If you could pick a General Staff, who?

[christian brown]

I would have:

Napoleon as battlefield commander (unsurpassed in all history)
Nelson as naval commander with Nimitz with carrier air (ditto above)
Clausewitz and Machiavelli as political advisers
George Marshall as head logistician
Yamamoto, Schlieffen, Montgomery, plans
Manstein, Guderian, Hannibal, ops
Patton, psyops
Ludendorff, weapons planning/development
Mao Zedong, political activist
Confucias, morale, behavior specialist
"Bomber" Harris, strategic air
Alexander of Macedonia, general counsel, "God of War"........
"Stonewall" Jackson, training, excercises
Henry Ford, industrialization/mobilization
Laurence d'Arabie, partisan activities
Leon Trotsky/Joseph Stalin, Strategic planning
Sherman, breakthrough specialist

Talk about the "dream team"!

Call me crazy.....;

[Tom Grosv]

ORIGINAL: christian brown
"Bomber" Harris, strategic air

Are you sure? I read Armageddon by Max Hastings last year and, if I remember correctly (never a safe bet), he didn't seem too enthusiastic about Harris - fixated that terror bombing of German cities would win the war rather than using Bomber Command to smash synthetic oil production.

[christian brown]

Max Hastings is quite clearly a God of Military History and only a jackass would disagree..............but Harris was able (perhaps slightly ineptly) to push for an all-out bomber offensive that (which rather inneficiently) consumed enormous German resources when other options of facing them were a bit scarce.  Was the campaign effective?  Yes.  Was it as effective as it could have been? No.  Is this Monday-morning quarterbacking?  Indeed.  When you look at the incredible cost associated with punishing the Reich by air (and the lack of other ways to accomplish the same thing) you have to say that is WAS worth it.  BTW, when playing AWD, which is of course a very good game, what do you do as the WA........................?

[Tom Grosv]

ORIGINAL: christian brown
BTW, when playing AWD, which is of course a very good game, what do you do as the WA........................?

Unfortunately, I am not a God of AWD - haven't even played a human player yet. Still, when did experience ever get in the way of an opinion......... strikes me that AWD has done a really good job (better than WAW) of making you agonise over the most efficient targets to go for - factories, rail, resources, uboats, ground units - I guess a good option, not necessarily the best one in every scenario but never a mistake, is to go after German resources. It's always going to hurt them as German factory capacity is usually higher than their resources....unless you can really smash into the factories big time in W Germany. But I'd be interested in the opinions of veteran players.

[cdbeck]

No Sun Tzu?! That's almost heresy!

Personally, I would have Henry V as a Field Commander. But only if I am fighting the French. He did miracles even when vastly outnumbered.

Son of Montfort