Captured equipment can be very much of a mixed blessing if you’re trying to actually use it on the battlefield, especially big complicated pieces of equipment like tanks which are notorious for requiring a lot of maintenance and spare parts. Supplying spare parts to your own guys for your own tanks is already enough of a challenge; it can be downright impossible if your captured enemy tanks use components which aren’t an exact match for what your own factories produce. Ditto for ammunition: I don’t know if the Germans had 45mm guns on any of their tanks, but if they didn’t I can see why they would have replaced the KV’s 45mm gun with a flamethrower. When the French battleship Richelieu switched to the Free French side in 1943, and went to New York for a refit, the shipyard workers – whose experience and measuring tools and (literally) nuts and bolts were based on the imperial system of weights and measures – had all sorts of headaches working on the vessel, which had been built using the metric system. Sometimes the best use for captured equipment is study rather than combat, a good example being the T-34, which gave the Germans a considerable shock when they they saw the shells from their Panzers bouncing off of it. Once they had recovered from their embarrassment (among other things, at discovering that the supposedly backward Russians had successfully produced a diesel engine powerful enough for a tank, something which Germany had failed to do), they created their own version of the T-34, the Panther. Another good example is the Akutan Zero, an A6M Zero which crashed in the Aleutians during the diversionary operation for the Battle of Midway. The pilot was killed, and from the air the plane looked like it had been totalled, but in fact it was barely damaged. U.S. forces found it about a month later. It was dismantled, shipped to the States, reassembled, then throughly evaluated by test pilots. This told American pilots, and American aircraft designers, everything the needed to know about the Zeros’s strengths and weaknesses.

Thanks for this excellent picture of a great ship’s demise. Earlier in 1941, Ark Royal famously launched the torpedo-bomber attack which jammed the Bismarck’s rudder, delivering the German battleship to the pursuing British naval units who otherwise would have failed to catch her.

Hi everyone,

Sorry to have been absent for so long; this is the first time I’ve logged into my forum account since the pandemic started. I’m fine, and I appreciate the expressions of concern; I’ve simply had to devote my time and my mental energies to dealing with the new situation we’re all living through. I’ve sidelined – for the moment – a lot of normal activities, including (sadly) my daily visits to the forum because I need to maintain my focus on working from home and dealing with the surreal environment in which we’re all living. Who ever thought that grocery shopping, a normally mundane task, would turn into an experience similar to the movie The Andromeda Strain, which features a multi-level biological research laboratory which requires increasingly severe sterilization procedures as one goes form level to level? Anyway, I hope everyone is doing okay.

All the best,
Marc

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

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

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

@captainwalker Stukas: now I am excited!

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

Given that your players are a mixed group with different levels of experience at various other A&A games, I think your best option would be a two-part strategy: start with Anniversary, play a few games to get everyone up to speed, then make the jump to Global. In terms of size and complexity, Anniversary is nicely positioned between the 1942 game and the Global 1940 game, so it’s a good tool for transitioning from the former to the latter. Jumping straight into the deep end of the pool might be less comfortable for the less-experienced players in the group; ideally, you want to set up a situation where the whole gang gets into Global with more or less the same level of skill and enthusiasm, so that nobody feels like an odd man out.

To follow up on a post I added to a different thread yesterday, here’s something I put together last evening: a home-made war rake, also known as a croupier stick. It’s made from a 12" x 3/8" wooden dowel (the arts and crafts section of my local dollar store sells them at $1.25 for a pack of six), a coffee stir stick sawn in half, and a drop of white glue. Unit cost: about 20 cents; assembly time: about five minutes (not counting the time it took for the glue to dry). The edge produced by the saw cut wasn’t completely smooth, so I used a nail file as improvised sandpaper to touch it up. To produce a good bond, I used two heavy books to press the components together while the glue was drying, since the glue company’s recommended practice of “clamping” is a bit difficult for an object that’s a foot long and less than half an inch wide. The end of the rake can be used either vertically to move individual sculpts, or horizontally to move massed formations of units. One pack of dowels and three stir sticks will produce six war rakes, which will serve the basic needs of a six-player game of Global 1940; two packs and six stir sticks will produce rakes for all nine Global player nations (with three spares which could be used for neutrals and for house-ruled additional player nations). An added refinement would be to paint the sticks in the appropriate national sculpt colours, if a deluxe version of the rakes is desired.

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

Hi everyone. I am new to this forum

Welcome aboard!

Ceylon and Madagascar do indeed occupy strategic positions in the Indian Ocean, but in order for a hypothetical Japanese occupation of these islands to have had a serious effect on the Allies the Japanese would have had to establish large and well-equipped naval and air bases there, keep them regularly supplied with food and fuel and ammunition, and defend them against Allied countremeasures (such as blockade and/or invasion). Considering how far these islands are from Japan, and considering how much trouble Japan (which had an inadequate marchant shipping capacity and inadequate convoy defenses) had with the logistical support of its much-closer holdings in the Pacific, I doubt that a large-scale, long-term Japanese presence in the Indian Ocean would have been a realistic proposition. Note by the way that Japan did occupy the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which are south of Burma and west of Thailand; the effects of this occupation were marginal (except to the local population) and by the end of the war the garrison was starving.

The site has been such a well-established part of my life for such a long time that it was a bit of a shock, upon seeing that this is its 20th anniversary, to take a step back and realize just how long a time it’s been and how much the A&A game has evolved during that interval. Many of the unit types and player nations available today in Global didn’t even exist at the time, which makes those days look like ancient history (which isn’t a bad thing, given that many A&A players are history buffs). As the previous post said, here’s to another 20 great years!

@midnight_reaper

And to follow up on Midnight Reaper’s question/comment about the flames: if they’re intended to represent smoke issuing from the chimney a functional undamaged facility or ship, an easy and inexpensive trick to achieve this effect is to use a bit of cotton wool (the stuff that’s sometimes found in unopened aspirin bottles), suitably fluffed up and stiffened with a bit of fine wire, or a section of pipe cleaner, or an unbent paperclip.

@andrewaagamer
And to expand on AndrewAAGamer’s answer, it sounds like a mangled account of the Remagen Bridge incident. Several of the details fit, but the part about the entire bridge going airborne then crashing back down on its supports is a wild exaggeration of what actually happened – and probably a sheer impossibility in terms of physics and engineering, given that the bridge in question was a massive structure over a thousand feet long. The Germans did make an attempt to blow up the bridge, but they bungled it; all they caused was minor damage. My guess is that a chain of explosions powerful enough to send the bridge sky-high would have sent it airborne in millions of pieces, not as an intact structure.

I’ve just renewed my Gold badge and PayPal worked fine for me.

You might want to try finding a second-hand copy of Donald Featherstone’s 1973 book Solo Wargaming. I read it ages ago, so I don’t recall much about it, but I remember that it mentions one particular wargamer who, as a multi-year project, solo-wargamed the entire Second World War – something that’s a little too ambitious for most people, but the chapter on that fellow (which includes his rules, if I remember correctly) could provide some useful ideas. The book might even be available online somewhere; there’s a link to it in the Wikipedia article on Featherstone, but it doesn’t seem to work.

Just a point of terminology, by the way, that I should have mentioned in my original answer: “miniatures” in the wargaming sense has two meanings. In the traditional sense, it refers to the scale models (soldiers and tanks and other land equipment, or ships for naval wargaming) which are used to fight “miniatures wargames”, which is also known as tabletop wargaming. They come in all sorts of sizes, and some of them are actually rather large; hobbyists often paint them in great detail, and sometimes build them from scratch. The A&A Miniatures line of products, which are pre-painted, are an example of these relatively large miniatures. The other meaning refers to the tiny plastic units used in A&A board games – sometimes called micro-miniatures, but more often called sculpts. To give you an idea of the scale, most A&A tank sculpts can fit on a dime (not counting the gun barrel). They’re essentially glorified gaming tokens. That’s not to take anything away from them: they’re great fun to use and collect (I own more of them than I can even estimate), and they add enormously to the WWII flavour of the game. But they’re closer to being game tokens that conventional “miniatures wargaming” units, which I think of as being conceptually closer to being model railroad trains or standalone plastic model kits.

In my opinion, the most basic difference between miniatures wargames (like Axis & Allies Miniatures, which has a whole section of its own in this forum) and board wargames (specifically the various Axis & Allies board games) is this. Miniatures wargames tend to be tactical in nature: they emphasize battles – specific engagements at a single place at a single time – and they can let you get into a very fine level of combat detail (such as which individual unit is shooting at which other enemy unit). They tend to be self-contained, meaning that they don’t lead from (or lead to) anything other than the battle itself. Board wargames tend to take the opposite approach. Their focus tends to be on either an entire war, or on a specific campaign within a war, so they’re strategic or operational in nature. The forces which fight each other are large (divisions and fleets, not individual tanks and ships) and the combat mechanics are fairly abstracted. In the A&A global-level games, economic management is an important factor, since units are purchased; miniatures games, by contrast, tend to be come-as-you-are games in which the units you have at the start of the battle are the only ones you’ll ever get to use.

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

While it wasn’t the main factor early on in the war, the US had broken the Japanese codes and had functional radar, very long range planes and incredibly detailed information and plans (yamamoto ambush) and other unknown technologies–I personally think that this led the Japanese to paranoia as US ships and planes kept showing up at the most inopportune times.

And interestingly, the Japanese also suffered on at least one occasion – at Midway – of what could be called anti-paranoia, which was to assume that the Americans would obligingly follow the timeline which Japan had scripted for them. Their Midway operation did not include any contingency plans to deal with the possibility that one or more American carriers might inconveniently show up ahead of schedule…so when that actually happened, Nagumo had to improvise on the spot (and do so in the absence of adequate information, a problem that haunts every military commander) and the operation started falling apart. It didn’t help that the Japanese were trying to accomplish two contradictory things at once: conducting an amphibious landing, an operation which needs to be carefully coordinated and which needs to take into account such immutable factors as the tides, and destroying a mobile enemy carrier force, an operation which involves many unknowns and which requires a high degree of flexibility. Their concept was built around a “First A, then B” scenario, but they ended up facing an A+B scenario.

I’ve sometimes wondered how Midway would have turned out if Yamamoto had dispensed with the diversionary Aleutian operation and instead had assigned the light carriers Junyo and Ryujo to augment Nagumo’s main carrier group. This would have given him added reconnaissance capabilities, a reserve attack force, and a bigger combat air patrol to protect his fleet from enemy fighters.

I was admittedly oversimplifying things when I described Nagumo’s decision as timidity. The situation was more complicated than that. Nagumo went into the Pearl Harbor attack fully anticipating (and, to his credit, being mentally prepared for) the possibility that his task force would suffer heavy losses. When the operation ended up going fantastically well – two successful aircraft waves inflicting heavy damage to the enemy with minimal losses of their own, and with no counterattack against his ships – he found himself in the position (as one author put it) of a man who was running at a door to bash it in with his shoulder and who ended up having the door unexpectedly opened for him at the last moment. He went from being prepared lose a couple of his carriers to wanting to preserve his task force from harm…and indeed, he got all his ships back to Japan without even a scratch in their paint. Unfortunately, it was the wrong call. Nagumo had been chosen for the job because he had seniority, not because he was an aggressive commander; he dutifully did what he’d been ordered to do, but he didn’t go further.

There’s a scene in the movie Tora Tora Tora where Nagumo argues to his air commanders (who were pleading for a third strike, this one targeting Pearl Harbor’s fuel depots and shipyards) that the war is going to be long and hard and that Japan must keep its precious carriers intact for that protracted struggle. I don’t know if the scene is historically factual or not. Nagumo does have a point when he says that in the film, but he’s also missing a counterpoint: even at the risk (which we now know would have been minimal, though he had no way of knowing it) of his task force being found and attacked the the Americans, a strike against the tank farms and dockyards would still have been worth it. The combat-focused Japanese military had a surprisingly poor understanding of the importance of logistics and infrastructure…something that you can get away with in a short local war, but not in a long one (especially against the most industrialized nation on earth) across vast oceanic distances.

Hmm. The flak bursts are fairly uniform in size and seem to occupy a single plane of the image, instead of being of multiple sizes and at multiple locations all over the harbor – which makes me wonder if this picture was doctored for propaganda purposes at the time of its original release, possibly to support the quote about “all the flak that’s up.” It might be a completely authentic picture, or it might have been retouched. The part of the quote which says “Apparently one of the reasons that there wasn’t a third wave was that American antiaircraft fire had greatly improved in effectiveness on the second wave, and that’s when most of the 29 Japanese aircraft were shot down” is something which could reasonably have been believed at the time, though we know in retrospect that Nagumo didn’t launch a third wave out of timidity, even though his officers urged him to do so. But at any rate it’s certainly a great panoramic view, and the colorization was nicely done.

Also of potential interest for the naval side of things are NavWar’s lines of Napoleonic ships:

http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=64
1:3000 SCALE - NAPOLEONIC SHIPS

http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=75
1:1200 SCALE - NAPOLEONIC SHIPS & AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=20
STARTER PACKS - 1:1200 SCALE - NAPOLEONIC

STARTER PACKS - 1:3000 SCALE - NAPOLEONIC
http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=24

Also note that Risk – the plain basic edition, not one of the countless spin-offs – has little plastic Napoleonic sculpts of infantry, cavalry and artillery, in multiple colours. On the minus side, they’re kind of small, but on the plus side the game is cheap and readily available, so its units could perhaps be used to supplement the bigger ones from other games if sheer numbers are needed. For instance, as a variation of the A&A concept of using mini poker chips to represent multiple units, the little Risk units (which are too small to be a good choice to use as the main game pieces) could be used on the board alongside the big ones to represent extra groups of five (or whatever) units.