Why do so many people play s the Germans?

[Russbrad]

The truth be known:the largest lion is no match for largest tiger.

[achappelle]

Winning Generals and Long History unbroken Wins In War ..

Got one string of numbers for ya.....


1812

Go 'Nucks

[MalleusDei]

>The US just has so short history and so many wars less it is like making
>final arguments of their history based on Vietnam war only.

Remember that we won every single battle of battalion size or larger in Vietnam. People act like Vietnam was an American military defeat; in rerality, we consistently kicked Viet Cong and NVA ass. After Tet, the Viet Cong essentially no longer existed as a fighting force - and yet the Leftist media still portrayed Tet as an American loss and the Democrats in Washington forced us to abandon the Vietnamese to the Communists.

>Americans wouldn't have a country if Franch hadn't sent their fleet to Yorktown
>during the Revolutionary War.

Sure we would have, it just would have taken a bit longer. And we paid the French back for that just by coming in with them against the English in 1812, and we overpaid when we saved France from the Germans in 1918. We can even leave out us taking France away from the Germans in 1944 and giving it back to the French.

>btw you are from Baton Rouge!
>it mean "red staff" in french,
>watch out it must be a French invasion

We call it "Red Stick" or just "The Stick." And we HAVE been invaded by the French, my friends have names like Guidry, Melancon, Guillory, DeVille, Fontenot, Broussard, and Bourgeois.

As to the stick itself, excerpted from the HISTORY OF BATON ROUGE http://www.ci.baton-rouge.la.us/History/historyBR.htm):

"In early 1699, a French expedition headed by Pierre le Moyne, whose title was Sieur d'Iberville, first saw the site on which the City of Baton Rouge is now located...the party first saw the bluffs of Baton Rouge on March 17, 1699...D'Iberville and his men reached a small stream at the
right of the [Mississippi] river..its banks were separated by a reddened, 30-foot-high maypole with several heads of fish and bear attached in sacrifice and dripping with blood that the natives had sunk there to mark the land line between the two [Indian] nations...the red stick the French saw was probably used both as a boundary marker and for ceremonial purposes. D'Iberville called this area Baton Rouge (French for red stick), and hence the region's name was born."

[General Mayhem]

Originally posted by MalleusDei:
>The US just has so short history and so many wars less it is like making
>final arguments of their history based on Vietnam war only.

Remember that we won every single battle of battalion size or larger in Vietnam. People act like Vietnam was an American military defeat; in rerality, we consistently kicked Viet Cong and NVA ass. After Tet, the Viet Cong essentially no longer existed as a fighting force - and yet the Leftist media still portrayed Tet as an American loss and the Democrats in Washington forced us to abandon the Vietnamese to the Communists.

"

It is question of opinion, but I think
winning a conflict is lot more than killing
huge numbers of enemy. Problem with US
involvement in Vietnam to me it seems is
that whole policy was build around idea
that U.S. troops were there to support
South Vietnamese, and South Vietnamese
would both support and defend themselves
against North Vietnam. Especially after
U.S. forces would be gone.

Far as I've understood, South Vietnamese
were less than anxious to fight and they
even didn't helped lot of US forces. Nor
did US forces enjoy unquestionable support
among local population.

Thus while U.S. forces had big number of
enemy's killed, it all went to drain because
half of reason being there was just to support South Vietnam to it's own feets.
Which never materialized.

So while US won the battles, it lost the
conflict because military victories achieved didn't compensate the problems elsewhere
in overall strategy.

[KG Erwin]

I just want to add that in the posts I've seen regarding the SPWaW long campaigns, most players (myself included), take on the role of a German kampfgruppe commander, starting in Poland in Sept 1939 and fighting to the bitter end. Politics aside, most of us probably agree that given proper leadership and their marvelous toys, the Germans should have won. I fully agree with Kurt's earlier post in that the desire to rewrite history is one of the biggest parts of wargaming's appeal, so this shouldn't be any great surprise. Don't forget that the main selling points of all of the old Avalon Hill board games was that very thing--"can YOU do better than your historical counterparts and rewrite history as either (Montgomery or Rommel, Napoleon or Wellington, Meade or Lee, Alexander or Darius, etc.)"

[ June 27, 2001: Message edited by: KG Erwin ]

[ June 27, 2001: Message edited by: KG Erwin ]

[sven]

Originally posted by KG Erwin:
I just want to add that in the posts I've seen regarding the SPWaW long campaigns, most players (myself included), take on the role of a German kampfgruppe commander, starting in Poland in Sept 1939 and fighting to the bitter end. Politics aside, most of us probably agree that given proper leadership and their marvelous toys, the Germans should have won. I fully agree with Kurt's earlier post in that the desire to rewrite history is one of the biggest parts of wargaming's appeal, so this shouldn't be any great surprise. Don't forget that the main selling points of all of the old Avalon Hill board games was that very thing--"can YOU do better than your historical counterparts and rewrite history as either (Montgomery or Rommel, Napoleon or Wellington, Meade or Lee, Alexander or Darius, etc.)"

[ June 27, 2001: Message edited by: KG Erwin ]

[ June 27, 2001: Message edited by: KG Erwin ]

K.G. you are ignoring the fact that Darth Shicklegruber's country was outproduced and outnumbered(a bad combo)by vast proportions. It is okay to fantasize about saving the Reich(I guess??:rolleyes),but to say they 'should have won'is engaging in fantasy. They had no hope after getting on the wrong side of us AND IVAN, but if you want to pretend they had a prayer have at it.

regards,
sven

[ June 27, 2001: Message edited by: sven ]

[Tom Terror]

Originally posted by MalleusDei:
Remember that we won every single battle of battalion size or larger in Vietnam. People act like Vietnam was an American military defeat; in rerality, we consistently kicked Viet Cong and NVA ass. After Tet, the Viet Cong essentially no longer existed as a fighting force ...

Right. But this is no valid point. According to your theory one could come to the conclusion that it doesn´t matter if you´re finally defeated if you only win enough battles during the whole conflict.

But i must agree from a pure military point of view you could win battle after battle without being actually defeated but loosing the war or conflict due to economical or political reasons. Of course this is strongly simplified.


Tom

[General Mayhem]

Originally posted by Tom Terror:



Right. But this is no valid point. According to your theory one could come to the conclusion that it doesn´t matter if you´re finally defeated if you only win enough battles during the whole conflict.

But i must agree from a pure military point of view you could win battle after battle without being actually defeated but loosing the war or conflict due to economical or political reasons. Of course this is strongly simplified.


Tom

I think entering a battle is not meaning
of war. Every conflict has a goal. Battles
are really only important in relation
what they achieve concerning overall
goal.

Like Sun Tzu has said, purpose of warfare
is not to destroy enemy, but to make his
plan(whatever they are) futile so that
one can implement own plans.

Killing lot of enemy troops doesn't help
if the plan why you're doing the battles doesn't work, but enemys plan does work
despite heavy casualties.

[JTGEN]

Good example of winning a battle -loosing a war comes from when Russia conquered Finland from the Swedes. Swedish troops kept retreting in front of superior enemy force. They retreated for a long time, and when they finally fought, they won. But by that time the Russians had most of Finland in control. That is what you get when you put a logistics general in charge of army. (if I remember correctly)

[MalleusDei]

The job of the military is to win battles in the field. We did that, and did it very successfully. The politicians' job was to turn those military victories into something politically benficial, and in that they failed utterly and miserably.

As to South Vietnamese fighting ability/determination, it varied widely - from the likes of one ARVN senior officer who never, ever left his safe underground bunker to one ARVN junior officer who took on NVA tanks with small arms and grenades virtually by himself and died doing it.

Part of the problem was that the U.S., due to its relationship with France, was also viewed by many Vietnamese as a colonial power - even thought we were not one - and locals/natives who work with a colonial power are often viewed as collaborator scum by the locals/natives who don't. Add to that the fact that most of the Vietnamese that we dealt with (as officers, government officials, etc.) were from the Gallicized (Francized?) Catholic Vietnamese upper class elite, who were very unpopular with the large mass of Vietnamese Buddhist peasants, and you have a situation where the people who were running the South Vietnamese government and army didn't have a lot of support from the people.

We didn't understand this very well at the time, and trying to tell Marvin the ARVN (ARVN = Army of the Republic of Viet Nam = "the South Vietnamese Army") that he should stand and fight with us because this was his land and it was being invaded by Communists usually just puzzled poor Buddhist peasant Marvin, who was wondering just what the heck he was doing with a gun in the field in a conscript unit run by a Catholic French-educated ARVN CO (with American colonial advisers) fighting his own cousins who were wokrking with the NVA to restore Vietnam to the Vietnamese anyway. Marvin, by and large (and there were notable exceptions), had no interest in fighting his cousins whasoever and just wanted to stay alive and get home.

When it came to non-military issues we really - sadly - didn't know what we were dealing with or what we were doing.

[Arto]

Originally posted by DataKing:
The Germans fought against Poland, Norway, The Low Countries, France, England, America, Russia, and the Balkan countries. No other option gives you such a wide array of opponents.

(Did somebody already correct this?)
And Germans fought against the Finns too. After Finland and Soviet Union signed peace -44 Finns had to get the Germans away from Lappland. Germans didn´t leave as fast as the Soviet Union would have wanted and Finns had to start a new war, The War of Lappland.

I´m so patriotic that I have to play as Finns. But I like to play WWII campaign so I have to play as Germans. Finland is quite good country, we stopped twice Red-Armys major assault and bet the Germans and stayed indepented.

[Del]

Give me a Wolverine any day. I like them dogs too.

Uh...a Wolverine is not a dog. It's from the same family as weasels, polecats and skunks. It is a bad tempered squat, nasty, intelligent ball of fury. DO NOT say, "here doggy" and attempt to pet one. No self respecting Wolverine would have anything to do with a dog.

I like to see combat vehicles that are named after undomesticated animals. Seems the Germans did too. Not many of those in the dog world.

[Tom Terror]

Originally posted by Del:


I like to see combat vehicles that are named after undomesticated animals. Seems the Germans did too. Not many of those in the dog world.

Are you talking about undomasticated animals in the dog world? Oh well there are:
wolf, hyena, fox, dingo (ok, ex-domasticated )coyote, jackal, dhole.
Probably they weren´t chosen to name Tanks etc. because of their natural behaviour. They don´t look as impressive as tigers, panthers and lions and some of them eat the leftovers of others...
But anyhow they are usually very efficient in hunting down their prey in packs (foxes excluded), they are team worker - cats aren´t.
Knowing this it is actually rather surprising that the excellent german tanks were named after cats which go hunting in the night, in the woods and (!) alone (lions excluded, but male lions do nothing anyway).


Tom

[sven]

Originally posted by Del:


Uh...a Wolverine is not a dog. It's from the same family as weasels, polecats and skunks. It is a bad tempered squat, nasty, intelligent ball of fury. DO NOT say, "here doggy" and attempt to pet one. No self respecting Wolverine would have anything to do with a dog.

I like to see combat vehicles that are named after undomesticated animals. Seems the Germans did too. Not many of those in the dog world.

Not true. Eskimos keep them as pets if they are captured when kits.

[JTGEN]

Tom Terror :
Knowing this it is actually rather surprising that the excellent german tanks were named after cats which go hunting in the night, in the woods and (!) alone (lions excluded, but male lions do nothing anyway).


The German tanks were so good they did not need such a big pack

[sven]

Originally posted by JTGEN:
Tom Terror :
Knowing this it is actually rather surprising that the excellent german tanks were named after cats which go hunting in the night, in the woods and (!) alone (lions excluded, but male lions do nothing anyway).


The German tanks were so good they did not need such a big pack

Which is why they lost....

[JTGEN]

They lost because their industrial production capacity and the natural resource situation were not big enough against the opponents ones.

[MalleusDei]

Check out rec.pets.wolverines on USENET.

[AmmoSgt]

Come on Guys ..be nice Germany was only created in 1871 ..they are new to this international stuff .. even if you go back to the 1st Reich in 1740 the U S Contential Army used the Hessians for Practice at Trenton .. give the new Kid a break and quit sic'in yer Dogs on the kittycats ..

[sven]

Originally posted by JTGEN:
They lost because their industrial production capacity and the natural resource situation were not big enough against the opponents ones.

They lost because one panther. or Tiger cannot cope with seven shermans, or 11 T34s. Saying that the Germans were 'better' at war is kind of like saying that the Bengals are great at football. Ivan and Uncle Sam smoked Fritz.

regards,
sven