Sebastian P. Breit's Blog, page 21

Let's Play: Hearts of Iron Doomsday Armageddon: Italy 2

Part 2: I intervene in the Spanish Civil War & create the nation of Ethiopia... which I had conquered only weeks before.

Let's Play: Hearts of Iron Doomsday Armageddon: Italy 1

I'm doing a little "Let's Play" of Hoi 2: DD Arma.The popular vote in this thread fell on Italy, so now I'm trying to do a better job than Il Duce did IRL.

Review - Seelöwe Nord

Review - Seelöwe Nord
Yes, I have done it: I have finally read a novelization of the fictional invasion of Great Britain by Germany. I have tackled the unmentionable sea mammal, as the operation also is called in alternate history circles. Now, the author's words are as good as mine in describing the plot, so here is a quote from Andy Johnson's own webpage about Seelöwe Nord:

Seelöwe Nord is a war novel that tells the alternative history of Operation Sealion, the proposed German invasion of Britain in 1940. In Andy Johnson's debut novel, the invasion actually takes place, but instead of falling on the south coast of England as was expected, the Germans land on the east coast of Yorkshire between Scarborough and Skipsea. The invasion also involves a parachute attack on RAF Driffield and a glider-borne assault against the gun batteries on Spurn Head. In the days following the invasion, the Germans fight their way south-westwards through Holme-on-Spalding Moor in an attempt to cross the River Ouse between Selby and Goole.

While the British forces in the area put up desperate resistance in order to delay the German advance, the British reserves are rushed northwards to deliver a counter-attack, which eventually takes place four days after the German landings. This results in a climactic final battle on both sides of the Ouse in the vicinity of Church Fenton, Cawood and Ricall. In addition to this, the area of Filey Bay, Bridlington and Holme-on-Spalding Moor, become the settings for some spectacular battle sequences, and readers familiar with this part of Yorkshire will be able to follow the action, quite literally, field by field.

The novel is written using the snapshot method, switching between the German and British forces and is written from a soldier's perspective. The colourful language, black humour and sometimes absurd nature of battle, will resonate with serving or former soldiers. The book contains a mixture of historical figures, such as Churchill, General Alan Brooke, and the German Commander of the SS Totenkopf Division, Theodor Eicke. In addition, there are many fictional characters typical of the low level soldiery from both sides.

The historical plan for Operation Sealion.The landings - in reality as well as in Johnson's Seelöwe Nord, are conducted using hastily converted river barges, but that is were the similarities stop.
Instead of landing in Kent and Sussex, where the distance to cross is shortest and the most easy (in relative terms) to defend, Johnson's Germans land in central eastern England, having crossed 250 miles of the North Sea after the Kriegsmarine expended a good number of its already not exactly substantial transport capacity in a maskirovka, a faint against Folkestone and Dover. Why? Apparently because Göring and Himmler have been planting strange ideas in the Führer's head, supporting the already existing desire to defeat Britain with a knock-out blow, and the whole OKW just goes along with it, albeit grudgingly. To cut matters short, the end result is even more predictable than that of the wargames staged on the actual invasion plans. Hint: Germany loses. Badly.

Now, I do have to commend Johnson for stating right away that he does not claim his scenario to be possible. Rather, he simply postulates that within the confines of the story he wrote that simply was the case. But simply saying so does not make the inherent problems go away. In fact, Johnson himself falls back on these problems over the course of the novel: the superiority of the Royal Navy & the immense problems of supplying an invasion force across the open sea. The force the Germans are able to land amounts to roughly four divisions worth of personnel in fighting shape after they have established a beach head.

Seelöwe Nord suffers greatly from this change of location, even though it undeniably offers a gust of fresh air by not repeating the work of half a dozen other authors. Johnson knows the territory featured in the book in great detail, and this intimate knowledge shapes the narrative and combat depicted in it. Still, there never is any sense of urgency of danger to Great Britain itself involved; the reader knows from the start that the Germans will fail. In Johnson's book, this collapse takes a measly but somewhat adequate (given the whole setup) four days. This invasion story sadly offers the reader no suspense.

What it does offer us, though, is a haystack of problems. And for the sake of this review, I will not comment on the inherent infeasability and madness of the whole operation as it is.

No, what Seelöwe Nord offers us are British supermen reminiscent of bad US 1960s war movies. Scores of German elite mountaineers and paratroopers with automatic weapons are mowed down by hodge-podge groups of ill-equipped and ill-supplied, green Home Guard troops. Pillboxes and machinegun trenches go through the German troops like scythes. The same German troops who would be hardened combat veterans who - going by the very insightful plans and recon photographs reproduced in William Foot's The Anti-Invasion Landscapes of England, 1940 - actually had a very good idea of what they would have been faced with, defense-wise. I'm not complining because I have a German bias; I'm complaining because it further takes away any sense of dread or urgency of your story when your ad hoc groups of ill-equipped old men and young boys can so easily inflict heavy casualties on a trained and prepared enemy. If the last months of WW2 showed us one thing, it is that the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth were not able to do anything remotely like that in the defense of Germany.

Aside from the story concerns, Seelöwe Nord is riddled with editing problems, and I'm saying that as someone whose own novel has been criticized with the words "needs editing" (a problem that has been solved, by the way). But at least I had an editor! Mr. Johnson, apparently, did not, and it shows, much to the novel's detriment. Seelöwe Nord is a self-published novel, using the Spiderwize print-on-demand service. Now, I'm self-pubbed myself, as is an increasing number of authors. But - but! - one thing that has been clear from the very beginning when going the self-pub route is that, well, you have to things yourself. Nobody is going to get you an editor: you have to search one on your own.

In Seelöwe Nord, full stops are missing, names are constantly misspelled ("Kreigsmarine" & "Gunther Prein", just to pick two), hangars become hangers become hangars, and so on. It's especially egregious with regards to German names; nearly half of the names used are either misspelled (constantly missing an "n" at the end of the name, others having vowels switching places) or would have never even existed at all. More than once I was tempted to just give up on the book on this account alone. Not because I'm a name fetishist, but because I like accuracy.

Verdict: 2/5. It's no masterpiece, but it's no Kaiserfront either.
Having ranted about the book for a while now, it is not all bad. It has problems - obvious problems - in its setting and execution, but it also has some high water marks. Johnson writes extremely vivid combat scenes, be they on land or at sea. The man has seen combat himself, and he knows how to portray it. The battles are fast, hard, chaotic and brutal - and hugely entertaining. Johnson is no great word smith, but then I did not really go into this with Shakespearian expectations. I feel had he used his strengths to write a novel with a more plausible and balanced approach - and be that a new take on Sealion in the south, for all I care - this could have been at least a good novel. The way it is - massive editing problems, lack of tension, lack of balance - makes it impossible for me to recommend it in good faith. Nonetheless, Johnson has potential. I hope he gets himself a good editor. I'll be keeping an eye on him.

And one more point: why no ebook? If parts of the money made from Seelöwe Nord really go to military charities, Mr. Johnson could do far better, financially, if he also published it as an ebook in the $2.99-3.99 range!

The War Review, Episode 2: Dresden - The Inferno... OF LOVE?!

Alternate History Moments in Gaming, 1

Today: Italy, 1943

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Europe, 1943. Click to enlarge.
The Hearts of Iron series of games is one of the few great strategy exceptions that keep drawing me back in time after time despite having owned and played them already for ages. With an active modding community and the possibility to play every existing nation of the time period, the games have been going strong ever since they first appeared on the market (though I still prefer Hearts of Iron 2 and its add-ons). Given that the players can chose to lead any nation they wish to, this is the penultimate alterante history game. The screenshot above is from a Hearts of Iron 2 Doomsday Armageddon match, using the excellent Mod34 Revolutions! mod. I played as Italy, and as you can see, history took a turn down a very strange road. The game railroaded me into declaring war on Ethiopia, which I really didn't want to do in the first place: Italian East Africa would have been untenable in case of WW2 breaking out, so I did not want to have to do anything with that corner of the globe. That decision led to me being underprepared when the war actually started, and it took me until the middle of 1936 to beat the Lion of Zion. I immediately withdrew all my forces then and liberated Ethiopia, which created a puppet state allied with Italy I could leave on its own. It's still there in 1943, doing remarkably well.
My overall strategy was to stay out of the big war, whenever it would start, until I had built up my nation and my country. As such, most my efforts up to 1939 were to upgrade the Italian infrastructure and industry rather than my armed forces. Doing so allowed me to boost the basic Italian IC score over 80 points, which opened up a 5th tech team for me. A country can use a max. of 5 tech teams simultaneously to research new technologies; given most nations' industrial bases are limited, only few reach the possible 5 slots.
Meanwhile, history largely took the "official" path. Anschluß, Sudetenland, Nationalist Spain winning (I supported Franco), Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement - everything as it would have been in actual history. 
Then the butterflies began to fly. Germany botched the attack on Poland, taking nearly twice as long as historically to beat the Poles (the Soviet entrance into the war is scripted; it won't happen until Germany holds several Polish key provinces). In a stunningly suicidal move, the Netherlands joined the Allies in December 1939, forcing a German reaction with one obvious conclusion: the Netherlands were occupied by Germany. Meanwhile, Germany decides against preparing for Weserübung, the attacks on Denmark & Norway, meaning the AI player left them alone, leading to a peculiar stalemate on the Western Front. Belgium was neutral, wedged between Germany and France - but Germany did not attack!

For more than two years, absolutely nothing happened between the Allies and the Axis (which, at that point, included Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria). I used the time to slowly build up my own forces to be ready to strike at southern France, Tunisia and Egypt once the stalemate broke - but it didn't! I was too weak to challenge an Allied power on my own, so in the early months of 1942 I chose to seek glory in Yugoslavia. 
Bad move. My intel was subpar, putting the Yugoslavian forces at less then 20 divisions with negligeable air support. What I faced when I came crashing in through northern Yugoslavia amounted to about 30 divisions with good artillery support, fighter cover and good positions along the country's hills and numerous rivers (terrain has a far greater impact in Mod34! than it has in the vanilla version of Hearts of Iron 2). Numerically, we were about evenly matched on the ground.

Luckily for me, I had an ace up my sleeve: three armored divisions and a superior air force. Slowly, I began to pound my way south-eastwards, into Yugoslavia, but the campaign was mired in setbacks, the worst being the loss of two army corps in Albania to a Yugo counter attack, costing me six divisions and roughly 110,000 men & their equipment.
Then summer came, and the world as I knew it went to hell in a handbasket: the USSR declared war on a Germany whose troops were largely stationed on its western border in that infinite stalemate with France. What followed was the most epic destruction of Germany I've ever witnessed in all the Hearts of Iron games I've ever played. In less than four months, the Soviet juggernaut steamrolled and annexed Romania, overran Hungary and Slovakia and conquered Germany up to the Ruhr area. In four months! At the same time, Greece (!) and Portugal joined the Axis (apparently, the AI decided it was time for national suicide), and Spain offered me an alliance, which I gladly took. Quite frankly, as crazy as the world was getting, I could use every backup I could get.
And this is where we are in February 1943. Southern Europe is dominated by an Italo-Iberian Alliance. The USSR has created a series of puppet states to secure its flanks. It's here where the scripting of the game reaches its limits: for the "post war" order to arise, part of Germany had to be conquered by the USA, so western Germany for a few days was occupied by the US - even though the two countries had not been at war!
I'm not sure if I'll continue this particular game of HoI 2, since my options are largely exhausted by now. My alliance is too weak to tackle any of the bigger players, and any offensive move against third parties like Turkey will most likely draw the Allies or the Soviets in. I could probably steamroll Greece as the last Axis holdout, but all in all I guess I'll just hunker down and fortify my northern border - bloody communists.

The War Review, Episode 1

Review - Spike TV's "Alternate History", Episode 1

I can only imagine this to be a picture of a Spike TV executive.
Review - Spike TV's "Alternate History", Episode 1
The Nazis Rule the USA
I'm not an American, so my knowledge about stateside TV is based on what I am told by friends and relatives. Nonetheless, Spike as well as the Syfy Channel are household nomes de crap even on my side of the great pond. As such, I did not go into this with great hope, and my friend Mitro already said a good deal about the show I am about to take a look at.
The episode - which has a runtime of barely more than 20 minutes - opens with "illegals" (Blacks and Jews, complete with the yellow Judenstern the Nazis used) trying to flee into Mexico across a border guarded by US Nazi troops (who seem to be using G36 assault rifles). They are caught, and an SS officer arrives at the scene, scowling and spitting at them while the soldiers give the Nazi salute. And right there the show jumps off the nearest cliff. Questions:Why would the Nazi US try to stop undesirables from fleeing when Nazi policy actually hoped such "elements" would leave the country on their own account?
For that matter, why are there still Jews in the US after 70 years?
While it's nice to see Spike blow their special effects budget on nighttime helicopter gunships, if we assume that for some reason the Nazi US doesn't want their undesirables to leave (which they would), we actually know how they would do it: they would fence them in, like any other totalitarian regime. There would be a manned and militarized border fence. No need for a helicopter and dirt bike chase.
Why hasn't Nazi fashion changed in 70 years? Am I really to believe that an SS officer in his black uniform - including the heavy black leather coat - would operate in the Arizona desert?
There is so much stupid in this show that I've got to address is point by point. We are two minutes into the show, and I already hate it.

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1930s SS uniform, Nazi USA, 2011.
Then we switch to the inauguration of the new President of the United States (the show never really gets around to explaining how that works, considering it states at another point that the US would be annexed; as a rule, annexed nations don't have their own governments) who claims that the nation has to stand firm against the Jews and Blacks and homosexuals, and then declares "I am proud to be your new Führer!"

That's the point where I check if the bleeding from nose and ears from my hemorrhaging brain has already begun. Nope, not yet. Pity. Why would the President of the United States call himself that?! Führer is short for Anführer, which simply means leader. It's not a specific political title. Hitler himself used Leader (Führer, for the NSDAP party) and Reichschancellor (Kanzler, for his national function) as his full title. Was the PotUS also the leader of some kind of US Nazi Party? We never find out.

And what about the "Jews and Black and homosexuals"? Why would they even still be there in the first place, after 70 years ?

Contrary to the peabrained understanding of history used by Spike, the Nazis were not primarily about extermination. Historically, they were more than happy to slowly tighten the screws on the sort of people they did not want inside their society, with the straightforward idea being that at some point they would leave. Deportations, population swaps, expatriations - these were all tools used instead of and before the holocaust by the Nazis. Germany's Jewish population decreased from ~750,000 in 1933 to less than 200,000 in 1939 largely without violent excesses (except for the infamous Reichskristallnacht progrom). And even the holocaust itself appears to be something created more out of the entanglements the Nazis unwillingly created rather than a long-planned policy, as I have mentioned in this review.

It's far more likely in context that most the Blacks would have been deported to Liberia. However, a 3rd Reich victorious could just as easily have realized the Madagaskar Plan for the Jews within its borders. It would not have had any perceived need to continue the extermination.
We then cut to our first "expert", 1st Sgt. William Bodette, USMC, claiming that life in the Nazi USA would be horrible. I use the term "expert" rather losely for the show, and for good reason. I do not doubt that Sgt. Bodette has served his country valiantly, but he really does not know what he is talking about.

The simple fact is this: for the vast majority of the population - which would be constituted of Whites - life under Nazi rule would be rather uneventful. Pleasant even. And I am saying this specifically with history as we know it in mind. Why do you think the Nazi regime had so much support in Germany before the war started? Because, for the average Joe Shmoe, it worked! Job security, low crime, the perception of safety, mild wealth, paid vacations, the possibility of owning an affordable car - Hitler and the Nazis did not enchant the Germans by talking bollocks about the Jews. People followed him because his regime showed tangible results. And I serverely doubt that would be different for a majority "Aryan" United States - not after 4 to 5 generations of social engineering & propaganda.
Lets do the time warp!
Normandy. It is D-Day, and the invasion fails because of... Me 262 jet fighters! Yeah, really. Even though the Allies historically enjoyed complete air superiority, with less than 200 Luftwaffe planes in France being even operational at that time, the Me 262 saves the day. Small problem though: the Allies would not have launched Operation Overlord if they had not been in command of the skies!
This whole burning stupid brings us to the second "expert", Kevin Hymel of the US Army Combat Studies Institute. Just a quick note ahead of the dissection: if that's the caliber of guys doing theoretical work for the US armed forces it's no wonder NATO has no chance of winning in Afghanistan...Mr. Hymel claims:that the Me 262 could go twice as fast as Allied fighters;
The actual speed difference is about 250kph max, with the caveat that the Merlin engine on a Spitfire could run for ages while the jet engines on the Me 262 would stop doing so for good after ~20 hours because of the subpar materials the Germans were forced to use in them.
that the Me 262 was armed with machine guns and a cannon in its nose;
The actual plane was never armed with any other gun than the Mk 108 30mm automatic cannon, of which it carried four (4) in its nose. No machineguns.
the Nazis were test-flying the Me 262 as a jet by 1941;
By that time they were flying prop-driven testbeds because the jet engines were not ready (and wouldn't be for quite some time).
the Me 262 would go on to attack the invasion fleet;
Even the fightebomber variant of the Me 262 does not have the capacity with its unguided bombs to make much of a dent on a fleet full of hundreds of warships and thousand of support vessels.
And on we go in the "March of the Stupid", with V2's being launched from towed launch containers from submarines while the narration goes "It's an undisputed fact that the Nazis tested submarine-launched long-range missiles in 1942". Again, reality looks a bit different. What the Germans did test in 1942 were makeshift Nebelwerfer rockets bolted onto the decks of submarines, namely the Wurfgerät 41 - which has a range of less than two and half kilometers. Long-range, my ass!

But it gets better! Those V2s carry nukes which destroy Boston and New York, and the US quickly surrenders. Now, leaving aside the inherent unreliability of the V2 model which made the missile likely to blow up inside its swaying launch container, the German nuclear program was never even close to building a working fission bomb. And even if it did, two nukes would not have kicked the US out of the war, not with the USA's own nuclear program nearing completion. In fact, Germany and Japan both fought on when most of its urban centers lay in ruins. Why would the US throw in the towel at that point?

Let's do the time warp...again!
Well, Hitler has implausibly beaten the US, and now remakes the country in his image. Despite the fact that he never really cared for the United States. But it's got to be true because Kevin Hymel claims the Russians found a globe with a swastika painted over the US in Hitler's bunker!

Anyway, the US subsequently becomes the global industrial powerhouse (Spike TV ignores that it already filled that role before the war...) because of...wait for it... slave labour! Which, despite all actual evidence, its not only cheap but also effective. Fact is, slave labour was only grudgingly accepted in Germany because of the mapower constraints the war effort imposed on the male population of fighting age. And of the 11 million foreign workers, not all were really slave labourers comparable to concentration camp inmates. The show then postulates that slave labour would be welcomed by US corporations, ignoring one mighty factor of the Nazi power structure: the Deutsche Arbeitsfront.

The Deutsche Arbeitsfront was the forced union of all labour unions and was one of the biggest players inside Nazi Germany, guaranteeing worker rights, vacations, payments, benefits etc. for all German employees. The same would be true for a Nazi USA. In fact, with an American Labor Front, you would probably end up on the average with better working conditions for the majority than many US employees enjoy today! An American Labor Front would pretty much limit the amount of slave labour done - to further its own power(base).

Anyway, let's wrap this up. There are a couple more points, like the Nazis pushing computer technology (again based on a faulty example of them using punchcards to round up Jews by 1934), and then the USMC sergeant claims eventually the people would rise up and send the Germans packing because... freedom, liberty, Mel Gibson and shit. Me personally - employing that little thing known as common sense -, I find such a revolt as implausible as the whole scenario in the first place. Just how likely do you think is it that a population living in an at least moderately wealthy nation that has been thoroughly indoctrinated for 70 years would revolt? Mind you, we're not talking about teh former Soviet block countries, stratified by class and economically run down, but a majority white USA that's economically powerful, offering wealth, security and technological progress to its Aryan population!

None of the things the show postulates make any sense, not in any perceivably framework. Where are the Russians (which should have had the full attention of the Germans nuclear program)? What about the British Empire? What about Germany itself? Questions to which we don't get any answers. And going by the answers this show did provide, maybe we're better off that way. The show sucks. It's an intellectual trainwreck. Alternate history is far too a complex issue for a 20 minute TV show; especially one that caters to the dumbest of the dumb. If you like the idea of alternate history, either don't watch it, or watch it to make fun of it.

Airships!

So, what have we learned? That an airship with a top ceiling of 20,000 feet is out of the range of enemy missiles. Gee, and Lockheed really is a defense contractor? In what century? The 19th?

Just so you know: the newest generation of Russian SAMs (the S-400 based 40N6 missiles) have service ceilings of up to 550 thousand feet...

Status Update

All right, some of you may be wondering what's up with my review schedule since I haven't really posted something new in a while, especially not the reviews I promised. The answer is easy: Company of Heroes Gold Edition. The game is old but fun (and there really haven't been any like it during the past three years) and has been occupying most of my time lately (because it tended to crash, a lot). So, what I'll do next (once I've finished it) is I'll write my first WW II Game Review.

Giveaway

I've just put the copies of the two lucky winners into the mail. Since they're both being shipped to international customers I hope you understand it may take some time till you get your's.