Sokal

There's Carlo D'este's book, which I read a few years ago. It seemed to over a plausible overview....as of course do both the British and American official histories (though the official histories offer more on the logistics as usual)

There are lions on the Ishtar Gate of Babylon (or Nineveh maybe?). I think there was a reconstruction of the gate in Berlin before WWII. Perhaps your tour guide meant to say the Germans had reconstructed the Lion Gate rather than blown the face off the lion (which sounds like the story of the French and the Great Sphinx at Giza).

Mentioning Cooper's book again from 1978, he seemed to like to point out how the German high command thought Rommel was quite irresponsible with his aggressive tendencies, and points out repeatedly how little was gained in the end. Of course, since Rommel never got those two extra panzer divisions he said were all he needed I guess we'll never know. I think ULTRA, and the ability to sink enemy shipping at will, was the real star of the North African campaign rather than the commanders involved. </font>

This is a CM-2-ish solution to the scale/pace problem. It seems what is needed is an operational map/layer that covers more time and space at a different speed. The two opposing sides would have smaller facing segments of the larger picture and could chose what parts of their area of responsibility they want to deal with in detail. For example, an attacking player could demand more air recon and corps artillery support at the price of delay and the possibility of being relieved of command or having the enemy dig in better and bring up more arillery himself. Players would also have the option of resolving some engagements at the operational level in some default resolution mode.

Whe I hit The blue button after selecting a quantity I get a screen that says CGI error...did not return a complete http hearer

I agree that the SA official history is the best book on the Crusader Battles and Gazala. It is a multivolume series, but often the Sidi Rezhed volume is missing.

I have to admit that I'm not too worried about 88s. The CM system tends to reproduce battlefield conditions pretty well and we know that in the prevailing conditions in the Mediterreanean in the period, the Allies managed to beat the Axis forces most of the time. I think 88s will be very effective, but we know from the accounts that they were only one of the ways that the Axis forces maintained an edge in armored engagements and I think we can expect the CM system to reproduce this. For example, the 50mm AT guns that operated right with Axis armored units seemed to have knocked out significantly more British cruiser tanks than 88s. And for another example of why we should remain calm in the face of the prospect of Germanic equipment in the desert, in the Easter 1941 battles around Tobruk, 88s that had been positioned too far forward before dawn had their crews suppressed by small arms fire before they could get into action. I guess it would be nice to have the growing light of dawn simulated, but maybe that's a CM2 thing.

AT guns -- anybody's AT guns -- seem to have done very well against armor very often in the desert. Even the Italian 47mm gun had some good days...though the most crucial and massive slaughter of armor by AT guns may well have been the Snipe Action in Oct 1942 where British 6-pdrs knocked out a very large number of Axis tanks and SP guns.

Just whatever happened in Crete, Africa or any Part of Italy? I suppose this is just as well since the nightmare of the relatively well-equiped Italian Army being roughly handled by the Greeks might be demoralizing and the German blitzkrieg through the Balkans and Greece might be disturbing. :cool: And we won't be invading Lemnos or Lesbos or Rhodes or Corfu...officially anyway.

Why would the UK go belly up in 1941 if it had survived the crisis of 1940? This isn't an idle quibble because it seems that US policy was quite sensitive to whether the UK stayed in the war. In the book Finest Hour, the point is made that US aid began flowing as soon as it looked like the Canadians (secretly) promised to let the US control the RN if it came to Canada and that the British were going to fight. The US was already mobilizing and the premise of helping the UK was that it was worthwhile if it bought time. On the other hand we know that: 1) Germany was not anywhere near fully mobilized until 1942 and even then they never mobilized women (so the allies were ahead from 1940 on as far as full mobilization went) 2) as the German army studies of the 1970s have pointed out, Hitler thought that a second Hitler or successive Hitler would be needed to beat the US. So...the US would have simply built up for a slightly longer haul and pumped a lot more lend-lease supply into Russia much sooner and faster. Japan would have been wiped out much sooner by an ealier and closer Russia-US alliance and the US and Russia would have partitioned China and the colonial world, built A-bombs and wiped out and partitioned the Third Reich by say 1946 or 1947. I guess there would have been no Cold War and we would have a Colony on Mars.

[ October 24, 2003, 06:35 PM: Message edited by: Sokal ]

Now that the "revisionist" Israelis (the ones who thought that the Israelis somehow secretly controlled the whole war and knew exactly what was happening everywhere at all times) are being refuted and the Israeli intelligence and diplomatic archives are open for the period...there's a lot coming out. Enough to suggest that by say September 1948 all of the Arab armies (except for the Egyptians) were surviving only by bluffing and the UN's various pressures on Israel. This was because only the Israelis and the Egyptians had any real logistical structures (or much ammunition and spares left at all for that matter) and only the Israelis had some sort of arrangements for assembling and training large formations of new regular troops. This kind of reduces the interest in simulating the war as it actually occurred except on the Egyptian front. Oh....so the Saudi companies. I have the vague impression they ended up on the coastal part of the front and I don't recall their being destroyed, though the final big battles around Rafa were bloody enough to have finished them off. There were several types of semi-regular troops operating under Egyptian command (such as the Moslem Brotherhood) and the Saudis seem to have been the most regular of the semi-regulars.

Is this a whole new game or a mod of some other system? It has always seemed odd to me that the Wars around the Old Mandate (which offer many classic, clear well-defined cases of the basic elements of modern war) should have been so neglected. It's odd that Vietnam is a "safe" war in the minds of the gaming public when it was say 50-1000 times bloodier than the combined losses of all participants in the relatively unspeakable/unthinkable wars around Israel and the Falklands. I should add that in some ways a lot of the stuff in Palestine in 1948 is nearly impossible to simulate. The fighting in Jerusalem is just too nutty and a lot of the terrain is very hard to get right in any game system I've seen. That's one reason I've done most of my work on the two big Israeli offensives in 1948-49 against Egyptian forces around the Negev, the mountains and Gaza. The terrain is relatively normal and the opposing forces relatively even and well enough disciplined to behave themselves for the most part. And the objectives all make a fair amount of sense geopolitically (compared to Holy sites in Jerusalem for example), though of course the Israelis are actually trying to avoid capturing areas with big towns like Gaza or Hebron...the Arabs didn't quite grasp that and the Israeli capture of Beersheba seems to have genuinely shocked the British anyway....so there's plenty of room for alternative history scenarios such as British or American intervention, different Israeli Objectives (eg, Gaza) and many different possibilities in terms of forces involved and the timing of the offensives. [ October 22, 2003, 12:55 PM: Message edited by: Sokal ]

I guess there's a lot of truth to that. Still it would be nice to have ways of doing some of the more interesting battles around the Old Mandate of Palestine. As I've pointed out, for the 1948-49 fighting (for example), if you have a game with a wide range of WWII equipment then you have most of what you'd need. In fact CMBB has a lot of what you'd need in terms of vehicles...though you'd have to make sure both sides could have Bren guns and 3-inch mortars and so on.

This statement puzzles me. Certainly there was some night fighting, and some of it was important, such as the opening of Second Alamein. But by and large, when the sun went down, everybody pulled into their laagers, brewed up, and went to bed. It was a curiously civilized nine-to-five (actually more like 0500-to-1900) kind of war in that way. </font>

This statement puzzles me. Certainly there was some night fighting, and some of it was important, such as the opening of Second Alamein. But by and large, when the sun went down, everybody pulled into their laagers, brewed up, and went to bed. It was a curiously civilized nine-to-five (actually more like 0500-to-1900) kind of war in that way. </font>

Well...I've done some '48 and '49 Negev to Sinai scenarios in TOAW and HPS Middle East. The problems are with the maps and getting a handle on the OOBs and such things as the Israelis figuring out how to find and refurbish Roman roads (which would not be a problem in a CM Palestine 1948-9). In 1948-49, the technology is an odd mix of WWII gear. I guess that's good if you'r not tired of WWII. Both sides had some French Hotchkis tanks for example. The Israelis had Bf-109s and Spitfires etc. etc. Another interesting aspect of the 1948-49 fighting is that both sides had a very wide range of troops in terms of training and organization and these varied wildly over time. The Israeli/Yushiv Palmach and the Transjordanian Arab Legion were both first-rate professional forces while the Egyptians and most of the ex-Haganah were fairly well-trained and equiped and in many cases brilliantly led and then both sides also had plenty of less well-trained and well-armed forces as well. But...as for World War II...every new game is a new version of WWII. The CM series version is the most interesting I've seen. [ October 20, 2003, 11:33 PM: Message edited by: Sokal ]

I stand corrected,how else could they have stopped that great behemoth. </font>

I'm sure there will be 2-lbers en Portee. What more could you ask for?

I hope so. They definitely were there in reality. At Crusader the 28th Bn was a Maori Bn and I think they were Divisional reserve or something. Anyway they did a great job.