Favorite post WWII conflict

Here’s a great project that a filmmaker has been working on. And I think it’s especially nice that he’s a young man, not someone from a generation closer to WWII.

Thursday, February 28, 2019 6:38AM EST

A young American filmmaker is on a mission to interview every last Second World War veteran to share the stories of as many combat veterans as possible – before it is too late.

Rishi Sharma has spent the past three years documenting the lives of living Second World War veterans in the U.S., U.K. and Canada for his non-profit organization Heroes of the Second World War.

The average age of Second World War vet is now 93 years old, and the number of survivors is slowly diminishing with the passing of time.

After three years of visiting seniors’ homes to record veterans’ stories, Sharma says has filmed more than a thousand interviews.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/american-filmmaker-on-a-mission-to-interview-every-last-second-world-war-veteran-1.4316271

Wise words, Worsham.

Like Model , he would have done very well in the halcyon days. I believe he would have done less well, defensively, unlike  Model, though. He would have worried his Army commander, like Guderian, never wanting to pause to regroup. But that would not have mattered to him or to the result.

Here’s a nice story:

9 war-time letters delivered to family after 70 years
Soldier Lawrence Price wrote to his mother and grandmother in Fredericton Junction but letters went astray
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/war-time-letters-delivered-1.3330723

@KurtGodel7:

@Red:

Perhaps the greatest A&A gameplay weakness is that tanks and aircraft don’t take attrition losses.  Historically, even very successful attacks severely depleted these forces.  Examples would be heavy losses in Poland and France as well as pilot/aircraft losses in several of the major early war IJN/USN encounters.Â

Aircraft were particularly prone to heavy attrition just operating.  And they were easy to target in suprise attacks at the outbreak of war.  But since the game allows them to be chosen last they don’t attrit.  Plus they can be held away from the front.  This is why the USSR’s air force is almost completely absent in the initial placement.

Perhaps the greatest A&A gameplay weakness is that tanks and aircraft don’t take attrition losses.

They do in my rules set!  8-) Every round of ground or naval combat begins with the dogfight phase. In the dogfight phase, all units present fire at their air combat values. Any hits you receive must be applied to air units. Once you have applied a single anti-air hit to one of your air units, you must apply additional hits to that same unit until it’s dead, or until combat ends. (The same is true if you apply an anti-land hit to one of your land units, an anti-naval hit to one of your ships, or an anti-sub hit to one of your submarines.)

There are other ways aircraft can be destroyed as well. In strategic bombing raids, there is one round of dogfight phase, followed by strategic bombers attacking their targets using their strategic bombing values. Strategic bombing raids do permanent damage. For every ten points of damage a production facility experiences in a strategic bombing raid, it is reduced by one level. While nations receive some money from territory income, most of their late game production will come from production facilities. A sufficiently powerful strategic bombing offensive can destroy all those facilities; as well as the underlying cities in which they would exist. The correct defense against a strategic bombing offensive is to build air superiority planes; such as piston fighters or jet fighters.

There is a second way of defending oneself from strategic bombing raids: airfield attacks. To initiate an airfield attack, send your planes to a space with enemy aircraft, and declare an airfield attack. There will be two rounds of dogfight phase. Any of your planes which survived that dogfight may launch one attack against enemy aircraft, using their land combat values.

Interesting. At one time I had an idea for a variant of A&A where unit placement was at the start of your turn and the purchase phase was at the end. The units purchased were considered “in production” and set aside until placement at the beginning of the next turn. While the units are in production the enemy can strategic bomb them before they even get deployed.

By doing this the intention was to make strategic bombing more important and more costly. The other difference was that interceptors defended at full combat value and escorts attacked at full combat value for one round. I have never play-tested this so it might be a game breaker. It seems kind of fun to me though.

@ABWorsham:

Great post Black Fox.

Reading about the air war in the Pacific, if an aircraft was off a few degrees could lead to a watery grave hundreds of miles out in the vast Ocean.

Thanks

Thinking of the Pacific.  I knew a guy who was a B-25 waist gunner in the Pacific during WWII.  He told me a story where his squadron was sharing the air field with Richard I Bong when he was flying the P-38.  At the time their version had the eight .50 cal in the nose.  He said those guns we just vicious.  However, the high humidity was causing problems with the electrical circuits that controlled the guns.  When it got bad enough the moisture would connect the firing circuits and the guns would sometimes start firing by themselves.  One day they were getting ready for a mission.  Just as they were walking out to the planes, one of the P-38s guns went off.  The airplane starting bouncing and spreading lead all over the field.  It hit a few other planes and their guns went off too.  At this point they now had 5 fully load P-38 with guns just blazing away and planes just started exploding all over the place.  He said by the time it was all over, they had 45 planes destroyed on the ground!  I’m sure this is just one of many such incidents that added to those mind blowing statistics.

@strategic:

I may would have been a proponent of continuing the war to Moscow to obliterate Stalin after 1945, so communism would be nothing but a fad and dead.

If I remember correctly, the USSR had something like 300 divisions in Eastern Europe at the time of the Potsdam Conference – a rather large figure compared to what the Anglo-Americans had in Western Europe.  I doubt the Americans and the British could have beaten those kinds of numbers.  I also don’t imagine that a radical move like expending one of America’s rare and priceless A-bombs on Moscow would have done anything other than get those 300 veteran Soviet divisions (who had just helped whip the Wehrmacht) really, really angry at them.  The US and the UK being democracies, they would have also found it a trifle hard to convince their war-weary voters and servicemen to start a whole new war against the country which had just helped them defeat Nazi Germany, and which was getting ready to help them finish off militarist Japan.

At any rate, if you exclude Cuba and China and North Korea, Communism today is in fact pretty much a dying fad…espcially when you consider the amount of free-market capitalism with which China has been flirting for the past decade or so.

@balungaloaf:

Edit: Let’s not include hidden messages (political) in your posts. What happens is people who are on the other side start a flame war.

:lol:

This is exactly what I talk about with the bias around here.  B isn’t starting a flame war, but someone who responds to that nonsense is?

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Anyway, the WW2 in HD is on Xbox Live.  I watched the preview and was tempted to get it, but since I don’t own an HD TV, it would be semipointless.

I’m planning on buying a K98 M48 next chance I get, my friend has two K98’s one is a M48 the other was from his grandfather