As I recall, when the Norwegains protested to the British that Britain had violated Norwegian neutrality by entering Norwegian waters and boarding the Altmark, the British retorted that the Altmark had violated Norwegian neutrality by anchoring in Norwegian waters while retaining a cargo hold full of prisoners of war. The British also apparently implied that the Norwegians had been either openly complicit in this action or, at the very least, negligent in not discovering the German ruse. My understanding of international law is that belligerent ships entering neutral waters are required to release any prisoners of war they are carrying – a good example being, ironically enough, the British prisonners who were released in neutral Uruguay by Captain Langsdorff when the Graf Spee (the ship supplied by the Altmark) anchored in Montevideo harbour. At any rate, the British position vis a vis Norway was basically, “You drop your protest and we’ll drop ours.” Which they did.
WW2 movies, the most/least accurate.
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@Benito:
U571 was ok. At least the equipment was mostly accurate.
I haven’t seen that movie in so-long I don’t recall much about it… except I think remembering it was a nice action-flick but about as realistic as Pearl Harbor, and ergo something I wasn’t going to be rewatching later-on… which is why I can’t remember much about it.
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Who really captured those Enigma machines?
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I haven’t seen that movie in so-long I don’t recall much about it… except I think remembering it was a nice action-flick but about as realistic as Pearl Harbor, and ergo something I wasn’t going to be rewatching later-on… which is why I can’t remember much about it.
I saw it once. I didn’t really care for it. Like Wolf, I don’t recall much about it either…but I do recall groaning over its lack of historical accuracy (as noted in Private Panic’s post a moment ago).
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Uh Oh… Gauntlet thrown…
Will Kurt pick up and prove Imperious Leader wrong, or has Imperious Leader just exposed Kurt?
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Only two pictures allowed per post, seemingly. So here are two more games.
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Not technically an Axis and Allies game, but still, I’m throwing this in anyway.
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A note of explanation:
Several decades ago, Hasbro released the first Axis and Allies. (Classic.) It was fairly widely distributed, and you could buy it at Toys R Us, among other places. Originally, Axis and Allies was intended to be part of a series of games. Other games in the series included Fortress America, Shogun (later rereleased as Samurai Swords), and Conquest Empire. Of those, I enjoyed Axis and Allies and Shogun the most, with Fortress America also a good game. Conquest Empire was the weakest of the four, by a significant margin. I didn’t own my own copy of Shogun: they’d discontinued it before I became aware of its existence. So I borrowed a copy from my college’s game club, photocopied the map, and taped the resulting pieces of paper onto a table. And that’s how I played. I later rectified the problem by buying a copy of Samurai Swords. (The same game as Shogun, under a different name.)
I played plenty when in my teens and early 20s; and liked Revised significantly more than Classic. But people grow up, they move away. I moved away myself. You make new friends, people who aren’t necessarily interested in board games. My games sat on the shelf for years, unused, while I occasionally gave them longing looks. But they’re not much fun when you don’t have anyone to play against.
Then I went to a gaming convention, in Cincinnati I believe. It was an outstanding opportunity to get back into playing Axis and Allies. I remember playing all day–skipping lunch and dinner–getting out at 11:00 or later at night, without really being hungry. I was that pumped up! Some of the other participants told me how I could go about playing this online. I’ve now been playing online for years. If anyone here wants to play me, I’m on TripleA from time to time.
After years of wanting (but not having) real world opponents to play against, I eventually moved my physical games into a crowded storage unit. Fortunately, I was able to fight through the mess and chaos of that storage unit to find the majority of my games for picture taking.
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BAM !
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Why don’t you sell AA50 before too many people find out about the reprint? It was going for about $400 on ebay
The others are not worth much
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Thanks, IL, for the heads-up. I might sell, might not.
Attached is a picture of my favorite online map, Domination 1914 No Man’s Land. The picture shows you almost all the map, except for half the Pacific. While I’ve gotten plenty of enjoyment out of Larry Harris’s maps over the years, I like this map even more. They added some new units.
Trench: costs 3, takes 2 hits to kill, defends on a 0. You don’t need a factory to place trenches. Nor do trenches count against the unit placement limits of territories with factories. Instead you can place up to 3 trenches per territory per turn. Use: cannon fodder.
Heavy gun: costs 5, attacks on a 2, provides artillery support when attacking. Defends on a 4. Gives you more defensive firepower for the money than any other unit, including infantry. Use: defensive firepower.
Cavalry: costs 4, attacks and defends on a 1, moves on a 2. Can receive artillery support. Use: a substitute for infantry, when you need more mobility.
Poison gas: costs 4, attacks on a 4, cannot be used on defense. Movement of 3. Pre-battle kamikaze attack. Units killed by gas don’t get casualty shots. Trenches cannot be taken as casualties against poison gas attacks. Use: if you need an offensive unit that’s more mobile than cavalry. Also useful if you have multiple nations attacking the same territory. Gas allows the first attacker to get a decent exchange, even if the attacker’s force is much smaller and weaker than the defender’s. Also, gas is useful if you notice the defender has too many trenches, not enough defensive firepower. Gas will make that situation even worse–for the defender, that is.There are some familiar units:
Infantry: cost 3, attacks on a 1, defends on a 2. Can receive artillery support when attacking.
Field gun. These are the artillery you know and love. (Heavy guns are also considered artillery, which is why this unit has been renamed field gun.) Attacks and defends on a 2, costs 4, provides artillery support when attacking.
Fighter: cost 9, movement 3, attacks on a 2, defends on a 3, provides artillery support when attacking. (Okay, so maybe this isn’t 100% familiar because its stats are a bit different.)Domination 1914 No Man’s Land’s tech system is very very good. The best I’ve ever seen in any map. Tech allows you to reduce some of your units’ costs, to obtain free units, income, and a free tech token each turn, to improve the offensive firepower of your field guns and the defensive firepower of your heavy guns. Not to mention improving the performance of your ships. Tech also allows you to construct new unit types: the tank, the late fighter, and the aircraft carrier.
In looking at the picture of the map, Germany is grey, France blue, Serbia orange, Austria yellow, Italy green, Arabia light purple, Turkey red, UK brown, Nationalist Russia white, communist Russia/USSR dark red, and the USA a different shade of green than Italy’s. Neutrals are an off-white, and can be farmed. There are no diplomatic consequences whatsoever to invading neutrals.
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That’s a different map for sure.
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And there you have it… AA50, Classic and a little Conquest of the Empire and Samurai Swords thrown in for good measure. I loved those games back in the day.
I’m going to give this round to Kurt… looks like IL was reaching on the “Kurt doesn’t own or play A&A” thread.
Having said that, we all know a little more about Kurt…
He likes to play A&A outside in the grass for some reason, indoor tables are taboo…
We all know what his toes look like now, and that he likes to wear sandals…
Kurt is not from Minnesota or Wisconsin (everyone in Minnesota and Wisconsin wears socks with sandals)…
You may question his politics, but I’m going to say the man definitely owns A&A. 8-)
P.S.
Joking about the playing outdoors thing, I know they were in storage, I just think that’s the first time I’ve seen a pic of someone’s A&A outside in the grass… I also know what it is like to long for someone to play in the same room with you… I get the occasional game, but they are few and far between… still trying to convince my kids A&A is the greatest game ever… going to have to give them another year or two and try again… in the meantime I continue to collect and customize my copies. -
Well he owns Axis and Allies boxes with white paper with his name at least…
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still trying to convince my kids A&A is the greatest game ever… going to have to give them another year or two and try again…
Show them the movie Midway…or, if it’s too long for them to want to see the whole thing, just fast-foward to all the scenes in Nimitz’s map room and on Yamamoto’s flagship that show ship models (admittedly fairly simple blocks roughy shaped and sized to suggest carriers, batteships and so forth) and a few airplane markers being moved around on map tables (the American one fills a whole room) while the officers on each side strategize as if they were playing a complex and deadly kind of chess game. I credit those scenes for my own enthusiastic reaction when I subsequently discovered A&A.
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@Imperious:
Well he owns Axis and Allies boxes with white paper with his name at least…
Oh come on, give the man credit… he also clearly owns a pen as well…
He also knows the best place to store a beloved game like A&A is a storage shed out in the back yard.
Only two pictures allowed per post, seemingly. So here are two more games.
If you were a completionist… in the 80s, there were a couple more games in the series… Fortress America (fairly well-known), the far-less known (but I do have it) Broadsides and Boarding Parties… pirate game with two snap-together sailing galleons you had face-off against each other.
@Imperious:
Why don’t you sell AA50 before too many people find out about the reprint? It was going for about $400 on ebay
The others are not worth much
I dunno… I haven’t checked E-Bay lately, but MB’s Samurai (Swords) game is out of print, and it’s rebranded (diff company) game of Samurai Swords is also out of print… to my knowledge, you just can’t get that game in any format anymore, short of second-hand sales… is it worth anything on E-Bay, or were there so many printed the 2nd hand option is flooded with them? No clue, but my guess is Samurai (Swords) might still be worth some coinage.
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Oh come on, give the man credit… he also clearly owns a pen as well…
He also knows the best place to store a beloved game like A&A is a storage shed out in the back yard.
LOL, a joke right?
Samurai Swords is worth more than $50, you should sell that too.
Sell the shed while your at it.
Broadsides and Boarding Parties… pirate game with two snap-together sailing galleons you had face-off against each other.
I think this game is worth a few hundred, look on ebay.
The games are worth more than the shed you store them in.
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@Imperious:
Broadsides and Boarding Parties… pirate game with two snap-together sailing galleons you had face-off against each other.
I think this game is worth a few hundred, look on ebay.
Come to think about it, my copy of Broadsides and Boarding parties should be in a box up in my attic… now (after determining what condition it is in after 30-plus years of storage), should I see if the kids like it, or sell it on E-Bay?
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should I see if the kids like it, or sell it on E-Bay?
A third option would be the Ferengi approach: sell it to your kids.
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I dunno… it’s August in Florida… I might not want to brave my attic…
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@Private:
Who really captured those Enigma machines?
There were numerous instances of Enigma machines, parts and codebooks being captured by Allied forces all through and even before WW2, the first ever case being a German (Hans Thilo Schmidt, who’s brother was a General in the Enigma program) selling cyphers to French intelligence from 1931 to 1943. Before anyone says something about him being a hero against tyranny and fascism, he did it for money so he could cheat on his wife, isn’t History great?
The most notable and popularised event was HMS Bulldog capturing U-110’s machine and books without the German crew ever finding out (which was the real achievement) but there were many other courageous and disastrous occasions. In late October '42 Lieutenant Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier of HMS Petard died inside U-559 after retrieved codebooks. (The seacocks having being opened by the crew when abandoning ship, who were ultimately gunned down by Petards Captain when in the water :oops:).
In truth, no one event or person was responsible for the Enigma capture, as I said, there were many events that I could go on about, but I’d be typing all day.
On that note and in response to the actual theme of this post, as enjoyable as it is, the film with historical inaccuracies that bothers me the most is The Imitation Game because it actually doesn’t do everyone involved justice, closely followed by Pearl Harbour, which I do not enjoy.
My favourite and one of the most accurate being Tora! Tora! Tora! Then probably Sink the Bismarck!
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