Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: color

When you talk about Dunkirk and try to retrieve any conclusion about morale of the british units involved,
it would be wise to first take into consideration the fact that Hitler stopped the panzers dead in their tracks.
I've heard about two theories about this decision:

1) A favour to Gøring so he could bask in the glory of his luftwaffe finish off the british - which he eventually could not do as the luftwarre failed to stop the british evacuation, so that would be an EPIC FAIL there Gøring.

2) Intent by Hitler to allow the British to escape without too much of a humiliation so they would be more receptive to a negotiated peace.

Don't know which is correct, but it's pretty obvious that apart from national morale, there were some factors in that escape which arguably played a sizeable role.

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ORIGINAL: Oleg Mastruko

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ORIGINAL: Smirfy
Could the Russians have lauched attacks like Veritable or Infatuate. These were highly sophisticated operations, morale we are told are to reperesent doctrine. By 1944 the British army was an efficent fighting machine.

Could they? They launched Bagration for god's sake. Let alone half a dozen highly successful offensive operations after that, each of them probably bigger than Veritable and Infatuate taken together.

However let me state again that in this discussion I prefer speaking about MORALE as PURE morale. Obviously, in WITE morale represents all sorts of things, proficiency, training ability, tactical prowess, who knows what else. Obviously, whatever "morale" represents in WITE is highly subjective and flexible, but in pure morale, no army, not even the fanatical Japanese, could beat Germans and Russians IMO. Those two armies are like way above all others.

Since we don't exactly know how morale works in game, we can discuss it only rhetorically, ie "how would I rate morale of some army in some year of WW2 in some hypothetical game".

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By the way the difference between the Berezina and Dunkirk was at Dunkirk the Army survived. A 20th century army 330,000 men was evacuated off a beach, tell me who else achieved a comparable feat?

Solid part of Nappy army survived Berezina, in fact he was waging, and winning, biggest battles in history to date, less than a year after Berezina.

If you want to look at Dunkirk as victory, something I have problems with, then that's more of a navy feat than army. We are talking about army morale here.... Navy games usually don't model morale, but for what it's worth obviously Brit Navy would get very high morale ratings. RAF too. Army, however, IMO does not deserve any such high rating. Again, probably lower than Russians, certainly not bigger (equal would be reasonable compromise).