally have something to agree on with you… anything… and something i never thought you had a proclivity for.

Thanks for the kind words. However, I can’t take credit for this map. TripleK and Surtur created the original Domination, and Imbaked converted it to Domination 1914 No Man’s Land. This map can be played on TripleA, which I strongly recommend!

Rand loves playing this map, is very good at it, and is working on his own version of it.

If the attacker is using poison gas, that gets to fire before any other units.

The benefit to being an entrenched infantry isn’t captured by allowing entrenched infantry to fire first. It’s captured via the trench unit.

To give a specific example: suppose the German player uses his Pacific fleet to take Guadalahara on G2. Almost all neutral territories are defended, but Mexico City isn’t. Guadalahara is adjacent to Mexico City. So all you need is one German infantry in Guadalahara to take Mexico City on G3.

Mexico City is worth 4, and has a factory. If Germany is going to defend Mexico City, it should use those four points of unit placement for a combination of infantry and heavy artillery. In addition to those 4 infantry/heavy artillery, Germany can also place 3 trenches in Mexico City each turn. It takes two hits to kill a trench, so Mexico City’s hitpoints are growing by 10 a turn! (3 trenches = 6 hitpoints, + four hitpoints from infantry or heavy guns.)

The U.S. player decides to do something about this. So he spends 20 to build a factory in Texas, and another 20 to build a factory in New Mexico. Texas and New Mexico are each worth 2, so he can now place a total of 4 units right at the Mexican border. That’s good, but not by itself enough to let the U.S. take Mexico City against a determined German opponent. So he spends another 20 on a factory for San Francisco. San Francisco is worth 4, but it’s rather far from the Mexican border. So he uses the San Francisco factory to produce 4 cavalry a turn. (They give you mobility, and are artillery-supportable.) The Texas and New Mexican factories each produce 2 field guns a turn. At this point, the American player is now throwing 8 hitpoints worth of units at the problem, compared to 10 for Germany. The American player’s effort is good, but not quite good enough. He needs a bit of an extra push. So he builds poison gas in his starting factories in New York and Charleston. (Those are the only 2 starting American factories, by the way.) Those factories are very far from the Mexican border. But poison gas can move 3, so it won’t take all that long for the poison gas from there to threaten Mexico City. If the U.S. builds 6 poison gas a turn (in addition to the 4 field guns and 4 cavalry I mentioned), then eventually Mexico City will fall.

This effort will consume all or nearly all of the United States’ income for a number of consecutive turns. The German player knows he can’t hold Mexico City forever against an all-out American offensive. His goal is to delay the American offensive into Spain, or the Pacific, or wherever else the American player had planned on going. The early game U.S. is a little weak. Its income is in the 60 - 70 range, compared to 120 for Germany, about 80 for Austria and Britain, and about 70 for France. Later in the game the U.S. income can be 150 or more, due to neutral farming. The U.S. can do very little neutral farming if it’s going all out against Mexico City. Edit: Britain’s income also tends to increase as the game progresses, with an income of 120 or 130 being fairly normal. Austria’s income should also increase due to conquests at its neighbors’ expense.

In the battle for Mexico City itself, the American player will typically be dealing with a lot of German trenches! The U.S. player will spend most of the battle working his way through German trenches. Recall that of the 10 hitpoints of units a turn the German player had been building on Mexico City, 6 hitpoints came from trenches. The American player will get to kill some non-trench German units at the very beginning of the battle, with poison gas. After that, it will take several combat rounds before the German trenches are killed. Several rounds of the American force’s firepower decreasing, while the German force’s firepower stays the same. (Trenches don’t provide defensive firepower.)

Maybe I’ve sold you on the map’s existing mechanics, and maybe I haven’t. If I haven’t, then I’d encourage you to learn how to create player mods to maps. Imbaked created a player mod to the original Domination map, and Rand is working on a player mod to Imbaked’s map. No one is stopping you from creating your own mod to this map. (Though there is a bit of a learning curve.) I’m over 90% sure that the TripleA engine would support all the changes you mentioned.

I’ve attached a picture of part of the map. France is very difficult, but not impossible, for Germany to conquer. Austria has a three front war on its hands, against Italy (green), Serbia (orange) and Russia (white). Normally Austria will try to wipe Serbia out quickly, so that it can focus more attention on its two remaining fronts.

Moscow starts the game dull red, because it is owned by the communists. However, the Russian nationalists conquer Moscow before the communists’ first turn. That doesn’t matter as much as you might think, because Moscow is no one’s capital in this map. The nationalists’ capital is St. Petersburg, and the Communists’ capital is surrounded by the territory of eastern Russia.

The initial target of Turkish aggression is typically Arabia. Arabia’s capital is Mecca. Arabia cannot build any of the units on the normal tech tree, except for factories and trenches. In addition to those, the one unit Arabia can build is the Bedouin. Bedouin cost 2, attack on 1, defend on 2, and move 2. They’re half the cost of cavalry, for a better unit than a cavalry. Arabia cannot research technology. Arabia can place up to four Bedouin a turn, because Mecca is worth four. Once Turkey conquers Arabia, it will then be in a better position to adopt an offensive posture against Britain and Russia.

Domination 1914 No Man’s Land is a WWI-themed custom map. It uses the same rules as Anniversary Edition. It’s an immensely fun map to play, and gives you the feel of WWI.

The Big Picture

The Centrals begin the game with significantly weaker income, and significantly weaker Total Unit Value (TUV), than the Entente. To correct this problem, the Centrals should seek to conquer minor Entente powers, such as Serbia and Arabia. In addition, the Centrals should launch a massive land grab against some major Entente power, such as Russia.

Central powers consist of Germany, Austria, Turkey, and the communists. Germany is the strongest Central, has fleets all over the map, and starts with a factory in east Africa and another in the Pacific. The remaining three Centrals are local powers. Austria is almost as strong as Germany. The communists are initially the weakest of the Central powers. The communist capital is in eastern Russia–a red territory amidst a sea of white. Russian nationalists and communists are at war against each other from the very beginning.

Entente powers consist of France, Serbia, Italy, Arabia, Britain, Russia (nationalists), and the United States. The minor Entente powers–Serbia, Italy, and Arabia–should seek to hold out as long as possible. France’s main responsibility is to wage land war against Germany. It can also help wage land war in north Africa, or send units to help bail out Arabia or Serbia. Britain’s three main responsibilities are naval war against Germany, land war in western Europe, and anti-Turkish spending. In addition, Britain has primary responsibility for countering Germany’s moves in Africa and the Pacific. Russia is often faced with a three or even four front land war. Communists in the east, Turks in the south, Germans and Austrians in the west, and Germans in the north (Scandinavia). The U.S. begins the game as a somewhat smaller, weaker power than France or Russia. But it can grow in strength over time due to neutral farming. It isn’t a particularly useful nation early game. Late game it can be a good counter to the Austrians or the communists.

Land Units

Land units consist of infantry, field guns, heavy guns, trenches, cavalry, poison gas, and aa guns. Infantry cost 3, attack on a 1, defend on a 2. Whereas cavalry cost 4, attack and defend on a 1, and move 2. Both infantry and cavalry can receive support from artillery. Field guns are the artillery you know and love. They cost 4, attack and defend on a 2. If you’re attacking field guns provide artillery support. Heavy guns are also artillery. They cost 5, attack on a 2, defend on a 4. If you’re attacking they provide artillery support. Heavy guns provide more defensive firepower for the money than infantry! Heavy guns should absolutely be part of your unit mix if you’re on defense. They’re also not a bad unit for offense, though of course field guns are better for offense than heavy guns. Trenches cost 3, defend on a 0, and take 2 hits to kill. They provide twice as much cannon fodder for the money as infantry! You can place up to three trenches per territory per turn. You don’t need a factory to place trenches. If you happen to have a factory there anyway, trench placement doesn’t count against the factory’s overall unit placement capacity. Trenches cannot be used as casualties in poison gas attacks.

Poison gas costs 4, attacks on a 4, and moves 3. It is a suicide unit. It can be used on offense only. Poison gas attacks happen at the very beginning of combat, before anything else fires. Units killed by poison gas don’t get casualty shots. The only land units with a movement of 2 or better are cavalry and poison gas. Poison gas is useful as the “finishing touch” of your effort to overwhelm someone else’s defenses. Also, poison gas can be useful if you notice an enemy has a lot of trenches and not many units providing firepower to those trenches. If you could use poison gas to get rid of, say, half his defensive firepower, then getting rid of the trenches + the other half of the defensive firepower will be much less painful for your infantry/cavalry/artillery force.

AA guns cost 6. One aa gun can fire at an unlimited number of air units. Aa guns are captured, not destroyed.

In addition to the units I’ve mentioned, there are also some nation-specific units. Britain and France can build Colonials, and Germany can build Stormtruppen. Colonials and Stormtruppen are like infantry: they cost 3 and defend on a 2. However these units also attack on a 2. With a unit this good, what’s the catch? The catch is unit placement restrictions. French Colonials can only be placed in its starting factories in North Africa. British Colonials can only be placed in its starting factories in Canada or Australia. And German Stormtruppen can only be placed in its starting factory in Berlin. Germany’s main land front is against France, and Berlin is well to the east of that land front. So the reward of a better unit for the money is balanced by the punishment of inconvenient unit placement.

Both the (white) Russian nationalists and the (red) Soviet communists can build every land unit on the normal tech tree, including normal infantry. In addition to that stuff, they also have the option of building the conscript. Conscripts are an infantry-type unit, and can receive support from artillery. However, they are cheaper and weaker than infantry. They cost 2, attack on a 0, and defend on a 1. They provide less firepower for the money than infantry, whether you’re on offense or defense. But they make up for that by providing better cannon fodder value for the money than infantry. Because conscripts aren’t a great source of firepower, you should always resist the temptation to buy straight-up conscripts. You should add plenty of field guns to your unit mix if you’re on offense, and plenty of heavy guns if you’re on defense. And of course plenty of air for back-and-forth battles.

Air units consist of the fighter and the Zeppelin. Fighters attack on 2, defend on 3, and provide artillery support. They cost 9, and can move 3. As the game progresses you will unlock the ability to build the “late fighter” unit. Late fighters cost 10, attack on a 3, defend on a 4, and provide artillery support. They have a range of 4. You have to love that increased range for late fighters!

You don’t need any special technology for Zeppelins. These units attack on a 1, defend on a 2, have a range of 5, and can strategically bomb. They cost 16. No one starts with any aa guns on the map, so building a Zeppelin or two can be a good way to force your enemies to spend a lot of cash on aa guns.

Naval Units

Naval units consist of subs, transports, destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships. A sub costs 7, attacks on a 2, defends on a 1. It can submerge before the battle begins unless there is an enemy destroyer present. Only destroyers can block the movement of subs. Destroyers cost 9, are anti-sub, attack and defend on a 2. Cruisers cost 10, attack and defend on a 3. Battlecruisers cost 16, and attack and defend on a 4. Battlecruisers can bombard. Battleships cost 22, attack and defend on a 4, can bombard, and take 2 hits to kill. Injured battleships heal immediately after the battle. Offshore bombardment is limited to the number of units you drop off. Let’s say that you have 10 battleships but only 2 units attacking amphibiously. You’ll get 2 bombardment shots, not 10.

Technology

Technology is an absolutely essential part of this map. This map is normally played low luck, and low luck for tech. To research technology, purchase tech tokens. Tokens only disappear once you research a new tech. Whatever tech tokens you happen to have, you keep rolling them over and over until you eventually discover something new. If you buy one tech token a turn, you are guaranteed (at worst) one tech advance every six turns. Buying two tokens a turn guarantees you one tech advance every three turns (worst case). You don’t get to choose which particular technologies you get. But you do get to pick the category of tech you’re researching. There are three categories of tech research: industrial, land, and naval. There are six techs within each category, for a total of eighteen technologies. Normally I like to research industrial tech first, regardless of nation. Once I have all the key industrial techs, I’ll move to land or naval.

Industrial tech consists of the following advances:

Working women: reduces the cost of field guns and heavy guns by 0.5, the cost of poison gas by 1, the cost of fighters by 2.

Industry: adds +3 to the unit placement capacity of all your factories. Only works if the territory is worth at least 2. If for example you could place 2 units on a factory before this tech, you can now place 5.

Late fighter: unlocks the late fighter unit.

Propaganda: each turn you get 3 free infantry, placed on your capital.

Victory bonds: each turn roll 2 d6 dice. Add the rolls together. Whatever number that comes out to, add it to your income.

Science: one free tech token a turn.

Land techs

Creeping barrage. Your field guns now attack on a 3. Very, very good for offense!
Rail guns. Your heavy guns now defend on a 5. A solid tech for improved defense.
Bunkers. Your trenches now defend on a 1. Another solid defensive tech.
Mobile warfare. Your cavalry move at 3. Useful for offense–especially for getting cavalry to distant targets you want to take.
Mustard gas. Poison gas attacks on a 5. A good offense tech.
Tank. Unlocks the tank unit. Tanks cost 6, attack on a 4, defend on a 1, move 2, provide artillery support. The tank is a pure offense unit, obviously. But once you have working women and creeping barrage, field guns will provide you with even more offensive firepower for the money than tanks! So buy tanks only when you need more mobility than field guns provide.

Naval techs
Sub warfare: subs attack at 3, defend at 2.
Convoys: destroyers defend at 3, cruisers at 4.
Dockyards: reduces cost of battlecruisers and battleships by 2, all other ships by 1.
Fleet action: battlecruisers and battleships attack at 5.
Merchant marine: transports, destroyers and cruisers move at 4. A very useful tech!
Aircraft carrier. Unlocks the aircraft carrier unit. Attacks on a 2, defends on a 3, cost 13. Can land 2 air units. Fighters and late fighters can land on carriers.

Neutral farming.

Neutrals can be attacked without declaring war, and without any diplomatic consequences whatever. Most neutral territories are potentially income-producing. The Entente is better-positioned to farm most neutrals than the Centrals. However, Germany can grab Scandinavia. Also, it can use its Pacific fleet to grab a territory adjacent to Mexico City. Next turn, it can march into Mexico City. You’d think that this would be a relatively easy problem for the United States to solve. But no. Mexico City can produce 4 units a turn, plus three trenches. If Germany max builds there, the U.S. will have to spend a number of turns throwing its full weight against the problem before Mexico City ultimately falls to the Americans. Granted, this will also suck up a noticeable portion of Germany’s income.

Japan is a very tempting place to neutral farm, because it’s less well-defended for the income than most other neutrals. Normally the Entente gets to neutral farm Japan. Other places the Entente can neutral farm include Spain, South America, and China. (Though if the communists are strong enough, they might do some Chinese neutral farming themselves.)

@Karl7:

Wow!

Sorry I’ve been away from this discussion!  I’ve been on summer vacation for several weeks.

So, I’m not really sure what arguments are being made on a theoretical level.

Kurt, you’re saying the UK put in place a food blockade?  Yes, and…?  That’s war.

You are basically arguing that the Allies were hypocrites.  They condemned Nazi Germany for “human rights violations” and yet committed them themselves.

Well, yes an no.  What’s a “human rights violation” and when was it declared such?

You are engaging in a basic logical/historical fallacy liberals always engage in which is: liberal democracy that respects human rights has always been achievable and thus the baseline on which all historical-national actions must be judged.

That is a load of nonsense.  Reality/history is the absolute opposite: violence, meaningful or arbitrary, against the weak to dominate or exploit them is the real rule of humanity.  It has only been by the extraordinary striving of counties like the US and UK that even a semblance of “international law/human rights” has gained ground, even if superficially.  There’s no absolute truth or requirement for the respect of “human rights” when its violation has been the historical norm.  There is no thing as some “natural state” of human rights.

The reality is that few people really care about that stuff.  And if push comes to shove, it’s all out the window.  If you are a nation that strives to achieve the “rule of law” domestically and internationally and are confronted with an external power that absolutely doesn’t care, what are you going to do?  You’re seriously not going to blockade them? You’re seriously not going to bomb their cities–the center of that nation’s power?  What if you lose?  Then all that high minded shitt is out the window.  No one cares.

Come on Bro… that’s just dumb.  You’re inviting victory-- against yourself!  :-P

The highest best possible position is to say: we believe individuals have rights, but when a group of individuals collectively or individually act otherwise, they will be dealt with by all means NECESSARY.  That’s it.

An by necessary, forget this “proportionality” nonsense.  The “necessary” aspect is determined and judged by the power that conducts the act.

That is all.

Debate closed.

Thank you for coming.

The ruling class of any Western nation consists of two categories of people: politicians and plutocrats. Plutocrats are those at the very top of the economic pyramid. They are the ones with the money to buy media corporations, to make large contributions to political campaigns, to pressure universities through their alumni donations, etc. Of the two categories of ruling class people, plutocrats exert more power than politicians.

The actions of the Western nations’ ruling class bear no relationship at all to the values they claim to have. This goes well beyond mere hypocrisy. They are demonstrating every bit as much malignant intent as you’d expect from a hostile foreign occupier. In some cases, more malignant intent!

To give some specific examples: in recent times, the ruling class made it so that declaring bankruptcy no longer protects you from student loan debt. Lenders responded by greatly increasing their willingness to lend. The more money lenders were willing to provide, the more colleges raised their tuition in response. In modern America college has become a money grab–an act of financial predation against the middle class. College degrees are often economically worthless, and graduates labor under a crushing pile of student debt. Few members of the ruling class have shown interest in reforming this broken system. On the other hand, that same ruling class spent over $2 trillion on bailouts to themselves–TARP money, funded by the taxpayers, that went toward further enriching the rich. The near-complete absence of benign intent among members of the ruling class is seen in nearly all aspects of Washington lawmaking: the Omnibus spending bill, the law allowing robocalling to cell phones, immigration policy, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, etc.

The ruling class was every bit as divorced from benign intent during the '30s and '40s as it is today. In 1932 - '33, Stalin used an artificial famine to murder 7 million innocent Ukrainians, including 3 million children. The New York Times helped whitewash that crime by denying a famine occurred. FDR did the same, and extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union within a year of the completion of that famine. Within three years of the conclusion of that famine, France and Czechoslovakia had signed defensive alliances with the Soviet Union.

When Hitler invaded Poland, Britain and France responded by declaring war on Nazi Germany. They did not, however, declare war on the Soviet Union, even though the U.S.S.R. gobbled up the eastern half of Poland in 1939. And even though eastern Poland would lose 10% of its population during 1939 - ‘41 due to Soviet death squads and deportations. Western nations’ ruling class did, however, impose a food blockade on all of German-held Europe. No humanitarian aid was allowed through that blockade. The result was that millions of Poles (and tens of millions of others) died of starvation. Due to Allied victory, all of Poland was ultimately subject to hostile Soviet foreign occupation.

People of Polish descent have every reason to regard the Western ruling class as malignant, because that ruling class’s blockade starved millions of Poles. (While also demonstrating the falsehood of that ruling class’s claims to want to “help” the Polish.) Germans had every reason to distrust the Western ruling class, because of the starvation that ruling class deliberately created in postwar Germany.

But can people in Western nations trust our own ruling classes? The simple answer is that we cannot. The ruling class in almost any Western nation pursues a malignant “divide and rule” strategy against its own nation. The basic game plan is simple. Open the floodgates to immigration, in order to make the population as heterogeneous as possible. That way the nation’s people become divided against themselves. If that alone isn’t enough to divide a nation, stir up animosity amongst the people through race baiting and other means. Get the people so busy opposing each other that they’ll fail to notice (or at least, fail to adequately oppose) the iron grip on power held by the ruling class. The fact this “divide and rule” strategy is an excellent way of converting First World nations into Third World nations is, for the ruling class, beside the point. The ruling classes of Western nations do not have benign intent toward the nations they rule, and are quite content to see First World nations turn into Third World nations. Just as, decades earlier, they’d contentedly watched Stalin murder tens of millions of innocent people, while themselves helping Stalin get his hands on additional millions he’d wanted to kill.

@Imperious:

You provided nothing to support your claims.

Of the lies you told in your post, I’ll focus on the one quoted above. I’ve made two claims relevant to this discussion: 1) That Churchill imposed a food blockade on Germany, and 2) That this food blockade caused massive starvation in German-held territory during WWII.

I’ve cited three sources in support of the first claim: a book written by a former U.S. president, a book written by an award-winning historian, and a Wikipedia article containing 87 references. The latter two sources also support my second claim. But time and again, you conveniently ignore or misrepresent facts you don’t like, or that don’t fit your chosen narrative. You are not responding to what I’m saying. You are testing the waters to see how much distortion you can get away with before people other than me start calling you out.

Below is a quote from p. 541 of Tooze’s work Wages of Destruction.

Backe was in an impossible position. The Fuehrer had demanded more workers. Gauleiter Sauckel was dedicated to delivering them. Hitler and Sauckel now demanded that the workers [mostly Soviet POWs] be fed, which was clearly a necessity if they were to be productive. And yet, given the level of grain stocks, Backe was unable to meet this demand. What was called for was a reduction in consumption, not additional provisions for millions of new workers. The seriousness of the situation became apparent in the spring of 1942 when the Food Ministry announced cuts to the food rations of the German population.

@Imperious:

Or he could just make peace for the world war he caused, moving forward entails getting anything he deserves from the Allies in spite of the Genocide Hitler caused.

That might be because Hitler caused a world war?

There are a no needles of truth in that post. Rather Hitlers secret only lasted till the end of the war when everyone with half a brain understood that the Nazi hunger plan was an excuse to exterminate countless millions, while making it seem that ordinary Germans were starving on anything different than England was doing…Thats called “rationing food”. This rationing was followed by every participant in the war only you make up lies and got fooled by Nazi propaganda about Herman Goering actually losing weight because some B-17 dropped bombs and wiped out the sausage factory. I suggest you read something else perhaps?  In hoovers book, he offers many Chicken recipes that everyday Germans could have prepared, but no… they had to have sausage!

At least you didn’t blame it on the Allies and that bogus “food blockade”.

Wrong again. He made it no secret that he wanted to exterminate what he considered “subhumans” and use any excuse for doing that and not have anything written down on paper regarding this truth so that people ( like Kurt) could be fooled into thinking some basic economic embargo would cover up Genocide. That worked only until the world found out the truth.

Hoover wanted to sell more Chicken cook books. Belgium was liquidated and no longer any semblance of " small democracy". It was destroyed like everything else the Nazi jackboot entered. Hoover should have been more concerned with ending the war before Germany killed any more people, not selling cookbooks. Germany would have taken all that food to Germany. Are you really so dense as to think the food would be distributed by the German army to feed the Belgiums? You are from Pluto.

You have embraced a number of outright fabrications in this thread, including the claim that I’d cited neo-Nazi sources, the claim that I’d denied the Holocaust, and now the claim that there was no Allied food blockade during WWII. (Even though I’ve provided rock solid sources to prove there was such a blockade.) Your attempt to lighten the nastiness and deceptiveness of your posts by making jokes about Goering’s corpulence has fallen flat.

But in acting this way you are actually providing a service. Not a service you intended to provide. But a genuine service nonetheless.

Will you succeed in leading many astray? Absolutely. The tenor of your posts exactly corresponds with the highly propagandistic approach to WWII always taken in Western schools and the Western MSM. That gives you an enormous head start in discussions such as this. Most of those reading this want to believe you, and don’t want to believe me. For someone in that position, believing your posts represents the easy choice.

Anyone with the strength, courage, and intellectual integrity necessary to make the right choice is a person well worth knowing. I’m sure there are also plenty of people worth knowing whom you and others like you have misled. But that isn’t the point. The point is that if one could gather a group of people who reject every word you and others like you have ever written, you’d have a very good group of people! Smart, not easily deceived, intellectually honest, strong, altruistic.

In a world where true statements were also popular, the above-described group would get plenty of bandwagon followers. Such followers are unnecessary, and represent subtraction by addition. Getting rid of such bandwagon followers is much easier with your help, and the help of others like you, than would have been the case without.

@Imperious:

That might be because Hitler caused a world war? and England did the same thing she did in the Great War, except not as successful since Germany conquered France this time and had alot more resources to feed Herman Goering with. The Majority of the 23 million deaths that Germany caused during the war by deliberately shooting and starving proves the success of their Hunger plan.
:roll:  The facts that the German Hunger Plan was hugely successful, as it tricked the world outside Nazi occupied territories that Hitler was not effected by food shortages until The Allies could capture more resources that were currently held by the Nazis, which came to a crescendo only until late 1944.The fact is Germany,  Italy and all the satellite minor axis partners had no issues with food shortage. Kurt knows this but alas has never read any book not written by Hoover. In Greece, Poland and Holland the Nazis starved many tens of thousands. Germany controlled the shipments to all occupied areas, which made the plan such a success at fooling only Kurt until latter in the war when the Allies took alot of territory back. The ignorant statement about “cordoning off” captured cities is another myth Kurt is fooled by. In reality, if so many Soviet citizens, Polish, and Jews didn’t die by Einsatzgruppen and interior security forces, basically Kurt is a Holocaust denier and should be ashamed of himself.

There are a few needles of truth in your post, mixed in with whopping haystacks of error. You are correct to assert that Britain imposed food blockades in both world wars. The British food blockade was instrumental in the Entente’s victory, having resulted in 400,000 - 750,000 civilian deaths in Germany and Austria. Even more importantly (from the Entente perspective) the food blockade lowered the Centrals’ morale, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Kaiser’s government. Hitler had learned from the Kaiser’s mistake, and was determined to do whatever it took to prevent starvation among the German people, even if that meant starving Slavs.

Europe was far less able to feed itself in WWII than it had been in WWI. That was due to population growth, urbanization, and (in the east) Stalin’s industrialization. The Ukraine, for example, produced a much smaller food surplus in WWII than it had in WWI. Overall, the western Soviet Union ran at a food deficit. The same could also be said about Germany, and every major nation Germany captured. Even France ran at a food deficit, due in part to the fact that the British blockade cut Europe off from external fertilizer imports. Poland also ran at a food deficit.

Hitler made no secret of the fact that if he had to starve Slavs to feed Germans, he would. Churchill knew full well this was the case when he opted to impose a food blockade on Germany. The resulting food shortages are described in Adam Tooze’s book Wages of Destruction. Tooze was awarded the Wolfson History prize. The book has been praised by The Times (London), The Wall Street Journal, and History Today, and is rated 4.5 stars on Amazon. For those unwilling to buy this magnificent history book, there is always the Wikipedia article.

As 1940 drew to a close, the situation for many of Europe’s 525 million people was dire. With the food supply reduced by 15% by the blockade and another 15% by poor harvests, starvation and diseases such as influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhus and cholera were a threat. Germany was forced to send 40 freight cars of emergency supplies into occupied Belgium and France, and American charities such as the Red Cross, the Aldrich Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee began gathering funds to send aid. Former president Herbert Hoover, who had done much to alleviate the hunger of European children during World War I, wrote:[33]

The food situation in the present war is already more desperate than at the same stage in the [First] World War. … If this war is long continued, there is but one implacable end… the greatest famine in history. . . .

In January [1941] Herbert Hoover’s National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies presented the exiled Belgian Government in London with a plan he had agreed with the German authorities to set up soup kitchens in Belgium to feed several million destitute people.[52] Under the plan, the Germans agreed to supply 1m bushels . . . of bread grains each month, and the committee was to provide 20,000 tons of fats, soup stock and children’s food. However, Britain refused to allow this aid through their blockade. . . . Hoover said that his information indicated that the Belgian ration was already down to 960 calories – less than half the amount necessary to sustain life – and that many children were already so weak they could no longer attend school.

@aequitas:

KurtGodel7 wrote:

@KurtGodel7:

The food blockade the Allies imposed on Germany resulted in 20 - 30 million deaths.

German populations in May '39

79.375.281

German population in Oct '46

65.137.274

Wierd isn’t it :?

So you see Kurt, your statement is wrong.
You are talking about an invisible foodblockade.

Britain imposed a food blockade shortly after Churchill came to power. The National Socialist government recognized it did not have the food with which to feed the people within its own borders. The plan was to place a much higher priority on feeding Germans than on feeding Slavs or Jews. The majority of the victims of Churchill’s blockade were Slavs.

The Hunger Plan that IL keeps referring to really did exist, though of course all his claims about it are fictitious. It didn’t kill the 50 million people that he made up, nor even the smaller number the Nazis had wanted to kill. The idea behind the Hunger Plan was to starve captured Soviet cities, thereby freeing up the food necessary to prevent starvation in the rest of German-held territory. The Hunger Plan was a failure: Germany lacked the manpower it would have needed to cordon off captured Soviet cities. In the absence of that cordon, food continued to flow from captured Sovied farmland to captured Soviet cities.

The failure of the Hunger Plan did not lessen the death toll caused by the Allied plutocrats’ food blockade. the failure of the Hunger Plan meant that the German government did not obtain nearly as much food from the captured Soviet countryside as it had planned. (That food instead went to captured Soviet cities.) Because the German government didn’t obtain the expected quantity of food, it was impossible to carry out Hitler’s order to feed the Soviet POWs. Those POWs had been conscripted to work in German weapons factories, and were an essential part of the German war effort. Hitler’s order to feed them was based on military necessity, not racial ideology. The fact that millions of Soviet POWs starved to death while in German captivity was the result of the Allied food blockade, and a result of the failure of the Hunger Plan.

@Karl7:

Kurt, I respect your thoughts on this. You’ve definitely put a lot into it. Our disagreement is not one of tit for tat. The Allies decimated German cities. I acknowledge that. I’ve seen it. I was in Germany for a wedding and during that time I went to Darmstadt. There I saw some memorials to the allied bombing raids. I was simultaneously repulsed but proud. USA blew in and killed! But then a city was leveled. Not great for USA or Germany, but sadly necessary.

My point is only that when the fighting starts, the gloves come off and the winners don’t care how bloody it gets. That’s all. Indeed, when the casualties start coming in, few if any will care if the violence is “respecting international norms.”  Vengeance is the watch word–meeting out all necessary violence the goal.

You say that the Allies were wrong in the war effort because they leveled greater firepower than was necessary? That’s an after the fact justification. Germany and Japan were deadly strong.  No nation in that situation should be held account for “overestimation” of the amount of violence it needs to dispense to win.

The idea of “proportionality” has got to be one of the dumbest military ideas in history. In the middle of the fight how do you even know?  Winning is all that matters, and if you overshoot, well, so what–as long as you win!

The Soviet government engineered the Ukrainian famine in the early 1930s. That famine killed 7 million innocent people, including 3 million children. The FDR administration’s response to that famine was to whitewash it. Just as the FDR administration whitewashed a number of subversive Soviet activities directed against the United States.

You wrote about how it was justified for the Allied gloves to “come off” once war started. The problem with that is that the Allied had never actually been wearing gloves. Their prewar actions–especially by the Soviet government–demonstrated a brutality rarely equaled in human history.

The food blockade the Allies imposed on Germany resulted in 20 - 30 million deaths. Did that food blockade have military value? Absolutely! Stalin’s regime was so horrible that, had Hitler been able to actually feed the people within his own borders, many or most Soviets would have gone over to the Nazi side. From the Allied perspective, it was absolutely necessary to convince the Soviet people that the National Socialist government was waging a war of extermination against them–that it was deliberately starving all Slavs to death. Only then would Hitler seem even worse than Stalin. But that propaganda campaign was only going to work if Germany physically couldn’t feed everyone within its borders. Stalin understood this as well, which is why he ordered the removal or destruction of all food supplies and farming equipment as part of his scorched earth policy.

During the early postwar period, the American government instituted the Morgenthau Plan (a.k.a. JCS 1067). In 1947 Herbert Hoover wrote, “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.” It is estimated that a minimum of 6 million Germans starved to death during the three years that the Morgenthau Plan had been in place.

Nor was the Morgenthau Plan the only Western plutocratic crime against humanity during the early postwar period. There was also Operation Keelhaul, which most likely resulted in millions of death among refugees from the Soviet Union. And there was the treatment of German POWs during the postwar period, which also resulted in large numbers of illegal deaths.

Allied plutocrats condemned the Nazi government using morally universalist language. But the Allied plutocrats were not moral universalists. They themselves had no objection at all to murdering millions, or even tens of millions, of innocent people. They committed these murders not just during a time of world war, but for at least the first three years of the postwar period.

@Karl7:

Suppose that the Nazi government found that the Jews living within German-held territory opposed the Nazi war effort, and were doing everything they possibly could to thwart it. Would you feel the Nazi government had a legal right to exterminate this Jewish population every bit as vigorously as the Allies were working to exterminate the German people?

War between nations and quelling insurgencies are not really analogous, thus the question isn’t correct.

Let just say, I don’t believe in “universal human rights.” I know that’s not popular these days. But I really don’t see any basis for their existence other than aspiration, i.e. they are “good” so they must be.  People at best have only natural rights, which are secured and augmented by government. If you live in the state of nature and someone kills you, well too bad. If you live in society governed by law then you are protected by the criminal law. If one segment of society, say the Jews, start blowing up your railroads or whatever, then they would be prosecuted as criminals. I guess your criminal law could be as harsh as you want. I suppose that’s a matter of taste. But that really isn’t relative to two nations at war.

Ok, I think this is where the confusion lies. War and law can only exist in the absence of the other. One negates the other. The reason is axiomatic and self-evident. If someone attempts to dominate you by force, no law, by itself, is going to help you, especially if the attacker doesn’t care.  Once war is unleashed winning is all that matters. Sure, I guess you can try to stipulate that you won’t do X destructive thing if your enemy doesn’t etc. But that is also unenforceable.  There was no real reason why Germany couldn’t have used poison gas in WWII. The Germans just thought better of it, and I guess took the chance others wouldn’t do it, which paid off in the end.  But there is no reason they couldn’t have.

As for bombing, I am not condemning anyone for it, Axis or Allies.

Yes, I am aware of that history. I had to write an essay on it in High School about if the A-bombs were justified in light of Japanese peace feelers.  Again, who cares?!  If I am in a total war situation with a deadly opponent, and they start saying TO OTHER PEOPLE, “maybe I’ll surrender if blah blah blah” – why should I do anything but continue to blow them away? The allied terms were set. The Japanese did not accept them. EVEN AFTER TAKING 1 A BOMB.  It took 2.

Who cares.

Treaties are NOT laws, no matter how hard you pound the table. The only real penalty for breaking a treaty is war. So you’re back to bombing civilians in the name of stopping the bombing of civilians.

I mean, it’s a little ridiculous. The Allies bomb the hell out the Axis, then turn around AFTER the war and start saying oh, that was bad, but then adopt as THE cornerstone of national defense policy to totally annihilate their enemies with nuclear bombs, building thousands…

It just goes to show you that all this hysteria about “BOMBING CIVILIANS” is just frankly silly.  Yes, it is mean, and it shouldn’t happen in a nice world.  But when the going gets tough, the bombs got to fall. Sorry.

Have a nice day  : :-D

If I understand your logic correctly, law and war are mutually exclusive. Shortly after Hitler came to power, three large Jewish organizations declared war on the Nazi regime. Granted, those organizations didn’t necessarily speak for all Jews. But in this particular instance, it’s reasonable to suppose that the anti-Nazi sentiments expressed by those organizations were shared by the overwhelming majority of Jews.

Germany went to war in 1939, against enemies stronger than itself. With the exception of Stalin in late '41, none of the Big Three Allied powers showed the slightest interest in negotiating peace with Germany, or accepting anything other than unconditional surrender. Unconditional surrender would mean mass murder in postwar west Germany (Morgenthau Plan), and mass murder in eastern Germany (Soviet occupation).

When the decision was made to kill Jews, Germany was in a state of war, and the Jewish community was in a state of war against Germany. You’ve argued that all law goes out the window if your nation is in a state of war. Such a state of war clearly existed between the Nazi government on the one hand and the Jewish community on the other.

The laws of war do not exist to protect governments. Governments do not derive benefit from the existence of such laws, and will often ignore them if they think they can get away with doing so. The laws of war exist to provide some protection to the people–to make the conflict less brutal and bloody than it otherwise would have been. During WWII, there was an arrangement among all parties not to use chemical weapons against each other, for example. It was understood that if any one participant violated that arrangement, its enemies would quickly follow suit. That arrangement was harmful to Germany, because its chemical weapons research was easily ten years ahead of the Allies’. Maybe more.

The problem with all this is that the Allied governments were much better-positioned than the Axis to impose food blockades and to employ heavy bombers against civilian populations. It was in their interest to ignore the laws of war in those areas, except to the extent they cared about minimizing civilian casualties. Nothing about Allied actions remotely suggests that minimizing civilian harm had ever been a relevant consideration. Not that Axis governments were angels in that regard–they certainly weren’t! But of the two, Allied brutality toward enemy civilian populations exceeded that of the Axis. That Allied brutality demonstrates the hollowness of the main Allied propaganda theme: the claim that Allied leaders were horrified by Axis atrocities. Such claims ring hollow once it’s realized that Allied leaders committed worse atrocities than did the Axis.

I’m glad that IL finally found links to support his assertion that Japan bombed civilian targets in Honolulu. Of course, there is no guarantee that the newspaper/NBC accounts of the bombings were accurate. (There seemed to be considerable confusion around that time, with for example some claiming that Japanese planes had glided to Pearl Harbor to avoid detection.) But even though I’m less than 100% sold on the accuracy of this claim, I now know this isn’t something IL just made up on his own.

As for Japan’s willingness to surrender: Herbert Hoover addressed this in his book Freedom Betrayed (pp. 560 - 561).

In April 1945, the Emperor substituted a group of civilian anti-militarists for the militant ministry. Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, who had a long record of friendliness toward the United States, was made Prime Minister. Suzuki’s new cabinet included Shigenori Togo (not to be confused with General Tojo) as Foreign Minister who was also an anti-militarist and had opposed Japan’s joining the war in 1941. . . .

Before the ultimatum issued at the Potsdam Conference on July 26th, there had been six months of peace feelers by the Japanese, and nearly two weeks before, the positive proposal of Japan to Russia of which Truman, Byrnes and Stimson had full information from intercepted telegrams.

The importance of this is to show (a) that at least Secretary Byrnes was informed of these proposals before he reached Potsdam and (b) that it might be surmised that Marshall Stalin was not interested in ending the Allied war with Japan until he had collected the great Chinese provinces given him under the secret Yalta Far Eastern Agreement of the previous February.

All of these peace feelers had one stipulation in common, the preservation of the Japanese Imperial House. Secretary Stimson had long favored this condition to the Japanese.

@Karl7:

Oh sigh….

I think it’s weird and nonsensical when people get wound up about US/UK WWII bombing of cities. “BUT IT’S CIVILIANS!”

Yeah, so what?  Civilians pay taxes, they get drafted, they work in factories, they have kids that get drafted, they are the back on which enemy militaries rest. THEY ARE LEGITIMATE TARGETS!  No question.

I guess you can get into the vagaries of if a country’s citizens really support the regime and all, and thus you shouldn’t bomb them if they are more like slaves than supporters.  But that wasn’t really an issue in WWII.

As for the dropping of the A Bomb… Come on man, get with it.  Japan was fighting tooth and nail until the end and held large amounts of territory.  As a leader of a nation at total war, you are going to seriously try to superintend or second guess what your enemies may or may not do, i.e give up, when your people are dying en mass… like the 50K US casualties in Okinawa.

Hell no. Peddle to metal. Drop that bomb and let 'em know what’s coming. It’s up to them to give up, not for you give them breathing space and HOPE they come to their senses.

The prevailing attitude about the “horrors” of bombing civilians and nuclear weapons is kind of joke… actually it’s just a joke. We haven’t had a real war since WWII, i.e. a war between world powers. Why?  Because the real powers of the world know such a conflict would be catastrophic. But since one side has that ability, you have to have it too, or be in the camp of the side that does.  This is just a fact.  Maybe a despairing one, but it has prevented a real war from erupting for over 70 years. Let’s hope more.

You’ve made a very interesting claim–that it’s legal to exterminate civilian populations, as long as those populations are supporting the enemy war effort. Based on your own interpretation of legality and the laws of war, let me ask you this question. Suppose that the Nazi government found that the Jews living within German-held territory opposed the Nazi war effort, and were doing everything they possibly could to thwart it. Would you feel the Nazi government had a legal right to exterminate this Jewish population every bit as vigorously as the Allies were working to exterminate the German people?

If you don’t feel that such an act would have been legal, then please explain why the Allies were allowed to target and exterminate civilians, and why the Axis wasn’t allowed to do so.

As for the atomic bombing of Japan: the Japanese government had agreed to a conditional surrender months before the bomb was dropped. The bomb was not necessary for the U.S. to win the war–we’d done that already. The only reason the bomb was “necessary” was because “unconditional surrender” made better propaganda than the phrase “we let them surrender with some dignity.”

According to international treaties, artillery bombardment of an enemy city is legal if the following three conditions are met.

1. The city must be a defended city, not an open city. A military presence makes it a defended city.
2. The bombardment must be part of a good faith effort to capture the city. This means your own army must be physically near the city, or else rapidly approaching it.
3. In bombarding the city, you must make a good faith effort to focus your fire on the military presence in the city, while minimizing collateral damage to civilians. Some collateral damage to civilians is expected, but you are not allowed to make them your true target.

In the postwar era, a Japanese court correctly found that the atomic bombings had been illegal, because conditions 2) and 3) had not been met.