The Channel Dash was a huge embarrassment to the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, with the Times commenting that “Nothing more mortifying to the pride of our sea-power has happened since the seventeenth century.” As I recall, when Churchill was informed by telephone that Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen had escaped through the English Channel, he answered, "Why?’ then hung up. One recent naval historian summed up the answer by saying that the British had spent the operation periodically tossing handfuls of gravel at the German ships, and that they would have been better served by taking a deep breath, taking the time to concentrate their forces properly and throw one good well-aimed rock.
Best posts made by CWO Marc
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
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RE: Chicago NFL Team (Bears)
Of the seven numbered suggestions, I think Axis & Allies MB would be the best option. It has the twin virtues of being concise (it’s the shortest of the seven options) and of including the unambiguous reference to Milton Bradley, the only manufacturer of that version of the game. In fact, it even replicates the initialism “MB” found on the box itself, which is a nice touch. The options which mention the Gamemaster Series element strike me as being a bit long, and also unnecessary: the Gamemaster Series didn’t contain any other A&A games, so in my opinion referring to the series simply complicates the picture without adding any information which clarifies who produced this version of A&A; the MB part does that quite satisfactorily.
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A&A Unit Identification Charts
After looking at some WWII aircraft recognition posters this summer, I decided to put together some similar unit identification charts for the Axis & Allies sculpts, using actual photographs of the plastic pieces. I shot the photos in close-up, using a high-contrast lighting arrangement, then converted the pictures to greyscale black-and-white to produce colourless silhouettes. The pictures are shot pretty much from an identical distance, so the sculpts should all be more or less correctly scaled relative to each other (though the aircraft pictures did come out a little larger than the other units because I was shooting them with a different camera setup).
I haven’t tried printing the picture files directly, but as an experiment I copied-and-pasted one of them into a Word document, in landscape page layout, with the four margins reset to 0.5 inches; the page came out fine when I printed it. I used black-and-white printing for this test, but the next thing I’ll do is print out the full set of 23 charts in colour to display the roundel colours.
I’d like to share these charts with my fellow A&A enthusiasts, so I’ll be posting them in this thread, two at a time, over the course of the next couple of days. For the sake of variety I’ll be jumping back and forth between land, air and sea units; the filenames, however, give a more systematic arrangement under those three broad categories.
Please note that the charts only assign one primary country roundel to each sculpt, even when a sculpt is used in multiple plastic colours by multiple countries in various A&A games. The main purpose of the charts is to differentiate between the various unit types and to identify specific models and classes within each type, regardless of which A&A game features them.
The first two charts for today are the WWI and WWII infantry charts.
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RE: Axis & Allies 1941 Trivia
@taamvan said in Axis & Allies 1941 Trivia:
Both purposes were not achieved when my toddler ripped the board in half
A video of that event would have made a great sequel to the notorious A&A Hitler Rant video (a subtitle re-edit of the scene in Downfall in which he throws a monumental tantrum) in which the Fuhrer denounces the lack of sufficient Japanese bomber sculpts in Pacific 1940. His generals try to calm him down by saying he can always use poker chips instead, to which Hitler replies by shouting that if he wanted to use poker chips he’d play freaking poker. It’s too bad that video was eventually taken down; it was hilarious.
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RE: What are you reading
@Private:
The book would add a number of points, of which here are a couple:
A few comments on this. First, I doubt that France and Russia saw themselves as defending “a balance of power” in Europe; if any of the Allied powers thought that way, it was Britain, whose foreign policy in the decades leading up to WWI basically aimed at keeping Britain’s options open. This non-committal policy infuriated the French, whose objective was to get Britain solidly on-side for any eventual war with Germany. (Ironically, that’s pretty much what Britain’s own objective was vis-a-vis the U.S. from 1939 to 1941).
Second, the search for a single “key cause” for WWI is a quest that has occupied historians and other commentators for a whole century, with the pendulum swinging back and forth (according to the fashion of the day) between “it was Germany’s fault” (see Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, a.k.a. the War Guilt Clause) and “it was everyone’s fault” (see Margaret MacMillan’s book “The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War”, though she does attribute significant blame to Kaiser Wilhelm, arguing that his unstable personality would not have been an issue if he’d been the ruler of Lichtenstein rather than of the preeminent military land power of his era).
Third, it should be noted that Germany wasn’t the only major power of the day where right-wing views were espoused by the army and other leading social actors. The pre-WWI Dreyfus Affair scandal in France illustrated a similar dynamic, and in the run-up to WWII the right in France hated the left to such an extent that it was sympathetic to the concept of an authoritarian regime, which is exactly what France got from the Vichy Regime under Marshall Petain (who, when France was crumbling in June 1940, blamed its defeat on (as I recall) “twenty years of Marxism”).
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RE: 🎖 Axis & Allies .org 2021 Support Drive
I’ve just renewed my Gold badge and PayPal worked fine for me.
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RE: A&A Unit Identification Charts
This is a great idea!!
Thanks! I like the unit identification charts in the A&A rulebooks, but there are some things about them I find less than optimal, so I created my own unit charts (mainly from the perspective of sculpt organization rather than game play). The pictures in the rulebook unit charts are a bit small and not all rulebooks have them – for instance, the 1914 rulebook has no such chart, it doesn’t have proper unit profile silhouettes for the submarines and transports, and (if I remember correctly) the rulebook even refers to the battleship as a cruiser on one of the maps. The 1940 (2nd ed) rulebook chart uses identical silhouettes for the British and ANZAC cruisers, even though the sculpts are different. Some of the names given in the rulebook charts are problematic: for example, some designations are vague (“Baltic Timber Ship” rather than “Volgoles type”), some use the name of a non-lead ship as the ship class name (“Ray” rather than “Gato”), and some are arguably wrong (“Hilfskreuzer” – which is incorrectly spelled with a “ue” in the rulebook and which refers to an auxiliary cruiser rather than a transport ship – instead of “Dithmarschen type”). There have also been unit name inconsistencies from one rulebook to the next, as in the case of the Yak fighter which some rulebooks identify as a MiG. And of course, for obvious reasons, the rulebook charts for a given game exclude sculpts from other games – for instance, the trucks from BotB aren’t found in the 1940 rulebook charts, which is perfectly understandable. So I tried to address these issues as much as possible in the customized charts I made.
Continuing from where I left off yesterday, the first two charts for today are the Allied and Axis tactical bomber charts.
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RE: Axis & Allies 1941 Trivia
@taamvan said in Axis & Allies 1941 Trivia:
@CWO-Marc Have you seen the downfall rant for varied armor pricing across editions?
I even have an expression “to go a-ranting like H in his bunker…” to mean that you’re about to lose and make some bad decisions in the process of losing
No, I’d never heard about the armour-pricing one.
I like the expression you quoted, and it makes me wonder what would happen in an A&A game if the Germany player were to apply the order which Hitler started issuing more and more often in the 1943-1945 period, which was basically his “not one step back” approach to fighting a war that was more or less already lost: German troops were to stand their ground and fight to the death rather than retreating. In fairness, the Soviet leadership issued the same order to their troops at Stalingrad – but in their case, it was to buy time while they built up the strength to go from the defensive to the offensive, which they ultimately did. In Germany’s case, it was basically an attempt to delay the inevitable, or to buy time until Germany could be saved by a hypothetical miracle (such as the wonder-weapons it was developing, or a hoped-for collapse of the uneasy alliance between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets).
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RE: Dec 4
The unlucky POW has the unfortunate distinction of being, as far as I know, the only British battleship which was involved in two famous and important naval actions of WWII, one against Germany and one against Japan, and of ending up on the losing end of both engagements (fatally so in the second case). On the more positive side, she was the venue for the August 1941 Churchill-Roosevelt summit in Newfoundland, which among other things resulted in the Atlantic Charter. The document would be called a “communique” today (when summit meetings are common events, and post-summit communiques are a routine element of such meetings), but back in 1941 this sort of thing was rather novel. The Atlantic Charter was referenced at various times during WWII, either pleasing or embarrassing Churchill depending on the circumstances (such as when he argued that the Charter article which expressed respect for “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” didn’t apply to British-rule India), and it ultimately helped to lay the foundations of the United Nations charter.
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RE: Anniversary!
Congratulations and best wishes! A fitting way for you to celebrate would be for you to play a game of A&A Anniversary edition with your local group. :)
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RE: A&A Unit Identification Charts
The next two charts are the Allied and Axis battleship and battlecruiser charts.
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Video Interviews with WWII Vets
Here’s a great project that a filmmaker has been working on. And I think it’s especially nice that he’s a young man, not someone from a generation closer to WWII.
Thursday, February 28, 2019 6:38AM EST
A young American filmmaker is on a mission to interview every last Second World War veteran to share the stories of as many combat veterans as possible – before it is too late.
Rishi Sharma has spent the past three years documenting the lives of living Second World War veterans in the U.S., U.K. and Canada for his non-profit organization Heroes of the Second World War.
The average age of Second World War vet is now 93 years old, and the number of survivors is slowly diminishing with the passing of time.
After three years of visiting seniors’ homes to record veterans’ stories, Sharma says has filmed more than a thousand interviews.
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RE: Have you ever done miniature wargaming?
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.
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RE: A&A Unit Identification Charts
The next two charts are the Allied and Axis tank charts.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
It’s ironic that Friedrich Paulus was sent (as an OKH staff officer) to consult with Rommel in April 1941 with regard to the Tobruk operation because a couple of years later there was another overlap between the two officers. The Stalingrad campaign was on its last legs in early 1943, with Paulus and his staff surrendering on January 31st. At the same time, the North Africa campaign was winding down: Tripoli fell to the Allies on January 23; the Allies entered Tunisia in March, and Rommel left for Germany on March 9. Both defeats were bad news for the Axis side.
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RE: I Need Help! - Special Round Robin Tournament Algorithm
Now to resume. By now we’ve generated a tentative table of three-number match-up lines which looks like this:
1 2 3
1 4 5
1 6 7
2 4 6
2 5 7
3 4 7
3 5 6As a check, I then mentally went through the following two-number combination: one-two, one-three, one-four, etc., all the way up to three-seven, to see if each pair of numbers in the combination can be found on one and only one line of the table. Answer: yes. So – unless I’ve overlooked something, which I hope I haven’t – we now have a complete list of who gets matched with whom, which meets the required “play with everyone but only once” condition.
Now to figure of the turn order. Each player gets to play in each position (A, B and C) once. The first cluster of unedited lines is:
1 2 3
1 4 5
1 6 7If we move the 1 by one and two spaces respectively, we get:
1 2 3
4 1 5
6 7 1Now for these unedited lines:
2 4 6
2 5 7The first line already has the 2 in the A position, and the 4 and the 6 don’t conflict with anything above, so it’s tentatively fine as is (more on this later). The second line needs to have the 2 in the C position. Putting the 7 in the B position would conflict with an earlier line, so our only choice is to put it in the A positition:
7 5 2
Our table thus far is:
1 2 3
4 1 5
6 7 1
2 4 6
7 5 2We’re now left with these two unedited lines:
3 4 7
3 5 6Here we run into a problem: the lines can’t be arranged to avoid conflicts. I therefore had a second look at that “tentatively fine” earlier line and tried switching it around. That fixed the problem, with the rest of the table fell into place. The full final result is…
1 2 3
4 1 5
6 7 1
2 6 4
7 5 2
3 4 7
5 3 6…which can be verified by noting that each number appears once in each column:
A B C
1 2 3
4 1 5
6 7 1
2 6 4
7 5 2
3 4 7
5 3 6 -
RE: A&A Unit Identification Charts
The next two charts are the Allied and Axis strategic bomber charts.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
@Midnight_Reaper said in On this day during W.W. 2:
HMS Prince of Wales holds the distinction of being the only British capital ship to face both the Kriegsmarine and the Imperial Japanese Navy in the first half of WW2. Unfortunately, she did not give a good account of herself, with her main guns jamming in her engagement against Bismarck and a lack of air cover and effective anti-aircraft gunnery leading to the IJN’s bombers sinking her.
HMS Prince of Wales was in commission for less than one full year, from 19 January to 10 December 1941. A tragic fate for what might have otherwise been a fine vessel.
-Midnight_Reaper
On a brighter note, HMS Prince of Wales was one of the two ships – the other being the heavy cruiser USS Augusta – on which Churchill and Roosevelt held their first summit meeting in August 1941 at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. The eight-point statement issued from the conference, which came to be known as the Atlantic Charter, presented the joint vision of the two leaders for the post-war world; it later inspired the United Nations Declaration which was signed by the Allied powers, which in turn later inspired the United Nations Charter. The Atlantic Conference, to which Churchill travelled aboard POW, has an partial connection to POW’s engagements with both the Germans and the Japanese. On the German side: POW’s journey to Newfoundland was her first mission after the refit which had repaired her battle damage she had suffered in her battle with Bismarck. On the Japanese side: if I’m not mistaken, one of the topics discussed by Roosevelt and Churchill was the strategic question (which the US and the UK had already been discussing for about a year) of how to reinforce British naval strength in Southeast Asia (and specifically at Singapore) against possible Japanese aggression. The general idea was that the Americans would take some of the load off the Royal Navy in the Atlantic, which would free Britain to redeploy some of its naval assets to Singapore; this ultimately evolved into the concept of Force Z, of which POW was part.
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RE: Pearl Harbour Attack
@taamvan said in Pearl Harbour Attack:
Well said Argo, that’s what a “gambit” or “stratagem” is— we will be taking a large risk in order to reap large gains. However, a more flexible, reactive and conservative strategy outlines only general goals, assumes the game will take the full 12-15 turns, and hopes that by refusing to take big risks that solid play will prevail and your opponent will hopefully give up before being constricted to death.
Dave has a bit different philosophy; “go bold”. He focuses his air and naval attacks in a “schwerpunkt” fashion–maximum force applied at the critical place. I think that’s why we make a good team, I take the more general and conservative approach, and start the game with few assumptions or plans.
Here’s an equivalent, from the world of chess, of these two contrasting philosophies:
Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian was a Soviet Armenian Grandmaster, and World Chess Champion from 1963 to 1969. He was nicknamed “Iron Tigran” due to his almost impenetrable defensive playing style, which emphasised safety above all else. […] Petrosian was a conservative, cautious, and highly defensive chess player who was strongly influenced by Aron Nimzowitsch’s idea of prophylaxis. He made more effort to prevent his opponent’s offensive capabilities than he did to make use of his own. He very rarely went on the offensive unless he felt his position was completely secure. He usually won by playing consistently until his aggressive opponent made a mistake, securing the win by capitalizing upon this mistake without revealing any weaknesses of his own. This style of play often led to draws, especially against other players who preferred to counterattack. Nonetheless, his patience and mastery of defence made him extremely difficult to beat. He was undefeated at the 1952 and 1955 Interzonals, and in 1962 he did not lose a single tournament game. Petrosian’s consistent ability to avoid defeat earned him the nickname “Iron Tigran”. He was considered to be the hardest player to beat in the history of chess by the authors of a 2004 book.
Jorgen Bent Larsen was a Danish chess grandmaster and author. Known for his imaginative and unorthodox style of play, he was the first Western player to pose a serious challenge to the Soviet Union’s dominance in chess. He is considered to be the strongest player born in Denmark and the strongest from Scandinavia until the emergence of Magnus Carlsen. […] Larsen was known as a deep thinking and highly imaginative player, more willing to try unorthodox ideas and to take more risks than most of his peers. This aspect of his play could even manifest itself in his choice of openings. “He is a firm believer in the value of surprise. Consequently, he often resorts to dubious variations in various openings. He also likes to complicate positions even though it may involve considerable risk. He has a great deal of confidence in his game and fears no one. His unique style has proven extremely effective against relatively weak opponents but has not been too successful against top-notchers.”
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RE: G40 Historial v1.1
@SS-GEN said in G40 Historial Beta:
History wise Japan did Attack Siam for 2 days on Dec 8 1941. Then on Dec 27 41 signed treaty so they were allowed to go thur and attack maylay and other country.
I believe there was a ton of guerilla inf resistances. I could add a event card where they could pop up like they did in Philippines had. I do have an event card for US for that action.James Dunnigan’s book Victory at Sea: World War II in the Pacific has an interesting section on Siam/Thailand’s odd and complicated situation in WWII. As I recall (I don’t have the book in front of me right now), Siam had an authoritarian leader who was was willing to collaborate with Japan, but there were also pro-Allied elements in the government, in the population at large, and in the diplomatic service abroad. If I remember correctly, for example, Siam technically declared war on the US and/or the UK, but the US and the UK ignored the declaration, either because the Siamese ambassabors refused to pass the declaration along to them or because the US and the UK refused to receive it. And the Allies supposedly got a lot of intelligence during the war from the pro-Allied Siamese factions.