Beautiful work!

@Patchman123 said in G40 Redesign (currently taking suggestions):

How about making separate blue molds for France, instead of say, using Soviet Union (Russian) pieces painted blue? The regular color for A&A G40 for France? I think that it’s rather silly that ANZAC has its own molds and everyone else has updated sculpts, but not France. France gets knocked out, but later on, after liberation, she becomes a pain in the neck to Germany and Italy.

When the 2nd edition of Europe 1940 / Pacific 1940 came out, I was happy about the various new sculpts they included (including the full distinct ANZAC sculpt set) and disappointed that France’s non-infantry units continued to be blue versions of the Soviet set…but I guess that the single positive aspect of France being short-changed in both the 1st and 2nd editions is that it creates room for a nice sculpt upgrade in a hypothetical future 3rd edition: a full distinct French sculpt set. France is the last player nation left in Global 1940 which has such a large deficit of nationally-distinct OOB sculpts, and it would be nice for that gap to be filled. Global 1940 2nd edition has three minor gaps involving other nations, and it would be nice for them to be filled too in a future 3rd edition, but for the moment the 1941 game provides the means to do so: it has a distinct British naval transport, a distinct Soviet aircraft carrier, and it has an American P-40 Warhawk fighter which can serve as China’s Flying Tiger unit. An interesting question would be what kind of significant sculpt upgrade in a hypothetical Pacific 1940 3rd edition could be provided to balance the significant sculpt upgrade which a full French set would be in a hypothetical Europe 1940 3rd edition? I can’t think of any obvious single major upgrade, but perhaps several small ones would do just as well – for example, filling the minor gaps I’ve already mentioned, plus giving China a distinct artillery piece, plus perhaps reviving the concepts from the original Pacific game to give the US a distinctly-coloured Marine unit.

@barnee said in Churchill-Bradley Hypothetical Incident:

@captainwalker thanks for this. I’ve heard of the KV but never actually saw a picture of one this close up, that I recognized anyway. I know it was a heavier tank than the T-34 but thought it would’ve had a longer barrel. Maybe the picture is is a bit deceptive in that regard. Idk. I’ve read where they were quite the terrors on the battlefield

The picture isn’t deceptive. The KV-1 may have looked impressive in terms of sheer size and weight, and it was very tough in terms of armour protection, but it lacked firepower. To put things in perspective: the original version of the Panzer IV, which was intended to be a heavy infantry-support tank, was similarly armed with a short-barreled 75mm gun, with a barrel length of 48 calibers. The KV-1 gun had an almost identical caliber (76.2mm), but it was appreciably shorter, at 42.5 calibers, which meant a lower muzzle velocity. At the opposite extreme, the future Panzer V Panther’s high-velocity 75mm gun was an impressive 70 calibers in length.

Thanks barnee and Midnight Reaper for the info on the firing stances used by Ike and Churchill – I love these kinds of technical details. Churchill had indeed served in the Boer War and in places like Cuba and India as a young man; during WWI, after the Gallipoli debacle, he left government and spent a few months of 1916 an an infantry officer on the Western Front, which was quite a contrast from sitting on the padded benches of the House of Commons a year earlier. I’ve just checked on the specifics, and his posting (as a Lieutenant-Colonel) was from January to May 1916 in a Belgian village called Ploegsteert. It’s close to the border of Flanders, the region where his future opposite number in WWII, Corporal Adolf Hitler, would have been serving at the time: Hitler’s unit, the List Regiment, spent much of the war in Flanders, and in July 1916 it took part in the Battle of Fromelles, which is only 20 kilometers from Ploegsteert.

I’ve attached a scan of a WWII photograph that caught my attention today because it raises an interesting historical “what if?” question. It’s the one on the right, showing Winston Churchill inspecting a bazooka during a photo-op with Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, at which the men were photographed firing (or pretenting to fire) various weapons. According to the data attached to this file…

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Churchill_Shooting_M1_Carbine.jpg

…the photo-op was on May 15, 1944; this was three weeks before D-Day, at which Bradley commanded the US First Army.

It’s impossible to tell if the bazooka is loaded or not, but you’ll note that Bradley is standing almost directly behind Churchill – something he presumably would not have been foolish enough to do if the weapon had actually been loaded, unless perhaps Churchill moved suddenly and swung the weapon around in a careless way. If, however, it turns out that the bazooka was actually loaded, and if Churchill had accidentally (or in a burst of boyish enthusiasm) pulled the trigger at that moment, the backblast would have blown off Bradley’s head, or at the very least seriously injured him. The American reporters in the Allied press pool would have had a tough time figuring out a diplomatic way to report that story to their newspapers back in the States, to put it mildly. Churchill and Bradley.png

And as a further point of terminology, the Schwerpunkt concept is an important component of the style of warfare which was used to conquor Poland in 1939 and the Low Countries and France in 1940, but it’s a component rather than a synonym. It refers to the concept of concentrating superior combat power at a decisive point of the front (such as the Ardennes in 1940), a concept which is valid both in mechanized and non-mechanized contexts. The style of warfare to which the term “Blitzkrieg” refers, however, is the use of massed formations of tanks, closely supported by mechanized / motorized infantry, self-propelled artillery and ground-attack aircraft, to punch through the enemy’s front lines, bypass strongpoints, and quickly penetrate deep into enemy territory to seize key objectives and to surround and isolate large groups of enemy forces. This general concept was actually considered by the Allies towards the end of WWI, as a way to “win the war in 1919” if they hadn’t already done so by then (which, in the end, they did). To be clear, however, what the Allies had in mind at the time wasn’t on the same scale as what occurred in 1939 and 1940, partly because they didn’t have the technology to do it (tanks at the time were mostly too slow, and the only reasonably fast one, the Renault FT, was too light), and partly because it wasn’t necessary (because their objective was to break the deadlock of trench warfare, not to overrun hundreds of miles of territory). Mechanized warfare, with close air support, was perceived to be the solution to what had been two of the fundamental problems of trench warfare: the vulnerability of infantrymen on the offensive to the weapons fire of an entrenched enemy, and the inability of artillery to keep up with advancing troops (especially across shell-cratered and/or muddly terrain).

Incredible amount of detail; I’m very impressed. As a point of trivia, the portholes about which Harvard3X1 was asking are a feature to look for when comparing cruiser designs because they’re a potential tip-off about how well armoured a particular cruiser is. DMcLaren’s custom paint job correctly shows Indianapolis as having a single row of portholes (also called scuttles) located high on the hull. If you compare photos of Indianapolis with the Deutschland-class heavy cruisers (a.k.a. pocket battleships), you’ll notice that the Deutschlands have two rows of scuttles and that the second row is quite low, about halfway between the waterline and the deck. This showed that the armoured belt of the class did not extend very far up above the waterline.

@carsonbparker said in [Global 1940] Third Faction Idea for Russia/Communist China:

@CWO-Marc What do the Communist Chinese start with in your game and do they ever acquire anything more?

I’ve never worked out any rules for the ChiCom territory on my custom table. My objective in customizing the table was to create (with one exceptions) a “pre-war” picture of the world, whose default values (represented by the custom roundels which are attached to the map under its covering sheet of acrylic) show what the status of each terrritory on the map actually was at the beginning of 1931, before the invasion of Manchuria and the other territorial annexations and conquests engineered by Japan, Italy, Germany in the 1930s. The exception (or at least the only one I remember) is the ChiCom roundel in Shensi, which reflects a date of 1935 rather than 1931. I couldn’t resist putting it there because my sculpt collection (which is the part of A&A that interests me the most) actually include some “Red Chinese” sculpts from the second version of the old A&A Pacific game. (They’re Russian infantry units in terms of design, but they’re made of red plastic and their bases are stamped CH rather than RU. In the first version of Pacific, they were regular-coloured RU-stamped Russian infantry sculpts, just like the ones in the old A&A Europe game.)

@Xlome_00 said in [Global 1940] Third Faction Idea for Russia/Communist China:

GW36’s complexity is precisely why I brought this question up as it pertains to G40 because it is too complex to get enough people to approach it. Perhaps incorporating Communist-Friendly neutrals, or create a '36 setup for the G40 board which pulls in some of the diplomatic elements from GW36?

The answer would depend on two things: who the house rule is intended for, and what its basic objective is.

In terms of who the house rule is for, the simple case would be if it’s only intended for your own use and/or the use of your gaming group. In such a case, you have unlimited maneuvering room, plus the added advantage that you don’t need to worry about any dissenting viewpoints from anyone. The complicated case would be if it’s intended for use by the wider A&A gaming community. Those are the rocks on which countless house rule proposals have ended up wrecking themselves over the years because – as this discussion thread illustrates – A&A players have diverse opinions on such proposals. Diversity of opinion is a great and desirable thing, since it encourages creativity and individuality, but it tends to make it hard for most house rule proposals to gain broad acceptance; some of them do get widely adopted, but they’re the exceptions.

In terms of what your basic objective is, you’re in the best position to answer that question. If, for example, your basic objective is to play an A&A-type board game in which the Communist Block is a major military power in its own right and controls large areas of the map board right from the start, then you really have only two options: you either have to set the game in the Cold War era rather than WWII, or you have to throw out the history book and create a scenario in which “Communist China” during WWII consisted of the entire country rather than just the small area which Mao actually did control during WWII. If your objective is to borrow concepts from GW36 and import them in simplified form to Global 1940, I can’t offer any useful advice because I’m not familiar with GW36 (or any of its othr incarnations); the board members here who do know that game would be your best sources.

@taamvan said in [Global 1940] Third Faction Idea for Russia/Communist China:

@Caesar-Seriona Waaaaaay too complicated, but sweet!

Just for the fun of it, here’s a jump to the opposite end of the scale (meaning to something very simple). If you look at this section of my custom Global 1940 table, which uses as its default value the original status of China’s territories…

https://www.axisandallies.org/uploads/_imported_attachments/migrated/289190_8 Pacific Left Panel.jpg

…and expand the picture by clicking on it, you’ll notice that Shensi has Communist Chinese marker on it rather than a Nationalist one. That’s roughly the area (today’s Shaanxi) controlled by Mao after he ended up there in 1935 at the end of the Long March. If you want to set up a simple “communist block” in Global 1940 which would be historically credible and which wouldn’t be a major game-changer, make that area (and its sculpts) a ChiCom “micro-player” force controlled by the player who runs the Soviet Union. This would be a little bit like the way in which that the Soviet player already runs France (though on a much smaller scale), and it would also be a little bit like the oddball Flying Tiger unit in Global (a distinct unit with its own rules, and with the strange status of being an American unit that’s technically part of the Chinese Air Force, with the strangeness compounded by the fact that it’s the American player who runs China). I think that, from the point of view of historical accuracy, it should simply be an infantry force, and a fairly small one too; at most, I’d give it an artillery piece as extra firepower.