Matrix Games Forums

Hi all!

Ran across a situation while playing the CP, that I think might in reality be a bit unhistorical.

I was trying to deal with those pesky Serbs once and for all, and the Austria-Hungarians and the CP-allied Bulgarians had `em surrounded. But while the Bulgarian HQ unit had no Offensive Points to keep his troops moving, the two AH HQs in the area had one Offensive Point apiece. So, I sent one of the AH HQs to the Bulgarians, and used an Offensive Point from a Austrian-Hungarian HQ to get the Bulgarian troops to engage the Serbs.

Now, this seems a little flawed and unhistorical to me.

Shouldn't there be some issues with one nation's HQ leading another nation's troops? Language barriers and such? And what about nations that have some bad blood in their past? For example, would Bulgarian troops take kindly to a Turkish leader pushing them into battle? What about a Italian leading French troops? etc, etc.

Thoughts?
//TB

There were many cases of multi-national armies - Germans leading Turks in the Dardanelles and Palestine, there was a Turkish Corps or 2 on the Russian front in 1916, and of course Austrians and Germans fairly mixed up along the Russian and Italian fronts.  There were Russian troops in France (2 Brigades IIRC), Romanian troops served in Russian armies after teh Romanian collapse, and Russians were surrounded with Romanians in Sophia during that campaign.  The British and French sent divisions in Italy.  Portuguese troops served in a British army, Greeks served with Serbs, French and British at Salonika, French and British (and ANZAC) troops went ashore at Gallipoli.

You could try to work some kind of rules, but in general it seems they just got on and did it so it's easier to let them do so.

Most TE generals would have spoken French, and I suspect a lot of CP generals would also have spoken French - plus German was a common language in Eastern Europe with its widespred german populations (since ethnically cleansed in the modern parlance).  Foreign high level commanders only needed to talk to the "native" generals - there was no need for them to speak directly to the troops themselves.