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rkr1958 -> RE: Witness to World War 2. (1/26/2019 6:00:02 PM)
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Turn 8. Nov/Dec 1940. Allied #1.
Actions.
USSR - combine
China - land
Great Britain - combine
Free France - naval
USA - combine
Mistakes in Tactical Thinking.
I thought I'd start this section as sort of a lessons learned for impulses where applicable, which this impulse was. Specifically, I want to address decision made based on erroneous "tactical" data and assess the consequences of those decision. In some instances, bad moves made on erroneous "tactical" data may actually turn out well, just as sound decisions can turn out bad due to unlucky "rolls".
This impulse there were two instances of situations that developed because of decisions made on erroneous "tactical" data.
(1) Great Britain mistakenly "estimated" the defense factors of an out-of-supply and disorganized (OOS-DOG) Balbo's HQ-I as 1. Since this HQ-I is white print (i.e., elite), it defends at 3 and not 1 when it's OOS-DOG. The impact of this tactical mistake was that Great Britain took a combine instead of a naval. They wanted to ensure that they could overrun Balbo with Wavell's stack and with the chance that the Italians might reestablish supply to Balbo next impulse, Great Britain "needed" the combine to both evacuate the IV Mot at Calais (France) and make the land move necessary to overrun Balbo this impulse. It turns out that wrt/defense factors supply is irrelevant to Balbo's HQ-I, which defends at 3 in either case, and can't be overrun by Wavell's stack. The impact of the combine was that the RN only had two moves, (a) task force to evacuate IV Mot from Le Havre and (b) task carrier and surface force to 4-box East Med to provide support to Wavell's attack and to protect his supply line. Instead of being able to take a naval and see the RN move out their ASW escorts (w/CP's in 0-box) and patrols (e.g., 4-boxes) in addition to making the two critical naval moves describe above for the combine.
(2) The second tactical mistake was that both sides though that supply to Wavell and the British 8th army could be broken by eliminating supply through the East Med. This led to a heavy outgunned Italian RM cruiser force in the 2-box initiating a naval combat against an RN carrier task force superior in strength and position in the 4-box of the East Med. Interestingly, under this erroneous assumption, or mistaken tactical data, sound RN strategy would have been to use their second naval move to move ASW escorts into the 0-box of the East Med to protect those supply convoys instead of moving the carrier task force to the 4-box. In effect, an RN less sound move based on bad tactical data turned out to actually be the most sound move, which doesn't work out because of bad luck. AHH .........................
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