Chapter Forty-Three - Twenty-Two Days in January
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of Canada, it was the age of Germany. It was the Age When I Thought I Knew What I Was Doing, it was the Age When I Learned Seriously Otherwise.
But first, good times!
Losses 10-1, well, six or seven to one after you factor in our 200 losses to air attacks. But fun fun fun. Too bad the whole war can't be fought across the Straits of Messina, that's what I'm shooting for. However, as I mentioned in the non-update update, I cannot get my guys to their destination!
I cannot get to "X" because the enemy owns the passageway at "Y". Stupid me, this was not immediately obvious. What this means is that my entire plan was based on an impossibility.
Granted, it makes sense both militarily and from a gameplay perspective not to allow a combatant to just sail up to a critical landing zone, dump his troops, and run. From my perspective, though, this is pretty much all I've done this entire war
Why stop me now? I'd use something more like a "coastal sea zone" and have a set of onerous rules where all defending air units and sea units are guaranteed to intercept. I mean, had the Germans possessed naval units in the area and more air power, do we really think they'd have not found the D-Day force before the landings were complete? Anyway, this is how HoI3 handles the Copenhagen area. It's reasonable, but I had no idea.
So my old plan is caput. Still, it was Wednesday night, I had no other plan, so full steam ahead! Do or Die! The rest of this AAR might be really, really short ("me and the Canadian army took in a movie, but the row in front of us kept talking so I don't know what it was about; turns out it was the Canadian navy").
So between Christmas 1942 and the start of 1943 I spent the time trying to get my guys to land at their assigned spot with no success and mounting frustration and more embarassment than I'd anticipated short of losing all my land units at sea. Roll the montage:
Okay, a three-part montage. I landed in Oslo figuring I might be out of range. I tried using an "Invasion" order, which worked! In the sense that I was permitted to give the order, my guys just never went to their destination. So after a break, I decided to try to fight my way to the destination, or at least get a sense of what would be involved.
Well, you can see the tip of the province I wanted to take, but fighting across two straits against unknown German forces seemed like a bad idea. Plus, the whole point of my invasion was that you get a huge penalty fighting across these straits, so was I really gonna do it myself? No. I decided to grab the port. Of course, a makeshift plan like this was not well thought through, and I'd have to take the long way.
What's this? At the risk of seeming like the Mom at the end of Captain Ron - she fires a flaregun at the boat following them, sees a massive explosion in the water near it, and looks in amazement at the flaregun - I wonder if my capture of part of Denmark didn't trigger this. Probably not, but it's an odd coincidence. Kudos to Paradox, by the way, on the Soviet event, lol!
I don't see anything amiss from a German perspective except the same lack of progress they've had for ages. I dunno, but I'm taking credit! Especially given how all this turns out! One German division attacked my stack, which had ample supplies, and both sides lost six men. 1-1 losses, crap.
Meanwhile my Merchant Marine and associated escorts began melting down. I lost thirteen Transports and two Escorts all told this chapter.
That was a particularly bad day at sea, and you can see my plan, such as it was. Some units were going to port, others stopping short in the next province.
Then I got good news and bad news. Well, the Brits conquered Siam, so I suppose I got two bits of good news. But the bad news was that the German Armor arrived in my destination before I did, so we'd see how I'd do fighting my way across open land.
So I got the Battle Plan tech which gives my units a 5% chance of entering a battle from reserve status, which is great, but I could not let this fight go on long when other German units showed up. Even so, my vast army took double the losses of a newly arrived armored division. Not a good sign for my future. Then the bombings began. So I executed my brilliant plan - drop a port and pick up my guys!
...or, you know, not...
Plus, take a look at that very high number for the attacker. At this point, I was convinced that half the Canadian army was, like Kansas, "about to go bye bye". Wonderful, a massive force, or at least respectably large, is easily repelled by a single armored division, and then wiped out by cavalry. Great. What is this, Civ 2? Of course, I wasn't critical of the game, I was more imagining the Prime Minister's meeting after where I would have to answer the eternal question, "what the hell were you thinking?" Really, a Canadian invasion of German-occupied Europe seemed like an excellent idea at the time.
Our Persian forces arrived in Tobruk just in time for me to realize how pointless it was for me to take a screenshot of the event.
That's us, being defeated by some cavalry who apparently could not be bothered to fight in their own battle. Armored Car wannabes. To quote Captain Ron at about the same time as the Flare Gun incident, "we're all gonna die!"
Fortunately, like American Express, defeat has its advantages.
Plus, since these battles apparently don't count against manpower, we have the least bad negative manpower Canada has seen in ages!
To be fair to my forces, I did have a fair number of enemy arrayed against me. This is the kind of overreaction I was hoping to fight across the Straits of Messina or its Copenhagen equivalent.
Good plan, sort of. Somewhere between poor execution and it-was-impossible-anyway-so-meh execution.
It is a far, far better thing I do (
as soon as I think of it) than I have ever done before. It is a far, far better place I go (
I hope) than I have ever been before.