Edgar Allen Ho posted:

The whole "lol USA so late to the War" poo poo is absolute bullshit.

Every Ally was absolutely fine up until the point that they themselves were attacked.

HEY GUNS posted:

losing that many people in six months in our second foreign engagement ever was a big deal

Gnoman posted:

And then proceeded to do essentially nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War


The only significant British contributions to the war between the invasion of Poland and the invasion of the Low Countries was landing troops in Norway.

There was a fair bit of fighting at sea, but that was it - and most of those actions were caused by Germany pushing.

HEY GUNS posted:

losing that many people in six months in our second foreign engagement ever was a big deal

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

The great war actually helped with that. We ran out of dudes to name army bases after and went “welllll poo poo- Fort Lee it is!”

Also I can maintain dumb hot takes about ww2 while having family that was jewing it up in Alsace back then- I don’t need to be told what the wars did to France.

Polyakov posted:

Its a weird take on the matter, given that Britain did precisely what it had planned to do, which was take the Germans to town at sea but the idea of the BEF pushing into germany is an absolute farce. You can take potshots at the French if you like as the major standing army was nominally their bag, but i can sympathise with their motives and constraints that lead to them not doing that.

bewbies posted:

For something like Hearts of Iron, there isn't a whole lot of training value there. The game has a lot of engine limitations, and it is designed to be accessible to a mass audience, not to be brutally realistic. In other words, they eliminate a lot of the severe irritants that commanders and staffs have to deal with real world in order to make the game tolerable for your average guy with a computer. The engine seems to have some mechanical flaws as well....one think I remember is you could dominate the world's oceans by building a giant fleet of cruisers. Building divisions is also really...weird, and very divorced from how things are in the real world.

JcDent posted:

Could you elaborate on that?

Zorak of Michigan posted:

I get pissed about the overall incoherence of French policy toward Germany. I understand why they wanted to avoid another war, but thinking that they were going to do so through the infallible two-step plan of "impose harsh terms" followed by "welcome Germany back to the family of nations when they rearm in violation of said treaty" was never realistic.

Zorak of Michigan posted:

And you just pile battalions together into a division, with no reference to regiments or brigades. In real life chain of command within the division is not a trivial matter.

SeanBeansShako posted:

I imagine unlike video games in real life you are dealing with graft, politics of the civil and military kind, budget and just the weird social nature of humans to make it a lot harder to organize such things.

feedmegin posted:

They weren't really keen on this bit at all, to be honest, but in order to do something about it they needed the backing of the rest of the international community, particularly Britain, and they didn't get it.

Basically, the divisions between the Allies post-1918 give the worst possible result; a relatively chill Versailles and then you might avoid Nazism and revanchism taking over in Germany; conversely, going Full Morgenthau and/or occupying the country any time it does anything that looks dodgy, well, the long-term results are probably not going to be good but in the short term Germany would never be strong enough to launch a new war.

Ainsley McTree posted:

There’s an old SNES game called Pacific Theater of Operations where you periodically have a strategy negotiation minigame in which you compete with the politicians and the European theater commander for strategy goals and resource allocation. It was a neat gimmick that I feel like I never see Grand strategy games do enough.

Squalid posted:

hold up:

what the heck is happening in this avatar:

sullat posted:

Been playing Ultimate General Civil War and I just mash my brigades together with no regards to division and corps organization. It's much easier to win when you have a bird's eye view of the map and can send orders instantly with a few clicks.

bewbies posted:

The Virginia Historical Society isn't...bad, as southern civil war history concerns go. They've actually, albeit gently, started to push back pretty hard against the lost cause and states' rights stuff. Which, probably unsurprisingly, led to a bunch of angry southerners starting a new historical society that focused hard on the "southern perspective" (war was not about slavery and gallant southern heroes didn't own slaves and all that).

I dunno why or how politicians got involved but I'm guessing their motivations were not as academically pure as the VHSs were.



Also I just now realized that excellent movie Wargames came out like 3 months before the Petrov thing happened.

Kemper Boyd posted:

Playing Ultimate General: Gettysburg against someone who has no idea of how ACW-era tactics work is quite an experience.

Kemper Boyd posted:

Playing Ultimate General: Gettysburg against someone who has no idea of how ACW-era tactics work is quite an experience.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

Also the French had other decent policy reasons to switch gears and allow at least the initial steps of German military rebuilding, which had the perverse effect of making things worse and making it harder to intervene against the later stages they really didn't like.

Right after the Great War, the French decided not to pursue the wholesale breakup of Germany, but wouldn't have shed any tears if it had happened anyways. It didn't happen then, and by the mid 20s the French had gotten a good look at what collapsing empires meant, between Austo-Hungary and the Ottomans, and the partial dismemberment of the Russian Empire. They were a lot less sanguine about having that sort of thing happening across the border by then. Even worse - in the mind of the French governments of the time at least - was a red revolution taking over and a Communist Germany teaming up with the Soviet Union.

So with their allies not interested in backing direct intervention, normalizing the Weimar Republic and letting its military reorganize and increase its effectiveness to at least head off internal revolt was the least of several evils. It backfired badly on everyone, obviously.

zoux posted:

I almost went with Joesph Hooker

HEY GUNS posted:

imagine the burnside/hooker matchup

zoux posted:

Comrade Gorbash posted:

Right after the Great War, the French decided not to pursue the wholesale breakup of Germany, but wouldn't have shed any tears if it had happened anyways. It didn't happen then, and by the mid 20s the French had gotten a good look at what collapsing empires meant, between Austo-Hungary and the Ottomans, and the partial dismemberment of the Russian Empire. They were a lot less sanguine about having that sort of thing happening across the border by then.

MikeCrotch posted:

The two real big problems for the French post WWI were that they owed the US a shitton of money and the US was demanding repayment in full, and that the US refused to entertain the notion of ensuring French security against Germany, instead preferring to keep the former Allies at arms length across the Atlantic. This meant that the French had to squeeze every cent out of Germany that they could through reparations and occupied territory in order to keep up debt repayments, while at the same time making sure Germany couldn't rearm by whatever means necessary. Obviously this did not work out well in terms of Franco-German relations in the long term.

feedmegin posted:

Caveat of course - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhenish_Republic

Hunt11 posted:

It is kind of amazing just how horribly the US handled WWI. If they had just stuck out of it and let both sides just grind themselves down to dust then step in for ceasefire talks then Europe would not have become so much kindling for it all to be repeated twenty years later.