Destroyers for Bases

@aftertaste:

This thread is specifically about Global War '36-'45, I’m going to assume that everyone who reads this has read the rules, or at the least, knows that there are some very different rules and mechanics compared to A&A.
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This is a relatively straightforward House Rule that I feel is in keeping with the ideas behind GW36. There isn’t a great deal of loss on either side in game, but historically this was a raw deal for Britain. I’m sure if CWO Marc decides to reply, we’ll all learn something.

I’m hesitant to offer any input on this because I’ve never read the GW36-45 rules…and, in any case, it’s mainly just historical background I could provide, not really rule analysis that gets into the detailed mechanics of the actual rules.

@aftertaste:

I was talking about the historical stuff specifically when I mentioned you.

Fair enough.  The part that caught my eye is this one:

The price for the Destroyers would be that the US gains the ability to produce naval and air bases on the following UK territories […] The US does not gain possession of these territories.  […] There isn’t a great deal of loss on either side in game, but historically this was a raw deal for Britain. <<

I don’t know the answer to the two following questions, since I’m not familiar with the GW rules, but the two things I’m wondering are:

1. Does the proposed rule, in terms of how much destroyers cost and what role naval and air bases play in GW, reflect reasonably well the costs and benefits (to the US and the UK) of the historical DfB deal?

2. Is the proposed rule based on the assumption that the the UK got shafted by the DfB deal?

The second question is the one that intrigues me the most because the assumption I’ve mentioned – if it’s indeed the basis of the rule – could be an interesting point of debate.

The raw-deal concept is (I assume) built around the notion that the US was in a position to take advantage of the UK with the DfB deal, owing to the fact that: a) the UK desperately needed the ships and was in no position to bargain, and b) the US had no use itself for those rusty old WWI surplus destroyers.  In a normal transactional context, a situation in which the seller has a huge advantage over the buyer is normally very bad for the buyer indeed.  The DfB deal, however, wasn’t made in such a context.  On the contrary, the DfB deal was basically an arrangement that allowed Roosevelt to do legally (by executive order) something that Britain desperately needed but which some elements of Congress and some elements of the US public adamantly opposed: providing military aid (even if only in the form of equipment) to wartime Britian.  And Roosevelt actually took political heat for having done Britain this favour, rather than being praised as being a tough salesman who’d managed to take advantage of a weak “customer” who was in no position to bargain.

Moreover, I’d argue that Britain didn’t actually “give up” very much in exchange for those destroyers.  Far from being a fire sale, the DfB deal was really a huge bargain for the UK when it’s viewed from the perspective of WWII ultimately becoming a war between the Allies and the Axis rather than a war between the UK and the Axis. Those American bases proved extremely valuable for supporting Allied naval and air activities in the Atlantic, which benefited the Allied side (or “team” in gaming terms) as a whole.  Even better: the DfB deal allowed their construction to start well ahead of the actual entry of the US into the war in December 1941, and for that construction to be done at American expense (which the US could afford) rather than British expense (which the UK wasn’t in a good position to fund).  Keep in mind that naval and air bases can’t be thrown together overnight (even if, by about 1944, the SeaBees had gotten quite good at carving operational airfields out of Pacific island jungles in a matter of days).  I once read an account by a British journalist who visited the US base at Argentia in Newfoundland in August 1941, and hes described it as looking like a half-finished logging camp: dirt roads (if you could even call them roads), Quonset huts, and little else.  And on top of all that, the DfB deal was a victory for Churchill in the sense that it laid down one more brick in the edifice of Anglo-American cooperation he was trying so desperately to build.  Churchill used every technique in the book to try to get the US to join the war on Britain’s side, and he played up every little footstep that was made in that direction; when the US joined the UK in occupying Iceland in June 1941, Churchill described it – in a typical rhetorical flourish – as a capital event which ranked as one of the most important developments of the entire war.

Thanks for the response and additional information.  The loss-of-British-sovereignty angle is a fair point, though one which I’d see as just one piece of a larger pattern of imperial decline over several decades both before and after WWII.  I’m not sure what time-frame Paul Kennedy assigns (in his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000) to Britain’s decline from its former status as a (and arguably the) preeminent world power, but off the top of my head I’d pick the outbreak of WWI (1914) as the starting point and the Suez Crisis of 1956 as the end point.  Churchill once famously thundered that “I did not become His Majesty’s First Minister so that I might oversee the liquidation of the British Empire!”, but the years during which he served as Prime Minister (1940-1945 and 1951-1955), as did the period in between, only exacerbated the weakening of British power (economic and military) which resulted from WWI and to some extent the Great Depression.  Decolonialism really took off after WWII ended (with, in an early and spectacular example, the 1947 loss of the so-called jewel in the crown, India), but there were rumblings even before WWII started: the 1931 Statutes of Westminster, which gave legislative independence to the self-governing dominions of Canada, Newfoundland, the Irish Free State, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, were arguably a recognition of the political/military debt that Britain owed them for their support in WWI.  Canada, Australia and New Zealand were, among other things, seen to have “come of age” during that war (Canada  at Vimy Ridge, and Australia and New Zealand at ANZAC Cove at Gallipolli), and Britain wasn’t really in a position (even if it had wanted to) to operate these nations as imperial possessions ruled from London.  India, by the way, had similar post-WWI expectations, on the strength of the one million troops it had contributed to the war effort and on the basis of, if I’m not mistaken, British promises made at the time, but those expectations were not fulfilled; Britain, on the contrary, passed a 1919 act (the Rowlatt Act) which tightened its control on India, which only heightened the internal pressures for decolonization.

It’s somewhat ironic that, in the interwar period, the battlecruiser Hood – which was proudly displayed on show-the-flag cruises in various parts of the world – was regarded as a symbol of all that was great and powerful and magnificent about the Royal Navy and, by extension, the British Empire.  The parallel was in fact all too true: Hood and the Empire were indeed both large and magnificent, but both of them concealed some major structural weaknesses, as was spectacularly demonstrated in Hood’s case in 1941 when she was sunk by Bismarck after six minutes of combat.

While I like that you are looking for another angle to take the game in a historical direction, I have a fundamental concern with your proposal, aftertaste.

GW 36 is a 3 sided game. The Axis, the Allies, and the Comintern. If you were proposing to make some sort of compromise between 2 or more of those sides for mutual benefit then you might have a good idea. However, having 2 of the countries in one of the sides (Allies) make a deal that gives a mutual benefit means that you are only helping out one side to the detriment of the other 2. Putting aside the history of it, in a game there is no long term upside or downside to either the US or the UK. Neither country is giving up anything that will hurt them. They will both benefit big-time with the trade of destroyers for bases. I have played the game and this is exactly what both of them need.

If you do something to unbalance the game in favour of the other sides then this might be a good fix to bring the game back into balance. I’m thinking specifically in terms of using the “Elite of the Third Reich” expansion set or something along those lines. I have been trying to come up with something for the Allies to allow them to compete with a kicked up Germany. As you probably know there are several expansion sets for Germany but not many for the other nations. I will give your idea some thought and be sure to give you credit if I run with it.

Near the end of this video I talk about balancing the set;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnHYZMnUFhU&t=21s

What is it about the game that you’re looking to fix?

This is a very interesting addition. I like where this is going!
I would however agree with GHG. That if you implement this you will need to give a similar advantage to both axis and Cominturn.

In GW36 US can’t use anyone else’s bases. Can’t scramble in London etc…
This provides a number of forward bases to the US and 4× the lend lease limit in a turn to the British. Admitted that delivery is delayed by a turn. These may need to be Torpedo boat destroyers to show they are ww1 era. With a drastically reduced cost and effective ability compared to a regular destroyer.
All expansions usually come with a bit in cost though typically at a discount of just buying the items. Say make both UK and US pay a few bucks to start the Scheme to cover most of the ship costs.

I  like this thought don’t throw it out, play test it and let us know what you think it does to Atlantic. Germany typically is out of the convoy raiding before us gets involved anyway.

You could implement it as a ‘schema’, like Atlantic Wall in the Fortification Expansion.

@aftertaste:

The Germans had blockade runners that would take technical specifications and equipment to Japan in exchange for exotic and rare materials. Now, I know almost nothing about the specifics historically, so I am on unfamiliar territory, but I was thinking of a rule where Japan and Germany exchange, say, a certain number of free technology rolls for Japan and a one time boost of IPC’s for Germany. This rule is even less fleshed out than the Maskirovka, so feedback is welcome.

If you’d like detailed information on the subject, a good source is the book “Reluctant Allies: German-Japanese Naval Relations in World War II”, by Axel Niestle and Yoichi Hirama – but the short version of the story is that German-Japanese cooperation in WWII was minimal.  As the first two words of the title suggest, Germany and Japan didn’t provide each other with very much tangible help duing the war; there were a couple of cases of Japanese long-range submarines bringing valuable shipments of raw materials (such as important metals and rubber, if I’m not mistaken) to Germany, but I don’t think it amounted to anything of significance given the minuscule quantities involved.  Germany, for its part, was reluctant to provide Japan with sensitive technical information, as I recall.

There were a few reasons for this lukewarm (in both directions) relationship.  Part of the explanation is simple geography: Germany and Japan were on opposite sides of the world, a factor which even in peacetime would have been an inconvenience; in wartime, with the overland and oceanic routes between the two nations controlled by enemy nations (mostly the USSR and the UK), it became all that much more of an obstacle.  There’s also the fact that Germany and Japan weren’t fighting a single grand unified war (the concept conveyed on the Allied side by Churchill’s phrase “the grand alliance”), nor even separate but coordinated wars (which is, Churchill’s rhetoric notwithstanding, a better description of what the Allied war effort was really like), but rather separate and unoccordinated wars that were tenuously connected at best.  And there’s also the ideological context – specifically, the racial prejudices of both regimes against each other.  The racist element of Nazi Germany’s political policies and military actions requires no elaboration, but a less obvious point is that Japan too was fighting a war with racist elements, i.e. a war purportedly aimed at freeing Asia from white European colonial imperialism.  (The “purportedly” part refers to the the fact that, while Japan did indeed want to get rid of white European colonial imperialism in Asia, and said so quite publicly if I’m not mistaken, Japan also wanted to replace it with Japanese colonial imperialism, a detail about which they tended to be a little less forthright.)  So Germany and Japan at the time, while both authoritarian and militaristic regimes, were hardly natural ideological partners and were suspicious and disdainful of each other to various degrees.