MengJiao

You can trigger support fire. It tends to go off a bit early since it starts as soon as you spot the support fire target.

You can get the US official history (and or Blumenson): http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-E-Breakout/index.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Blumenson http://www.armchairgeneral.com/martin-blumenson-my-remembrance-of-a-friend.htm

Anything that makes the target button up is a pretty good idea: mortar fire, artillery, mgs, snipers, small arms are all good for that. I once cleared a village full of Panthers with an M10 and a 57mm mostly by using infantry to keep the Panthers buttoned up and spotted.

He should have been more worried about 6pdrs which is what knocked out his Tiger at Villers-Bocage.

Sounds about right when you think of all the new stuff. Achilles, 3-inch mortars! Sextons. various armored cars. Belgians with long knives in the Household Cavalry.

I think Elron Hubub was that rarest and most wonderous of creatures: an actual troll. Not a sockpuppet at all. I was hoping to keep him for a bit. What I found interesting was that he seemed only to read various internet sources about the game and attempted to pass such things off as his own observations. So essentially he plagarized his complaints and had no actual interest in the games or anything else, but only in his trolling. I wondered why he pretended to have played the demo since nothing he said had anything to do with the demo. It's sad, but actual trolls are very hard to keep in captivity, they have to be off trolling and trolling all the time.

The French in 1936 are indeed hard to understand. Reading Paxton's French Peasant Fascism didn't help me much. Shirer's The Collapse of the Third Republic at least gives a feel for how messed up France was in the 1930s.

Counting starvation for another year, attack from all sides and maybe some more fighting in China plus the US estimate (based on Okinawa) of 1 million US casualties, 12.5 million is probably a good ball-park guess. But at the time, blocking the Russians and avoiding 1 million US casualties seemed like a good enough idea.

Mr Emrys is entirely correct. Downfall does show that dropping nukes probably saved at least 50 times more people than it killed as well as saving Japan from being partly occupied by the Russians. The crucial element for Japan was timing. They were busy surrendering, but is was way too slow especially with the Russians getting ready to hit the relatively undefended northern Islands.

I'm always a little cranky when I patch my testes too.

Yet the Japanese got a much better deal than the Germans. As you point out even the nukes were just as much to keep the Russians out as to take over an relatively well-populated Japan. so there was a de facto settlement or a series of de facto settlements with the Japanese. Even after the series of surrenders in September (and each regional Japanese command seems to have surrendered under a separate local protocol), Japanese forces were still in control of large parts of China, Indochina, and the DEI. And of course, the Japanese got to keep their Emperor. So not a big win for the Little Empire, but not a complete and utter unmitigated crushing such as the Germans got.

The Japanese were still fighting in the Phillipines and controled most of China, all of Indochina, most of the DEI. US casualties were going up steadily as the battles got closer to Japan. Given how little they had, they did a lot better than the Germans. And in the end they faced all of the allied forces alone.

And Singapore. I don't think the Germans held "vast tracts" of anything when they surrendered. And it didn't take nukes to knock out the Germans.

though in China they were still taking lots of territory clear into 1944.

They still had all of their gains in China and the DEI and Singapore and all of Indochina and all their home islands. It took nukes to knock them out. All-in-all they did much better than the Germans with much less of an industrial base. They didn't do very well, but they still did 10 times better than the Germans.

The pre-1942 non-mobilization is a myth and the post-1942 production miracle is as well. What we know is that German production never actually got going in the same way that production did in the USA (much, much more quickly), the UK and the USSR. It never got going and it began to collapse in 1943. It seems to be difficult to realize just how much better Japan did in WWII than Germany. With a much smaller industrial base, the Japanese managed to seize all the essential resources they needed and hold on to almost all their gains until they got nuked. Even then they weren't invaded and they got to keep their Emperor. Germany never got its production going and was completely crushed and divided up. The comparison suggests the fantastic incompetence that it took to take a reasonably good industrial power and wreck it steadily from 1931 to 1945.

Well, I think Tooze has to tear into Speer because (in Tooze's view), the Speer myth holds up a lot of misconceptions. For example, that Germany had not mobilized fully before 1942. The fact was ( according to Tooze) that Germany never could mobilize as fully as the USA or the UK or the USSR essentially because economically, Germany was just an unusually large France -- burdened with an incredibly inefficient agricultural sector that it was politically impossible to do anything but make more complex and useless. So if anything Germany started over-mobilizing far too soon. Other problems with the Speer mythos cover such odds and ends as the supposed non-impact of allied bombing. According to Tooze, as you might expect, blowing up factories actually had such a big impact immediately (in 1943) that the wonder of Speer is demonstrably just the wonder of a long parts pipeline coupled with measuring units that got priorities (eg the semi obsolete me-109) versus essential units (such as fuel and trucks) that either never were produced in sufficient quanities or that declined under the impact of the war (eg. bombing and loss of oil fields). Anyway, read Tooze and the Horace Greeley event will become clear.

I would just read Tooze. He is the most recent and he takes ideology and its contradictions into the account. The Wages of Destruction is quite an astounding book really. Once you get through with the influential German dude with "Horace Greeley" as his middle name -- you're ready for anything and Tooze doesn't pull any punches: Germany looks like a trainwreck from 1931 to 1945. Not only that but you will have a pretty good idea why. For example, Speer's miracle was due to retooling in 1942, a retooling that should have been done in 1934.

I dimly recall the Monmouths, who replaced a Rifle Brigade Bn in the infantry Bn that traveled with the 23 Hussars in the 11th armored (159 Bde? 129 bde?) just before Blue Coat were notorious for preferring to ride on tanks rather than in Bren Gun carriers. But even riding on tanks can be a fire hazard since sometimes the exhaust pipes would set things on fire.

Not really an option. See Tooze. The basic problem with the German economy was an unbelievably inefficient agricultural sector. What the UK fixed in the 18th century with enclosures, the US with mechanization and the USSR by shooting the Kulaks, the Germans bumbled and (like the French) just caved in to rich peasants. So after say, 1931, they are doomed unless they follow the lead of the USSR and have ford motors build them some 5-year-plan wonders, collectivize, and purge the army (shoot all those Prussian Generals before they start plotting) and join the USSR and take over the world.

Good point.

Yes, read Tooze. If there is a moral to the question, it is "So read Tooze."

Yep. Tooze pretty much answers the question. The best thing Germany could have done was to let inflation run up in 1931, gotten their exports in order, turned commie in 1938 after recapitalizing, gotten russian backing, crushed Poland etc. and taken the rest of Europe by 1943. Clobbering Fascist Austria, Italy, Roumania, Hungary, Greece and Spain would have just been icing on their Commie German Cake. So they stop with control of the Baltic, Mediterreanean and North Sea. Then the USSR cleans up Japan and Peace with the USA reigns as the colonial empires are divided up.

Oh boy. CMAK was my favorite of the old CMs. I got CMSF and added marines and stopped there since I mostly played red on red. I expect I'll get all the CMBN follow-ons since WWII is pretty much a red-on-red event.

I play RT partly because I enjoy all the surprises inherent in not knowing exactly what is going on. Questions about what exactly happen often remain. For example, the AI I had set up somehow surprised me from the flank. A whole panzergrenadier company (I assumed since I'd set them up) was coming right up the road to my hastily re-deploying paratroopers. The trooper platoons were caught in the open in the middle of moving away from the pg company. It looked like the troopers were just going to get mowed down if they stayed where they were or ran for it, so I put them all on assault and sent them head-on into the pgs. When I got back to check on them, one squad was wiped out almost completely and the rest were okay. There was no sign of the PGs. or at least none that I could see from a quick 9 second look-see. I still don't know what happened there.