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ChuckBerger -> RE: North Africa Please (12/17/2015 10:00:55 PM)
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I've spend quite a lot of idle time thinking through a theater-level Mediterranean game in the last little while.
The fascinating thing about this theater is that it's not a straightforward axis versus allies game. Italy and Germany had very different and divergent goals in the Mediterranean... and ditto the US and Brits. And then there's all the minors, each with their own goals and sensitivities - imagine Wavell's position, having to walk a delicate line with Greece, various Vichy and Free French commanders, Egyptian leaders, the Americans, his own troops (Aussies, South Africans, New Zealanders, Indians... each with demands and restrictions), plus relationships with the Navy, Spain and Turkey, coups in Iraq and Persia, etc etc. WHile managing a logistics tail that stretches from Egypt all the way around Africa back to the UK.
The US wanted to get its troops combat experience for the main show in France, while the UK (or at least Churchill) wanted the Med to be the main thrust against Italy & Germany. And at various time, to get bases to bomb Ploesti, to get a foothold in the Balkans before the Russians got there, etc. Very complex and shifting strategic goals for operations in the Med.
On the axis side, Italy wanted empire, Germany just wanted to tie down Allied troops and prevent the Italians from getting squashed. Or maybe grabbing Egpyt and pushing through to the oilfields? Or maybe not, after all. I can see a very interesting dynamic where you are strongly encouraged to pursue Italian ambitions in Greece, Tunisia, Egypt - wherever - and you lose PP if you fail to achieve them. But realistically, achieving those goals requires the commitment of German forces, which also costs a hefty amount of PP.
Imagine, Mussolini decides he wants Tunisia. But doing so will tip the Vichy over to the Allies again, and Italian troops bungle the operation anyway and Italy is soon at risk of losing Libya entirely. Germany has to rush troops over, UK sends troops in through Morocco to help French north africans, and the whole desert campaign takes place on 2 fronts, not just one. Plausible.
The permutations in terms of choices and the amount of branching the campaign could take are unparalleled. Germany gets Franco to intervene, takes Gibraltar, but French North Africa goes Allied because Franco's condition is that Spain gets Morocco and Algeria. As a result, US launches Torch in Andalucia in 1943... Plausible.
Or suppose Vichy goes Axis after Mers-el-Kebir, German rushes a mountain/airborne corps to the Levant, and Allies are faced with an invasion of Palestine from the north in 1940? With lots of running naval battles as Italians try to get convoys through to Beirut, covered by a Fliegerkorps at Crete/Rhodes? Plausible.
To my mind, it's this complexity of conflicting goals, the sheer number of players, and the huge potential for each game to play out very differently that has never adequately been dealt with in a true theatre-level simulation of the Mediterranean front.
Yes, a division-level approach would mean individual battles are not as detailed as most "desert war" games, which focus exclusively on the conflict in Libya/Egypt. That's OK. The fascination in the game, just as with DC3, is in the meta-dynamics around politics, logistics, and macro decisions about force allocation, not about detailed modelling of which tank regiment attacks which ridge in the middle of Cyrenaica somewhere.
The challenge doing this with DC is that you really can't just abstract naval operations away in a Mediterranean game...
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