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Posts: 94
Joined: 12/10/2000
From: West Hollywood, CA
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It's great watching you guys post stuff as history only to have others correct you. And then others correct the correctors, and so on without end. Now that's history to me.
I'll join in.
I recall Joachin Piper dying. I read it in TIME magazine when I was 13. He was quietly living in France, of all places, I think in Alsace or the Vosges region. It was pretty much suspected as foul play.
I find the discussion of Yamamoto fascinating, with the usual public message board essentializing of "national characteristics". Useful, but there are always exceptions since we cannot get in anyone's mind except our own (at best!). We can make educated guesses based on evidence, testimony, human patterns, etc., sure.
Also, great sea changes do occur in supposedly ironclad "national" characteristics. People are millions of idiosyncratic individuals, not just one monochrome nation.
What fascinates me about war is that humans spend so much effort, intelligence, resources, etc. to destroy and kill each other's effort, intelligence, and resources.
It remains for postwar commentators to try to sort out the ethical and moral effects of wartime. This message board mirrors that as posters try to come to grips with the decision to assassinate Yamamoto, which I support marginally, but who knows how I might feel as a US commander in 1943? I can only guess in 2001.
To simulate the maximum # of possibilities in a wargame is laudable!. War tends to be far less predicable and regular than peacetime, as most humans will never really enjoy killing each other predictably and regularly as much as say, posting in message boards, playing basketball or taking fishing vacations in the south pacific. And sex, always sex.
I support the idea of simulations like WAR IN THE PACIFIC allowing for variability in allegiances, assassinations, loyalties, even "cowardice" (cowards can become heroes in a second). Not every Japanese serviceman killed himself. There were prisoners from the first day of conflict. like that unfortunate midget sub guy at Pearl Harbor. He lived for decades afterwards, btw!There were cowards of all stripes, as well as suicides and assassinations in all nations at war.
In reprisal for Heydrich's death, the Germans killed an entire Czech village! How about adding civilian deaths to a war simulation? Civilian deaths have existed since the dawn of war (read the Bible) and Gary Grigsby's PACIFIC WAR attempted to simulate that with "civilian casualties" when industry was bombed. The Philippines was much opposed to the Japanese occupation for its many depredations on the civilian population in contrast to the much more pro-Japanese sentiment in the DEI, where the Dutch had been substantially harsher colonists that the Americans. Also, the Japanese administrators of NEI were probably wiser there.
How to simulate the battle of Manila in '45 with about 20,000 Japanese casualties( mostly KIA), maybe 5,000 US( mostly WIA), and over 100,000 civilians killed?
Yes, add the Yamamoto assassination, but also allow for him to become despondent/depressed. In Japanese civilian/military/Imperial government
from 1931-45, many were pro-western, anti- militarist, and possibly even "cowards". Hirohito himself is a complex case. He appears now more complicit in starting/prolonging the war but his role in ending the war is also critical.
Design a randomizer(s). Make leaders(and their troops) suffer a % ofsuicide, surrender, collaboration, enlightened or despotic administration or occupied peoples, "depression", civilian casualties, etc. And randomize it. Nothing will ever be certain, except uncertainty.
I won't even begin to post about "Yamamoto's Ghost"!
Cheers
Sergio
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