JerseyJohn
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Posts posted by JerseyJohn
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Thank you, Blashy, and I agree. The United States has never been a democracy, it's been a representitive republic from the start. The Founding Fathers built a lot of inconsistencies into the Constitution, the worst being slavery, which is never mentioned specifically. They couldn't afford to abolish it, at least that was their assumption. So they kept it as an institution. It's always been hard for me to believe they couldn't have found a way of getting rid of it right from the start, but they were thinking in terms of a far more limited central government than later generations became accustomed to.
As for a Third Party, even more, party/parties in the United States, I think the only way is for the Federal government to make private contributions illegal, alotting campaign funds from tax money, equal amount to each party that has a viable ticket. And, of course, it has to be illegal for any American media outlet to deny air time to anyone running for office. Maybe set it up so each network needs to donate a bloc of air time for campaigns that is then divided into three equal parts, one for each party.
Without something like that U. S. politics will continue to be an insider's game between the two major parties.
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We've reached that magic moment where the person who started the thread no longer has a clue of what it's about.
-- Good Guys and Bad Guys in government were never as clear cut as the politicians or whoever was in control wanted their citizens or subjects to believe. When there's a war all governments use slogans like God is on our side. Even the formerly Godless Bolsheviks brought the Orthodox church back in the early days of WWII after twenty years of persecuting it.
Generally speaking the United States has followed good directions whenever possible. In the early twentieth century it sent a lot of aid to countries like Japan (earthquakes) and Russia (massive famines). After WWII it did a lot to help ruined countries, though a lot of present revisionists say that's all nonsense. As a boy in the 1950s I met innumerable people who moved to the US from Europe and if American aid didn't do much then those people who used to say openly that it saved their lives must have been hallucinating.
But revision is to expected and isn't a big deal because for every good thing done by the US there would be an equal number of bad things done in its name, such as controling all of South America for decades on behalf of American businesses.
And it's true that American foreign policy has more often than not supported dictators and closed governments that worked against the common people. We still do. We preferred people like the Shah, Pinochet and Franco to people like Fidel Castro on one side and religious extremists on the other. Guess it's a matter of those magic socialist and nationalization words.
At this point I think it's time to just see the United States as being the same as any other nation, no better and no worse. It never really exported democracy, unless it happened to be a convenient and profitable action.
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They might not have cared about radiation till word started getting out about the miserable death people suffered who weren't even within the radius of the explosion.
I think the psychological effects would have been far worse than what 1,000 bomber raids produced, even if the actual death tally might have been greater.
It took a couple of days for the Japanese government to believe the stories about the Hiroshima explosion. They were confused because all communication from the city just ceased and didn't resume.
There's still some debate as to whether it was the two A-bombs that forced Japan's surrender, or the quick and decisive invasion of Manchuria and Korea by the Soviet Army.
The German fanatacism in 1945 was incredible. For all practical purposes the country fought to the death. A final effect of the damage inflicted is that two full years after Germany's surrender the country had only 40% of the food it's population would normally have required.
-- It's easy to see Germany's WWII ruin in movies made in the late 1940s. Most of them didn't even want them as a backdrop but of course there was no way to not film it. The Third Man, filmed in Vienna around that time, is fill with characters walking down streets, past huge piles of rubble that used to be buildings.
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An ugly little historical fact that was suppressed for thirty or so years after WWII ended is that American doctors working for the army and CIA studied the results of Japanese and German experiments on human beings. In the case of the Japanese, none of the scientists involved were ever prosecuted and many went on to hole key positions in later Japanese governments.
Even though the tests themselves were illegal and immoral by US, British and most other country's standards, the information accumulated was regarded as unique and valuable, all the more because researchers from those countries wouldn't have been allowed to conduct similar tests on humans, even if they they were inclined to do it.
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When Stalin came to that conclusion radio activity wasn't well understood, even by scientists. Which is why so many of that original group wound up dying of cancer.
There's a documentary about the two test bombs set off at the Bikini Atoll not long after Japan's surrender. The people studying the aftereffects walk around without a care. Many of the sailors later died of cancer and the U. S. Navy, even to this day, denies any responsibility.
In any case, I don't think the United States made more than two or three bombs a year during the mid-40s, so Stalin's lack of fear was justified. When we dropped the bomb on Nagasaki we didn't have another for a long time to follow.
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That term even had the German physicists confused, I think something came up one time from the Gestapo advising that scientists weren't supposed to use anything that Einstein had come up with. Fortunately for the German scientists the Gestapo had no idea what that was supposed to entail, so they pretty much ignored it.
Hitler seems to have been mildly interested in developing an atom bomb till the war began going badly and as it got steadily worse he became more enthusiastic about the various miracle weapons that he was always given exaggerated reports about. By 1945 he was telling people, at least his secretaries because Trude Linga talked about this in a documentary, that Germany would soon smash London with a single bomb and when they did the Allies would plead to have peace.
Stalin knew all the details of the American bomb's progress even before Truman was told of it. He coldly calculated that the USSR had taken the equivalent of at least two dozen a-bomb hits during the German invasion, so he wasn't overly fearful of America's new weapon.
Throughout the late forties the United States only made a handful of a-bombs per year and had a hard time finding enough nuclear material for the Nagasaki bomb. As it turned out a German sub that started out for Japan surrended instead in Virginia and it's cargo was used to complete the third bomb (the first had been used for the initial desert test).
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What field are we talking about? There are numerous books on the Manhattan Project and what it took to complete, not only in manpower and wealth but also in resources. And the kicker is nobody knew if it was even possible to make an atomic bomb. The United States went to extremes to develop it partly because FDR was told that Germany was working on one -- exaggerated claims that turned out to be completely wrong -- and partly because the US government wasn't sure, in the early days of the war, that it would be able to cross two oceans and win with conventional warfare.Originally posted by jon_j_rambo:@Blashy --- So you're an expert in this field? Could you quote a source?
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-Legend
It was incredibly expensive, at least done the way the U. S. did it, with 5x duplication of effort finally narrowed down to 2x, with all parts of the program being totally in the dark about the other parts except for the one or two key people at the top of each branch of the program.
I agree completely with Blashy, without the war raging nuclear energy might have been researched for it's own sake and, somewhere along the line, nuclear weapons would have also been researched and developed, but instead of the 4 years it took the United States during WWII I think it would have been more like 15, at the very least.
Also, of course, the B-29 and the even larger bombers on the drawing boards, weren't specifically designed to carry A-bombs, but until the mid-fifties they were the only aircraft capable of doing so.
-- The Soviets reverse engineered U. S. B-29s that were forced to land in Asiatic Russia after flights against the Japanese. When they had them operational the Soviet version was given a Russian name, but they were B-29s down to the last detail. It wasn't till United States officials actually saw the Soviet clone flying, in formations, that the United States realized the Soviets were manufacturing their own version and not just flying the ones the ones they'd grabbed from the USAAF.
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I agree, Blashy. We were talking more about the war ending in 1940 and resuming later on, along the lines we were discussing earlier, but I think it amounts to the same thing.
Wealth and resources required for an uncertain result would have been too great to expend during peacetime.
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And a Happy Fourth to you too, Brother Rambo. :cool:
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Liam,
Terrific post, as always.
I have to agree all the way through.
The Italian troops had no chance on the French border. It never shows up in war games but there was a defensive line there built during the Maginot program and it was made tremendously more effective by the terrain.
In Greece, Mussolini launched the drive during the worst time of year, as the rains were coming down in the mountains becuase he thought it would give him the element of surprise!
In North Africa even his own generals, Grazziani chief among them, told him that sending large infantry columns across the open desert was inviting disaster and that's exactly what happened.
His admirals advised him that his navy, without radar or aircraft carriers, was a paper tiger. The Italian Air Force had been among the best in the world ten years earlier, but by 1940 it was hopelessly obsolescent.
And, of course, behind it all was substandard equipment and an army filled with political hacks in its officer corps.
Prior to Italy's entry in the war, Rundstedt's evaluation went something like this: "If they remain neutral we'll keep two divisions along the Alpine passes. If they join Britain we'll need four divisions to defend the southern border. But, if Italy becomes our ally, we'll have to send twelve divisions to defend the place." -- Very prophetic indeed.
Agree completely on the development of an A-bomb. I don't think any other country could have had anything like the Manhattan Project. Originally it was five programs, all independent of one another, looking into five different ways of making an atomic bomb. By 1945 two remained, the uranium and plutonium branches. This program alone dwarfed what most other nations were expending on their entire war effort.
And the B-29 program was almost as costly and an even more closely guarded secret!
It seems doubtful to me that the V-2 rocket could have been made to carry an A-bomb. Reliable nuke carrying missle systems weren't developed till, I believe, the mid-50s.
Given a couple of years truce it would have been interesting to see what sort of aircraft both Germany and Britain would have been flying. You draw an interesting British A-bomb scenario. Considering the comparatively short distance involved I don't think Germany could have had an adequate defense even with their own radar, which was on a par with Britain's. Conversely, I don't think Britain could have defended against a German atomic bomb strike. All either side would have needed to do was to send off several bomber strikes to draw all the intercepts and send the single bomber carrying the nuclear device behind everything else. I think it would have been a sure bet on getting through.
With the USSR I agree fully. 1943 always seemed to me to be the earliest Russia could have struck against Germany. In game terms I think there should be two basic Soviet Armies, one representing it's forces prior to the German invasion (or 1943, whichever comes first) and a second kind of army that comes into existence after a year of fighting. Due mainly to Stalin's purges the Soviet Army and Air Force had to learn it's craft from spilling unimaginable amounts of blood. Despite all of Hitler's mistakes in Barbarossa, in the first six months he did the equivalent of defeating France twice! -- and then the winter set in.
Terror bombing -- no doubt about it. Also, a very cold blooded definition of military targets that included first the workers, and then the workers families, and finally all civililians in enemy territory. Kill the enemy's soldiers, kill the workers who provide munitions for the enemy's soldiers, kill the farmers who feed both groups, kill the communications and transportation workers that keep the enemy's country functioning, and finally kill the enemy's families. Terror bombing at first on Rotterdam and London, expanded on Hamburg, Hiroshima, Dresden, Nagasaki, Tokyo till it was no longer just terror or killing workers, the miltary target became the entire enemy population.
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Been there. Done it. Any side I play is always doomed.
It's why I give the disclaimer that I'm not really a player. No one ever argues with that. :eek:
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Sorry S. O., guess it's just the Bunta in me.
I think nearly all these things are way out on a limb. But, as I was saying, it's hard to have a scenario where one side is just outright doomed -- as Germany would have been if France took military action against Germany in the mid-30s.
On the other end, I agree 100% with what you're saying about the USSR in the early 1940s. I think the German invasion jumped them several years ahead of where they'd have been without it -- but of course that was with an unfathomable cost in lives and wealth, and the real risk of being defeated. Whatever defeat for the USSR would actually have come to mean.
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-- Well, the original point of this thread was the possibility of concluding an armistace, say for a number of turns minimum, without closing the game, etc & etc, something along what can be done in Civilization type games.
On the What-if front, I think all these things were probing different ideas, not a contest to see which ones made the most sense. Also, I don't think we can base anything on the personality of the historical leaders since, for game purposes, we're starting from scratch: if a human is running that country then it's the human player's personality. If the AI is running it, then it would be good if there were a way to try and simulate various attributes to an historical figure, but I don't think we've got one here.
Regarding Italy, one of the ironies is it already had oil in Libya and didn't know it. Mussolini's decisions, at least in planning for WWII, aren't really irrational when we consider he was working on a 1941 timetable. Hitler, in mid-1939, assured him that he would not get involved in a major war before then. Immediately afterwards he began planning for the invasion of Poland. From Hitler's view he wasn't lying to Mussolini, he was just moving ahead on his assumption that Britain and France would not go to war over Poland.
I don't think pre-war what-ifs, such as were mentioned by Stalin's Organist, are suitable for a scenario because, if France had acted upon Hitler's early moves the result would have been obvious. Even Hitler realized that. The moves were made on the assumption that France was having too many internal problems to react to Germany moving back into it's own territory. He turned out to be correct, but as we've said twice already in this thread, a more rational leader would never have gotten to the position Germany was in when the war started.
-- Also, there doesn't seem to have been any inclination for Czechoslovakia and Poland to work together, and Hungary was definitely leaning toward Germany, pretty much negating moves by it's neighbors.
Neither Italy nor the USSR originally sought to move close to Hitler, the western allies went out of their way to push both countries closer to Germany.
If either Britain or France had a suitable bomber in early 1940 they might have bombed the Caucasus oil fields, as they'd discussed, and tossed the USSR into the war against them. Another close call was in not being able to send troops to Finland, as they'd also wanted to do, again getting themselves into a war with the Soviet Union.
With Italy Mussolini felt he was following up on a late 19th century agreement with Britain and France, inviting Italy to conquer Abyssinia as a colony. The reasoning was it would give the continent a European balance by having almost all of the continent colonized by Europeans. The Italians fell on their end of it by having a defeat similar to the British loss against the Zulus at Ishandwana. The difference being Britain pushed on till it controled Zululand and the Italians took four decades to come back. Meanwhile a treaty had been signed between Britain, France and Italy in 1906 revoking the earlier understanding. Mussolini mulled over the issue, finally making his move when a royal marriage would have established an Ethiopian alliance with Japan.
This put Britain and France in an awkward position. They reacted through the League of Nations and only made things worse. Japan withdrawing because of Manchuria and Italy leaving over Ethiopia. -- The Civilizing Mission by A.J. Barker is an interesting look at the Ethiopian War.
Anyway, I think it's obvious that part of Hitler's reasoning in 1938 and 39 was that Germany was more prepared for a major war than either Britain and France, both in arms and in national will. Both Italy and Spain needed time to recuperate from their more recent wars. Italy might have recovered somewhat by the promised 1941, though Spain would probably have needed at least a year beyond that.
There was the Balkan League, of course, but it seems to have been little more than a loose mutual defensive understanding between Turkey, Rumania, Bulgaria. I don't think either Greece or Yugoslavia were in on it. Poland wanted a real defensive treaty of all the Baltic and Balkan nations, with itself as the hub, but none of the other countries would thow in, ironically because they felt the Poles would act with Germany.
Pre-1939 Europe would be extremely difficult to fathom in this what-if game. Which is why I was primarily discussing situations that might have arisen with the Fall of France. To me that's the last point where WWII might have remained a totally European war -- Germany throws everything into isolating and strangling the UK and doesn't move on the USSR. From there I think ideas like a Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo Axis start making more sense.
SeaMonkey,
I've been leaving Italy out of most of what I've been discussing because to me it was partly pulled into a war it didn't want to enter, and partly jumped in when Mussolini thought it might suddenly end without him grabbing some of the spoils. It had a an impossible position in both Hitler's and Mussolini's view of things, a new Roman Empire dominating the Mediteranean and Middle East. I don't think it could have done that even with Britain agreeing to peace in 1940. It certainly would not have agreed on pulling out of Egypt, Malta or Gibraltar, and I doubt Italy could ever have forced the situation later on.
-- On the other hand, if as you said, the UK is driven out of Iraq and it throws in with the Axis, it becomes a different situation. Except of course both Iraq and Egypt were controled by the UK in the same manner, puppet monarchies propped up by British money and garrisons. But the thing is, the UK did come very close to being driven out of Iraq in 1941, holding on by virtue of the most meager and obsolete air units. If even the small amount of German aid that arrived too late had been there from the start, the Iraqis might well have succeeded.
With the situation changed there, and German troops actually sent to the Middle East, the Italians might well have been a decisive factor coming in from Libya.
-- I all of these ideas can be represented as scenarios created through the SC2 editor. Most of it would rely on speculation by the designer, but that's where a lot of the fun always lies.
Regarding the development of either the A-bomb or an aircraft capable of delivering it, I'm inclined to think none of the continental powers had the resources to carry through on such programs. Perhaps Germany if vicorious in 1940 might have developed them by 1950, but I don't think either the United States or the USSR would have followed that path unless actually involved in a desparate war, as was the case with the U. S.. And I think both Britain and France, if they'd signed a peace treaty in 1940 after being traunced by Germany, would have have pursued more conventional rearming for the next war.
It seems more likely to me that all the major countries would have put a lot into jet aircraft programs and Germany might also have put major resources into both rockets and smart weapons, which it was the first in the world to develop and use.
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targul
I can see it being closed too, especially if it meanders too far into religious views and current politics. Or, of course, starts getting nasty.
But so far it seems to be going pretty well.
And, of course, it would definitely be good if the posts got back to applying a few of these ideas to some future version of Strategic Command. :cool:
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Liam,
I agree with what you're saying. To me it amounts to a situation where each time Hitler seemed to have reached his goal he immediately set a more impossible goal instead of building on what he had. A more rational leader wouldn't have done it that way. But, as we know, a more rational leader would probably not have gotten to that point in the first place.
Also agree that a Berlin-Tokyo-Moscow Axis would have been very unstable, but as you also said, even if it held up for 2 or 3 years it's members might have reaped huge rewards. I picture it as the USSR moving south into Iran; Germany backing the Iraqis and driving the British out of the Middle East with Japan driving Britain and France out of Indo-China/Malay-India and the Dutch from the East Indies.
-- Whether the United States, not being attacked along the way, would have gotten involved, is an open question to me. Even if the country stopped being isolationist it couldn't have simply declared war because another country was an aggresor if that aggression wasn't directed at the United States.
arado234
Agreed. I think what you've said is indisputable.
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So that means you've never seen One, Two, Three --? I find that hard to believe.
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Stalin's Organist,
Bravo! As is obvious by now, I agree 100%.
Brother Rambo,
I'm pretty sure I saw that one, there were a few documentaries on the Berlin Wall. If I remember correctly the first person to pass through was an East German soldier! -- What a propaganda boost that must have been.
-- You've probably seen the old James Cagney movie 1-2-3 . One of my favorites even 45 years later. :cool:
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Thanks Retributar,
:cool: I keep thinking of the opening words of the song, Exodus:
This land is mind,
-- God gave this land to me.
Sorry, no, it wasn't. It was the British who gave the land to them as part of a secret deal in WWI even while they agreeing to give it to the Arabs!
What folly. Life someplace, go off for a couple of thousand years and come back to rule over the people who moved in during the interim (or, really, were always there!) and claim you're empowered by God.
-- The British, for their part, did everything in their power to insure that Israel would be overrun within a year or two. Playing both hands all the way and, in the end, the close-Israeli victory of 1948 screwed Britain's plans in the region.
I'll be called a fascist for saying this, but I don't care for idea that WWIII will be triggered by the twisted logic that resulted in this situation. Those who say it's in the bible ought and they're okay because they believe and will go straight to whatever heaven they happen to believe in are really gone. A lot of us don't choose to plan our future according to what was said in somebody's prayer book.
The same with catastrophic climate change, it's in the bible (everything seems to be in there depending upon who you're talking to) so don't worry, just scream Praise Jesus! or Alla is Great or whatever the specific deity is, and all will be well.
How unfortunate that, as a species, we can't just do things because they make sense and will help our survival.
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arado234
True. None of the Axis powers ever cooperated the way the Allies cooperated with one another. Italy didn't tell Germany about its attack on Greece till after it was launched (fiasco that it was). Germany didn't tell either Italy or Japan about its attack on the USSR till after it was launched and Japan didn't tell Germany or Italy about its attack on the United States till after they did it. Not much in the way of working together.
I don't think Ultra was used for diplomatic communications. And the allies didn't always have the code broken, a lot of it depended on carelessness by German operators and the arrogance of assuming it was unbreakable.
Brother Rambo,
Manifest Destiny is the same self-serving garbage in a different bag. The United States in sprawling from coast to coast crushed anything and anyone that got in it's way. Cite the Indian Wars and the Mexican War. Later we wanted what Spain had so we created the Spanish American War. Exactly the same reasoning -- "God is OUR side" -- BS that Germany and Briton (The White Man's Burden), France, Italy, Czarist Russia and all the others used.
As you said, "A land grant from above." You'd have a different view if someone came along and said your property was theirs because God gave it to them. Or that they should rule you because they have better weapons and are therefore superior. It's been a variation of one or the other since the start of recorded history and no doubt it was that way from the beginning.
Nobody's version of that nonsense is any more justified than anyone else's, regardless of what they're calling it or which God they're saying empowered them.
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Kuni,
Thanks Kuni.
-- Hess typed and edited the manuscript. A lot of the thoughts on geopolitics came from one of his professors, Karl Haushofer, further reinforced by his friend, the professor's son, Albrecht.I found an interesting Wickopedia article on him:
Excerpt from the article:
Born in 1903, he was the son of Karl Haushofer, a famous German geopolitician. Albrecht studied at Munich University under his father and alongside Rudolf Hess, who would later become Hitler's deputy. After Hess's imprisonment following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 Albrecht was a frequent visitor to Landsberg Prison. Following graduation, Albrecht became Secretary General of Germany's Society for Geography, and later editor of the Periodical of the Society of Geography. In his official capacity he would travel the world, lecturing and gaining a wide experience of international affairs.
Liam,
I think the only way for us to understand Hitler's reasoning is to look at the world through the eyes of post WWI Germans. There country was less than a century old when it was already a world power. After 1871, having defeated Austria, Denmark and France in a quick series of wars, they began seeing themselves in what would later become the supreme Aryan view. Germany seemed invincible and destined to dominate the world. It was exactly the same as America's Manifest Destiny reasoning. Except Germany's delusions crumbled in 1918. The Nazis didn't point the way, they only said what a lot of other Germans were taking for common knowledge, that they'd been conspired against from within etc & etc -- we all know the rest.
I think, by the time of the attack on Poland, Hitler and Germany were dealing with the greatest national inferiority complex in history. It wasn't just a matter of re-establishing their place as a great powere, by then they had to also prove themselves superior to everyone else and, of course, they needed to retake what they felt was rightfully theirs: Poland and European Russia.
Denmark, Norway and Holland all had tremendous strategic significance far beyond their natural wealth. But I think a further motivation to having them was the prewar theme of having all Aryans within the Reich's borders. Whether those same people wanted to be included was immaterial.
There seems to have been a turning point in Hitler's reasoning that occurred after the absorption of Slovakia in the spring of 1939. Up to that point planned in a fairly logical progression, taking a single political geographical objective and setting the stage for the next objective. With each goal accomplished his contempt for the British leadership, and especially the French, became more pronounced. By the attack on Poland I don't think he was even considering actions by those countries.
He wanted what he felt would be a showpiece war to demonstrate Germany's newfound might. It was supposed to have been Czechoslovakia but when that failed Poland would serve the purpose even better, it was bigger, had a larger (but less modern army) and the terrain was ideal for blitzkrieg tactics.
His first assumption was the British and french would back down once more, probably have another Munich Conference in which he'd be able to grab his half of the country and claim he was helping to butress Europe against the Soviets. In that scenario I think he reasoned the move to be a later attack on the USSR with Britain and France actually supporting him.
When the British and French actually honored their committment with Poland the new assumption was that they were just saving face and the peace treaty would be drawn up in the spring or summer of 1940, exactly enough time to grab Denmark and Norway before bloodying the two enemies in the Low Countries. He didn't anticipate taking France, the plan was to inflict large casualties on the allies and negotiate a treaty that would leave Germany with western Poland, Denmark and Norwary.
But things happened differently and when France fell the plan had to be revised. Etc & etc. It's as though each of the early successes helped work against Germany because at the heart of all Hitler's actions was the great war to fought in the east. Everything else was only a distraction.
-- With North Africa, neither Hitler nor his generals ever wanted to be drawn into it. They didn't even want to get involved in Iraq and Syria, considering the whole Mediteranean to be the Italian Sphere. Of course, no one on either side realized either how unprepared for war that country was or how out of touch with reality Mussolini's ambitions had become.
Anyway, even as late as the winter of 1939-40, I think Hitler was dreaming in terms of a sort of crusade in Russia that would have the full support of all the western nations.
-- It's interesting that Japan, after it's pair of fiascos in Mongolia, saw the future as a Berlin-Tokyo-Moscow Axis. No doubt Stalin also saw that as the smartest continuation and he must have been sure that Hitler would see it too.
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arado234,
True. Even Hitler realized he was loony. At one point, during the siege of Stalingrad, Goering passed along an offer for the Swedes to act as hosts for a Russo/German peace conference and Stalin was willing to make broad consessions to stop the fighting. Hitler considered it, then laughed and said, "You know me, in no time at all we'd be right back at it. Better to see it through." So even with Stalingrad surrounded he passed on ending the fighting, as he would again before the Battle of Kursk.
The only difference of course is he didn't really want to fight the British and right to the end felt they should have been allies with the UK being the naval and colonial Aryan power and Germany running things in Eurasia. That might well have made the difference.
You're one up on me. I read Mein Kampf when I was 13, bought it in a 2 volume set for $2.00 from a used bookstore run by an elderly Jewish couple who immediately banned me when I bought the books! :eek:
I'm pretty sure they actually lived through all or part of Hitler's controling Germany, their daughter must have bought those books as part of a batch and priced them. Anyway, they became convinced I was a Nazi for buying it. Which I wasn't. So I went home and read them, bitter about the way they'd treated me, and within a week I became a storm trooper. That ended not long afterwards when I was trading comic books with my best friend, a blond haired boy whose mother was Jewish and I decided he wasn't really Jewish. From there I began deciding who had what % in them, exactly as the Nazis had done (which I didn't know about at the time) and, thankfully, after a while I came to really hate racism, particularly the virulent Nazi kind.
That was 1962. I read it again twenty years later because in my memory it was a scholarly work. The second time around I kept wondering how I'd managed to read it in the first place, really a terrible piece of writing.
Also, that second time, I could see what parts were written by Rudolf Hess and not Hitler, all that dreck about the Japanese being distant Aryans and how they'd solved their "Jewish Problem" -- huh? when did Japan ever have a Jewish population?!!
-- that had to all have been written by Hess and not Hitler. Also, I think the section on the Protocals of the Wise Men of Zion was also Hess. I wonder if they ever realized that whole thing was a concocted by the agents working for Czar Nicholas II? Anyone interested in modern history should suffer through reading that tome at least once.
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Groovy is making a comeback? I hated it the first time around, forty years ago. :eek:
I'm not really a player so I won't offer a rating; when I played the new version I enjoyed the games but I'll always prefer hexes over tiles. The scenario editor is very good. Add to that the expansion kit and from I understand it's a sort of universal game making kit. :cool:
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Liam!
Great to see you too. I haven't played the game very much, no reflection on the system just that I've been swamped with other things and haven't had any game time. So my posts haven't been in the game play threads, which is where I think you've been putting most of yours. Glad we finally found a place to exchange ideas -- I still think that mamoth History in SC thread you started a few years back was the best we've ever had.
Agreed about Stalin. I think he was incredibly paranoid and cynical, never a real communist only the ultimate opportunist. He never thought in terms of military conquests. Even when he occupied nearly all of Eastern Europe it was mainly as a buffer zone.
Considering Hitler served in the front lines for virtually the enitre First World War, was wounded and twice decorated with the Iron Cross, it's more than a little curious he was never promoted past corporal. There was definitely something wrong there, it has to mean his superior officers and noncoms felt he not only had no leadership ability, but was actually a trouble maker.
It's interesting that only a person with the abilities you mentioned could have made the early gains, such as dropping the Versailles Treaty, ending reparations and reoccupying the Rhineland. His generals and fellow politicians didn't think any of that would work, and it shouldn't have, but it did and he became stronger with each of his successful unsound moves. I've seen that in chess games, where a player is so wild that other players assume his moves are sound when, in reality, it's all smoke and no fire.
His interference with the generals actually started fairly early. He made Denmark and Norway his personal projects and, while Norway was pulled off in plain sight of the Royal Navy, his meddling with ordering destroyers to remain in the fjords after they'd landed infantry led to pointless losses when the Brits arrived with cruisers and battleships and the German destroyers had no room to either escape or maneuver and were forced into an unfair slugging match.
From there he interferred exactly enough in Fall Weiss to allow the B. E. F. to be evacuated. In fairness, the older generals, especially von Rundstedt, kept advising him that the panzers and pzgrenediers were too far ahead of the walking infantry and heavy artillery so his halt orders were really just acting on advice. And then there was Goering telling him the Luftwaffe, acting at the edge of their effective range, could handle it all on their own. So, of all his catastrophic blunders I think Dunkirk is the most understandable.
As you said, he was a gambler. It's a popular belief that all hardcore gamblers want to lose ultimately and I think that was the case with Hitler. Originally he wanted limited successes in the west, when he had it all he increasingly lost sight of reality.
Blashy,
That was an interesting point in an earlier post, about where Germany keeps Holland in that hypothetical peace treaty and the Dutch East Indies declares independence rather than become part of the Reich.
I think it's unlikely because the colonial governors would have had to accept the native population as equals instead of subjects. But assuming they did:
-- The Dutch occupied the territories with small army garrisons, obsolete aircraft and a flotilla of destroyers. Historically it was sunk in the Battle of the Java Sea, 1942. The Dutch Admiral Dorman commanded an ill-fated combined fleet that was destroyed by the Japanese.
Even Germany had a more than adequate fleet in 1940 to deal with the Dutch East Indies squadron -- Scharnhorst and Gneisenau along with the two remaining pocket battleships and some heavy cruisers. The problem would have been air cover. Britain would have had to cooperate in allowing the German expeditionary force and fleet pass through both Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. Considering the circumstances I doubt they'd have refused.
-- So the German force of two battle cruisers, several assorted cruisers and transports with a small infantry force is passing through the Red Sea on it's way to the Indian Ocean. I wonder how that scenario plays out. Does Japan suddenly declare itself the guarantor of Indonesian autonomy as part of a deal for it's oil and rubber trade?!
I don't think the Congo would have similarly struck for self-rule, partly for the same reason of the unequal racial strata and partly because Belgium would have been returned to self rule, surrendering it's colony as one of the conditions.
All the way around those are interesting situations to think about.
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Reminds me of the SC-1 days when someone came in and asked if anyone played it. Someone (I think it was John DeFool, answered, "Nobody plays it. Now go away!"
Hitler: Why didn't they finish Dunkirk? Why not WMD?
in Strategic Command 2 Blitzkrieg and Weapons and Warfare
Posted
Churchill came close to ordering gas attacks on German cities when the V-2s began falling on London, but was talked out of it by General Allanbrooke.
He was talked out of it by the local army group commander, von Rundstedt, who thought sending tanks and motorized infantry up the coast was too risky because his marching infantry wasn't close enough to support them. In hindsight that was a poor decision but, at the time, it was reasonable and Hitler was doing something he rarely did later, following the advice of one of his field commanders.