In terms of game rules, I don’t have an answer, but in real-world terms military personnel aren’t the same thing as jeeps. Having Nation A use the troops of Nation B isn’t really Lend-Lease, it’s more along the lines of inter-allied cooperation, and that’s problematic for two reasons. Reason one (and WWII offers lots of examples in relation to the British and the Americans in 1944 and 1945) is that of senior military officers can be reluctant to serve under (or cooperate with) another nation’s senior military officers, Montgomery and Patton being a good case in point. Reason two is more subtle. Even with the best of intentions on everyone’s part, military forces from different nations generally can’t function as a single unit or even in close cooperation without a good deal of training for that specific purpose (as the short-lived ABDA found out in early 1942). Even when they speak the same language, different armies have different doctrines and practices, not to mention differences in nuts-and-bolts details like equipment and weapons and communication protocols. Even within the same nation, different services can find each other’s combat doctrine incomprehensible. The US Army and the United States Marine Corps in WWII sometimes ran into trouble because of this in the Pacific, one nasty example being the so-called “War of the Smiths” during the Marianas campaign in which a Marine General (Holland M. Smith) relieved an Army General (also named Smith) of command. During the Cold War, NATO devoted a lot of effort to the question of inter-operability (joint training exercises, standard small-arms ammunition calibers and so forth) for precisely these reasons.
Posts made by CWO Marc
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RE: Using your Allie pieces in combat.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
August 25 is also the day on which Paris was liberated. The film “Is Paris Burning?”, which depicts the liberation of Paris, includes the most badly dubbed sequence I’ve ever seen in a movie, the one in which Kirk Douglas as Lieutenant General George S. Patton is having a conversation with someone.
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RE: Axis and Allies on a Fictional Map / Earth-2 (idea for a new A&A game?)
Personally, I’m having trouble grasping the exact concept that’s being proposed here. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but it sounds as if the idea is to keep almost everything about A&A intact, including the nations/powers which are fighting each other, but transplanting them onto a new world map that’s completely different from the world we know. I really don’t see the point, and I also have serious reservations about how this would affect the game’s mechanics because those mechanics draw heavily on both real historical events (like the Russo-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact, to give just one example) and real geographical considerations (like the fact that Japan and Germany are cut off from each other by the Soviet Union). Many of those elements would get thrown out the window if the geography of the world were different, which means that the idea of keeping everything identical except the map wouldn’t actually be feasible; many of the rules would need to be rewritten. An alternate world geography would also imply an alternate world history, which means that we wouldn’t actually be dealing with the same powers that fought in WWII. To give an example: in the real world, the major naval/maritime powers of Britain and Japan have in common the fact that they’re highly industrialized island nations located a short distance away from a large continental land mass controlled by long-established foreign nations. Would Britain and Japan have turned out that way if they were physically attached to Europe and Asia – like Holland (arguably yes) and Korea (arguably no)? I’m really not understanding what this transplantation idea is meant to achieve or what problem it’s meant to solve with the A&A game as it actually exists.
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RE: Axis and Allies on a Fictional Map / Earth-2 (idea for a new A&A game?)
I don’t know if this could be of any use for your project, but I’ll mention it in case it’s relevant. I once read a book about miniatures-based wargaming campaigns, and it mentioned a particular wargamer who wanted to create his own fictitious continent for a medieval-era game. He had few graphic design skills, but he was a creative thinker and he figured out an easy and low-cost (in fact, no-cost) way to carry out his project. (Note that at the time he was using 1980s resources, and that today this would be even easier to do with GoogleMaps.) He got himself a bunch of free tourist pamphlets and travel brochures containing decent-sized maps of lesser-known places within countries rather than of countries themselves – like the island of Corsica, for instance. He fitted them together in a way that looked attractive, put a large sheet of paper over them and traced their outlines to produce the main countries / nations of his fictional continent. The small awkward gaps between the map sections were put to good use by being turned into little independent principalities (like Lichstenstein in in real world). He used similar techniques to insert coastlines, mountains, lakes and rivers into his fictional map. The result was a large, attractive, geographically plausible continental map which looked completely different from the real world because its component countries weren’t originally countries in our world, weren’t originally near each other, and weren’t originally of similar sizes. Using GoogleMaps today would be even easier because you can scale its maps up or down as much as you want just by rolling the wheel on your mouse.
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RE: 3d Axis & Allies board
Since it sounds like getting this map 3-D printed will be a large expense, you may want to take the precaution of first trying out your idea as a low-cost prototype, by which I mean cutting the shapes out of sheets of thin balsa wood and gluing them to a large sheet of foamcore posterboard. This would allow you to test how well the G40 plastic game pieces would work on a 3-D board.
The potential problem you may encounter is that a 3-D board could cause problems with piece placement and piece movement. The large flat “high” land areas like Russia and the large flat “low” sea areas like the Atlantic Ocean would be fine, because you’d have lots of flat maneuvering room, but map sections where high and low areas are bunched together might be another story. The Pacific Ocean would probably be the biggest problem: some of the islands are small, so trying to put a bunch of sculpts on a small elevated island could be tricky, and moving ships around on a board full of elevated obstacles could likewise be harder than moving them on a flat surface. One way to reduce the cost of the cardboard/balsa wood test would be to build just the Pacific area rather than the whole map, but to build it as close to full size as possible, then try out the actual game sculpts once you’ve bought the game.
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Potential A-Bomb / Belgian Congo House Rule
This is just a starting point rather than a fully-developed concept (it would need to be worked out in detail by players who are experienced with house rules), but it’s an idea based on this BBC article published yesterday…
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-forgotten-mine-that-built-the-atomic-bomb
The forgotten mine that built the atomic bomb
3rd August 2020…which indicates that a mine in the Congo was the source for nearly all of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project, culminating with the construction of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. According to one part of the article, “In no other mine could you see a purer concentration of uranium. Nothing like it has ever been found. Mines in the US and Canada were considered a ‘good’ prospect if they could yield ore with 0.03% uranium. At Shinkolobwe, ores typically yielded 65% uranium. The waste pile of rock deemed too poor quality to bother processing, known as tailings, contained 20% uranium.”
From an A&A perspective, this suggests that any house rules which permit the construction of atomic bombs need to be accompanied by a house rule requiring control of the Belgian Congo, presumably for a cumulative total of several turns to allow the required quantity of ore to be mined and stockpiled. A variation would be to make control of the Belgian Congo a national objective of some sort; if we assume that only the Allies have a realistic prospect of building an A-bomb, then control of the Belgian Congo could be an Allied N.O. whose aim is to gain that capability, and it could be an Axis N.O. whose aim is to deny that capability to the Allies.
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RE: CWO you OK ?
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 -
RE: Identifying destroyers
It’s all a matter of preference, of course, but here are a couple of related reasons why painting the stern is a good option. Most (though not all) A&A destroyer sculpts have transom sterns, meaning that they’re flat, which means that looking at the shape of the stern is already a good way to distinguish destroyers from cruiser sculpts (whose sterns tend to be pointy) – so by painting the stern, you’d be attracting attention to their most distinctive characteristic. Also note that if you paint just the flat vertical part of the stern, the paint won’t be visible if you’re viewing the sculpt from the front or the side. The benefit is that this doesn’t mess up the appearance of your sculpt too much; the drawback is that you won’t necessarily be able to tell at a glance if a sculpt is a destroyer, which may not be what you’re trying to achieve.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
@captainwalker said in On this day during W.W. 2:
February 22, 1942. Eastern Front
Adolf Hitler institutes a new practice by designating the Demyansk pocket a “fortress” (Festung). This makes the position there sound deliberate rather than unplanned and connotes a pleasing sense of permanence.This could be viewed as a case of using inflated rhetoric and wishful thinking to compensate for a desperate situation on the ground. A similar thing happened in June 1940, when the Germans were sweeping through France: overwhelmed French generals repeatedly drew “halt lines” on their maps, only to find out that the Germans had already passed them.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
@SS-GEN said in On this day during W.W. 2:
@Wittmann said in On this day during W.W. 2:
@barnee it is. I checked its operational history though and thought it was first used in late 42 at Leningrad. I don’t think the photo can be from the Demyansk encirclement.
Yes wittman. There was 4 Tiger tanks that saw service on Aug 29 in SE of Leningrad. 3 broke down and all 4 had to be recovered. Then they made more changes to the Tiger designs and then later mass produced them.
Another way of looking at it is that Tiger tanks – as A&A sculpts – were first deployed in 2012 when A&A 1941 was released. :) Truly a historic moment.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
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.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
@captainwalker said in On this day during W.W. 2:
On this day in 1944, Field Marshal Manstein begins his relief attempt to break the Korsun–Cherkasy Pocket.
Six German divisions were surrounded. Though many trapped men escaped, they had to leave nearly all of their equipment behind, with heavy losses.Interesting. This engagement sounds like an Eastern Front counterpart to the Falaise Gap engagement on the Western Front, in August of the same year. A similar number of German troops were encircled, and like the ones at Cherkasy-Korsun they left vast amounts of equipment behind in order to escape.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
@captainwalker said in On this day during W.W. 2:
1 February, 1943
T-34s on the main square of Stalingrad, a six-barrel Nebelwerfer mortar standing by.
While the last fighting goes on in the industrial district, the city center is cleared of German troops. Victory is near.!In another indication of approaching victory, Friedlich Paulus had surrendered the previous day, the same day on which Hitler promoted him (by radio) to the rank of Field Marshall. The promotion wasn’t exactly in congratulations for a job well done: no German field marshall had ever been taken alive, and Hitler – who wasn’t known for his subtlety – therefore expected Paulus to shoot himself. Paulus declined the implied suggestion.
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RE: On this day during W.W. 2
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.
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RE: Player Aids for G40 and G42 (Global 2012 Europe +Pacific)
And actually, here’s a supplementary idea. Since the I.D. charts contain a silhouette for every nation-specific sculpt, what you could do is produce a nation-specific version of this chart for all of the player powers, with the name and symbol of each power added at the top. The textual data would remain the same in every chart; all you’d need to do is is replace the unit images.
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RE: Player Aids for G40 and G42 (Global 2012 Europe +Pacific)
@Cloudesley said in Player Aids for G40 and G42 (Global 2012 Europe +Pacific):
@Cloudesley I don’t like these, they are too low resolutions and grey on grey is hard to read, anyone got a snappier style?!
If you’re looking for high-resolution silhouettes of the units, you could use the ones in my unit identification charts:
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/21626/a-a-unit-identification-charts
Click on each chart to expand them to full size.
Your four-part table mostly consists of text, plus unit silhouettes, so you could create a higher-resolution new chart by:
- Having one-part large table rather than having four quarter-size tables
- Using images from my ID charts
- Using a larger text font
I don’t know, however, where you could get a larger image of the four grey squares depicting bases and ICs.
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RE: Home-Made War Rakes
Very nice, and I like the added touch of a national identity marker being inserted into the top of the rake. I notice that the map has a few national flags mounted on miniature flagpoles; I’m curious about what the distinction is (if any) between territories marked with these flags and territories having the usual round marker resting on the table.
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RE: Could of should of ?
Hmm. Interesting article, but when I read the line that says “One other grave mistake was not continuing the attack on British airfields after the initial blow on Aug. 13, 1940” my reaction was to wonder why they needed “a computer model using a technique known as weighted bootstrapping” to figure out something that’s been known for decades. To give one example of this point being made long ago, the Battle of Britain episode of the 1970s BBC TV series The World At War says that Fighter Command was almost brought to the breaking point by the phase of the campaign which focussed on the airfields, and that British pilots characterized as “a miracle” the day when the Luftwaffe’s incoming raids went past the airfields and switched to bombing London instead.
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RE: French government to grant knighthood to WWII vet Prewitt of Eden, NC
Congratulations to Mr. Prewitt. It should be noted, however, that France’s highest order of merit is called the Legion of Honour (Légion d’honneur), not the Legion of Armour, and also that France doesn’t actually have knighthoods in the same sense as Britain does. “Chevalier” (knight) is indeed one of the Legion of Honour’s five levels, and the name is a holdover from the days when France still had an aristocracy, but the French nobility system went out the window with the French Revolution. I once saw a series of amusing cartoons depicting what life in France would be like today if the Bourbon monarchy hadn’t fallen, and one of them showed an irate air traveler standing at the ticket counter of “Royal Air France” and telling the ticket agent “But I’m a baron and I have a confirmed reservation!” The agent replies, “I’m sorry, sir, but the Duke of So-and-so has precedence over you, so we gave him your seat.” In fairness, the same sort of thing actually happens in real-life republican France. A few years ago, there was scandal involving one of the major D-Day anniversaries (I think it was the 50th one), when the French government contacted various hotels in Normany and appropriated some of their existing reservations so that various French officials could have rooms for the event. Some of those rooms, however, had been reserved by foreign veterans of the D-Day invasion. When the story broke on the front page of French newspapers (under such headlines as “Our Liberators Insulted!”), public opinion was outraged and the French government beat a hasty retreat. The prevailing editorial opinion over this affair was: Do this to our own citizens if you want, but don’t do this to the heroes who ended the occupation of France.
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RE: Winter 2019/20 Battle of Britain - 12th January 2020
@Wittmann said in Winter 2019/20 Battle of Britain - 12th January 2020:
@Private-Panic I am not old. Just blind. Is a bitch yo drive up north, with the sun from the right, blinding my one good eye.
This reminds me of an anecdote about Horatio Nelson, who on at least three occasions disobeyed orders from the fleet flagship during battle. At the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, Admiral Sir Hyde Parker sent Nelson a signal to withdraw. Nelson, upon being informed of this by his signals officer, raised his telescope, held it up to his blind eye, pointed it at the flagship and stated that he did not see the signal. As usual, he got away with it. And once Nelson became Commader-in-Chief, the problem of disobeying orders from the Commander-in-Chief solved itself.