sambourg2000

I just got an idea... Has anyone played a game, where both sides buy the forces for their opponents and then slug it out ? What would you buy to your opponent, if, say, you had minimum of 2000 points to spend in ME ? To make it more interesting, they should be distributed e.g. 1000 to infantry, 500 armor, 200 vehicles, 100 support and 200 indirect fire. All these values are minimums. More could be spent. So, basically, what are the lousiest (=least cost effective) units in the game ?

When a tank is hull down and targets something, the game says "hull down, hull mg blocked", but when I check the ammo expenditure, it seems that the hull mg ammo goes down at the same rate as the coaxial mg. So, what is happening ? Is the hull mg firing after all ?

Does anyone know, if in the Finnish version has proper Waffen-SS or are they using Waffengrenadiers (or whatever the German version has) ?

Just to correct you so that 1 £ is roughly 1.5 ?, not the other way round. So, Special Reserve's price is roughly 44 ? + p&p which brings it pretty close to Peliversumi's price. Sambourg

Originally posted by Traject0ry: I think that most German officers tried after the war had committed "warcrimes". The question is that if a soldier is forced to kill a civilian in order to protect his squad from ending up in enemy hands is he committing a war crime? The answer is no as his immediate superior is responsible for either giving him the order or for failing to prevent the act. This is exactly what the Wehrmacht officers up to generals said. They were given an order. My point was that an order to kill civilians if that is seen necessary does not in any way remove the responsibility from the person who executes such an order. And this was the significant result in the Nuremberg trial. The German guys ordered large groups of civilians to be killed without any other than racial excuse. They got what they asked for. Had they declined from such actions they might have ended up dead anyway, still I personally might have tried to survive the court martial instead of burning loads of people locked inside a village church. To understand these men even partly the obvious reason for them to be able to excuse these acts was their view of the Russian civilians produced by the Nazi propaganda machine. Regardless of what was the motivation behind the killing of civilians, it's still killing of civilians. The Geneva Convention does not make exceptions to this. If they had justified the burning of people in the church by saying that some of them were partisans, but it was impossible to tell who, it would have still been a war crime. Of course the defending army is responsible to take care of the evacuation of civilians away from military targets, but this does not mean that if there is a single military hq in a city, then leveling the entire city with nukes would be ok. This did not happen for instance in Bagdad in 1991, but it did happen in WWII. Lifelong indoctrination does leave a certain impression. The fact that these guys were condemned was that the world had to be shown that such acts of violence should not go unpunished. If every allied or axis soldier causing civilian deaths would have been tried after the war most of us would not be here. Why not ? You don't need to execute every one found guilty. For instance, the War Crime Tribunal in Hague isn't even allowed give death penalty to Mladic, Karadiz or Milosevic. The point of condemning people who killed civilians would be to show that this is wrong. This is something you cannot do to win the war. It is a crime, still failing the mission could mean that a great number of men get killed for your failure. It is easy to say "I could find another way to handle it". A helicopter pilot transporting special forces knows that if they are stranded behind enemy lines he has to ditch for it by himself. The guys have a job to do and the pilot DOES NOT WANT TO KNOW what might happen if he gets in the way. Now he is a soldier but still on the same side. He knows the risks. The point is that you don't even send men to a mission where they have to meet unevacuated civilians. Or if you do, then you take the risk that the mission is a failure because of the civilians. The idea is that as civilians are there they have become part of the war. Like a plane crash a war is a catastrophy. People get killed for just being there. No no no. There is a BIG difference between a war and a plane crash. A war is always a deliberate act. All wars from Hitler attacking Poland in 1939 to the US bombing Afganistan just a few months ago were all results from decisions. They didn't just happen by accident. Shooting civilians without a purpose is lunacy. Blowing up an enemy field HQ and killing some local population is an act of war you get decorated for. Shooting someone on the way in order to achieve this grand goal is murder you get shot for when you get back? Yes, if it's an unopposing and unarmed civilian, who had no way to get out of the warzone, it is a murder. I don't understand were you get the idea that all war criminals should be shot, but yes, some convivtion should be a result of such a deed. That blowing up of the HQ is not a war crime, because it's the responsibility of the HQ personel to warn the people living nearby that this is a danger area and that they should move away. Ok, this is now so far from CM that I stop here. Or maybe the CMBB could be used to model partisan warfare and then these issues would come into play.

But now the question is what is this "job" to be done ? Usually it is defined by the politicians, but does this remove all the responsibility from the soldiers ? If the soldiers are ordered on a mission that requires killing unarmed civilians and commiting war crimes, can they just hide behind the "job had to be done" phrase ? Wehrmacht officers tried this in Nuremberg and the result was that "doing the job" was no excuse for war crimes in the Eastern front. Following orders does not remove responsibility from the soldiers. I was taught in the army training that an illegal order is not to be fulfilled. I see this as such that if not killing civilians results in failure in mission, then failure it will be. What kind of society would I be defending, if it allowed killing civilians ? Would the society that I was sent to defend, be any better than that of the enemy, if it asked for killing innocent civilians in order to survive ? Interestingly, the question of war crimes is at the moment very actual as the International Criminal Court starts functioning from this day (July 1st). Unfortunately, for some reason, the USA sees itself above other democratic countries and is not going to join even though it signed the treaty in 2000. Even such countries as Iran, Yugoslavia and even Israel are joining.