Michael the Pole
Posts: 680
Joined: 10/30/2004 From: Houston, Texas Status: offline
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I've been looking back on the last 6 or 8 months of posts and have come to the conclusion that a lot of what we have been arguing about can be distilled into the following statements: Hitler was an irrational psycopath. Stalin was a somewhat more rational psycopath. The Allied political and military high commands were were more or less completely dominated, espescially in the pre-War years, by self-deluded idiots of the finest quality. We're faced with the problem of trying to recreate a historical situation that was created by massive amounts of, at best, uninformed blind stupidity, and at worst by the kind of sick lunacy that would make Michael Meyers or the Jigsaw Killer blush. So at what point do we draw the line and say, "I'm not going to play while handicapped by that particular mistake." I think that this is the problem facing Doomtrader as he recreates hundreds of historical events. And this is the bottom line - who do we see ourselves as "role playing" when we play RtV? Is it Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler or Stalin, or is it Eisenhower, Alanbrooke, Keitel or Zhukov? The problem, IMHO, is that if you're trying to play as one of the political leaders, espescially as Hitler, the war probably would never have happened! No rational, more or less omniscient, leader of Germany would have let himself get into the hopeless strategic position that Hitler, in his psycotic madness, insisted in leading Germany. It is more or less a truism that democracys do not fight wars of conquest. Perhaps a more accurate statement is that non-pathogenic leaders do not fight wars of conquest. Hitler's achievements gained while taking advantage of the idiocy of the (primarily) English idiots in the three or four years before 1939, can argueably be seen as advantageous to Greater Germany, but it is widely agreed that he finally miscalculated when he pushed the Danzig/Gdansk question into open war with Poland. After that error, each miscalculation was wildly larger and more suicidal, until it seems likely that he was actively courting the final Götterdämmerung. But without that insanity, do we even have a simulation? So I have discovered that I have changed my whole outlook on the question of who are we playing when we play WW2:RtV, and as a consequence, my position on the question of "historical events." The challenge in this situation is not seeing if we could win the war for Germany if we (as a "rational, more or less omniscient, leader of Germany") had control of the situation from September 1939. The challenge is, can we win the war standing in Generalfeldmarschall Keitel's shoes. Because, if a Churchill, a Mussolini, or even a Stalin (for instance) had been in Hitler's place, the World War would never have taken place. You can't have only some of the lunacy. Well, perhaps you can. Assume that the March 1943 assasination attempt by Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff had succeeded. We know that the conspiracy that led up to the July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler was resolved to seek immediate peace with the Allies. But a lot had changed for Germany in the 15 months since the Spring of '43. What would the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht have done in March, 1943 if Hitler was dead? Now that would be a real challenging scenario.
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