• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Hell yeah.

After 2 days of reading I have finally caught up with this AAR. Excellent so far..
But one thing has been buggering me..

Tanks?? No tanks.. Can't believe it :rofl:
 
They'd certainly be a waste of valuable research and IC... but I'd still like to see some. Maybe he could license some from his useless ally?
 
Yeah, maybe I'm the fool..

I usually play as Germany only, haven't played the other factions. I usually build stuff for flavor and my research is usually 50-60 projects, all of them waiting for their time to come ;D
 
He could, but as Myth has stated a couple of times, he doesn't have the doctrines to do anything useful with tanks anyway.

By the way Myth, I hope you not still sitting on the stairs outside your room.:D

Psh. Doctrines only matter if you can find someone to fight.
 
Hey guys, sorry for the long silence. Internet woes, still on the stairs, busy at work and all that. The internet in the stairwell has become reliable, however, at least for the moment, so there will be an update tonight. :p

walnutr113: Withdrawals, you say? Try reading some military history or something! :eek:

Kman211: I think they're about as sorted as they're going to get now. :p

timkoningskelp: Thanks for the compliment! :D

Ruunu3004: Don't need no stinkin' tanks. ;)

Kman211: Precisely. :D

dublish: Nah they're useless. ;)

Ruunu3004: Man I couldn't even afford 50-60 projects. 18 was stretching me back when I had an enormous empire. :p

Kman211: I've actually not played Germany. In fact, Italy's the only country I've played. I don't have time for any other serious games of HoI3. :p

rasmus40: That's true, no doctrines. And yes, I am. Last night I sat here for four hours, my ass hurt once I finally got up. :p

dublish: Which may or may not be the case now. :D

So yeah, update tonight for sure! And this weekend I'll be playing through 1945. It'll be interesting. :eek:
 
The Year of the Masters of War
Part 14: Conclusion

1944 came to end not with a crash but rather quietly actually, with Italian operations in the Balkans coming to a successful end some months prior to the new year and the Germans suddenly taking over the bulk of the war effort and of the reclamation conquered Italian territories in Anatolia. The last weeks of the year marked a period of quiet as Italians, Germans and Soviets all took stock of the situations they found themselves in and made plans for the future. All three had faced surprises and shocks during the year and the first priority was to be how to work around these to achieve the most favorable effect.

The Germans began the year very promisingly, pushing south to within a short drive of Helsinki. The Finns were on the verge of disaster, their armed forces nearly split into three distinct parts with no way of directly helping each other. Soviet intervention, possible despite the initiation of the Italian Balkan offensive, slowly turned the tide. The Germans were brought down by their conservative operational art, which gave the Finns and Soviets the opening they needed to counterattack and drive the Germans back. The German position subsequently collapsed and only recovered in northern Finland, anchored on one side by the northern tip of the Gulf of Bothnia and on the other wide by the northwest corner of the White Sea that made Kola a peninsula. In the process of this humiliating and shocking defeat, the Germans lost approximately one hundred and fifty brigades, totaling perhaps over four hundred thousand men. At the same time that the Germans were taking such horrific casualties in Finland, the Eastern Front was hemorrhaging strength not only northward, to remake the Finnish line, but also southward, as the Germans felt that the Italians were not secure in their positions or some such nonsense. Germans strategists failed to realize that the Italians had control in the Balkans. Throughout the year, the Soviets proved themselves consistently superior to the Germans in their warfaring talents.

The Soviets, in turn, were quite inferior to the Italians in waging war. Failing to recognize the Balkans as a trap of epic proportions, despite indications the Italians were thinking in such terms during the previous two years, the Soviets dedicated over half a million men to holding the line in Illyria and to garrisoning various Aegean and Adriatic Sea ports. Still hardly conversant in the attributes of sea power, particularly of dominant sea power, because of their continental focus, the Soviets failed to realize their vulnerability. Sustained naval air assault opened breaches in the ring of Soviet garrisons and maritime transport deposited, over the course of operation, a total of six or seven corps along the Balkan periphery from Athens to Istanbul to Vylkove. Reacting to these significant threats to their rear, the Soviets then left themselves open to the hammer blow from the five Italian armies which had been sitting quietly in Illyria. The result was a blitzkrieg from the northwest and a swinging back and forth in the east in which the Soviets never swung quite hard enough to save themselves. In the end, the Balkans was cleared of Soviet troops. The Soviet Union lost an entire theater of war, approximately three hundred brigades in eighty divisions totaling more than five hundred thousand soldiers. The Italians showed themselves to be the masters of war in the Balkans.

The shocks of the year for the Italians came from the performance of their German allies. German catastrophe in Finland, particularly after such near success, stunned the Italians. The Germans could bungle even nearly guaranteed victory. Their simultaneous division to dedicate an unwanted and unnecessary forty or so divisions to the Balkans resulted in the further denigration of their understanding of strategy. Germany more closely resembles a ball-and-chain weighing Italy down rather than any sort of useful friendly polity. The German willingness to push into Anatolia and out of Dacia into the Ukraine softened some opinions within the Italian strategic community, but as a whole the Italians judged that it was too soon to judge the Germans on this. It could yet end in a properly German disaster.

The Soviets, of course, experienced the worst shock of the year. Their defeat in Balkans reduced the size of their army by perhaps even a fourth. Italian intelligence estimated that the Soviets were fielding twelve hundred brigades at the beginning of the year but only about nine hundred by its end. This, however, does not take Soviet allies into consideration, such as the Mongols, or apparently the Persians, Finns and British. Nine hundred brigades, of course, still represented an enormous army. The entire German army after the disasters of Finland fielded about one thousand fifty brigades. They were only another disaster away from parity with the Soviets. German clients—the Norwegians, Luxembourgish and Slovaks—together contributed another sixty or seventy brigades. The entire Italian army, to deal with all commitments, weighed in at slightly over two hundred brigades. Of course, the Axis powers had such other commitments. Italy had to garrison Spain and manned a frontline in Africa; Germany had to garrison the entirety of Western Europe and Sweden. Thus across Eastern Europe, by the end of the year there was probably a rough parity in actual armed forces between the two blocs.

Rough parity was not promising to the Axis. As Clausewitz asserted, the defensive was the stronger form of warfare. Any invasion would only serve to gradually weaken the attacking power, while the defender would simply be pushed closer and closer back to his centers of supply. The culminating point of victory was a constant Damocles’ sword above the heads and necks of any attacker. The Italians already faced this phenomenon once in the Ukraine, in early 1941 when Graziani launched his reckless push into the Soviet Union at Germany’s declaration of war. The Italians were stronger at the beginning of 1945—much stronger—but the geographic problem remained the same. The Soviet Union was vast, very vast. For an invader, the sheer scale of the country was as much as obstacle as any armed force determined to defend it.

Yet Mussolini hoped to knock the Soviet Union out of the war if it was at all possible. The strategic situation was different enough in early 1945 as opposed to early 1941 to make it seem plausible. The Germans were already present in Anatolia and the Ukraine. The Soviets had just lost a quarter of their entire army and were also committed to supporting the Finns in the far northern theater. They were committed to an offensive of sorts in southern Poland as well. If the Italians acted correctly, there seemed to be the opportunity to overstretch the Soviets and initiate the breakdown of the entire Soviet defensive system. However, if history taught anything it was that invading the vast expanses of Russia, particularly from the west, was risky, very risky.

Yet what was war, if not inherently risky? There is no such thing as riskless war. The innate dialectic of will and force in war guaranteed that.

118-01-YearMap.jpg

The map at the end of the year.
 
dublish: Which may or may not be the case now. :D

I'll believe it when I see it. ;)

I remain very impressed at the concept (never mind the execution) of the value of naval supremacy to do damage to the Soviets ... tis good also to see Luxembourg standing aloof from all this brutal stuff going on around it

Luxembourg is a German puppet, IIRC. They were fighting in Finland in early 1944.

@Myth: Those garrisons in Spain must have been awfully bored for the past couple of years. I think you need to find some entertainment for them. I hear the French Riviera is quite nice in winter.
 
"The Germans could bungle even nearly guaranteed victory."
Could or couldn't? :p

Pocket Carpathia... Here the Rus was defeated 1916-17, why not 1945? :p
Brusilov is DEAD!:(
 
loki100: As Colin Gray likes to point out, maritime alliances have won most of the major wars of history, Peloponnesian War aside. I wonder what he'd say about a hybrid maritime-continental power though, where the continental power is terrible but is too strong to die. :p

dublish: The Spanish coast isn't all that bad either, really. ;)

Enewald: They could bungle nearly guaranteed victory, yes. :p

walnutr113: I've not read that one. I've actually not read a significant WW2 history in a while now. Last one would have a few months back, Intelligence and the War Against Japan by Richard Aldrich. My reading has gotten much more varied now, and there's a good bit of pure strategy in there. :p

Okay so I was playing yesterday, got nearly through October, and then went to post yesterday's update. HoI3 stopped responding. So I've not yet played 1945 and won't today, have work to do and playing a year is a whole day commitment. So I'll only be playing next weekend. When I replay I'm going to follow the same strategy (as closely as possible) that I was originally (despite knowing approximately its effect) because it resulted in a very good year. So yeah, the next chapter will start once I actually replay the damn year again. :p
 
Turn monthly autosaves on my good man! (and to think, i cringe at having to replay 20 days when I get a crash)

Certainly a great oppertunity for encirclement in southern poland, that would be good so i'm assuming you managed to do it.
 
118-01-YearMap.jpg

The map at the end of the year.

if i were you, iwould aim to link up with the Italians in Southern Poland and then also pour through Finland (if possible). going through poland should give you a good enough run th Moscow, or you could complete a few more encirclements.