Part Two - The Fucking Big Update
Part Two - The Early War (1939-1940)
The war began on two fronts with Germany facing Poland in the east and France in the west. The German ground forces, spread thin in the east, nonetheless pressed the offensive, with a sizable contingent coming down from East Prussia as a pincer along with the forces on the western border. The Poles fought back aggressively, making headway especially against undermanned Slovakia. In the west, the French adopted a defensive stance, making only limited attempts to advance beyond the Maginot Line.
The Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy went to sea, fighting an especially nasty series of engagements in the waters around the Danish coast. Both sides suffered several losses in destroyers and submarines, but the Kriegsmarine was the first to score a major triumph when the British battlecruiser,
HMS Renown, was badly damaged in one of the engagements and finished off with torpedoes by the light cruiser
Königsberg. The fledgeling Polish navy also skirmished with German fleet units, losing several destroyers.
The Soviet Union launched the Winter War against Finland concurrently to the German invasion of Poland. Although initially pushed back, Finnish resistance proved far harder than expected, dragging the war on until April 1940. For a time, the Finns even succeeded in capturing the northern port of Murmansk.
As the Polish campaign dragged on into October, Hitler became impatient with his army’s failure to bring the campaign to a rapid conclusion. Impatient to begin offensive operations in the west, he called on Hungary to invade Poland from the south, offering the Dolne region of the southeast as a prize. Poland soon fell, although its fleet, led by the cruisers Conrad and Dragon, managed to slip past the Germans and make it to safety in France. The Polish fleet would continue to serve throughout the war under Royal Navy command. The incomplete heavy cruiser Baltyk was scuttled as Danzig fell to keep it out of German hands.
The eastern campaign concluded, Germany turned its attention west. Denmark was invaded to secure the Baltic as a German lake. Germany forced its ally Sweden into the war at this time; the Swedes took a minor role in the Denmark invasion, exchanging shots with the Danes across the straits.
The surrender of Denmark not only locked the British out of the Baltic, but also provided them with the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland as long-range bases, which were soon garrisoned with German troops. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, aching to avenge the loss of
Renown, soon got its chance.
German battleship
Bismarck was lured out of Wilhelmshaven by a French fleet, which it successfully engaged, blasting apart a group of destroyers, but soon after fell to a trap.
Swordfish pilots of
HMS Courageous claimed the mighty battleship with their torpedoes. Hitler, furious at the loss of one of his three operational battleships, ordered vengeance. The Kriegsmarine, however, was battered in the next series of battles, losing numerous vessels including the new light carrier
Main in a carrier battle with
HMS Furious and brand new battlecruiser
Moltke to
Courageous’ airmen, who were quickly forging a reputation. Sweden’s navy, operating alongside the Germans, also took a beating, losing the heavy cruiser
Manlighten and the light cruiser
Gotland.
As the Kriegsmarine regrouped and repaired in port, Germany, looking to take pressure off its outnumbered navy and to open a second front against France, called Italy into the war. The Italians launched a rapid offensive to break through French lines in the southeast, while the
Celere motorized cavalry units raced deep into Egypt and Tunisia.
The Italians also scored some successes at sea, most notable being the sinking of the modern French battleship
Richelieu in a duel with
Littorio. The Italians also had their share of setbacks, especially to the Royal Navy’s carrier force; escort carrier
Falco was lost to
HMS Glorious and old battleship
Conte di Cavour to
HMS Hermes.
Other fronts also opened up: Argentina entered the war, quickly invading and conquering its Allied neighbor, Paraguay, and clashing with RN ships stationed in the Falkland Islands. Turkey was put in a very compromising two front war situation, facing Greece and British forces in the Middle East.
With most Turkish forces pinned down fighting the British in the east, the few troops left in the west were easily overwhelmed by the Greeks. With Istanbul fallen and an open road to Ankara, the Turks’ only hope was for intervention from their Italian ally. But with most of Italy’s army committed to fighting in France, there was only a limited force in Albania that could do little more than hold the territory. Turkish battlecruiser
Yavuz’s group was trapped in the Bosporus by the Greek capture of Istanbul. The Greeks reached Ankara, managing to capture the entire Turkish government and forcing a total surrender. Turkey’s battlecruisers and other ships were scuttled to save them from capture. The anticipated showdown between them and Greek battleship
Kilkis never occurred.
In the west, the Italians continued their advance into southern France, while the Germans began forcing their way through the Maginot Line, bolstered by contingents of Hungarian troops in the north and Swedish troops in the south.
The clashes at sea continued. The elderly British battleship
Malaya managed to score a victory against another World War I veteran, the Italian battleship
Caio Duilio. The Italians scored another victory against the French, with the battleship
Andrea Doria sinking the much younger battlecruiser
Strasbourg. The French struck back by sinking the weakly armored Regia Marina battlecruiser
La Spezia with heavy cruiser
Dusquesne.
In the north, the war took an increasingly harsh toll on the Kriegsmarine, which lost many of its heavy cruisers as well as the battlecruiser
Von der Tann and the pre-dreadnought
Schlesien. However, the German fleet was bolstered by the arrival of new battleships
Friedrich der Große,
Großdeutschland,
Hindenburg, and
Ludendorff and the
Graf Zeppelin-class fleet carriers. Work was begun on new vessels to replace losses, as well as two very modern carriers,
Clausewitz and
Barbarossa.
The Royal Navy took further hits, including the loss of
King George V-class battleship
Anson to
Gneisenau, battleship
Royal Oak to the new German carrier
Peter Strasser, and battlecruiser
Repulse to Italian battleship
Roma in the Mediterranean. The Polish fleet fought a number of number of engagements under RN command, with heavy cruiser
ORP Dragon going down in a gun duel with the more heavily armed
Admiral Hipper and the three Polish destroyer squadrons bravely but suicidally facing down the German battle line of
Hindenburg,
Großdeutschland, and
Ludendorff in an effort to save a transport fleet.
In France, the German and Italian forces began to loop around Switzerland and form a grand princer movement, trapping much of the French army between themselves. The Italians advanced far enough westward to capture the entire French Mediterranean coast. The pincers soon closed, with the French desperately trying to form a new line facing eastward.
In South America, the clashes between the Argentine and British fleets left Argentine light cruisers
Generale Belgrano and
Generale Pueyrredon sunk by British heavy cruisers and British light cruisers
Leander and
Diomede sunk by Argentine battleship
Moreno.
In North Africa, an Italian
Celere division reached the outskirts of Alexandria, but was unable to dislodge the British defenders, and the Italians were knocked back into Libya by a major counteroffensive, spearheaded largely by Britain’s Greek allies, fresh from their victory in Turkey.
As the French line of defense began to collapse, Germany declared war on the Low Countries and invaded immediately. With no French or British troops to spare for their defense, all three quickly fell. However, the Dutch were not out of the war yet. The destroyers and light cruiser
De Ruyter stationed at home managed to escape to South America, while a powerful task force consisting of the battleship
Reinier Clauszen, battlecruiser
Van Speijk, and heavy cruiser
De Zeven Provinciën was recalled from the East Indies to the Mediterranean, where it clashed with an Italian cruiser force.
The Dutch came out of it having lost
De Zeven Provinciën to
Zara but managed to take the old Italian heavy cruiser
San Giorgio down with them.
After the fall of Paris, France surrendered on March 20, 1940, scuttling the
Jean Bart,
Bretagne,
Dunkerque, and incomplete carrier
Painlevé to keep them out of Axis hands. However, the Free French did manage to save a substantial portion of their fleet, including France’s old battleships
Provence,
Lorraine,
Courbet, and
Paris and its two carriers,
Béarn and
Joffre, transferring it to new bases in the Caribbean.
The British, determined to maintain a foothold on the continent, committed much of their army to a holdout in Brittany and Normandy, supported by French troops who refused to surrender. Outnumbered and outgunned, the British lost hundreds of thousands of men taken prisoner when this perimeter collapsed. With only a skeleton force plus several allied Irish divisions to protect the Home Isles, Britain’s survival would depend on victory at sea.
The Axis followed up their victory over France with a joint Swedish-German conquest of Norway and with an invasion of Yugoslavia that dismembered it between Italian and Hungarian claims, a Croatian puppet state, and a German occupation zone in Serbia and Macedonia. The Norwegian navy was demolished in port by Luftwaffe naval bombers.
The Italians went on to invade and conquer Greece and Turkey, reaching northern Iraq by the end of the year. The Greek battleship
Kilkis attempted to break out before the fall of Athens but was driven back into port by Italian battleships and scuttled by the Greeks after their defeat. Romania and Bulgaria were welcomed to the Axis powers as new allies.
The South American front exploded in 1940, with Chile, Peru, and Brazil entering the war one after another, pitting Argentina and Peru against Brazil and Chile. Neither fortune nor geography favored the Chileans; the Peruvians captured the rich mining territory of the north while the Argentines conquered the rest of their country. The Peruvians scored a success in sinking a Chilean submarine group, but the majority of the Chilean fleet, led by the battleship
Almirante Latorre and heavy cruiser
Almirante O’Higgins, managed to make it around the Strait of Magellan and join up with the Brazilian navy to fight on. Argentina launched an invasion of southern Brazil, back by Peruvian reinforcements, that managed to push the defenders halfway back to Sao Paulo by the end of the year.
In Spain, the civil war continued on throughout 1939 and 1940, with both exhausted factions deadlocked in utter stalemate.
With France out of the way and the side campaigns in Europe concluded, Hitler was determined to finish off Britain once and for all. He called on his ally, Japan, to open yet another front against the Allies in the Pacific. Eager for a new opportunity for victory after the failure of the China campaign, Japan complied and declared war on the Western Allies near the end of the year, bringing the war to an unprecedented global scale.
The naval warfare of 1940 was vicious, with heavy losses on all sides. The Royal Navy lost its battleships
Resolution,
Ramillies,
Revenge, and
Warspite, the Germans lost battlecruisers
Scharnhorst and
Goeben, and the Italians the new battleship
Impero, battlecruiser
Taranto, and most of their heavy cruisers.
December 19 - 1940
Allied Navies
Axis Navies
Comintern Navies
American Navy*
*Note: The US Navy has a particularly large number of ships under construction at this time, including ten carriers, eight battleships, and six battlecruisers.
Losses to Date - Allies
United Kingdom
BB: 6 (Anson, Royal Oak, Warspite, Resolution, Revenge, Ramillies)
BC: 2 (Renown, Repulse)
CA: 6 (Dorsetshire, York, Suffolk, Sussex, London, Devonshire)
CL: 17
DD: 21
SS: 1
TP: 7
France*
BB: 1 (Richelieu)
BC: 1 (Strasbourg)
CA: 1 (Foch)
DD: 1
SS: 2
TP: 1
(*Some units were lost on surrender as well)
Nationalist China
CA: 2 (Ning hai, Ping hai)
CL: 3
DD: 6
Netherlands
CA: 1 (De Zeven Provinciën)
Poland
CA: 1 (Dragon)
DD: 3
SS: 1
TP: 4
Norway
CA: 2 (Eidsvold, Norge)
DD: 2
SS: 2
TP: 1
Greece*
CL: 1
DD: 1
TP: 1
(*Remaining units were lost upon surrender)
Chile
SS: 1
Losses to Date - Axis
Germany
CVL: 1 (Main)
BB: 1 (Bismarck)
BC: 5 (Moltke, Scharnhorst, Von der Tann, Goeben, Schlesien)
CA: 7 (Deutschland, Friedrich Carl, Roon, Admiral Scheer, Prinz Eugen, Albatross, Nautilus)
CL: 8
DD: 7
SS: 9
TP: 4
Italy
CVL: 1 (Falco)
BB: 3 (Conte di Cavour, Caio Duilio, Impero)
BC: 2 (La Spezia, Taranto)
CA: 7 (Zara, San Giorgio, Trento, Trieste, Gorizia, Bolzano, Fiume)
CL: 8
DD: 7
SS: 12
TP: 1
Japan
CA: 2 (Haguro, Kako)
CL: 2
DD: 3
SS: 8
TP: 2
Sweden
CA: 1 (Manlighten)
CL: 1
DD: 2
SS: 2
Siam
CA: 1 (Chon Buri)
CL: 2
DD: 1
TP: 1
Turkey*
(*Entire fleet lost upon surrender)
Argentina
CL: 2
SS: 1
General Observations So Far
Wow, has this been a crazy game. I have never seen a Spanish Civil War anything like that. As far as I know, both sides are pretty much out of manpower and just seem too exhausted to really fight. Portugal could probably steamroll both of them.
Finland also held out for a crazy long time; they outdid their real life stand and went until April 1940 - that’s a month after France surrendered in this game, for perspective. They usually get crushed in Hearts of Iron games.
Italy and Germany also pulled a pretty much textbook perfect envelopment of France (considering Germany didn’t declare war on the Low Countries till afterward). Usually one or the other fucks it up. Also proud of Sweden for actually contributing to that in a meaningful way.
There’s a reason Turkey ought to stay neutral...the Axis having direct access to the Middle East becomes a mess, and it only gets worse when the Soviets get involved. The Turkish AI is also incapable of running a two front war and pretty much let Greece walk right over them. It was too bad, I was looking forward to seeing those Turkish battlecruisers try to fight.
That is pretty much the cleanest looking division of Yugoslavia I've ever achieved, thanks to setting the war goals for all nations involved.
The South American front is going pretty nicely; I’ll be perfectly satisfied once Uruguay joins the Allies (it’s set to prepare for war/align to Allies), getting rid of that weird bulge in the Argentine/Brazilian front. Chile is geographically screwed, but the AI did manage to send its navy around to Brazil after it fell, and I then took the liberty of giving it to Brazil as an expeditionary force (same situation with the Polish navy going to the UK). I would have “saved” the Turkish and Greek fleets the same way if I’d had the opportunity. If the Free French fleet spends the whole war sitting in the Caribbean doing nothing (and if the Dutch start to do the same), I’ll expedite them to the UK or USA to see more action.
So on to the bits this AAR was started for: the war at sea. The British surface fleet has been given a pretty hard beating by the Germans and Italians, but they haven’t lost any carriers yet. In fact, carriers all around seem to be doing pretty well, with the only two lost being low/no tech escort carriers. The Germans have done a sinfully bad job of keeping their BCs alive, but their new battleship fleet has actually proven very formidable. As usual, the Italian and German heavy cruisers haven't done much but get themselves massacred by the RN. The Italian and German CVs (except for Peter Strasser) also haven't done much as of yet in comparison with their RN counterparts, but that might change in the coming year.
It's interesting to see which of the minors get stomped and which actually hold their own. Argentina has traded blows equally with the Brits, and the RN actually did have a battleship and a few CAs move down into the Falklands to fight them. Sweden's been a bit more disappointing and has mostly kept to port after being slapped around by the RN a bit at the beginning, but they still have four BCs that might see some action when the Soviets get in. The Dutch fought well in the few actions I've seen. The Siamese navy got totalled within days of their joining the war. Australia hasn't done much yet but I'm eager to see what they do with their BC and freshly built CV now that the Japanese are in. I've played one other game with a big Australian navy similar to this one (a BC plus a CVL) and watched it all get blown to scrap by the guns of the mighty Cristoforo Colombo (the greatest battleship Italy never had).
Japan hasn’t had much chance for action yet, but they have a huge new fleet of CVs waiting for blood. I decided to have Germany bring them in early because the Axis seemed like it was getting beaten up too badly early on, and I wanted to still have big German and Italian fleets around by the time the Americans and Soviets enter. I predict 1941 is going to be a very, very difficult year for the RN, but the Germans and Italians will continue to take a bruising, and once the USA and the Soviet Union are in, things should start to turn around.
Ships with Notable Careers So Far
HMS Courageous [CV]
Sinkings:
1 x BB (Bismarck)
1 x BC (Moltke)
1 x CA (Albatross)
1 x CL (Mikuma)
4 x SS
HMS Furious [CV]
1 x CVL (Main)
2 x CA (Manlighten, Chon Buri)
1 x CL (Dhonburi)
1 x DD
1 x SS
HMS Victorious [CV]
1 x CA (Roon)
5 x CL (Gotland, Königsberg, Leipzig, Bartolomeo Colleoni, Duca d’Aosta)
1 x DD
4 x SS
HMS Malaya [BB]
Sinkings:
2 x BB (Impero, Caio Duilio)
2 x CA (Admiral Scheer, Haguro)
HMS Ajax [CL]
Sinkings:
2 x CA (Nautilus, Trieste)
1 x TP
KMS Peter Strasser [CV]
Sinkings:
2 x BB (Warspite, Royal Oak)
2 x TP
KMS Gneisenau [BC]
Sinkings:
2 x BB (Anson, Resolution)
3 x DD
RN Vittorio Veneto [BB]
Sinkings:
1 x BB (Revenge)
3 x CL (Colombo, Caradoc, Helle)