|
loki100 -> RE: Why the Allies need to invade Italy (2/19/2015 7:21:53 AM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Q-Ball
I wanted to expand on a comment that Seminole made in another thread. I completely get that in game terms, as it stands, it may make sense to skip the Med in 1943, and move directly to Europe.
IRL, however, there is no way the Allies would do that. The reason Seminole aluded to, not because Allied planners thought that you could get to Germany through Italy. The reason it was invaded was POLITICAL; the Allies were already thinking ahead to a post-war Europe.
There was no way Churchill would leave the Med in 1943, not with large communist uprisings in Yugoslavia and Greece. This is why he pushed so hard for engagement in the Med, because the Brits had vital interests in the Med. This drove Italy, the landings in Greece, and the whole mis-guided Dodecanese campaign.
I think the game should reflect this political reality; the Allies should be forced to invade mainland Italy. Allies are not going to leave Italy to Communist insurgents and the possibility of the Red Army entereing through Central Europe. No chance.
VP conditions should be changed to mandate an Italian landing. If I am Germany, I would agree to EF Box off if Allies had to land in Italy, no problem.
That's my 2 Lire......
I agree with your conclusion but not your logic (I think).
Churchill had a tricky relationship with reality during the war and no shortage of personal ideas that the British General staff had to spend a lot of effort squashing. One was to bomb Baku in 1940-1 (pre Barbarrosa), another was an enduring fixation with an invasion of Norway. Invading Greece was another.
Italy was one instance where his personal bugbears and military reality coincided. It suited the Royal Navy to take out Italy, even if the Italian navy by 1943 was no longer a real threat it was tieing down a lot of vessels 'just in case'. It suited the army who wanted a safe testing ground to try out their ideas for how to conduct a naval landing after the disaster of Dieppe and the unopposed Torch experiences. It also suited those in the British military hierachy who were a bit sniffy about the combat capability of US troops when up against the Wehrmacht. It also fitted the deployment of the British army in N Africa and that the Australians and New Zealanders were very unwilling to let the British deploy their units to France (where memories of the British using them as shock troops in battle and hanging them for stealing when out of the line were very raw from WW1). Also the more independent S African govt refused to let its units be used outside N Africa at all.
Politically, the Allies knew by early 1943 the Italians were looking for a route out of the war.
So I think that was the underlying logic.
In early 1943 the Italian Communist Party (PCI) had an underground membership of around 10,000 and was completely ill-prepared to move from political actions to armed revolt. I doubt its latent strength was understood by anybody (including the Party's own exiled leadership). More generally the British had an odd relationship with those parts of the overall European partisan movement that were dominated by Communist Parties. In France, it was the link up between SOE and the Communists that gave the British the means to start industrial sabotage within factories (including 'guest' workers in Germany). In Yugoslavia, the British rather liked Tito (read Fitzroy MacLean's Eastern Approaches), not least they had worked out he wasn't that enthusiastically pro-Soviet. In Italy, the Allies took the CLN (the broad resistance movement) as they found it, not least as Togliatti (the PCI's leader) made it clear that war against fascism would not become a civil war. Greece was the exception and for very specific reasons.
Sorry long way to say there was a combination of politial and military reasons that argued for 'Italy first', but I don't think in 1943 it was particularly shaped by competition for post-war Europe (it was in 1945 when the British for example raced to take Trieste ahead of Tito's forces).
How to handle this is difficult. The problem with rules that are not organic to the core game system is that is where our fellow players with an obsession with winning tend to find fertile ground. WiTE suffers from this mostly driven by a few specific mechanisms. The ideal is a strong bonus to the allies that makes the logic of 1943 very obvious. But, if the Germans know that Italy is the only target in 1943 then we'll see more of Pelton's trick of stripping down their forces everywhere else - which the Germans didn't do historically as they didn't know the Western Allies in 1943 only had the capacity for one major focus. Add on the FZ-unit spam and you get walls of level 3 forts in a region where the main historical defense was the terrain and a few strong points.
|
|
|
|
