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Western Europe





The British paras return by boat to Folkstone for tea, medals and new parachutes. I hope the Yank paras on R'town hold out so I can swap them out next turn. Only other action was to damage and retreat the pz xxx where the 16-6 US mech is now, and to bing over Eisenhower and 2 more tank xxx. I need to start expanding the pocket next turn. It looks daunting but the allied air forces can pound any axis unit into a state of marshmallow. There's always a period of attrition at this stage of an invasion but the allied air supremacy ends up deciding the day. In addition, paraspam is a great destroyer of units. I only have 7 para units on the map at the moment, but more are in training.............

Sveint has got a lot of his strength here, so France is now looking more tempting for a 2nd invasion. I have the land forces and LCs. Also, as you can see from the Russia picture, there seem to be a lot fewer axis units in the AGN + AGC areas. I think he may be moving some units out as well as not replacing any of his losses.

Finally, in case anyone is wondering why I left a US inf xxx exposed in the top R corner of the pic, it is actually a Bulgarian xxx. I learned this when I tried to move it. I just hope sveint' troops will be just as confused and attack it. NB I am slightly red/green colour-blind so it may just be me.

Naval action

I forgot to mention that the remnants of the axis fleets committed hari-kiri trying to blockade Amsterdam. They they had nothing else to do...............

Sadly, Evil has triumphed. After the destruction of my invasion of Holland, I can't mount another that would fare any better before '45. The Russians won't get anywhere on their own so I've told sveint that I see no point in continuing. I only have myself to blame for losing and all credit to sveint for his successful strategy. His having masses of spanish and yugoslav xxxs meant that I could not get any real breakthrough in '44 after a promising start.
It's no 1 each so I have suggested that we play the decider when the new patch comes out.

Pity. If you had done a more conventional invasion of France that might have been enough to do the job. I can understand the desire to grab the low country ports. The logistics are bad for the Western Allies without them and it is difficult to get into Germany without those ports. But he was too strong to rush them like that.

There were too many units guarding the coastal ports and other coast hexes of France for any invasion there to be a guaranteed success, especially if the ports had xxxs as garrisons as I had to assume that they did. If I has got ashore somewhere else,, I would then have had far less port capacity and the same problem of being swamped.

There wre almost certainly XXXs in every port, and all the French ones had other units next to them ehich would have prevented any better attacks. Even if I had got ashore in France, I would have been swamped the same way. The only difference would have been my having far less port capacity.............

I wish this game had Mulberries. I supposed you can use the fleet in a pinch to provide supply to units on the coast, but that's not quite the same thing and doesn't help you in the interior.

I don't know. Between trucks, airlift, and coastal supply I think you could have gotten ashore in Normandy and Brittany and kept it. It's easy to isolate those landings from reinforcement by the Axis, especially with the swarm of paratroopers you started with.

But eventually you would have run into a wall from the Low Countries down to Switzerland and he would've made it very hard for you to take the big ports in the Low Countries to drive into Germany. I've done this myself as the Axis. I'm not sure the allies have an answer for this tactic, the logistics are pretty terrible in France.

Some of these channel ports perhaps ought to have larger capacities. Le Havre seems low to me.

If sveint showed a pic showing all the defensive units in that area, you will see that he had all the hexes between the beaches and ports occupied. No way would that enable me to take 1 low rent port if that. and the I think it would have been much harder to gain and hold a foothold of any size, and lack of port capacity would have prevented useful expansion. That's what I concluded after a lot of thought. There wasn't much choice of location when you need 20+ bombers to get ashore and grab a port.

D Day would also have failed in real life without the mulberries.