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Xenophile

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About Xenophile

  • Birthday 03/13/1958

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  • Location
    Ireland
  • Interests
    History, current affairs, Mexico
  • Occupation
    IT

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  1. I'd endorse this. Well worth reading. Excellent explanation for much of the course of the campaign over the first 18 months. Especially interesting on the early demise of the Soviet Mechanised Corps; the apparently endemic German logistic overstretch; and the impact on the development of weapons, munitions and tactics. Concise accounts of important actions - Mtensk is especially interesting.
  2. I thought Zitadelle by Mark Healy was excellent. Seemed thorough, well-written, with enough background, detail and good maps (although no book ever has enough maps) to let me understand the battle.
  3. Most scenarios are standalone, although as mentioned there are operations which take place on a single map but with several episodes using the same force, perhaps with reinforcements, throughout. Some designers have made sequences of linked scenarios exploring a situation over an extended timeframe. There is no 'campaign' element to the game itself. You generally start each scenario with a different force on unique terrain. It is an engrossing game, not too difficult to learn the controls, but learning to win might take time.
  4. Sound idea. I'd buy it. Never happen. It seems such an easy idea to generate income for BFC with relatively little effort that it must have occurred to them. So it involves more effort than we imagine or it's likely to generate less income than we think or they believe they can make more money with CM:SF or they are more interested in coding an new engine than exploiting the old one. Hope I'm wrong.
  5. (Self-confessed pragmatist, but with both moral absolutist and cultural relativist tendencies and failed hippy who perversely likes WWII Eastern Front wargames which attempt to model the historical reality but prefers playing scenarios which are designed to give both sides a chance within that limitation. Definitely not a Nazi. But prepared to play their forces in a game.)
  6. Is it not a little hard to believe that the various cultures of pre-Columbian America incited all their European...visitors? to conquer them all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, all over both those continents? It surely couldn't be that Europeans behaved in North America as they did in South America and Australia and Africa where the native populations were similarly weakened by alien disease and outmatched in war-making? Or could we see the visitors as somehow in competition with the native population and engendering violent resistance from them? Permanent settlement is not a precondition for use of land. Forest is productive in a different way to pasture or cropland, perhaps less productive but still necessary to those who have that way of life. Does the mere fact of increased material productivity justify morally the displacement of the forest people by farmers? It helps to explain why it happens, but does it justify it, morally? Contemporary European culture has determined that capital punishment is barbaric - would the continuation of the practise in the US justify it's invasion from Europe? Is it only the military strength of the US which prevents this? Or have Europeans perhaps reached a level of civilisation (through their recent and direct experience of modern war) which understands that the cost of war is almost always outweighed by it's benefits? Or that cultural change is almost always better for the people of any culture to be adopted than imposed? I don't believe that the US is fascist - it's as democratic state as any I think (but flawed too). I do think it is hegemonistic (rather than outrightly imperialistic) and aggressive and that is why it is mistrusted, despite the undoubted good it has performed, particularly in WWII in helping defeat fascism in Europe. It is hard to reconcile the moral presentation of the US as the last best hope for mankind with the state which pursues it's own self-interest so purposefully. This is not to say that the US is any worse than almost all other states which have attained a position of material or military dominance thoughout history. In some respects it may be somewhat better than most; but in others it seems depressingly similar. [ April 13, 2006, 05:28 PM: Message edited by: Xenophile ]
  7. Replicating some of Strachwitz's reported exploits should be a very interesting challenge for a designer. Looking forward to it. Doesn't Der Panzer Graf's first name translate to Hyacinth? Almost surreal.
  8. I didn't even think it was possible to sit on three fences at once...
  9. Didn't Hermann Balck have an even faster wartime rise - rifle regiment to army group commander? And was there one who ended the war in the Volkssturm?
  10. Ouch! On another matter the thread touched on, I think the role of the USSR in WWII is simply not part of the common cultural knowledge, certainly in the UK. Even where 20th century history is taught in schools, the importance of the Nazi-Soviet conflict isn't normally recognised, let alone emphasised. It's not uncommon to realise that an intelligent, better-than-normally informed person simply has no idea of the hugely greater relative scale of the war on the other side of Europe compared to say, Italy or North Africa. Or is completely unaware of it. (I suppose 'Enemy at the Gates' may at least have widened common knowledge a little.) I'd concur with the notion that the Cold War is responsible for that ignorance and though that really isn't a barrier now, WWII is sufficiently long ago that the details(!) of it are hardly likely now to become part of common knowledge.
  11. I don't know enough to properly judge Bartov's thesis on the nature of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. It does seem that that conflict was on a more vicious level than those against other enemies. My reading of him was that he believed that the German Army's complicity and involvement in the general atrocity of the war in the Soviet Union had been overshadowed by the attention paid to the specifically Nazi organisations. Perhaps he tries to swing opinion too far that way. (From my intermittent reading here, I really hadn't held you to be in any way sympathetic to the Nazis, nor do I now. I just thought your view of Bartov was expressed more vehemently than seemed warranted.)
  12. I'm not certain what point Michael is making here. It surely can't be that the German Army actually carried out their moral responsibilities to Soviet prisoners of war, or that they made proper provision for the civilian population they controlled, or that they didn't massacre many of those civilians as 'reprisals' or simply call them partisans and massacre them anyway. They didn't steal or destroy their food or shelter as a matter of policy? It is not to excuse the crimes of the Soviet state against their own people to accuse the German Army of at best, indifference to the deaths of millions of civilians and culpability in more deliberate exterminations. So what is the point - that Bartov may exaggerate what they did? How many demons are on the head of the pin?
  13. Isn't the best early Soviet AT weapon the Ampulomets - at least in CMBB, if not historically? I've had Pz IVs die against them. Hard to spot, much better range than other infantry AT weapons and they scare the pants off German infantry, too.
  14. I think it's apparent that the problems of the British automotive (and other) industry at the time were with the management culture, not the engineers. While I may not completely agree with Corelli Barnett's analysis in 'The Audit of War', it's hard to argue with his facts. (As for rivets being popular - rivets were easier. Cast or welded construction was better.)
  15. I had the distinct impression that, at least in the early war, British tanks were notoriously unreliable. And pretty ill-designed too. Bolted or riveted amour? Didn't the heavily armoured Matilda have two engines? What was wrong with putting in one more powerful engine? And why did the British make such great use of the Sherman if their own tanks were up to much? But if your contention that national tank design reflects national car design is correct, then that would explain the fact that people making cars in the UK these days mostly work for companies with Japanese (and German) names... There may well have been a continuity of mediocrity.
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