War Diary (dev log) of Conflict-Series by Joni Nuutinen
(see also: Sortable Table of Games :: FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions)
I'm pondering about releasing a simple, easy, and smaller-scale WWII campaign for free to reach new players in the Play Store (discovery getting worse each year). Fully free, no ads, no in-app purchases, no tracking, no turn-limitations. Maybe just strip away quotations and a few settings, etc which could be an issue with the masses (somebody always finds a way to get offended), and streamline maintenance. If nothing comes out of it, so be it: I wasted a few weeks. However, if the freebie, over the years, pulls a few more players into the orbit of the series, nice.
Science/Research: Military experience predicts military multitasking better than laboratory measures in officer cadets
— In contrast to our expectations, the associations between lab and military multitasking and working memory were weak. Furthermore, the participants did not display multitasking decrements but improvements as a function of time on task in the military setting. Moreover, we found a positive association between the time officer cadets had already served in the military and military performance. In conclusion, it appears unlikely that one can simply predict military performance by means of lab measures. Hence, personnel selection procedures might need to consider cognitive capabilities as less important and rely more on training achievements.
Almost like real-world experience is invaluable, who could have possibly ever guessed that *sarcasm*
Article: What British children are taught about history in school (report by Policy Exchange)
— Sitting at the bottom of the list was the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo with only 11% of students studying the topic. They were followed by the Battle of Agincourt (18%), the Boer War (25%). The top five most studied topics are now the Transatlantic Slave Trade (99%), Britain in WW1 (99%), the Norman Conquest (98%), the Abolition of Slavery (96%) and Reformation (95%). Elsewhere, 53% of people say their knowledge on British history has been informed by film and TV. 15% learn about history through social media. 12% say their knowledge comes from newspaper and news media outlets.
Falaise Gap (Allied Side) version 2.4.2 is on its way.
Video: 15 Controversial War Films Hollywod Buried
— This list is packed with banned war movies, blacklisted anti-war films, and controversial military dramas that studios buried, censored, or disowned.
Tarawa 2.4.0.1 out to fix strangeness caused by the reef-system interfering with the logic of who controls water hexagons.
Luzon version 2.6 on its way... Restores the replacement rate back to the expected and supply-related icons redone to better fit the theme of unit-icons.
I thought about sharing an interesting video from YouTube, but I'm stuck between "every history buff already follows the famous high-quality channels" and "darn, most of the other content is just content farming and semi-auto-generated generalities without any actual research and knowledge."
Designer: "Make it more boxy, I'm taking a stand against all these rounded and sloped surfaces!"
"At the German listening post at the Dutch plant of Phillips Electric outside Einhoven, agents were listening to the radio traffic on the main cable between Britain and the USA. One time, experts hit the jackpot; they overheard a conversation on the scrambler phone between Churchill and Roosevelt... There was an attempt to undermine the British economy with the mass production of fake British 5 pound notes. One German agent had the audacity to ask a Swiss bank to check whether the notes were real or not. He said he suspected they were not. The Swiss gave the notes a clean bill of health. However, the plan to drop notes by the ton into Britain was never carried out. Instead the money was mostly used to buy the weapons the Allied had dropped to the various resistance groups... Operation North Pole was an unqualified success. Nearly 50 Dutch agents from SOE went into the bag. The booty dropped by the RAF was an eye-opener. For the first time the Germans were able to obtain British secret weapons, almost straight from the factory. And what weapons they were: coal filled with plastic explosive, Chianti bottles with explosives in the base, folding motorbikes, armoured canoes for attacking shipping, even dead rats filled with plastic explosive and rusty bolts which were, in reality, limpet mines for destroying railway bridges... Americans planned to stop Swiss banks from handling German gold, but Admiral Canaris pushed a whole stream of Germans from the fake ‘resistance’ to contact John Foster Dulles to block this blocking. In the end Canaris succeeded. People are arguing about the missing Melmer gold to this day, with the current German and US Governments at loggerheads over what happened to the stolen assets and which firms should pay compensation to whom... Canaris had dreamed up ‘strategic sabotage’. This entailed the sabotage of US plants which would have a far-ranging impact. Abwehr agents were to blow up a cryo-lite factory in Philadelphia, which manufactured the essential materials for the production of aluminium. The plan failed as one of the agents, an ex-waiter, figured out he could keep the whole flush-fund if he betrayed his comrades to the FBI... After the war the Allies found a dossier of some 250 individual reports in the German Admiralty archives, all dealing with the time and place of the Allied invasion. ‘Of these only one, from a French colonel in Algiers, was correct. But this had been filed away unheeded with the dross. The majority opinion gave July 1944 as the month and the Pas de Calais as the place."
— Espionage Campaign Against the Allies by Charles Whiting
Will the future wars be about water? Some households spend up to 30% of their income on water
— Almost half of the Kabul’s boreholes (the primary source of drinking water) have dried out. If trends continue, all of Kabul’s aquifers will run dry as early as 2030, an existential threat to the 7 million inhabitants.
Overused rivers leave little or nothing for downstream nations, creating critical challenges for agriculture and livelihoods. For example, extensive water usage by China and Laos on the Mekong River jeopardizes Vietnam's vital rice-growing regions. Similarly, the Colorado River is so heavily tapped that it no longer consistently reaches the sea, devastating Mexico's delta and farming communities. India's hydroelectric projects along the Indus River are crippling agriculture in Pakistan. In the Middle East, Turkey's extensive irrigation systems significantly deplete the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers, causing severe water shortages in downstream countries like Syria and Iraq. Furthermore, as Ethiopia and Sudan increase their use of the Nile River, less water reaches Egypt, a nation heavily reliant on its flow.
These aren't theoretical concerns; water scarcity is already leading to deadly conflicts. In April 2021 and again in 2022, border clashes erupted in the Batken region between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan over access to the Golovnoy water intake facility on the Isfara River. These confrontations tragically resulted in over 55 deaths and hundreds injured, with both sides resorting to mortars and heavy weapons. More recently, in May 2023, Iranian and Taliban border guards exchanged fire at a disputed canal point along the Helmand River. This conflict, triggered by reduced water flow from Afghan dams, left at least three Iranian soldiers and two Afghans dead, highlighting the severe human cost of water disputes.
Tinian version 1.4.0.3 on the way. Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith considered Tinian "the perfect amphibious operation in the Pacific war."
A reminder to all who are new here: there exists a free, turn-limited version of almost all the games available if you know how to sideload an app. No ads, no tracking, just a turn-limit, usually at 20. Try any game as long as you like. See "local APK" download link on the main page.
Tarawa v2.4 rolling out...
If you wish to feel old, try explaining the concept of "WIRED headphones" to a member of the latest generation. "It goes INTO the phone?" I think it's safe to say the very latest tech kids have grown almost solely around wireless charging and wireless headphones, and the ancient Sumerian-era concept of "wire" greatly mystifies them. Also, what happens when these new incoming generations are supposed to take care of the basic infastructure?
Article: D-Day soldier who helped capture Pegasus Bridge passes at 102
— Trooper Roy Cadman was a member of 1st Special Service Brigade which landed at Sword Beach at Normandy on June 6 1944 and helped capture Pegasus Bridge. Trooper Cadman, of 3 Commando, 1st Special Service Brigade, later recalled: “The beach was a mass of flame and smoke, and I thought nobody could survive that. We went ashore with green berets. We battled our way through three or four big concrete bunkers with slits in it and guns sticking out. Our objective was to meet the 6th Airborne Division who captured Pegasus Bridge. We were in such a state that we couldn’t go any further – we had not got enough men. The commandos regrouped and made the eight-mile journey to Pegasus Bridge before sealing the perimeter.
Battle of Leyte Island rushes to version 4.0 after somebody spotted that, ahem, minefields don't really work. Obviously, that also includes a major Hall of Fame clearance. .
Book excerpt:
"The only questions that the Japanese had in 1944 was where and when would the Americans attack. They knew that the Philippines would be attacked, but which island and when? While garrison forces were established on all major Philippine Islands, an attempt was made to retain a mobile reserve which could be rushed to the point of the most danger once the Americans showed their intentions. General Kuroda was left with the choice of where to station his reserves and how to plan for an effective defense. His tenure was short-lived, however. Early in October 1944, General Kuroda had accepted the reality of facts in evidence that his superiors chose to ignore. He advised the chief of army intelligence in the Imperial General HQ that it would be better for Japan to negotiate a peace now than await the destruction of the nation at the hands of the victorious Allies. He advised a concentration of all available ground forces on Luzon, mentioning in his reasoning that the Americans, with their superiority in air and naval power, could take the Philippines whenever they chose. He detailed the superiority of American air power and remarked that the building of airfields on Leyte was of no benefit to the Japanese since they could not staff or equip those fields. He concluded that in effect, they had been built for the American's to use. Quickly labeled a “defeatist” he was removed from his command."
— Leyte 1944, The Soldiers' Battle by Nathan N Prefer
How German tank commander evaded FBI for 40 years by building new life as all-American ski instructor after escaping PoW camp at end of WWII
— Having been sent to fight with Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in North Africa, Georg Gaertner was captured by British troops in Tunis in 1943. By September 1945, after WW2 had come to an end, Gaertner had decided that he did not want to grapple with the possible fate that awaited him back home as his hometown Swidnica was now controlled by the Soviet regime. Gaertner slipped under the fence of Camp Deming and boarded a freight train to California. He had nothing but the clothes he was wearing...
Invasion of Japan version 4.0 out! Faster pace of replacements and resources, plus plenty of other tweaks plus a proper refresh of the REAL-icon-set, few icons are entirely new.
Well, Defending Spanish Republic has unfortunately entered the spiral of "fix one thing and another one pops up". We are already at at the version 1406. I had to re-reset few MP-cost-counters.
Article: Major evacuation in Cologne after WWII bombs discovered
- The biggest evacuation (20,000 people) in Cologne since WWII is under way after the discovery of 3 unexploded bombs (two of 20 tons and one of 10 tons) dropped by allied forces. Three bridges over the Rhine have been closed and rail traffic has been halted or diverted.
Operation Spring Awakening is reaching towards version 2.6. The handful of the best scores are ridiculous; I'm saying this after my own risky attempt saw those risks realized at full.
Site: Old Maps Online
— Choose an area and use slide-timer to see how borders have changed over time
Saipan: fix on its way (v3602).
After somebody pointed out that lyrics of the song Winner Takes It All by Abba could apply to board gaming, I have not been able to hear this song without thinking board-games. Where is the undo-button for the mind.
Podcast episode: British Tanks of the Red Army : WW2 Podcast
— While most British tanks did not fare well in Soviet conditions, the Red Army appreciated Valentine tanks that were shipped over in thousands, so that it actually made a two-digit percentage of all the tanks at one time. Sadly, since no country wants to remember their losses or draws, this huge contribution during the early critical years has not gained a foothold in the headlines, and most glory goes to domestic T34.
Okay, I'll admit it. After a week of watching photorealistic videos of newscasters, standup-comedians and re-imagined film trailers made via a simple text prompt by a kid who knows nothing about videos and audio, I'm enjoying online videos less. Instead of relaxing, my mind is working overtime trying to figure out if this is real or not. It's basically a standard joke now that video content creators make AI versions of themselves talking about AI, and most viewers can't tell the difference as the footage flips between the real and the AI creator.
And flagging AI-videos as "AI" will only make it worse, since only law-abiding entities will comply, and for example, a state wanting to push propaganda will obviously not tag their videos. Therefore, people relying on AI-tags, instead of learning to identify fake footage themselves, will be fooled more.
Dreadfully, I have already watched many people working in the audiovisual field talking about their very recent firing. The inescapable reality is that, if you're running an ad agency, will you risk $200,000 to shoot a single ad with real, finicky, injury-prone humans when the end result might not even be satisfactory? Or do you spend $200 to have AI generate 100 ads of the same quality and then choose the best one out of those? Since most are struggling financially, the AI videos will take over. Can you recall a time in history when a 1000X cheaper product of similar quality lost to the more expensive one?
Comically, even online creators raging against AI-generated videos are regularly caught liking AI-generated videos because even pros in the field can't tell the difference half of the time. Tip: At this early stage, the skin is still too flawlessly smooth, and the background might be too much/little out of focus vs main object. And this is only the crude, first widespread version.
On the plus side, if you have ever dreamed of making a film, you pretty much now can, with only a few hundred dollars, get both film-studio quality audio and video with only text prompts. And we are not too far from the point where one can just ask AI to generate more episodes on the fly. "Okay, AI, make me 10 more episodes of Friends, but include fewer jokes about Monica cleaning stuff and more Ross overreacting and Chandler making jokes."
Remember when we had 2 TV channels, and pretty much every human being saw the same thing? We had shared experiences we could talk about. Okay, admittably we had a horribly one-sided view of everything, but arguably that felt safe and comforting, since that one-sided presentation kind of made sense. Having shared experiences is getting more rare by the month. Even when watching a sporting event, you can now choose different camera angles, etc.
Our mindset should recalibrate into approaching Internet (videos) as we would approach a magician doing a street show. The magician will pull a pink elephant out of our ears, but we don't take that as the reality on which we build our worldview. But how do we deal with the inevitable apathy when nothing can be trusted or everything requires an excessive amount of work to verify? It's the classic issue: a lie takes a second, but properly disproving it with sources consumes days of intense work. Many athletes doing amazing feats after years of disciplined training are already getting brutally attacked in comments because people don't believe what they are seeing is real. There is one tall woman sharing people's reactions as she walks through malls: now her comments are just people screaming; it's all AI. Anything deviating from the norm will be doubted relentlessly. Did you buy a shirt that looks perfect on you? It must be AI! Trust will be in short supply.
And let's zoom out ten more steps to look at the ultimate level: What is the point of improving yourself and your skills as a human if the AI will be 100,000X better in seconds? What's the endgame.
PDF: WWII shipwrecks and submarine attacks in New South Wales waters 1940-1944
— Wartime secrecy meant that the public knew little of the impact on merchant vessels by enemy submarines during WWII. But Japanese submarines, even a German U-boat and to a lesser extent minelayers, had significant successes operating along the east coast of Australia. Here is a detailed list of 19 merchant ships were sunk by torpedoes, gunfire or mines off the NSW coast during 1941-1944.
Random rumination: Is there any practical way to include and showcase the massive effect of code-breaking into the game play? Is it such an underappreciated part of the WWII, that sometimes I want to include it in its full effect just to drive home the point. And if you don't believe the importance of code breaking, here is a handy test: Challenge your friend to a chess match, but always loudly explain all your plans to your friend before each move. How can you win under such conditions? Unless your friend is a deep friend potato, he will win.
The mind of an AI: One of the conundrums I have wrestled with for two decades is how to balance tactical and strategic priorities when AI makes decisions. If an AI unit, on the way to massive attack, doesn't take the empty city nearby, the AI will look dumber than a doorknob. However, if most AI units on the way to attack get distracted with small local tactical tasks, that massive attack takes place with one or two units. In that case the AI feels like a harmless kid running after every shiny thing it sees. For a smart person, crunching all those countless aspects to make a smart decision is almost effortless. But trying to give a sensible numerical value to everything in a way that reflects the current tactical and strategic situation is a fool's errand. The number of variations is infinite. And worse yet, you can't really use any fixed weighted values, since that would eventually make the AI predictable. And if that priority system is already such a complex formula that your head hurts from understanding what happens and why, adding "varying variation" into it will make later analysis such a Herculean effort.
Let's take a quick case study of how humans make decisions: Your unit could take an empty AI city, but nearby your unit is about to be encircled. You factor in the importance of the city, is the city threatened, are you likely to be able to hold it later, do you have resources to fortify the taken city? How much will this slow down the unit taking it, etc. And on the other side of the equation: how likely is the other unit cut off, can other units nearby help it, is it a key unit, can air force supply in if it get cut off, maybe that unit can afford to be cut off for one turn, etc. Each of these factors in turn requires thinking about a handful of other factors. Once you start to break down human decision-making, you realize how tricky modeling it even a little bit is. As a human you instantly merge info from dozens of hexagons and factor in dozeons of units in 2D map where time is the 3rd dimension. This is why so AI is useless in most games. If the AI unit super simply and mindlessly always goes towards the closest city there really isn't much challenge in that game. And even the seemingly obvious decisions can get fuzzy quickly in real life. Let's say you can move a unit south to cut off an AI unit. Okay, on the theoretical surface level, that move should always be done, because trying to help a cut-off unit is such a disruption. But what if that means weakening your line defending supply city while the AI will most likely push your unit away with tank units flooding towards that hexagon? Is it still an obvious move to make? How do you put that scenario in numbers, formulas, and math in multiple dimensions of map and time?
It's tragi-comic, but once the number of AI tasks per unit grows too high, the best and most practical answer to this AI-priority-challenge actually is... adding more AI units. If the AI unit marching to the mass attack can tag an adjacent unit to take the empty city a turn ot two later, the problem is for the most part solved. This 'too many tasks' issue is why games with fragmented control of the map, like Spanish Civil War games, are such a perplexing undertaking for the AI. There might be tactical tasks both in the north and south of the unit, plus the front line cohesion should be held, and there are strategic things to group towards in the East. In the worst case, there are 20 tasks pulling the AI in every direction, and sometimes the AI unit moves south and sees a never-before-seen player's unit. This new information tilts the priorities of those 20 tasks in different order. Oh no, now the AI unit moves back, which looks like a silly waste of move points. But, after a certain level of improvements, the processing required and the data needed to be kept in memory to make the AI smarter are now no longer worth the cost. This also partially explains why pushing a risky spearhead deep into the AI front line works better than what you might expect. As the number of front-line hexagons and enemy units near the AI unit in different directions increases, the number of tasks fighting for the top priority in the AI's logic goes up drastically. And this in turn increases the chance that the best move might get narrowly beaten-in-priority in the middle of the sea of various tactical, operational, and strategic moves the AI ponders. This also explains why the last 10% of the campaign might not be an epic final battle: Supply is out, AI is crushed under too many tactical tasks. Taking a wider view: Maybe the big epic final battles died with modern warfare that require supply and logistics. In WW2, Japan and Germany did not rise to the one last epic battle, but simply whithered away, running out of fuel and ammo.
Defending Spanish Republic version 1.4 marching out... Let's see if this take finally restores the balance for everyone. Also trying to get a singular fix out for the Union.
Science: Aging with board games: fostering well-being in the older population
— This study investigated the role of board games as a viable tool to promote the well-being of older people and, consequently, to promote positive aging... The results showed that the level of well-being experienced while playing was significantly higher than that observed in daily life, F(1,131)=14.604, p=0.000, particularly with board games with a low or medium level of difficulty, F(2,126)=10.982, p=0.001... The results are particularly important because board games can be a low-cost intervention to promote the well-being of older people. They can be easily adopted by social community centers, and playing board games can become a routine practice.
Site: Oculi Mundi is the online home of The Sunderland Collection of world maps, celestial maps, atlases, and globes
— Various maps basically from 1470s and onwards
I remember when in the early days of Facebook you could post to your group of 10,000 people, and 10,000 people saw that post. Then it fell to 1,000 seeing the post, and Facebook once asked money to 'boost' the post. Then only 100 out of 10,000 saw a new post, and there were several popups about paying Facebook so they might graciously show your post to the group of people who wanted to see that post. Now, if you're lucky, 10 people out of 10,000 will see a new post, and for one week I'll be beaten to exhaustion with Facebook's gangster extortion to 'pay for any visibility whatsoever'. By now, almost all platforms and search engines work the exact reverse way to their early days. Imagine if the weight of the average food portion went down 1000X, or the price of a new car went up 1000X. Why do we tolerate certain things worsening 1000X when we would riot if other companies did that to their products? Remember how magical the Internet was when Google hired 10,000 engineers who found and highlighted the best content there was? Then somebody at Google realized that "wait a second, if those 10,000 engineers prevent anyone from ever finding anything, the content creators have to pay to us to be discovered." I'm sure kids who have known nothing else than this model find this normal. But, let me tell you, if you experienced the time when social media and search engines showed you content, it has been a painful downfall to live through. If I had one extra lifetime, I would do a search engine or social platform my way, not ruthlessly optimizing it to make money. How about we optimize it for discovery and happiness, and make enough money to keep the thing going? I have an odd respect for Craigslist because it has not changed much over decades: it's still hyper simple, with very few ads and data collection. Almost every other giant of the web has fallen to the greed.
Russian GPS interference is so exceptionally heavy that Finnish ocean-research ship Aranda struggles to carry out meaningfully accurate work on Gulf of Finland. Somebody might ask when low-intensity warfare against a NATO member is too much...
Experience report by XXXXVIII Panzer corps about its deployment on eastern front late-1943/early-1944
"Infantry divisions in the present form are no longer up to date. The assignment of an assault gun battalion can fundamentally remedy this... Blocking units. The German side could for the most part only throw alarm units against Russian tank formations that rapidly penetrated in depth. Their combat value was low. ATG regiments seem necessary... In its present organization, the artillery is very difficult to move (apparatus of staffs and supply units, which is constructed around the few barrels is too extensive and complicated.) To achieve a mass effect and a destructive effect at the decisive point, an increase of mortars and rocket launchers at the expense of the barrel artillery is necessary. The Russian has moved in this direction for more than a year."
— The German Army on the Eastern Front: An Inner View of the Ostheer's Experiences of War
At first glance I thought this was a fake photo, but its' just colossal semi-transparent German WW1 biplane Linke-Hofmann RI
Marcel Ophuls, Oscar-winning filmmaker who forced France to face its WWII past, passes away at 97
— His landmark 1969 documentary "The Sorrow and the Pity" shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the occupiers during WWII. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French TV for over a decade. French broadcast executives said it "destroyed the myths the French still need." The film's devastating message: France´s wartime story was not one of widespread resistance, but of ordinary compromise - driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism, and, at times, quiet complicity.
Version 1.4 rolling out for Panzers to Baku.
"The oil question was becoming crucial for both Germany and the USSR. To emphasize his intention, at a meeting of Heeresgruppe Süd’s senior officers at Poltava on 1 June 1942, German leader stated that ‘If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny then I must end this war.’ Nearly two weeks later, General Halder reported that based on a land forces quartermaster’s assessment, fuel for the upcoming summer offensive was only expected to last until mid-September... Brandenburgers were tasked with infiltrating enemy lines to Maikop, where they were to ease the way for the anticipated arrival of 13th Panzer Division, as well as securing the area’s oil assets until conventional forces arrived. After dark a 62-man fake-NKVD contingent marched through friendly lines around Novoalexandrovsk and into the Soviet territory... As Brandenburgers approached the Armavir–Tuapse Railway, which comprised several parallel tracks at the city’s main train station, they were stopped by actual NKVD personnel attempting to regulate military vehicles through the overwhelming chaos. When asked who he was, the Brandenburger commander responded that he was a ‘Major Truchin’ from 124th NKVD Rifle Brigade on special assignment. The checkpoint commander moved them through."
— Behind Soviet Lines, Brandenburgers Capture the Maikop Oilfields 1942
Spanish Civil War version 3.4 marching out. This should finally settle the overactive AI generals issue that has been bugging this particular campaign so badly (due to the fragmented initial setup putting so many generals near the front line).
"On June 8 1944 General Spaatz issued an order that remained in force until the war ended - the primary aim of the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces would be to deny oil to Germany. Following that order, Ploesti and other oil refineries were the major targets. How could the Germans take such punishment? How could they defend their country? Where did they get the fighters? The pilots? The antiaircraft guns? These questions were difficult for the AAF to answer, since the feeling had been that just one more blow - or two, or three - would do it and the Germans would pack it up. Nothing like that happened. The Germans made vast efforts to disperse their aircraft factories and at the end of 1943 were producing twice the number of fighters estimated by the Allies. At that stage of the war, German fighter pilots were among the best in the world. German technical knowledge and skill were equally outstanding. They were bringing a rocket-propelled fighter, the ME 163, and a jet-propelled fighter, the ME 262, on line. Despite many attacks on aircraft-producing factories, the Germans built 2,177 single-engine fighters in June 1944 (compared to 1,016 in February 1943) and more than 3,000 in September. The jet aircraft were the most serious threat and the Fifteenth went after the jet factories in Friederichshafen in a series of July raids. A postwar assessment determined that these missions destroyed 950 jet aircraft, fewer than the estimates at the time but still an impressive result. The raids on ball bearing plants had caused much physical damage but had hardly interrupted the flow of ball bearings to the factories where they were needed. In July 1944, the Fifteenth lost 318 heavy bombers in its many missions against refineries scattered across southern Europe. It was the worst month of the war for the Fifteenth."
— The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany
I come bearing both good and bad news. After days of diving deeper and deeper into how the AI figures out things with its fuzzy logic, I ultimately located the logic error that made some Partizan, etc units oddly passive at times. Bad news: Partizan and Polish Home-Army units will now be more active. You can see the first fixed logic working in the Fall of the German Army Group Center as the version 2603 rolls out. It's maddening to hyper-focus on one issue that long and relentlessly; I need an episode of a lighthearted and empty-headed TV show to unwind.
Axis Crimean Campaign is inching towards version 2.6 and there is a minor update to Japan-in-WW2 with version 1.1.0.7 (never-ending balancing of elements and fixing the Australian graphic issue).
Article: Royal Navy launches first 12-meter uncrewed submarine
— The 19-tonne sub is categorized as an Extra-Large Uncrewed Underwater Vehicle (XLUUV). Name Excalibur, it will operate under the newly formed Fleet Experimentation Squadron, which falls within the Royal Navy’s Disruptive Capabilities and Technologies Office.
"Records from Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs verify that Japanese officials contacted non-Japanese journalists as early as December 1932... Following Japan’s military invasion of China in the summer of 1937, Japan had faced harsh international criticism. The Japanese government sought to discredit what it considered exaggerated accounts foreign missionaries provided to the outside world. One American in particular, journalist Frederick Vincent Williams, worked for Japan by producing in 1938 a book called Behind the News in China, suggesting that the behavior of the Japanese military was beyond reproach and that Japan had no role in the instigation of any problems in China... Tourism plans in 1930s Japan surpassed the wildest dreams of even its staunchest supporters. Japanese travel brochures touted Xinjing, the new capital of Manchukuo, as a planned utopian city of the future to demonstrate to the world the modernity Japan was bringing to Asia... When news of Tokyo as the future site for the 1940 Olympics was broadcast, Japan went into a delirium. However, the 1940 Olympics never took place. Japan cancelled its Olympic plans in the middle of 1938 amidst worries over steel production and whether the government would be able to requisition from tightfisted military leaders the necessary funds."
— The thought war: Japanese imperial propaganda
Last resident of WWII 'ghost village' that was cleared for D-Day troops passes away at 100
— The 'village that died for England' was evacuated in 1943 so soldiers could practice house-to-house combat manoeuvres ahead of D-Day. Peter Wellman, the last surviving former resident, made a final visit last year to see the abandoned coastal village of Tyneham in Dorset where he was born and brought up. Although MoD promised citizens could return after the war, they were never allowed back.
Updated Demyansk Pocket 1942 to version 6.6. That took ridiculously long, since there are so many exceptions to normal rule sets. Also, every time I type the word 'Demyansk' anywhere, all the spell checkers kick in and start to scream that 'this here is a super obvious error'.
HOF (Hall of Fame): Trying to make the visual appearance of the HOF pages both more dense, so the lines don't go 'over' with long names, but also add a dash of color. And, since there are two entirely different ways to handle the style of HTML pages, you either have to support the old or the new standard. I try to support both to make sure everything is covered, but the challenge with running both standards is that even the tiniest mistake with the placing of 'empty space' can break some obscure parsers, resulting in colors being off. So, if you still are seeing white-text on white-background, drop me an email. The current code should, in theory, work on pretty much every possible combo, but there is that nasty thing called 'reality' that always seems to find some device that interprets standards a bit uniquely.
Dieppe version 2 is making its way through the app store processes. I'm testing writing some hollow freehand text to the update-text field on the Play Store to see if that would reduce the chance of getting stuck in eternal review. My theory being that if Google's ultra-simplistic AI sees logical text (=could be AI) or text that repeats elsewhere, it flags the update, so maybe that can be avoided by being non-strict, non-logical, and non-useful in the what's new field. I used to regularly post to various social media pages, and since I was REGULAR in my actions, I nonstop got flagged for being an automated/AI poster. It tells so much about how dysfunctional modern times are. If I want to submit a simple post online, I have to think hard about how to appear as a chaotic humanlike poster instead of a disciplined, engineer-minded person. That has over time effectively killed my desire to post anything anywhere: I just want to merrily and in a carefree manner post something for the joy of it, not do a 60-minute analysis of current policy/censorship/posting-schedule trends. Also, if you do not follow big tech, many big firms have now given an order that a new human person can ONLY be hired if the manager can prove that that particular job cannot be done by an AI. UPDATE: the new version went through the Play Store security in seconds, either it's a random coincidence, or Google's 'improved security check' truly relies on infant-level-thinking and all text appearing like a drunked random chaotic human wrote it.
Video: Sinking of HMS Glorious: German Film Reel 1940
— Original film reel showing the sinking of the HMS Glorious aircraft carrier by German battleships.
Let me tell you about the most devastating historical letdown I’ve ever encountered: the Knights Templar’s unshakable obsession with the stuff that gave them their power. Some years ago, I had the privilege to read translated documents about one of the biggest Nights Templar bases and how they operated. After lifetime exposure to the lore of their wealth, secrets, relics, and military prowess, I was not ready for what 85% of their inner writings were actually discussing about. Obviously they needed to be in top fighting shape and mental state, so they required nutritious food, which meant manure. Document after document, week after week: Where to get manure, which was the best kind, etc. To be the shining example to the whole neighboring area on how to flourish, everyone needed to be healthy and strong, meaning reliable, solid food to give energy to build things and guard routes. This could only be provided if Templars had a steady flow of fertilizer. To strike the fear to the heart of rulers, Templars needed, you know, a chain of stuff that all ultimately relied on getting that mulch. The glamour went from 100 to zero. Imagine these legendary warrior-monks, sworn to secrecy and clad in iconic white mantles, spending their days debating cow vs horse dung like medieval agricultural influencers. And yes, seriously speaking, it makes sense. In medieval times, it was hard to rely on others delivering food to you during tough times. So the more critical and fought-over the location, the more fractured the environment was, the more the focus went to securing your own crops in limited spaces, meaning you were inevitably preoccupied with manure or you were dead. To this day, every single time a documentary breathlessly announces, ‘We are about to dig up a secret Templar vault!’ I can't help but to think, ‘Forget gold: test that soil for 700-year-old fertilizer potency'!”
Japan-in-WW2 assign-resource-freeze might happen when trying to assign a resource to a stack of units. Version 1.1.0.6 rolling out, fixing this.
When RAF dropped 200,000 incendiary devices and cheap pistols to Germany
— On September 25, 1944, a squadron of Lancaster bombers dropped 200,000 packages containing small incendiary devices and American-made single-shot Liberator pistols above Frankrut. It was hoped that the weapons would land behind the barbed wire fences of various camps and cause a wave of mass sabotage.
Okay, Japan-in-WW2 is starting to push against the limits it can safely run on, so version 1.1.0.5 will try to keep less data in memory and 'trim the fat' so to speak.
Argh, a couple of the campaigns have a bug that activates AI units too early.
Updated FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). Added a list of settings to tweak to make moving the units easier and thereby help to pass the turns in a quicker manner.
"During WW2, the US Army resisted most efforts to place a heavy tank into operation. The difficult encounters with the heavy King Tiger and Panther medium tanks in Europe changed some of this policy, but the Army Ground Forces tended to oppose any tank approaching the 50–70 ton range. The Ordnance Department, however, saw a need for a special assault tank capable of dealing with fortifications. In September 1943, concept and design work began on a vehicle designed to deal with the expected works of the West Wall and other conceivable German strongholds. Early concepts called for use of the new T5E1 105mm cannon that performed very well against armor and reinforced concrete. With frontal armor 203mm thick, the resulting vehicle would require the electric drive installed in the T1E1 heavy tank and T23 medium tank... In March 1944, the design was approved for five pilot vehicles of the special assault tank, designated heavy tank T28. Among many departures from conventional designs, this tank was designed without a turret in order to lower the height of an otherwise huge vehicle. In order to reduce the ground pressure, a second set of tracks was provided... Then the chief of research and development of the Ordnance Department, advised the head of the department that the “startling performance of the new tungsten-carbide ammunition” now in use by the German Army left the T28 too vulnerable. He recommended increasing the frontal armor to 305mm."
— Super-Heavy Tanks of World War II
Lucky me, I seem to have developed a new typo: Whenever I'm typing at a high speed, there is a danger of 'London' turning into 'Longon'.
Well, a few millennia have passed by, and most updates are still stuck in the eternal Play Store review. So I guess I'll need to stop posting "version X is rolling out" stuff or post them with time delay. In the worse case, those messages are only creating confusion when players don't see the announced updates. Sadly, there is now less point in quickly reacting to any issues in the games, since nothing can be updated within a reasonable/relieable/knowable time frame. Plus, it's taking mental gymnastics to realize that "ah, this feedback email is about the new latest version on the Amazon App Store and this another comment is about the old old old version at the Play Store, and that issue was already fixed a few versions ago".
It feels like that every day, a new Google product or service takes a step closer to being outright useless. After weeks of missing Gmail notifications, I was forced to install another email app simply to get notifications working. It's Google's own app on Google's own Operating System, for crying out loud. Basics should work! I do not care if the fancy AI garbled replies work, but I truly need the fundamentals to work without fail; otherwise, there is zero point to even using that product. Google's market cap is almost 2,000,000,000,000.00. One might think they could afford to hire one guy to work on fundamentals instead of all focus going to new exiting, exploding, market-disrupting innovative speculative vaporware.
Oh, and why did installing the new email app feel like walking through a minefield? After typing the precise name of the app I wanted to install into the search field of the Play Store, I got a ton of ads and misleading images. I guess those screen-filling images also directed to the apps mentioned in the ads. After scrolling down and managing to tap the tiny, narrow space allocated to the actual real true search result showing the only app that matches the searched name, I got greeted with... pointless data safety info. Please show me something useful like the version number, last update, feature list, and how long the developer account has been active, or user reviews. Data safety info is a joke. Let me demonstrate, since I have to fill out billions of those bureaucratic forms. Since I do not collect device-released user-account data at all, should I answer that "I sell user-account data to third parties" or that "user-account data is only sent to my servers"? Either of those has anything to do with what happens in my apps, but I'm only given the bureaucratic, pre-made, poorly thought out options to choose from.
Well, what a screeching day. Every single app update, big or tiny fix, is firmly stuck in an eternal yet pointless Play Store review. I dropped my favorite coffee mug on the floor, and it shattered into tiny pieces. I missed several critical emails, and so I had to install a SECOND email app on my phone to simply get notifications of new emails. Gmail never shows notifications, and some of its notification-related settings crash if I try to alter them. And yes, trust me, I have flipped on the 9889 layers of settings that could be blocking notifications. And to add to the misery. I tried to send a package to a friend to cheer him up but decided not to send the book after realizing that postage fees would be more than there is currently money on this planet. The prices don't make any sense to me anymore. I think it's much cheaper if I study to become an aircraft engineer, build a plane, and fly the book over to its destination. I can't wait for this day to be done and dusted. Oh, I'll just need to find a way to unwind enough to be able to get into sleep.
The major elements left out of the Japan-in-WW2 game:
— US bombing raids: excluded for balance reasons.
— Japanese submarines: too many units to move/process already.
— Atomic bombs: few players like sudden game enders, plus it's a sensitive topic.
One might sum most of that up as 'too many dimensions'... Basically, the underlying 2D game engine would need to be properly morphed into a 3D one to allow aerial and submerged units to exist in their own dimension without causing mayhem. Just imagine a busy channel between islands filled with surface units, submarines, and planes.
I might have to find a super-tiny scenario to one day try running the game-play in air/ground/surfare-water/under-water levels.
Article: How America’s Mexico Campaigns Shaped the Civil War’s Top Generals
— On April APRIL 9, 1865 Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met at Appomattox to formalize the end of the bloodiest war in American history. After a few seconds of awkward silence Grant spoke first, reminding Lee that they had met 18 years earlier in Mexico. It was during General Winfield Scott’s 1847 Mexico City Campaign... In 1848, the young army officers believed that they had just been through the great epic event of their lives; none could imagine that it was just a prelude to something much bigger and far bloodier that would overshadow the two-year conflict below the Rio Grande.
Japan-in-WW2 version 1.1 rolling out, assuming it does not once again get stuck in the Play Store review. I'm starting to think it's some foolish AI that sees the word 'dive bomber' and goes haywire. At this stage, I'm just so mentally tired of coming up with'safe' words to replace anything history- or military-related. I guess we could call them something like 'sea planes', which would also differentiate from land-based ground attack planes.
Main Change Log:
— AI-controlled cities left uncaptured may now experience local insurgencies
— MP markers now include a white or black dot for easier visibility (Options: Off, Default Transparency, Max)
— AI battleships may now conduct bombardments against land targets
— Japanese main units parked within 2–3 hexes of U.S. cities on the east side of the map will increase tensions
— Ground attack planes are now less effective against warships and may suffer extra MP loss (especially when overused)
— Uprisings are now more likely (previous strict rules made them rare)
— Unit Size toggle [U] now cycles through a 'hide all units' mode
— Tension levels escalate faster during the 1940s
— Warships at full HP will begin to refuel automatically when idle in a friendly harbor
— Option added to hide oilfield/mine/industry capture images
— Ground units can no longer rest while on harbor hexagons
— Bases can now refuel from a truck located on the same hex (via 'Take Fuel' button)
— When a Dive Bomber unit moves to a hex with both carriers and bases, total aircraft capacity is now correctly calculated
— AI: Expanding and varying the target selection for AI landing fleets. Trying to choreograph the edge-warship-pile-up with more robust refuel/task/repair priorities
— Fix: Piling up over 16 units per hexagon caused graphics issues
— Crash fix: Cost counter overflow when too many units of one type are in play
If you guys had ANY idea how much energy and time it takes to change anything in a system this complex. Just doing the above took me 8 hours of high-intensity concentration and thinking, and it's all taken from my Sunday. And I left a couple of the bigger things for the future major updates. Plus there is the fairly hard to avoid fear of screwing up the whole pandemonium.
Guam slides to version 2.6.
As evening of 20 July closed in, Admiral Conolly and those around him who were responsible for the invasion of Guam looked forward with high optimism to the success of their enterprise. Reports indicated that "all known major defensive installations in position to interfere with the transports approach and the landing have been destroyed and the assault beaches cleared of obstructions and searched for mines with negative results."
Ashore, the Japanese command was not to be outmatched, at least in outward show of confidence. To the men of the 48th Independent Mixed Brigade, General Shigematsu announced encouragingly: "The enemy, overconfident because of his successful landing on Saipan, is planning a reckless and insufficiently prepared landing on Guam. We have an excellent opportunity to annihilate him upon the beaches. We are dedicated to the task of destroying this enemy, and are confident that we shall comply with the Imperial wish."
— Campaign In the Marianas: U.S. Army Center of Military History
Panzers to Leningrad version 3.6 is rolli ng out with all the latest doohickeys.
Remember that time when the Union army marched to New York to fight... the draft rioters?
Thanks to its status as America's business capital, New York City stood deeply divided at the start of the Civil War. The passage of the nation’s first military draft act, in March 1863, only worsened the situation. Not only did it allow the wealthy to buy their way out of military service but it also exempted African Americans from the draft. As the initial lists of the conscripted began to spread, a large-scale armed protest movement got underway. After a night of heavy rain, rioters returned to the streets early on Tuesday, July 14, looting and destroying businesses in the downtown area. Among the dead was Col. Henry O’Brien, the commander of a local regiment. The mob also began constructing barricades around the city. As the violence continued to spread, the city’s mayor formally asked the War Department to send federal troops. By the fourth day of the uproar, more than 4,000 federal troops, including battle-hardened veterans fresh from the horrors of Gettysburg, had arrived in the city to face off against rioters. Estimates vary greatly as to the number of people killed in the Draft Riots. Local reports initially cited 1200 perished, but modern historians believe (only) up to 120 people lost their lives.
the main source for the above
Somebody asked why the way the storms are drawn has changed twice in a year. So, one day I realized that there exists a fairly good 'rain' symbol in one of the Unicode sets. No need to carry around an image file; just use that pre-set symbol. Since that particular Unicode set has been around for well over a decade and it was not an edge-case character set, I foolishly thought that every single manufacturer would be implementing it by now. Halfway through rolling it out, it turned out to have two problems. One, some manufacturers did not support it, and the result was that some type of messy placeholder symbol was used instead. Second, I found out that one of my many code editors did not support that character set either, and when I rarely opened up the code in that one editor, it turned that great rain symbol into an incoherent mumble. And that's why, in the middle of rolling that first way to draw the storms, I was forced to flip into a simpler, second system. One of the issues of any complicated way to indicate 'rain' is that it can cover too much of the underlying information/units/etc., especially if other big changes happen to the map (like winter in some scenarios). In some cases, there simply are too many layers of information to show. Terrain, rivers, units, roads, markers on units, weather, etc can pile up on top of each other. And on a budget phone, when zoomed out, it's just outright impossible to show dozens of different things with few available pixels.
Article: 598-coin cache hidden in the 1940s found in Czech Republic
— Hikers came across the 15.4lb (7kg) hoard worth over £250,000 after taking a short cut on the wooded slopes of the Czech Republic's northeastern Podkrkonosí Mountains. The metal box contained a total of sixteen snuff boxes, ten bracelets, gold coins...
CRETE now at version 5.0. After 9 years of putting patch after patch over the chaos created by dozens of parachute units randomly ending up over each other, I finally bit the bullet. I rewrote all the code handling the unit scattering during initial/early major landings. It's so much clearer now: let me tell you, looking at your own code from a decade ago is not always pleasant. On top of the that, I added two weak British light tank units to give the scenario some variety, plus introduced random impassable cliffs (the same system used in Bougainville). With the REAL unit icon set rebuilt from originals, it feels like a different game now. I was also a bit sad to find that on some devices there was a ghost text drawn on the screen. Geez, had somebody told me, I would have fixed that months ago.
Video: What Happened to All the Flak Fired During WWII?
— In some edge cases, the falling debris from Flak-fire and unexploded shells caused more damage than the bombing raid itself.
Article: Black female WWII unit, 'Six Triple Eight,' to receive U.S. congressional honor
— The only Black, all-female unit to serve in Europe during World War II, commonly known as the "Six Triple Eight," will be presented with the Congressional Gold Medal
The Third Battle of Kharkov marching towards the version 3.6
The greatest naval battle in history
"The American combined chiefs-of-staff had long before agreed the policy for defeating the Japanese at sea and recovering all the many islands they had occupied... The first move was a thrust from the Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal north to the Gilbert and Marshall Islands. The island of Tarawa proved the hardest nut to crack, but thanks to the control of the air by the Americans, Tarawa was captured by the courageous Marines...
The Marianas were a different matter. The Japanese High Command was now alarmed and gathered together the remnants of its Navy into one giant task force. The supreme commander was Admiral Soemu Toyoda. The Japanese had managed to scrape together no fewer than 9 carriers. In all they could launch 500 planes...
The Battle for the Philippines was the greatest naval battle in history, judged in terms of the number of ships taking part, the number of ships sunk, and the importance of its outcome. It included every form of naval warfare of the twentieth century: gunnery duels between battleships; destroyer battles at night and by day, as ferocious and sustained as any at the Battle of Jutland; submarines that stalked the depths, sinking many ships; and, finally, carrier warfare on a scale never dreamed of even by the most ardent enthusiasts of air warfare at sea."
— Naval Battles of the Twentieth Century
I have been traveling near the Russia-Finland border, and it's horrifying how a couple of times my GPS has been 1 km off for hours. After some small Finnish airports near the border unsuccessfully tried new fancy ways to block the 'mysterious' GPS disruption, they have now been installing the old-style radio navigation equipment to facilitate aircraft landings. Modern solutions are unreliable if somebody puts any effort into messing them up. Official numbers: There were a total of 2,800 GPS disturbances affecting aviation in Finland in 2024, compared to just 200 incidents in 2023. So, I can't help but to wonder: Now that Finland is in NATO, how will their troops with excessively fancy gear manage here?
You would not believe me if I told you the amount of feedback I get that basically begins with "you should follow my advice since I'm the inventor of board games and served in most armies and special forces around the world, and I know everything about business, and I personally know every name in this field, and I ace every game." Sigh, okay, so why in the past 20 years, every publisher and developer that has tried your suggestion went bankrupt? Although, to be fair, one should never judge a message by its style. In the early days, I once received an ALL CAPS SCREAMING message written in a childish style, and in hindsight, to my shock, I ended up at least half-implementing most of those points. A good idea does not need merits or coherent style, and a bad idea does not get better even if it is backed by the emperor of dice. Also, there should be a different folder for feedback received on Friday or Saturday night after maybe emptying a few barrels too many.
Supplying Rommel
"The senior quartermaster officer for Africa was Oberstleutnant Graf Klinkowström. He organized his logistics support forces into 3 supply columnss, each with a lift capacity of 360 tons. With the shift of the front to the area around Tobruk/Bardia, the distances to the front from the main port of supply climbed to 1,500 km... The first blow to the German supply effort was delivered by Force “K” on the evening of 16 April. All 4 freighters of a convoy were sunk and 3,000 DAK soldiers swam in the waters of the Mediterranean for their lives...
The Italian freighter Birminia had reached Tripoli safely. In the bowels of the 10,000-ton ship was ammunition for the DAK, including 10-kilogram bombs, which were crated in bundles of 10. During the offloading, one of the crates was dropped and it went off. As a result of sympathetic explosions, all of the remaining ammunition went up, ripping off the deck of the ship...
Of the 37,000 tons that were loaded on ships in November, only 23% reached their ports of call. Despite the almost superhuman efforts of the German and Italian sailors and the coastal waterway traffic, the needs of the DAK for its attack on Tobruk were only 40% met."
— Das Afrika Korps: Erwin Rommel and the Germans in Africa, 1941-43
Video: How the US Brazenly Stole the Soviet Union’s Best Helicopter
It seems that many updates and fixes are once again stuck on the Play Store. Sigh. I think Google's automated technology doesn't any more work on weekends, you know, just like your toaster, TV and game console do not work on weekends because it's way too impossible to do technically. Why is so much tech going backwards?
On the road, so limited replies...
Case Blue: Version 3 rolling out.
"General Hasso von Manteuffel had no choice but to order the Panzer Lehr and 2nd Panzer to bypass Bastogne. Instead, he left the 26th Volksgrenadier to perform siege warfare... After the war von Manteuffel became irritated by the focus on Bastogne. ‘It’s surprising to me that Bastogne has an honourable place in American military history,’ he observed, ‘and St Vith is hardly mentioned! The Battle of the Bulge was not fought solely at Bastogne.’
Field Marshal von Rundstedt: too much reliance had been placed on Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army. This meant that the emphasis of the attack was not in the central Ardennes, where the roads were better. 'This decision was a fundamental mistake that unbalanced the whole offensive.' German HQ then made matters worse by reinforcing Dietrich and not von Manteuffel, even though the latter had created the opportunity for a breakout...
The grand plan had all been for nothing. Nevertheless, the Ardennes offensive had proved to be a remarkable battle. Germans had thrown 3 armies at 6 US divisions over a 50-mile front achieving complete surprise. This resulted in an embarrassing breakthrough that brought the Americans and the British to loggerheads. Despite some American units being thrown into a state of utter confusion, Von Manteuffel and Model, though, never came close to getting to Antwerp, which had became the holy grail for the Allies, as it answered to all their supply problems. The Allies were only able to land just over 35,000 tons of supplies a day using the liberated Channel ports. Antwerp’s docks were capable of handling up to 3X this amount.
Germans severely underestimated the speed of the Allied response: Within the space of just four days the Allies reacted by redeploying half a million men to the Ardennes."
— H’s Winter: The German Battle of the Bulge
It literally does not matter how much memory I reserve for resources in any given campaign, there will always be a handful of players building and placing and stockpiling so much that the underlying game engine runs out of memory. At least in some games, I can slowly increase the price/cost of resources if there already exists a board-filling amount of them. Another issue is speed. Sometimes you have to loop an index against itself. And looping 100 on 100 is only 10,000 checks… but try giving 1000 × 1000 a try, and suddenly we are at a million checks level of magnitude. The jump from 100 to 1000 is 10X, but the checks in a loop checking against itself: the jump is 10,000 to 1,000,000 that is 100X times more processing. The requirements simply spiral out of control if you're not putting in some limits, even if the resources might cycle at the higher and stranger rate for a player or two.
Berlin version 5200 rolling out. Okay, make it 5203 that should fix most issues.
Overworked and underforked. I literally don't know where all my forks are, I can currently locate one.
Video: When One StuG III Crushed 24 T-34s in a Day. Ace Commander Hugo Primozic’s Hour of Glory.
"Outstanding early successes only concealed Japan’s grave structural weakness. The army was already overextended in China, and each new conquest in Asia or the Pacific seemed to demand still another troop commitment to protect the recently acquired territory. Thus the navy needed Rabaul to protect Truk’s southern flank, but then needed Port Moresby to protect Rabaul’s flank, and then needed northern Australia to protect Moresby. It needed the Solomons as advance bases for operations against Port Moresby and Australia. And Fiji and Samoa became essential in order to sever the line of communication between Australia and the United States. In China, generals clamored for offensives against Chongqing; in Burma they wanted to drive to India; and in the southern region, admirals dreamed of invading Australia and India.
The imperial navy approved the F-S (Fiji-Samoa) and the Midway operations on April 5. The former would sever the line of communication between the United States and Australia (and thereby deny Australia’s use as a forward staging base for the Allied counteroffensive), and the latter would provoke the decisive naval engagement and destruction of the American fleet. It was further decided to occupy the Aleutian Islands to prevent air attacks on Japan from that direction. The Midway operation came as a total surprise to the army, which went along because it was solely a navy operation and there was nothing the army could do about it... The Doolittle raid embarrassed the army, which was responsible for air defense of the home islands and was thus persuaded to join the Midway operation to thwart future carrier-based air attacks. Around the same time, the North China Area Army tried to broker regional truces by bribing warlords."
— Japan's Imperial Army, Its Rise and Fall, 1853-1945
Let's see if version 3.4.0.5 finally settles everything in the Balkan game.
HOF: The service provider tightened database-related security settings, and that prevented one part of my code from running as normal. So, just to be safe, I flushed the database-'pipes' to force any scores stuck on my end.
France 1940 version 6.0 rolling out! The Belgian divisions were split into active (normal) and weaker reserve unit types. Graphics reconstructed from originals. There might have been some unit-icon confusion between French motorized, mechanized, and armored.
You know it has been a good week when, in spite of hectic updates, almost every single crash on record from the last 7 days has been caused by me testing various things.
Japan's Indian troops attack Gurkhas defending India
"Some argued that with the Indian National Army (INA) in the vanguard of the Japanese offensive into India it might even topple the Raj... For months the Indian National Army had been awash with the propaganda that when confronted by their kith and kin the Indian troops of the British Army would refuse to fire, and joyfully join in the revolution. For the men of B Company, 4/10th Gurkha Rifles, however, nothing could have been further from the truth. Five miles south of Palel, dug in along a ridge, the Gurkhas watched the Indians approaching in an extraordinarily lackadaisical manner. The sustained and disciplined firepower of the waiting Gurkhas, unmoved by the thought that they might be firing on their erstwhile colleagues, scattered the startled Indians. For the loss of two Gurkha, the INA lost two officers and many soldiers, together with the surrender of 35. A few miles to the rear the INA Regimental HQ was attacked, and the following morning was hit by a strike by RAF Hurricanes coordinated with an artillery bombardment. The attacking force was largely decimated by these actions. The greatest effect of these disasters, however, was on INA morale which, combined with repeated Japanese failure to supply the division with either food or ammunition precipitated a series of crises in Indian National Army ranks. Many men deserted, while others shot themselves through the foot or hand in an attempt to escape the battlefield. Of the 3,000 men of the 2nd Gandhi Regiment who marched into the hills at the end of March only 1,000 remained by 15 June, and then only 750 two weeks later."
— Japan's Last Bid for Victory, The Invasion of India 1944
If you need to get those pesky colonial Brits out of India, who is the one fiery Indian woman you will call to raise all-female regiments to attack and liberate India? It's captain Lakshmi Swaminathan of course. Rani of Jhansi Regiment was one of the first all-female combat regiments in modern military history, and in spring of 1944 it was one of the Indian National Army (INA) units that attacked from Burma to India... Although after the Allied-side Gurkhas wiped out few INA regiments, Japanese decided to keep captain Lakshmi's female regiment in the rear handling the resulting chaos from the failed attack and retreat.
Japan-in-WW2Version 1.0.7 starting to roll out.
— AI Unit Animation setting: AI units now animate only if there are at least X player-controlled hexagons within range 2.
— Carrier Deployment: The 5 initial Japanese carriers and their planes can now be time-released at the start of Year X so they only enter play later to speed up play
— Japanese airforce units block more of the AI strafing and with high tech-level withing range 2. Reduced strafing in China during early years; strafing heavily depends on wars against the UK/US.
— Ships can only rest/repair in harbors if no adjacent enemy city or unit is present.
— Updated new US battleship names for accuracy. During the transition, new names use underscores to avoid duplication issues
— Fixes: Fixed an issue where the USSR war-status counter failed to escalate to full war. Addressed AI over-cautiousness with amphibious landings. Resolved an issue where planes with full movement points (MPs) but low HP could become stuck among AI units, blocking turn progression.Fixed "river-on-ocean" graphical glitches. MP cost for constructing dugouts now scales more sharply with the number of existing dugouts. If the game engine runs out of memory, it prioritizes removing dugouts farthest from enemy units (excluding those on the west/north edges of the map and in Home Islands).
If you're trying to install an app manually (also known as side-loading) on an older device and it doesn't work the first time, don't worry, it might just be a timing issue. Sometimes, even if everything is done correctly, the device may show a message like "install failed" at the end. In many cases, simply trying the installation a second time will succeed. This happens because newer software is often tested on the latest high-end phones, and may not always account for how slowly things work on older devices. So the app is not necessarily prevented from installing, your device might just need a second attempt to catch up.
Once again, I'm shocked and bewildered to discover that the 'trial and error' of life includes actual 'errors'—and, truth be told, I'm not especially fond of the 'trials' either.
Axis Balkan Campaign updates itself to version 3.4.0.2 (make it version 3.4.0.3) and that includes rebuilding most of the icons. On top of the ongoing list of additions, changes include new unit type for the Greek Tankette unit, less HPs for the not yet fully mobilized units, new icon for the Italian commander, if Engineers are turned OFF generals can request airfields and hospitals.
I would like to meet the devious person at Amazon who replaced the one hyper-quick “remove all screenshots” button with excruciatingly slow one-by-one removal of screenshots via an incredibly ultra-tiny x-marker. I could previously do that task literally, no exaggeration, in under one second. It was one button. Now it's like this: Do one super-focused click on one tiny 'x' marker in the corner of one tiny thumb of a screenshot. Then wait, wait, wait, processing, wait, wait, oh wow, YES, the page is responsive again for the next action. Try very hard to click on the next miniscule 'x' button without boiling over from frustration. Then wait, wait, wait... Repeat until all the countless old screenshots are removed. Sigh! Who walked into a meeting and said, 'I got a great idea, guys!' This is a strong contender for the most bewildering tech change I experienced in the last 12 months.
I wonder how much happier and unique game-makers were in the 1990s, when you basically never received feedback unless somebody wrote you a letter or your game got reviewed. And since you had very few games to compare your idea to, you were much more inclined to follow your own, utterly non-standard vision. Now there is a nonstop flood of feedback in every direction, and since almost everybody copies almost every (good) feature and practice, we are marching towards a clone city, where everything just resembles everything else more and more. Don't get me wrong, feedback allows 20X faster fixes and corrections, but it's also very challenging on many layers. Even if you do 999 out of the 1,000 things right, the majority of the feedback will be negative. And players will loudly demand the game be taken in a direction they happen to like. It's hard to maintain a positive drive and a clear vision of your own when there is booming, nonstop screaming to make things differently. What was the last game that made you go: “Huh? WTF is this?”
Features rolling out:
— Setting: Each turn store full-screen map as a screenshot. These can be viewed turn by turn later. Tap to 2x zoom. Default OFF. Note: eats up to 300k storage per pic on 1920x1080 display. [please note that these are on the app's own storage so not visible on image galleries of the device, and all these will be removed when you finish the game]
— Stars indicating the most battles changed: Now the unit with the most battles of its unit type has 2 star-markers
— ROUT: Out-of-supply unit can once per turn ROUT, lose roughly half of its HPs to gain 1 MP
— Setting: Make unit-icons harsh/gritty as they lose HPs (less saturation, more contrast) [similar to 'darken the damaged units']
— WAYPOINT: Select a unit with MPs, tap further than the unit can travel to during this turn, and the unit will automatically continue the travel at the start of the next turn. Or select no-MP unit, long press the hexagon where it should go. Options: OFF or ONLY if target tap >= 1/2/3/4 hexagons away. [the newer version will be get triggered by scrolling on the map]
— If unit has multiple negative MPs at the start of a turn and it has no other text-tags set, -X MPs tag will be set. If nothing else is happening, focus will be on the unit with most negative MPs at the start of the turn.
Since the lowest-end budget phones no longer crash after I add slightly higher-quality icons, I'm also tempted to start adding new unit types into older campaigns. Or use that untapped capacity to include some basic variation, like using different REAL icons for German vs Italian commanders on the same side. Sadly, there still are some campaigns that outright lack unit types. For example, some Pacific islands were basically attacked by American Marines and defended by the Japanese Army. There might have been a few tanks and some random Japanese construction or Navy unit, but that doesn't change the fact that without adding some miniscule, insignificant unit types, it's tough to even get to 10 different unit types. Or should I take advantage of that unused potential to make the image of every general unique in those campaigns? Although if I do that in only a few games, then there will be nonstop questions of why this isn't the case in every game. And maybe in those extreme cases, new unit types should not be forced into play just to add variety. Maybe war was sometimes gray and monotonous. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Eastern Front: "Please add all the Axis separately, Italians, Romanians, Hungarians, Finns; plus also keep all the auxiliary units separate by type: oh, and add light tanks and late-war heavy tanks, and Stugs and split antitank guns into early weak ones and later strong ones." One unit type at a time, please.
Oh, this riles up me: I have new 'friends' on several social media platforms. Why? Because most apps have switched to a new, sneaky design that shows the 'add as a friend' button precisely where you press when you are quickly flipping through multiple posts. We have reached a point where we need an acronym for “sorry, I didn't mean to add you as a friend; the borderline illegal setup misled me into tapping that action.”
German Security Divisions vs Soviet Partizans
From as early as the summer of 1941 demands for troops at the front had stripped the German Security Divisions of considerable manpower. The Security Divisions lost not only personnel from their initial complements on invasion but also horses and hence mobility. On 2 June 1941 the 281st Security Division had 1,876 horses, by 11 September there were only 760. Replacements were considered inadequate for the task expected of them. The 281st Security Division reported that "the bulk of the personnel are too old, more than 80% more than 30 years old"...
In a partisan diary captured by 281st Security Division, it was reported for 14 September 1941 that "our reception in the villages has become consistently worse; the Germans warn the civilian population of the consequences of assisting us". Consequently the diary went on to state that "the population of the villages is intimidated by the Germans. They barter with us and assist us only with great trepidation, lest the German troops harm them". Certainly the partisans were not seen in the same positive light as the Red Army in part as a result of the repercussions of a partisan presence in the locality. The above partisan diary reports that on 29 September 1941 the partisans arrived in a village to be told: "We are German subjects – move on! We don’t have any bread ourselves. Many of your sort come through here. Better that you were at the front with the Army!"
— The War Behind the Eastern Front, Soviet Partisans in North-West Russia 1941-1944
Updates. Big update to Union (version 1.6)! Amazingly enough, I changed everything, yet it went through the Play Store update process in seconds. Thankfully, after several days, the latest update to Japan-in-WW2 is finally out, that's version 1.0.6. Also, below are a couple of longer pieces of writing about AI and graphics, I guess after the all the coding I was looking for something else to do for a change. There is actual military-history/game posts below all the sudden verbalization.
Here is a separate page for my thoughts about AI & Chat-GPT. If you want to learn how a LLM (large language model) like Chat-GPT fundamentally works, and how hard it is to say how much of that text-message you wrote today was actually written by AI via predictive text tools, come on in... The U.S. starts using an AI in nuclear plants to consult about safety regulations, yes, it's basically the same AI that confidently tells people to put glue on their pizza. What could possibly go wrong here?
Graphics chat by non-artsy developer. I have been testing a bit higher image quality for a while now in several games, and unlike in the past, I have not seen any out-of-memory crashes. I guess the worst budget phones have all retired by now. So, this allows me to move forward with upgrading the unit-icons (please don't get too excited). Some games will see bigger graphics updates than others. In a handful of scenarios, the icons are effectively based on the decade-old base images and will be replaced with icons based on newer, entirely different image-sets that are a bit more board-game/drawing inspired. Yes, the good news is that I have had a decade to try to secure some image sets. I feel like they might work on these games. And while some images continue to look and be the same, they will be higher quality versions, reworked from the original HQ sources. It's strange to see something you have stared at for 10-years change; at times it's jarring, and in some cases it feels like jumping from cave-art to space-art. And yes, some old graphics were, how to put it nicely, 'not great'. Understandably so, after some images had been re-edited dozens of times, resized and rescaled to be smaller, driven through various image-optimizers, simplified to be recognizable at very low pixel densities, etc. You do that to an image year after year, not always with the greatest of care in the middle of the night, tired and monitor adjusting color-space without me realizing it. In the end, the 20th edit of the image is a broken mess. In some icons, the original base-color has half-vanished for various reasons, so at least the visuals should be more color-striking moving forward. One thing that has caused many wars inside my mind is 'gradient'. Yes, I admit, using a color gradient in the image looks great, but you basically instantly 4X the size for an eye candy. Plus, there is the argument that it's harder to get a solid quick-glance overview of the map if instead of unified simple colors, you are looking at the gliding and ever-changing color shades.
And since I don't have an artistic/visual bone in me, my fashion sense is 'beige cargo pants, please', I'm sure some changes will horribly misfire and mismatch the overall style of the campaign in question. I can't really draw from scratch, but I'm fluent enough with GIMP (image editor) that I can edit, mix, bend, and twist. And the world is filled with talented people to buy/hire source images from. Hopefully this stepping-up-of-graphics will happen at a four-steps-forward, one-step-back speed. The factor that is making this very challenging, is that all the options allow changing the style so much: NATO/REAL icons, background style/image, intensity of colors and markers, and shadows. What I'm trying to say: The changes should look tolerable on the default and most common visual options, but I'm afraid that some setting-combinations inevitably result in an ugly, chaotic, or cluttered map. For example, the new movement-arrow color fits pleasantly with the default background color, but is an eye-sore on some background patterns. Those types of things can't be solved so that everything always works and looks fine. And this leads to the question: Should some visual settings be removed? I'm split on this: On the other hand, I want there to be plenty of options to tweak the elements, but the maintenance of such a tangled web is overwhelming. I would like to cut down the time it takes to secure that the 100 options interacting with 100 options do not fundamentally clash. I'm strongly on both sides of the argument.
Victory Cards: I will slowly continue to add the various 'victory', etc cards. As an eye candy that has nothing to do with the actual game play, they will always be a low priority for me. Thankfully there are a lot of big old photo/poster/art collections freely available online these days, so I can always try to throw/merge together a handful of retro pics/drawings on GIMP. Add some military symbols to see if the end result would make a usable image. Most of the time it is not, but the process is something different, so it's actually relaxing if I don't take it too seriously or try to force it. I do appreciate the gentle feedback about the fact that some of those cards 'visually do not work at all within the theme of this game'. I agree. I'll replace the worst ones as the updates circle back, so basically the same process will take place as with the 'doodle flags'. Throw 30 things at the wall, repeat replacing the worst 3, and things will slowly get better. Obviously, I'm keeping the size of the victory cards tiny to avoid bloat, so that sets strict limits on how 'glorious' the entire graphic can be. But, at least they set the tone when they succeed in fitting the vibe of the campaign. And if one image is shown multiple times, I will try to include a setting to turn it ON/OFF. I'm not an arts guy, but looking at all the stunning old oriental drawings and posters made me want to create victory cards for all the big islands on the Pacific Ocean. Even as a coder, I get it: if I had one extra lifetime, trying to create something visual by mixing and editing would be a thrilling way to spend that one extra lifetime. But I'm still a coder: logic, numbers, algorithms. So, realistically, the level of graphics will always be between 'WTF is that smudge supposed to be' and 'good enough'. Like I have been consistently saying from the start: the selling point of my games is a certain hopefully unique mix of patterns and variation, easy to play but hard to master! No endless menus or micromanagement, just chasing that feeling when the player goes: 'JUST ONE MORE TURN'! To me, a game is a success if it makes me think: 'ooh, I'll play one more turn to see how that situation evolves as I maneuver my troops.'
"With the invention of photography in the 1830s, the possibility of capturing the events of war was first explored... (from Wikipedia/War-photography)
— The Mexican-American War was the first one to be captured by a camera. A number of daguerreotypes were taken of the occupation of Saltillo during the Mexican–American War, in 1847 by an unknown photographer
— John McCosh, a surgeon in the Bengal Army, is the first war photographer known by name. He produced a series of photos documenting the Second Anglo-Sikh War 1848-1849
— The Hungarian–Romanian Károly Szathmáry Papp took photographs of officers in 1853 and of war scenes near Oltenita and Silistra in 1854, during the Crimean War
— Stefano Lecchi took photos of the battle locations of the Roman Republic using the Calotype process (1849-1859)
— The first official attempts at war photography were made by the British at the start of the Crimean War. In March 1854, Gilbert Elliott was commissioned to photograph views of the Russian fortifications along the coast of the Baltic Sea."
How close was Japan to destroying the Panama Canal in WWII?
"Many in the Imperial Japanese Navy considered attacking the Panama Canal with huge I-400 subs—which could launch several planes—a top priority... There was tremendous complexity in launching the planes from the sub. While the sub was still submerged, the crew climbed up an access tube that led into the hangar. Once inside, mechanics pumped coolant and heated lubricating oil into the plane’s engine... After the planes destroyed the lock gates of Panama Canal, they were to rendezvous with subs in the Gulf of Panama. Ditching their planes in the ocean, the aircrews would swim to their subs... The I-400 left Maizuru Naval Base on July 21, 1945—the Panama Canal was about to be destroyed! However, while moving along Hokkaido, a Japanese shore battery spotted the sub’s silhouette and opened fire.. It was a close call... The attack plan was straightforward. The I-400, I-401 plus 2 other subs would travel independently and only meet up before the attack. However, when the I-400 waited at the final rendezvous point before the attack, none of the other subs showed up. They must all have been sunk. The transmissions coming out of Sydney claimed that Russia had declared war on Japan and a special bomb had been used. Many of the I-400’s officers doubted what they heard. One of the men even reported hearing that Japan had won the war. Unexplainably, the I-401 was actually fine, but it waited near a different faraway island - something had gone horribly wrong at some stage of planning or communication. The post-surrender orders subs received were contradictory. No order explicitly canceled the attack, let alone told to stand down. In fact, one of the orders said 'submarines should execute their missions'. Both subs separately continued with their attack plans.. I-401 was too far from Panama and just as it instead prepared to strike a nearby atoll, it received orders to cease all combat activity as the attack by the Soviet Union made continuing the war impossible. One officer suggested they hide out on a Pacific island... I-400 received its order to dispose of weapons when it was over a hundred miles away from the point from which it could strike the Panama Canal. Both I-400 and I-401 were later captured by the U.S. Navy, which scuttled both subs to prevent Soviet inspection."
— Operation Storm: Japan's Top Secret Submarines and Its Plan to Change the Course of WWII
Post-note: The locks of the Panama Canal were obviously heavily defended by the U.S. due to their ability to cause a nasty cascade of failures, both in the canal system itself if the man-made lakes broke free and to the global flow of U.S. military logistics. So, even if Japan had carried out the attacks, the outcome would have been unknown. Attack during daylight would have made bombing accurate but counter-measures would have been fully active. While night-time attack most likely would have failed to cause enough damage. And, even if successfull, the strike would have not made any difference in 1945 when everything else was collapsing for Japan. But it is a curious piece of history what-if and technology.
Pic (above): Already in 1927, Brits had HMS M2, a Royal Navy submarine aircraft carrier. As the West scrapped the idea over time, Japan ended up being the only country taking this weapon system seriously (I400 was classified for 'decisive long-range attacks') with the plans to make 18 huge submarines. However, during WW2 Japan only managed to manufacture 2 huge submarine aircraft carriers (pics below) and 1 huge submarine tanker (I-402). In addition, Japan had the smaller submarine aircraft carriers like I-13 and I-14 (Modified A2-type), plus some submarines that could launch a single recon aircraft.
Video: 15 Most Historically Accurate WWII Movies Ever Made
— One recreated the inside of a German U-boat down to the grease stains. Another used actual code that was once a government secret.
Latest 5 games that were updated in the past week or two: Juno-Sword, American Civil War (South), Battle of the Bulge, Japan-in-WW2, Kursk.
Joys of weather on Eastern Front
"In April the weather broke for good. Snow and ice melted. The water was knee-deep on the roads. The men waded waist-deep through the icy swamps and marshes. Rafts had to be built for the heavy machine-guns from branches of trees and bushes, or otherwise they would disappear in the mud. The wounded had to be laid on stretchers made of branches, or else they would have drowned. Anything that weighed anything (rifles, horses, men) sank into the swamp. The uniforms were sodden... Bale after bale of straw was collected by the grenadiers from the villages and flung down in the mud. Even the infantry got stuck with their vehicles and made only very slow progress... Entire companies were pulling bogged-down lorries out of the mud of the roads. The motor-cyclists made wooden skids for their machines from boards and planks and pulled them along behind them. Major Vogt, commanding the support units of 18th Panzer Division, was in despair. How did the Russians manage with these muddy roads year after year? He hit on the answer. He got hold of the small tough horses he had seen the local peasants use, as well as their light farm carts, and used them for sending his divisions' supplies forward. It worked. The motorized convoys were stuck in the mud, but the small peasant carts got through."
— Moves East 1941-1943
Yes, I'm aware of the issue in the American Civil War, version 7.0.2.1 has already been pushed out and should fix it. At this stage the best tool to predict if an app update gets through the Play Store quickly is to throw a dice. Sometimes it takes 2 minutes, or 2 hours, or maybe 2 days. Major update might be out in 2 minutes, and some hyper-tiny fix-update that barely changes anything is stuck in review for 2 days.
Battle of Bulge version 7.4 is rolling out, and should balance the flow of the campaign better. Plus the HOF has been cleared from the oldest scores, so there is a nice opening to seize the top spot.
User Interface: I think I’ve finally figured out the cause of the annoyance some players have experienced—excessive triggering of various features while scrolling the map. The bad news is that I still need to roll out this improvement to all the games, so it will take time. However, if you’re one of the players who scrolls the map frequently, the next round of updates will drastically reduce accidental triggers of other actions.
Logistics during the Pacific War
"Almost every human and mechanical need had to be met by shipment across thousands of miles of ocean. The south-west Pacific was known as the “goat and cabbage circuit,” because so much unwelcome food came from Australia. The scale of logistics was staggering. In the five months from 1 September 1944 fleet tankers delivered to the fast carrier force 8.25 million barrels of fuel oil, 12.25 million gallons of aviation gas. In addition, they shifted thousands of drums of lubricating oil in 14 grades, compressed gases, oxygen, spare belly tanks, mail, personnel and food. Fresh water was a constant issue. The heat caused tanks to become contaminated, which necessitated draining them for cleaning. So desperate were some seamen for a serious drink that they built stills or drained alcohol from torpedo propulsion systems. The latter practice may have raised morale, but drastically shortened the torpedoes’ range."
— Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45
Japan-in-WW2 Monday News: Later today, I’ll drop the price from "new" to "normal" (edit: done now). Over the weekend, heavy usage uncovered two critical bugs, so another update — version 1.0.5 — is coming as you read this, along with two handfuls of tweaks, plus the addition of a harbor adjacent to Singapore (whether to keep it or not was heavily debated during development). I’m not gonna lie: It’s humbling to see this complex app running and to daily discover a new "yeah, that absolutely needs changing" aspect. Change log is mostly: fix, fix, fix... But I have to believe that if I keep hammering the nails, eventually everything gets nailed down. One player even managed to land on the American mainland in a way that exposed a big bug nobody encountered during testing. The other way to look at it? Not enough testers ever made it that far with enough force to expose a flaw in full scale combat on the 'edge of the world' across the Pacific. Nail, meet hammer.
Future of Removed Play Store Games: I’m still unsure how to proceed with the games removed from the Play Store (thanks to Google’s overly aggressive bots). Compounding the issue, these games won’t remain available for purchase on the Amazon App Store for non-Kindle Fire devices indefinitely—Amazon is restricting their app store to Kindle Fire devices only. Here are the options I’m considering:
— Direct sales via PayPal, etc. (Great: No big tech ruining everything. Bad: Manual process, slow updates, tax/accounting hassles.)
— Third-party digital storefront (Reduces some hassles but depends on platform quality.)
— Alternative Android app stores (Most remaining stores are subpar.)
— Rework, rebrand, and re-release on Play Store (Risky and labor-intensive—would require maintaining two separate versions for Amazon and Play Store.)
Each option presents significant challenges. Feedback is welcome!
"Code changes were causing the Japanese considerable difficulty. Their forces were spread out over the western Pacific, and communications with some detachments were difficult. Before the code could be changed, code books had to be delivered to all holders. Occasionally, a major message would have to be encrypted in some minor code... I remember one message decrypted early in July 1942, when we were reading very little current messages... we were able to read all of a Japanese message planning a land attack on Port Moresby. A Japanese Army force planned to land near Buna on 21 July 1942 and cross the Owen Stanley Range to attack Port Moresby from the rear... There were a few nuggets of pure intel gold among the documents captured at Guadalcanal. One such nugget was a chart of Palau, which revealed that big Japanese ships used the West Passage. These files also included a number of Japanese propaganda (“surrender”) leaflets in bad English, illustrated with crude x pictures... A steady stream of captured personal diaries began to appear in early 1943. These presented another problem for the translation section because they were written in sosho, the Japanese cursive script... On 29 January 1943 the Japanese submarine I-1 was sunk. Allied divers salvaged a treasure trove of valuable secret documents. The I-1 was carrying not only the current codes, but editions scheduled to go into effect in the future. 200,000 secret documents, widely distributed across the broad Pacific, had been compromised and had to be replaced."
— Double-edged secrets : US naval intelligence operations in the Pacific
In my latest playthrough of Japan-in-WW2, I encountered a thrilling moment featuring land and naval units from both sides during a landing in Australia. However, as the success of the operation hung in the balance, I became so engrossed in the maneuvering and gameplay that I completely forgot to take any screenshots. ARGH! I was so furious - you can’t easily replicate those moments, which require countless hours of play in a certain way to reach.
What I like about this particular "peak Japan" map is that it actually shows how Japan managed to seize the coastal areas to form a coherent logistics flow in mainland China. Most maps skip this since Japan only achieved/secured this feat properly after starting to slip elsewhere.
"Many WWII maps depict Japan's maximum territorial expansion around 1942, emphasizing conquests like the fall of Singapore, the Philippines, and Burma. At this point, Japan was still struggling to fully secure large parts of the Chinese coast, so later gains often get overlooked. Unlike the Blitzkrieg in Europe, Japan’s control over the Chinese coastline wasn't a sudden event. It was a slow process, where they seized major cities, but rural areas remained contested for years. This makes it harder to represent on static maps. In addition, Western perspectives on WWII tend to focus on the Pacific and European theaters. The war in China, despite being a major front, is often treated as a background conflict. This leads to oversimplified maps that fail to show how Japan slowly tightened its grip on the coast. After the war, both the Communist and Nationalist governments had their own reasons for downplaying Japan’s control over China’s coast."
Japan in WW2
— Congrats to those who managed to win the game, amazing job!
— Version 1.0.4.2 rolling out, Play Store still lagging days behind
— This update should comprehensively eliminate wrong-country triggers
Random military tidbit: The Finnish army has for decades collected data on how much new recruits can run in 12 minutes (Cooper test). The peak was in 1975 when the average was 2760 meters (1.715 miles), and it has been declining ever since, the lowest average was in 2019 with 2358 meters (1.465 miles).
Please update Japan-in-WW2 to version 1.0.3.X depending on which app store you use.
To celebrate Monday, Google's Play Store, after taking their sweet time and letting several key updates pile up for some apps, actually let through two of my countless updates. *sigh* It reminds me of that time one developer tried to update an old app controlling a critical piece of hospital equipment, and Google rejected the update because the old app did not meet modern design guidelines. The hospital appealed, as spending months on a total rework of the old specialty app that worked perfectly well apart from needing one tiny update was insane, but Google shut them down. Because forcing everyone to mindlessly obey bureaucratic design guidelines was more important than using common sense and keeping people alive. It's a beautiful utopian illusion that we can be hyperefficient and control everything with one rule set, but there are always exceptions. And if 1% of cases are exceptions, out of 1,000,000 cases, that's 10,000 utter failures due to lack of human oversight and taking context into consideration. We live in strange times, as the last remnants of human interaction and reasoning are squeezed out of all the systems. Only the absolutely mind-numbingly boring average will be allowed; everything else will be unsympathetically filtered out.
MiniReview site has a review of the Eastern Front WWII
During 2025, I'll be slowly separating the html documenation pages (that apps link to) into game specific ones and one generic-rule page.
Article: Two Aircraft Carriers Were Stationed In the Great Lakes During WWII
— While the majority of aircraft carriers sailed the world’s oceans during the conflict, two were stationed in the Great Lakes: the USS Wolverine (IX-64) and Sable (IX-81).
I'll be posting several short book excerpts about Japan/WW2 over the coming weeks, as I went through a fairly big pile of history books during the research phase of creating Japan-in-WW2. Two things specifically stuck in my mind.
Firstly, the USSR had many oil fields on their 'eastern half', plus many other natural resources Japan needed. So, why didn't Japan go after the USSR, especially when it was 'busy' defending itself against German invasion? Japan attacking the 'godless west-hating' Soviet Union would have triggered the US/UK less than seizing the western assets in the Dutch East Indies. There seem to be numerous smaller reasons for Japan's reluctance to attack the USSR. Natural resources in the USSR were in primitive places with harsh climates; in addition to seizing the resources, Japan would have needed to make a huge infrastructure investment. In the early 1940s, Japan actually made deals with the USSR, so Japan did receive natural resources, even some oil, without tying itself up in combat. And Japan was wary of the Soviet Red Army after 10 years of border battles and wars, in which it sometimes got beaten badly. Plus, the Japanese Navy was keen on Southern expansion (food, rubber, etc).
The second aspect that was fascinating to me was how diverse the Japanese attitudes toward their conquest were. And by that, I mean that politicians and officers wildly varied, all the way from dreamers of Japan uniting all Asia as equals to ruthless power-hungry conquerors seeing themselves on top of the food chain. It's hard to escape the feeling that due to Japan being in a warlike (mental) state from the early 1930s onwards, the expansion steamroller slowly gathering speed was inevitable. At challenging times, slowly but surely, one compromise at a time, one moderate sidelined at a time, the politics eroded from meaningful multi-sided conversation into one-sided zealous approach. And it wasn't even one steamroller, but two, since the Army and the Navy were operating in their own separate universes. History, especially wars, often seems so simple when looking at the grand total, the superficial one-line summary, often written by winners for the first few decades. But if you dig deeper, all nations and armies are made out of millions of unique people, each with their own views and values. Military history quickly gets muddy when you read individuals' wildly varying fears and hopes from their diaries and memoirs. What I'm trying to say with this word salad is that, as a westerner, it has been a learning experience to hear all the different voices, what was planned at various levels, and what actually ended up happening.
Japan trying to figure out the Western Allies: "the impending British surrender would be a profound shock to the U.S."
"The Japanese navy wanted to establish an outer perimeter that reached to Australia, Hawaii, and India. Allied attempts to defend those vital areas would bring about the long-sought climactic fleet engagement. The army, however, was content to defend the current gains and consolidate its forces to repulse enemy counteroffensives anticipated after 1943. In other words, the army wanted to dig in to fight a protracted war of attrition whereas the navy demanded further expansion and the destruction SR f the U.S. fleet to make a protracted war possible.
In an economy-of-force move, army authorities expected to withdraw sizeable numbers of troops from the southern front to refit, reequip, and modernize them for the long-term struggle. Plans would reduce the 450,000 troops to 250,000 personnel by the end of 1942. The 200,000 recycled troops would reinforce Japan’s northern front in anticipation of operations against the Soviet Union beginning in the spring of 1942...
For the first time the Japanese army’s strategic planners expressed doubt that Germany could defeat the USSR in 1942, but they held out hope that German occupation of the Caucasus might cause the Soviet regime to collapse...
As for the British and American, the loss of their advanced bases and colonies had lowered overall Allied morale, and the impending British surrender would be a profound psychological shock to the United States, where societal unrest was likely to develop as the American standard of living declined and wartime sacrifices increased without hope of victory. Based on these encouraging assessments, the liaison conference decided to expand the current gains and create an impregnable strategic defensive perimeter."
— Japan's Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall 1853-1945
Japan-in-WW2 version 1.0.3 is rolling out. Biggest change: Only one increase in political tensions per province per turn, except for key events like seizing oil fields, etc. Well, the update instantly rolled out to the Amazon App Store as usual, but the critical fix-update is stuck on Play Store review, yes, yet again. How lovely that I can fix bugs in minutes, but Google Play Store, sigh, can't be bothered, and everything takes days. Why don't they let developers fix apps quickly? And what's the logic behind Play Store doing the 987987th deep review of the same exact app within 2 weeks? Every week I wake up and make a holy oath that 'this is the week I won't be raging about Google', and BANG, ten things they do make everybody's life worse. I simply can't take it quietly after the insanities pile up. Then Google has the audacity to loudly wonder why all developers abandon Android and move over to Apple. *sigh*
Japan in Java:
"In the summer of 1941, Japanese planning and organization for the invasion of Southeast Asia and the Pacific began in earnest, as worsening relations with the U.S. and the Netherlands East Indies and continued Axis victories in Europe made war for Southeast Asia’s resources seem a concrete possibility...
On March 10, 1942, one day after the Dutch surrender near Bandung, General Imamura and 12 top staff members of the 16th Army deliberated on the shape of Japan’s administration in Java. Imamura’s memoirs revealed a discussion of a much less inspiring nature than the nationalists might have hoped. The issue at hand: should the Japanese be moderate or repressive? ...
In March 1943, as the 1-year anniversary of the Dutch surrender approached, occupied Java hung in an awkward state of limbo. So many promises had been made in the past year, yet so few had come to fruition. After a dramatic early heyday, the personnel on both sides who had trumpeted these promises most loudly in the early going—the men of the propaganda squad, and the nationalists who had staked their reputations on collaboration with their early projects—had proven no match for stronger forces on both sides...
In December 1944, in an impassioned and sympathetic text by a Japanese officer pulled few punches in describing how Japanese ignorance, an inappropriate sense of superiority, and a shortsighted focus on material requisition alone were betraying Japan’s Greater Asian mission in Java... launched into a sustained diatribe against the persistence of what he saw as Western-style colonial attitudes regarding Indonesians among his fellow Japanese...
As the occupation wore on, supplies of cotton and clothing drastically dwindled. Those who were better off, from the middle class and above, were able to purchase clothing on the black market; but for Jakarta’s masses the only option were emergency garments distributed by the local authorities, at first made from gunny sacks, and later rubber. By 1945 “they were all wearing rubber. It was really rubber. When they’d walk, you’d hear a creaking sound.”
— Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War
Video: Hellenistic Mega Weapons
— The kings of the Hellenistic world became famous for gigantic siege towers, super battleships, floating siege platforms...
One Japanese perspective to WW2
"The Australians we fought at Isurava were tenacious. I was a veteran of China, but I’d never encountered such hard fighting before. In China the enemy ran away, but the Australians here, in a good position, stayed... They’d tricked us and recaptured Kokoda, and they held us up for 4 days at Isurava. They knew our tactics well and used them against us. We, on the other hand, we were not as good as we were in China—not as tough. Too many of our best men had perished. We had not given consideration to the type of enemy we now faced. We still had traditional weapons like swords, which we had used in China. The Australians had excellent weapons, like the Bren gun. It was better than our light machine gun and I saw to it that, after Isurava, all my company was using captured Bren guns... We had a parade and the commander called out names. As company sergeant major my responsibility was to reply. I kept saying ‘killed in action’ and I began to cry... Seeing their excellent sanitary arrangements it was hard to understand that Australia was the place where the British sent all their criminals. The men would make jokes, saying, ‘lookout, there are criminals up there.’ Given that, it was a surprising thing that they could create a disciplined army. During the enemy retreat they’d throw away food they could not carry back. If we saw something shining in the jungle we’d know it was a tin can. We’d go get them, or sometimes we’d find a pile of rice. We would wash the mud off and eat it."
— Sadashige Imanishi in Japan's Pacific War
NEW GAME: JAPAN in WW2 - PACIFIC EXPANSE
By orders of magnitude, this is the most complex game I’ve ever crafted! Both sides execute multiple landings that play almost as mini-games, while carrier battles with dive bombers rage, destroyers lay minefields, and battleships pulverize smaller ships. Diplomacy shifts from low tensions to desperate appeasement to all-out war. Direct your industry to produce infantry, supply ships, and tankers to seize Dutch oil fields, or manufacture tanks to capture Chinese mines for iron and coal. Maybe build more carriers and battleships to push the U.S. out of the Pacific—or shock everyone by taking on the USSR.
"In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain, I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success."
— Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy Combined Fleet
⊕ Full paid version on Play Store
⊕ Free turn-limited version as APK file for side-loading
NOTE: Amazon App Store will only continue to exists for Kindle Fire Tablets!
⊕ Full paid on Amazon
⊕ Free turn-limited demo on Amazon
This is definitely on the harder end of campaigns: In some test games, I seized most of mainland China and the iron-coal mines, but was decisively defeated on the oceans, which cut off all the islands I had seized. And if I ensured I conquered all the oil fields in the Dutch East Indies, I then inevitably got steamrolled on the mainland by the British, Chinese, and Soviet Red Army after failing to appease the latter enough to keep it out of the war.
There are a ton of moving parts and elements here, so please let me know if something goes entirely unwordly and battleships start to fly over the islands. In one particular test game, the British AI became obsessed with seizing Formosa. Their first landing took me completely by surprise, as none of my early warning systems spotted their fleet, but by sheer luck, I had just trained an infantry army on Formosa and a general was sailing by, and I managed to fight off the first landing. A year later, I spotted yet another British fleet suspiciously moving toward Formosa, so I had some time to prepare. The third time the British landed on Formosa was after the American naval power had wiped out two-thirds of my surface ships, and things were generally in a downward spiral.
Yet another way to try to explain how labyrinthine this scenario is: the final round of testing took 11 times longer than it usually does.
I know these games tend to attract people who like a challenge, but seriously, good luck!
See photos of America's attempt to create a WW1 tank out of a tractor
— The emergence of British and French tanks prompted the US Army to design a tank of their own... developed a prototype built off of an existing Holt Model 75 tractor powered by a modified hybrid gas-electric engine... moved at a top speed of 6 mph and was practically immobile on an incline.
Sooo, I might have slighly lost the control of the seas... and most of the home islands as the result. But I did manage to hold part of Australia for a while until the logistics collapsed.
I'll now be replying to many many many thousands of messages and emails that piled up during the creation of the new game, so apologies for general chaos, typos, and curtness in my writing in advance.
One such project by big tech closes down and other one jumps forward!
Google is bringing every Android game to Windows in big gaming update. The PC-based Play Games platform is expanding to bring every single Android game to Windows (no a firm timeline yet)
Last surviving Battle of Britain pilot passes
— The last surviving Battle of Britain pilot, John 'Paddy' Hemingway, has passed away at the age of 105.
Well, this is disheartening to say the least:
Amazon is shutting down its app store on Android (only keeps it for Kindle Fire Tablets)
— "Starting August 20, 2025, you will no longer have access to the Amazon Appstore on your Android device. The company added that the app store will still be functional on its own devices, such as Fire TV and Fire Tablet."
Rommel & Afrika Korps: Fixed the Next-Unit button not centering issue.
Working on a new game, many moving parts...
Article: Fight for Manila — Inside the Largest Urban Battle in U.S. Army History
— The Japanese set fires to destroy supplies rather than let them fall into the hands of the Americans. They lost control and a huge inferno burned about a third of Manila. Stunned at the devastation, MacArthur’s leadership began to fall apart. As the theater commander, it was his responsibility to develop strategy and communicate those plans to his subordinate commanders so they could design military operations and implement tactics to support his intent. He failed to perform these tasks...
The Bovington Tank Museum to Recreate Capture of Infamous German Tank at Tiger Day Spring
— Captured in April 1943, Tiger 131 had served with the Wehrmacht‘s Schwere Panzer-Abteilung 504 (Heavy Tank Battalion 504) throughout the Tunisia Campaign. This year, the Tiger Day event will be extra special, with the museum putting on a recreation of Tiger 131’s capture by British forces in Tunisia in 1943.
SAS rogue hero Mike Sadler, who was the last surviving 'original' member of elite WWII unit and passed away at 103, left over $2 million estate to his family
— In 1941, Mike Sadler met a member of the Long Range Desert Group, a reconnaissance unit based in the North African desert, who persuaded him to join the elite Special Air Service after it was formed by David Stirling in 1941. In that December, Sadler was part of the first successful SAS raid, on Wadi Tamet airfield, where a team of six men ruined 24 aircraft and a fuel dump.
End of January DISCOUNTS: Four early games, Okinawa, Panzer Missions, Rommel & Afrika Korps, and Operation Barbarossa are all available at the discount price until the end of January on both Play Store and Amazon App Store!
A pilot in Harrier GR9A ejects just in time, Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2009
Breaking the 'D-Day Loop': Supporting Obscure WWII Scenarios in Games
I wish more players would give the less known WWII campaigns a fair chance. Especially since there are free turn-limited versions available both on this site and on Amazon App Store to try them with zero commitment or risk or cost. No ads, no nothing, just turn-limit, usually at 20 turns. Bougainville has seen one of the highest rates of 'great game' feedback, but, alas, many do not even bother to try, since it is such an utterly unknown name even to us history buffs. Daily, players request ever-more obscure scenarios to be made. But, the sad reality is that unless I have 10X bigger fan-base or Play Store discovery actually works, 99% of those suggestions are a financial non-starter. I love history, but there is a limit after which is just not worth it anymore, because so much time out of your one unique life goes into crafting each game. This need for results creates a kind of self-reinforcing “D-Day loop”, since everybody knows that particular “history word” and countless films have been made about it, games about it tend to sell well enough. And while it's a great, secure first step for anyone looking to get their very first game out, you can't exactly make a 50 D-Day games. After the handful of obvious choices like Operation Barbarossa, Iwo Jima, Market Garden, and American Civil War, anyone crafting new games have to make a jump into the unknown and tackle a less-known battle or campaign or war. My point here is this: If you want to see unknown scenarios as games, you might have to consider supporting us by actively spreading the word or buying other less-known scenarios to encourage us developers to take risks by creating more of them. I personally love the unique setup of Demyansk Pocket: It's not about a single frontline, nor about seizing all the area. But if you stop 100 people on the street, it will be an outright miracle if one of them can explain what the combat at Demyansk was all about. How do you generate interest or sell 'unknown'.
One of the trickiest aspects of making a new game is that after working hard month after month, breaking game mechanics down to atoms, everything is super obvious to me inside my mind. Then, when finally the complicated major components of the new campaign click and work together, the all-encompassing feeling is being over-joyed. This is, on many levels, the worst possible head-space to try to explain and document how the new, different elements work to the imagined newbie player. It is such a mind-twist to then try to wipe out your memory and try to experience the game with fresh eyes. How does ammo truck deliver its cargo, and where does it re-stock? And even the hardcore fans doing the early testing are bad at this, because they know the series and the logic I'm likely to use, and they are good at figuring things out on their own. The best thing would be to locate a history buff who has never seen my games, place him in a rat-mace type lab conditions, and observe his very first attempt at finishing the scenario. So, I could put info on the unit-info dialog, but not many players check that out. So, I put info on the documentation, but ever fewer read that. Write the info to FAQ, nope, only long time players read that. I put info on the status line, well, that is only shown briefly and might not be seen. I brutally force the info on a pop-up dialog shoved to the player's face when they select the unit for the first or second time, okay, now they actually likely see it and might even glance at it. But that is such a disruptive user experience, especially after you have learned the info and do not need to or want to ever see it again. Clearly, then, I should only show the info once. Okay, but then I need to keep track of that data about showing information and store it. With hundreds and hundreds of pieces of information that need to be shown to a completely new player, eventually half of the game-code is about tracking data indicating what 'show-only-twice' info was shown and how many times. Considering a player might select that unit 100,000 times over the years, and I only show that popup once or twice, that is an extremely poor ratio of code and storage space to (hyper-rare) usage. After decades of wrestling with this, I have begun to think that it is fundamentally impossible to, in a simple way, make the experience smooth, both for experienced players (no pointless jarring dialogs about stuff they fully know already) and total newbies (bombarding them about how do the extra features of this particular unit type work). Probably the most feasible solution would be to have a setting for experienced players to turn OFF all 'intro dialogs'. And after that, ramp up the number of those 'intro dialogs' while mentioning in every single one of them that you can turn them off at any time. More work for the future updates, I guess, as the latest generation of players are not by default familiar with the logic and rule-sets of the old-timey physical board games.
As previously explained in detail, since out-of-control bots by Google now permanently ban games for having historically accurate flags and symbols, I'll be switching to fictional doodle flags. This will likely be a process with plenty of retakes as some ideas won't work on certain resolutions or screen technologies that twist colors, so don't wonder if each update throws in a new flag for a while.
Please, if you experience a significant non-crash issue with any game, just tap my picture on the app, and it will open your default email client, and you can write a quick message to me. I rather get 30 messages about a bug that affects game-play than none. And many issues are limited to only a handful of players (due to settings, tactics, devices, etc being different), so unless you don't take few seconds to report it, I might never be aware of it. And due to my mind-reading abilities still being close to zero, then it won't be fixed, quickly at least. I am passionate about these games, but I can't be playing all the games all the time with all the devices with all the option combinations to spot any potential flaws (which are inevitable when there are untold amounts of lines of code interacting). It TRULY breaks my heart to realize there has been a noteworthy issue for 2 weeks impacting some of you, but nobody bothered to report it to me. The second I woke up this morning, and somebody finally reported this particular bug, the first thing, even before my morning coffee, was to fix it. And yes, sadly, sometimes I fix a bug within 30 minutes of being informed of its existence, but then the app update gets stuck in a 1-day or 1-week or 1-month long Play Store review. Even though the app has existed 11 years and been through 983798769485 thorough checks, what a perfect waste of everybody's resources and time. Plus, a nice way to keep apps buggy and erode the trust in both Android apps in Play Store and on how responsive developers are.
Article (pics & vid) WW2 Junkers Ju 88 Plane found in the Sea South of Sicily
— A Junkers Ju 88 plane was found 51m deep on the seabed near the small island of Capo Passero, located at the southern tip of Sicily. This aircraft, identified by its serial number, belonged to Kampfgeschwader-54, a Luftwaffe unit that took off on March 2, 1943, from Catania with the mission to bomb the port of Tripoli. However, it was intercepted and attacked by night fighters...
Article: UK and US Special Forces veterans take on gruelling desert camel trek for charity
— Following in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia, former Special Forces soldiers are riding camels across 700 miles of Saudi Arabian and Jordanian desert in 25 days. The team is on a mission to raise funds for the Special Forces Club Benevolent Fund, first launched at the end of WWII to help Special Forces veterans.
All history-content creators covering history are just so exhausted by ever-increasing senlesess wrong-almost-always automated banning
"I want to fill you in on some of the challenges that anyone creating historical content on YouTube is really dealing with a significant way these days and I know that this has been a problem for a while now but it seems as though just even in the last couple of weeks it has ESCALATED in a SIGNIFICANT way and what I'm talking about is the problem of demonetization and AD restriction and even age restriction on videos simply talking about historic content and I want to use a few examples just from the last several weeks that I have personally dealt with and then talk about some of what I see happening across the board for YouTube content creators in general."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnPrVn24dTE
"The 6th Airborne Division used 20 Tetrarch light tanks during Operation Tonga, the British airborne landings in Normandy in June 1944. The tanks were landed by glider, where their appearance caused the Germans to cancel a counter-attack at a key moment in the battle but individually, they did not perform well. Several were lost in accidents and those that did see action proved to be inferior in firepower and armour to the German armoured vehicles."
Short book excerpt:
"Lion-sur-Mer was one of the few real trouble spots on Sword. Of the three British beaches, Sword was expected to be the most heavily defended. Troops had been briefed that casualties would be very high. Private John Gale of the 1/ South Lancashire Regiment was “cold-bloodedly told that all of us in the first wave would probably be wiped out.” The picture was painted in even blacker terms to the commandos. It was drilled into them that “no matter what happens we must get on the beaches, for there will be no evacuation ... no going back.” The 4th commandos expected to be “written off on the beaches,” as Corporal James Colley and Private Stanley Stewart remember, for they were told their casualties would run as “high as eighty-four percent.” And the men who were to land ahead of the infantry in amphibious tanks were warned that “even those of you who reach the beach can expect sixty percent casualties.” Private Christopher Smith, driver of an amphibious tank, thought his chances of survival were slim. Rumor had increased the casualty figure to ninety percent and Smith was inclined to believe it.” For a while it looked as though the worst of the predictions might come true. In some sectors first-wave troops were heavily machine-gunned and mortared... There will always be differences of opinion about the nature of the fighting on Sword. Men of the East Yorks disagree with their own history, which says that it was “just like a training show, only easier.”"
— The Longest Day June 6, 1944 by Cornelius Ryan
Perry Dahl, one of the last living American WWII aces with 9 kills, has passed away at 101
— Storied career: Dahl was flying a new P-38L7 when he downed a Kawasaki Ki-61 Tony over San Pablo, Leyte, on Nov. 10, 1944. As he turned to make a second attack, however, his plane collided with his wingman. Dahl bailed out, only to be captured by a Japanese patrol and later rescued by Philippine Resistance fighters. He rejoined his squadron on Jan. 15, 1945, and on March 5, he shot down a Mitsubishi Ki-21 bomber down near Formosa.
New year, new game banned in the Play Store by out-of-control AI bot. This time for using an old-timey anti-N*zi Soviet flag in the Patriotic War game. And yes, the Play Store Policy Team okay'ed using it in this particular historical context years earlier. But that doesn't matter. Facts don't matter. It's all automated to until infinity. Switching to fictional doodle flags and symbols in a desperate attempt to avoid getting flagged in the future. (Tragi)Comical to spent a decade getting things historically accurate and then another decade replacing everything with nonsense. My rant on how modern Google does not work at all
After the above event, I both literally and illiterally cannot handle anything serious at the moment, so here is my silly and whimsical attempt to identify the historical figure behind King Arthur.
Could a board game help prepare Taiwan for war with China?
— The latest development in a growing trend for ‘military boardgames’ gives players the chance to ‘defend’ Taiwan in the lead-up to a war with China. A new board game called '2045' allows players to take on roles from military commanders and undercover operatives to civilian resistance fighters battling a fictional Chinese invasion... In December, Taiwan’s Presidential Office ran its first-ever 'tabletop' war-game exercises for military and government officials simulating a military escalation with China to test the government’s response readiness.
How the last Japanese soldier was finally lured out of the jungle 30 years after WWII ended
— Teruo Nakamura's misguided loyalty to the emperor's cause was all the more remarkable given that he wasn't even Japanese... after the loss of radio contact with Tokyo, his unit was ordered to break up into smaller groups and launch a guerrilla campaign from within the jungle. Even when Allied planes dropped waterproof leaflets telling them that they were fighting a lost cause, they could not conceive that the emperor would have done something so shameful as admitting defeat. On rare occasions, he encountered islanders who tried to explain to him that the Allies had triumphed but still he was not persuaded, replying that 'Japan is invincible'... Once asked by a journalist how he felt about 'wasting' 30 years of his life on Morotai he had replied that his years had not been wasted: he had been serving his country. But the Japanese government seemed ungrateful for his inadvertent service. His low rank and Amis ethnicity meant that he did not get the hero's welcome, and as a Taiwanese citizen, he was ineligible for the pensions and honours granted to Japanese veterans.
Game series updates: Rolling out new icon for the cities: Settlement-Style (6th option, uses a bit more memory). Fallen-dialog now has an option to turn it ON/OFF or only show it for units with HP. In few games like Eastern Front and Patriotic War, northern rivers froze and crossing them costs fewer MPs for non-tank unit types. There seems to be a character-set issue and on some devices the blue-dots depicting rainstorms are not available, and the operating system falls back to using question marks. So, yes, a group of blue questions floating around is indeed a storm, sorry about that, darn compatibility. The new lighter-weight crash-reporting system is on its third iteration already, and rolled out to some games, and not at all on those scenarios that are most out of date at the moment of writing this. Norway has a setting to ramp up the later British warships. Panzer Missions had a major rewrite in the last few versions, as the logic via which Soviet units increase with each mission was completely redone (it had gotten too messy after 13 years of tweaks). And as already mentioned, some rarely-read in-app documentation will be moved to the website to reduce app-size.
Reading the book: “The Rising Sun The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945” by John Toland, and I'm really liking it, as it takes such a multitude of views on events as they unwrap. Kudos, no wonder it won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. You know it's a good book when one of your reactions is: Why haven't I read this much earlier?
Warren Upton, the oldest living survivor of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the last remaining survivor of the USS Utah, has passed away at 105
– He had been getting ready to shave when he felt the first torpedo hit the Utah. Then the second torpedo hit and the ship began to list and capsize. The then-22-year-old swam ashore to Ford Island, where he jumped in a trench to avoid Japanese planes strafing the area...
Well, what a fitting way to finish the year: saw a crash that I have never seen before, I can only assume this did not happen on a device that is a phone or even anything remotely like it. And while I appreciate one of you trying to run my game on the Android running a fridge or something like that... Please, seeing these obscure issues gives me serious stress until I finally figure out that this is not going to be a widespread problem.
D-Day commando whose unit landed in Normandy without helmets dies aged 100
— Dennis Donovan served with 48 (Royal Marine) Commando and was part of a force that landed at Juno Beach on June 6 1944. The Ministry of Defence estimates that 70 to 80 D-Day veterans are still alive.
Jolly Holidays! Don't let the Santa out-flank you...
First ever scientific study on WW1 Somme-crater reveals new details on its history
— British miners had dug a gallery for 900 metres from their lines and packed it with 40,000 lbs of explosives. It was one of 19 mines placed beneath German front positions that were detonated on 1st July, 1916 to mark the start of the Somme offensive. But the detonation of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge, filmed by Geoffrey Malins, took place 10 minutes before the whistles blew... Military historian Professor Peter Doyle: The Germans had mastered the art of capturing craters and used this to their advantage...
Trying to get Okinawa with its decade+ old special naval element with warships and carriers and special kamikaze element and special fake-unit element to work smoothly on the new streamlined code is sure taking some frustrating trial and error.
I believe I finally figured out why few games got (unintentionally) a step too hard in the fall. As intended, both the activation and activity of the AI generals increased a bit in most games as new, improved logic was rolled out. However, since the activation is partly based on the amount of front-lines nearby, this change hit campaigns like Spanish Civil War hard, because almost the entire map is effectively an active front line. Unfortunately, this created a kind of cumulative effect, where more generals got more active much earlier. And since there is limited AI-held area to cover, much of this activity took the shape of giving out +1 MPs to AI combat units. And since the player is in multiple places trying to hold an area 5 hexagons that is only 4–6 hexagons wide, any aggressive AI land conquest will be troublesome to say the least. The next round of updates will remove the excess early activation and return closer to the initial setup (it will still be a bit harder, as the AI generals are now smarter). So, with any luck, Defending Spanish Republic version 1.3.1 should be fairly close to the 'normal' experience. Thank you all who reported this, and my apologies for not instantly realizing the scale of this change (in my defense after decades of getting blasted with nonstop simultaneous 'too hard' (newbies) and 'too easy' (tactical gurus) feedback it takes s while to realize that the overall trend has changed). The setup of the two Spanish Civil War games is simply so drastically different from other games that usually have one neat direct line front line.
News article: Vietnam Veteran & Second-Longest Held POW in US History to Receive Congressional Gold Medal
— Everett Alvarez was the first US aviator to be captured and would spend 8 and a half years as a Vietnam-war POW in the prison camp they dubbed the Hanoi Hilton. He was the second-longest held POW in US military history after Army Capt. Floyd Thompson, who was held for almost 9 years after the aircraft he was riding in was shot down in March 1964.
If you have been reading the Change Logs of recent game updates, you have noticed that more than one game has lost a unit or two from the AI side. I have been double-checking the Order-of-Battle (OOB) which tend to gather conflicting over the years of dealing with hundreds of units, and moving them around between initial setup and reinforcements, not to mention extra additions as years pass by. Sometimes one source lists a division as 108th-Division, and another as 108-Rifle-ID, so the matching part can be only 3 characters and easy to miss. And sometimes, I have only known the Corps data, and as better OOB data emerges, I'm learning that the division I have added separately was actually already included as one of the units in the Corps. This shouldn't be a big change, as one game might go from AI having 120 units to having 118. In scenarios with only a dozen units, the active combatants are usually much better known.
Two underlying changes coming to the games.
— I will be relocating the rarely-read documentation from the app to the website. In addition, of reducing the app size, some segments of the text can also be unified into one single location instead of carrying around and maintaining 60 different copies of it.
— I will be switching from the open-source ACRA crash library to my own crash-and-error handling code. This both decreases the size of the app, and frees me from having to worry about issues and privacy of outside code libraries.
So, overall the size of the app goes down, nothing should change behaviour-wise, if it does, let me know as always. If you want a sneak peak, Okinawa version 5.0.3 already includes both of these underlying modifications.
In case you haven't noticed, there is a Sortable Table of all Games. You can currently sort the scenarios by release date, historical date, or by map size. I hope to add more data in the coming months if the table sees a lot of usage.
The version 2.4.4 of Axis Crimean Campaign sees a big change in the underlying codebase, so if the app feels bad in a negative way, drop me an email.
If you spend some time with me, you'll inevitably hear me say something along the lines of: "I just want 48 hours in every day, because there are so many interesting things to do, read, learn, try, research..."
Happy and relieved to say that I have finally managed to wrangle back the control of the conflict-series domain and properly set it to redirect to the old reliable hosting. Plus 2/3 of the games have been updated to flush out any missing scores, the rest of the apps will be updated to do the same in the coming weeks.
Article: Peleliu Island: Japan to exhume 1,000 WWII soldiers
- In 2013, a memorial group formed by the families and comrades of the soldiers who belonged to the 2nd Regiment of the Mito Infantry, which was stationed on Peleliu, obtained a map of the mass burial site from the U.S. Navy Seabee Museum
Change of Winds! So, okay, in few games the direction of the wind/storms have been completely wrong (when storms are turned ON from settings). It seems that I basically forgot to update the wind-data when creating some campaigns. So, if the rainstorm suddenly does 180, that's why. I'll be straight with you, the metrological data is not usually the upmost top priority when working on the intrigues of a scenario.
1539-42 Coronado Expedition Cannon Discovered in Arizona
- This wall gun is the first gun associated with the Coronado expedition and the oldest firearm found within the continental USA, and perhaps the oldest cannon known on the continent.
- Francisco Vázquez de Coronado mortgaged his wife's possessions and borrowed heavily for the expedition, that included 150 mounted soldiers and 200 infantrymen, to find legendary cities of Cíbola... the local Sobaipuri O'odham people attacked the settlement in the Santa Cruz Valley of Arizona, leading to the Spaniards retreating from the area.
Animation-process: As many have noticed, the AI animation now includes support units like generals and artillery in most games. There is also a status bar (bottom of the screen) text, indicating whether the AI general judges the situation (from his limited knowledge of player's units) to be favorable to attack, or tilted to player's favor, in which case the general focuses on defense. If the AI general can not see huge advantage either way, it settles for a middle-ground tactical actions. In addition, of the visual side, the logic of AI general has been updated. Enemy commanders are a bit more careful to not get overrun while also at the same time trying to avoid (senseless looking) back-and-forth movements, and share extra MPs to the closest unit more (just as the player can do). It goes without saying that when an AI general faces multiple nearby fronts, the priorities may clash, resulting in non-optimal moves. Most evident in games like Spanish Civil War, where it's very challenging to get the AI general to stay focused on one province. I would assume this also changes the gaming experience slightly into a more difficult direction.
Three latest games:
- Bougainville Gambit 1943-1945 (Australians take over)
- Kiev: Largest WW2 Encirclement
- Defending Spanish Republic.
Article: How Coffee Helped the Union Caffeinate Their Way to Victory in the Civil War
- Ten months into the Civil War, the Union was short on a crucial supply, the absence of which threatened to sap the fighting strength of the Northern army: coffee. Luckily for the Union, Stephen Allen Benson, president of the relatively young Republic of Liberia, had a plan. A ship that left the port at Monrovia in August 1862 carried 6,000 pounds of premium African coffee. It was the first major shipment to the Union, and would prove vital in the North's victory.
"The German Army which entered Russia wore a very smart uniform. Officers and NCOs carried silver lace on their shoulder straps, there were coloured bayonet knots. General officers wore gold and scarlet, everywhere there was colour on our uniforms... Throughout the last three years of the war our uniforms were being simplified and many units, particularly in the WSS, took to wearing camouflage pattern suits as a mark of distinction. All in all we took on the appearance of mechanics in dungarees and were no longer soldiers in a distinctive and smart uniform."
— War on the Eastern Front, The German Soldier in Russia 1941-1945 by James Lucas
FB link: "A Junkers 88 aircraft was found at a depth of 51 meters in the foothills of Capo Passero in Syracuse Province. Thanks to the spotting of the serial, was able to identify with precision: a KG 54 (Kampfgeschwader), taken off on March 2, 1943 from Catania to bomb the port of Tripoli... With this recent discovery, the total number of Junkers Ju 88 found in Syracuse waters rises to six."
[link to a facebook post with images]
Science article: New Estimates of US Civil War mortality from full-census records. We leverage the recently released full count of individual census returns and a sample of linked records across multiple censuses. Our national estimate is 698,000 Civil War deaths. This is substantially higher than the conventional historical estimate of 618,000 but lower than the most recent estimate of around 750,000 deaths based on a 1% census sample.
POSTPONED, since many still use old Amazon tablets! — I will be dropping the support for the Android 5 (API Level 22 nicknamed 'Lollipop') since that was released a decade ago in 2014/2015, and it is getting too hard to maintain compatibility that far back. The cheapest Android tablets/phones start from $40, so, you should seriously consider updating if you're still rocking a decade old device.
HOF/website missing? Hosting Debacle November-2024 explained!
500,000 Japanese WW2 'phantom' ceramic coins discovered. The coins provided a crucial substitute for standard metal currency during WWII, whenmetal was reallocated for munitions, prompting the Japanese government to commission ceramic coins to sustain internal trade. 15 million of these ceramic coins were produced, though most were destroyed after Japan's surrender. As a result, the 1-sen coins became known as "phantom" coins.
The Yanagi scheme included several famous long submarine voyages that transported essential wartime materials, blueprints, and technical expertise between Japan and Germany. Germans received rubber, quinine, gold, mica, tungsten, you know, if the cargo sub survived the mind boggingly long trip avoiding Allied mines/planes/warships... while Japan received optical glass, blueprints for jet/rocket/radar technology, mercury, plus an entire German Type IXC U-boat (U-511), while a disassembled Me 262 could not be delivered before the war ended. Japanese I-8 traveled 48,000 km in 6 months to carry out one trip. The Germans also converted a handful of large Italian submarines into supply subs after realizing they were much better fit for the epic, long voyages. Japanese submarines and German U-boats also operated together and shared intelligence, especially in the Indian Ocean, in order to cut the Allied trade routes. On oceans filled both German and Japanese submarines, they had to implement a policy to not attack other submarines. After Germany threw in the towel, 6 U-boats remaining in Japanese territory were taken over by the Imperial Japanese Navy.
"After sinking the USS Indianapolis, which we had thought to be an Idaho-class battleship, (Japanese submarine) I-58 made her way north. On August 9 an atom bomb similar to the one dropped at Hiroshima was dropped at Nagasaki. It was reported, too, that the Soviet Union had joined in the fight against Japan. The determination was still there, but there was little we could do. However, the morale on board I-58 was very good. While submerged during the forenoon of August 10, our sound detector picked up an echo. I raised the periscope and found there was a destroyer some way off. I ordered the crews of 5 and 6 Kaitens to stand by... In fact, since the advent of Kaitens, American destroyers had not been quite so confident as before... Kaiten 4 penetrated the American convoy right in front of the destroyer, and with the sound of the explosion the whole convoy was thrown into confusion.... On the evening of August 15, I was suddenly called to the hatch by the senior wireless rating. I thought I had never seen a man so sad: he said, "Look what's come." It was a communiqué announcing the end of WWII."
- Sunk, The Story of the Japanese Submarine Fleet 1941-1945 by Mochitsura Hashimoto
"By late 1944, the German military had reassessed the need for Zimmerit because Allied forces were not using magnetic anti-tank mines as much as initially feared and Zimmerit was time-consuming and labor-intensive to apply, requiring special coatings and time to cure properly. Germany faced severe shortages of materials and production disruptions, and Zimmerit was ultimately deemed an unnecessary use of resources"
Virtually every book or article suggest the failure of Market-Garden was caused by an intelligence failure... Not everyone agreed with SHAEF's overly optimistic assessment. In fact, the closer an analyst was to the front, the less optimistic his reports tended to be. Colonel Koch, the U.S. Third Army G2, stated in his G2 Estimate number 9 on 28 August that: "Despite crippling factors of shattered communications . . . losses in personnel and equipment, the enemy nevertheless has been able to maintain a sufficiently cohesive front to exercise an overall control of his tactical situation. His withdrawal, though continuing, has not been a rout or mass collapse…" Even though Ultra reported on the 6th that the First German Parachute Army was to assume the sector east of Antwerp, there is no mention of this in the text of the summary. On the German order of battle map provided with the summary, the First Parachute Army is written on the margin of the map as unlocated. The same is true for the II SS Panzer Corps and the panzer divisions. All of these units are reported to be unlocated despite the Ultra reports... Ultra continued to feed information to the analysts, but none of it went directly to the fighters.
- Operation Market-Garden: Ultra Intelligence Ignored by Major Joel Jeffson
Bougainbille Gambit version 1.0.1 rolling out. The usual one-month-after-release fixes and tweaks based on all the feedback, plus adding a setting to show orange redeployment circle on the units about to be removed from the play soon.
Professor of history Francis L. Loewenheim: "What we have here, in effect, is the real Ike."
- In secret parts of a wartime diary Dwight D. Eisenhower characterized Douglas MacArthur as a "baby" and an "uncertain factor" who "likes his boot lickers." Eisenhower in early 1942 described Adm. Ernest J. King, commander of the US fleet as WW2 began, as an "arbitrary, stubborn type" and a "mental bully." One way to help win the war was "to get someone to sh**t King."
NY Times Article
"The Brandenburgers would not be the only German commando forces in operation for Case Blue. Soviet POWs who volunteered were either used in their original uniforms or outfitted as civilians and began filtering behind enemy lines as early as May to wreak havoc in Red Army rear areas. On 22 May, Abwehr agents were also parachuted into Voronezh, Stalingrad, Krasnodar and other key areas where they sabotaged railway lines, power stations and pipelines while Operation 'Hannover' was launched by 350 White Russians of Sonderverbänd Graukopf on 22 May around Army Group Centre. Though they inflicted heavy casualties on the Red Army, the savage fighting left only a hundred survivors to return to the German lines. In the Caucasus, the Sonderverbänd Bergmann was formed from 200 Germans and 550 former Soviet POWs or deserters who were ethnically Georgian, Armenian, north Caucasian and Azerbaijani. The Brandenburger troops who were to take part in Case Blue moved east to their respective operational areas during June and July... However, as the Brandenburgers penetrated up to 100km behind enemy lines using the confusion as cover, it was not just the Soviets who frequently mistook them for Red Army troops and Pinkert's men were repeatedly shelled by their own forces, causing needless casualties and affecting morale. ... As resistance faded in the city of Rostov itself, Grabert's company made its way to the river by truck, carrying inflatable boats as part of their equipment and established itself with Stolz, crossing the northern branch of the Don River along with 28 volunteers from the Kradschützen Battalion's engineer platoon. Ferried across the river, they established a command post on the far bank. In sweltering summer heat, heavy machine-gun and mortar fire caused a small number of German casualties, the first half-company of Brandenburgers already making their way across using their inflatables under the command of Oberleutnant Dr Oskar Hüller. Securing a larger bridgehead on the river's south bank, the remainder of the 8th Company soon followed and Grabert planned his assault on the bridge itself. After establishing his position, Grabert awaited darkness before beginning his assault. Covered by supressing fire from the northern bank, the Brandenburgers pushed through intense fire, illuminated by drifting parachute flares and a burning truck on the bridge itself. They stormed the southern end of the bridge and captured it intact. Grabert was grazed in the head by a ricochet and his men were low on ammunition as he planned to continue the attack and take the next bridge downriver. Flares signalled his men to move their heavy weapons forward as his assault group prepared to rush forward, capitalising on their speed to keep pressure on the retreating defenders and keep them off balance. The bridge they held was still swept with heavy machine-gun fire and unusable and the seizure of further crossings would serve to push the defenders away from the river bank that they still held in isolated pockets. Leading from the front, Grabert took his company in a direct assault at 0230hrs as dawn approached, though Soviet machine guns that had previously been concealed opened fire and took them by surprise. Several men were hit, but the momentum of the attack carried the Brandenburgers through and the next bridge was soon secured, though only with a tenuous grip. However, amongst those men that had been seriously wounded was Grabert himself... Casualties were steadily mounting as ammunition and medical supplies began to run out for the remaining Germans. With the heat of the midday sun tormenting the Germans, Unteroffizier Fohrer was despatched to swim back across the river and request aerial and artillery support and it was only the timely intervention of Stukas that allowed the remaining Brandenburgers to hold their position until elements of the 13th Panzer Division crossed the captured bridge."
-- from BRANDENBURGERS: The Third Reich's Elite Special Forces by Lawrence Paterson
Price of Bougainville Gambit 1943 reduced from New Game to normal price!
Kurt Vonnegut's Lost Board Game Finally for Sale
- After releasing his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952, to positive reviews and poor sales, he needed other streams of income... he was most passionate about designing a board game called General Headquarters... The 40 pages of notes amid Vonnegut's papers include several revisions of its rules, and pitch letters to board-game companies suggesting that GHQ could "become the third popular checkerboard game" - and even "be used to train cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point."
John Kinsel Sr., one of the last Navajo Code Talkers from WWII, dies at 107
- With Kinsel´s death, only two Navajo Code Talkers are still alive: Former Navajo Chairman Peter MacDonald and Thomas H. Begay.
In one of the biggest updates I have ever put out, the Eastern Front reaches version 7.0. It gets SeaLifts, Gebirgsjägers, option to only rest in West, better AI, more data in Unit Tally, improved animation, un-captured POWs might give 1 HP to Soviet rifle units, etc. If you are in the middle of an epic play-through, maybe finish that first, since this is such a massive update, that better not take chances with it ruining something.
The Last Ever US Cavalry Charge Into Combat Occurred in WWII
- On January 16, 1942, Lt. Edwin P. Ramsey led men from E and F Troops into Morong. While their Japanese opponents were equipped with tanks and machine guns, the 27 American and Filipino cavalrymen had only their pistols and the horses upon which they were riding. The Japanese troops stationed in the village were caught off-guard by the sight and scattered as the American and Filipino troops, pistols drawn, galloped toward them at full speed.
NEW GAME: BOUGAINVILLE GAMBIT 1943
WWII Pacific campaign like no other: unique instant Japanese counter-landing on top of the US landing, Japanese counter-attack by the elite 6th Division that genuinely threatens the landing force, can Australians smoothly take over and finish the seizing the island once Americans are redeployed elsewhere.
You are in command of Allied forces in WWII, tasked with leading an amphibious assault on Bougainville. Your first objective is to secure the three airfields marked on the map, using American troops. These airfields are critical to gain air strike capabilities. Once secured, fresh Australian troops will relieve the US forces and take on the task of capturing the rest of the island.
Beware: a massive Japanese naval base nearby may launch a counter-landing. Additionally, you will likely be facing a truly fierce counter-attack by the elite and battle-hardened Japanese 6th Division, which has seen combat since 1937. Air strikes will only be available after the three designated airfields are under your control. On the positive side, the western coast, though swampy, should initially have a lighter Japanese presence, unlike the heavily fortified north, east, and south sectors.
Unique Challenges of the Bougainville Campaign: Bougainville presents a number of unique challenges. Notably, you may face a rapid Japanese counter-landing almost on top of your own ongoing landing. The Japanese will repeatedly attempt to reinforce their troops, though many of these efforts will fail. This campaign also marks the first combat action of African American infantry units, with elements of the 93rd Division seeing action in the Pacific Theater. Additionally, partway through the campaign, US forces will be replaced by Australian units who will need to secure the rest of the island.
This campaign is often overlooked due to its role in the wider passive encirclement of Rabaul, one of Japan's most fortified positions in the South Pacific. Bougainville's active periods of combat were interspersed with long stretches of inactivity, contributing to its lower profile in WWII histories.
Historical Background: After assessing the heavily fortified Japanese base at Rabaul, Allied commanders decided to encircle and cut it of supplies rather than launch a direct, costly assault. A key step in this strategy was seizing Bougainville, where the Allies planned to build several airfields. With the Japanese already having constructed fortifications and airfields on the northern and southern ends of the island, the Americans boldly chose the swampy central region for their own airfields, catching Japanese strategic planners by surprise.
Good luck with the campaign!
⊕ Full paid version on Play Store
⊕ Full paid on Amazon
⊕ Free turn-limited demo version on Amazon
⊕ Free turn-limited as APK file for side-loading on your device
The infamous Japanese counter-landing on top of the present American landing:
"Japanese soldiers slipped ashore in 21 landing craft under the very noses of the American defenders. Patrolling PT boats missed the destroyers, and an antitank platoon on shore saw the landing craft but thought they were American. The enemy soldiers landed so close to the American lines that they actually cut off several marines in an outpost, who were later rescued by two LCM's. The Japanese attacked at once in the vicinity of a lagoon... "
Developer backstory: I have been working on this rarely talked about Pacific War campaign for around five years. The fundamental challenge is that this 2-year long WWII campaign alternates between exciting fairly unique events, and absolutely-nothing-happened periods of several months. After years of trying to keep the time-frame historically accurate and artificially slow down the flow of the game in various ways, both me and test-players all came to the simple conclusion that: okay, let's just skip past all slow periods entirely, and weave the active periods into one continuous experience. Which, I'm relieved to report, actually worked out great!
News article: Masamitsu Yoshioka, last of Japan's Pearl Harbor attack force, dies at 106. When Pearl Harbor came into view, black smoke was rising from the US ships hit by the first wave of Japan's surprise attack. The crew of a Nakajima B5N2 torpedo bomber readied for its run. The 23-year-old navigator and bombardier on board, Masamitsu Yoshioka, had practiced his part of the maneuver for months. He was stunned when he was told his carrier group would be part of a massive strike on American territory that included more than 300 Japanese warplanes. "I knew that this meant a gigantic war."
News article: A Japanese Soldier's Son Receives the Flag of His Father after nearly eight decades. During World War II, many Japanese soldiers carried good-luck flags, which featured handwritten well wishes from friends and loved ones. They varied in size but were usually small enough for their owners to fold up and wear inside their uniforms. They also happened to be an item that Allied soldiers collected as battlefield souvenirs...
Gut-wrenching bug in every other recently updated game, so more updates rolling out. If the latest play-through seems extra hard around 15-30 turns, wait for the next dot-one etc fix and restart the ongoing game play from the start. Apologies! Sad face.
Market Garden: Hey, you one player who managed to crash the latest version of this particular game. If you see this, could you kindly drop me an email, letting me know what and under which circumstances were you attacking that caused this issue. Thanks.
Okinawa: Version 5.0 sees addition of the surprise parachute landing of Japanese Giretsu Kuteitai airborne commandos (assumed to gone perfectly to make sense on the scale of the map, there is some variation built-in to counter the players stockpiling units at the right hexagon to instantly neutralize this threat). Some scenarios are really, really hard to come up with various unit types. In the most boring cases, it really just was one type of infantry fighting against enemy infantry. And so, if you want to add some 'flavor' to the Order of Battle, you have to dig pretty deep, meaning tiny scale units. And eventually it simply no longer makes any sense to have 10 men unit fighting 10,000 men division. But such is life: Some battles were a Smorgasbord of unit types, and some were plain vanilla all the way through.
Yet another American secret weapon?
"I was one of the lucky ones to go in on the first wave at Leyte," says Bob Seiler. "The night before my platoon sergeant made a racquet, similar to one for tennis, using a piece of cardboard. Because I was the tallest in the platoon, I was to stand up and bat away any hand grenades that the Japs might try to throw into our amtrac."
- Crisis in the Pacific, The Battles or the Philippines Islands
With Panzer Missions version 6.2 it was time to admit that 13 years of adding various rules and tweaks and exceptions and modifications on how the Soviet units and unit types increase with each passed mission had turned it into a mess, and it was time to rewrite that critical piece of code. The latest version offers a much more streamlined logic, so any tweaks in the future won't be half-guesswork because of all the complexities involved. A new weak 'Newly-Raised infantry unit' type was added, this type gets more common as turns of each mission pass by. Soviet replacements initially only happen in the northern third of the map, but with each mission the limit moves southwards. It should be more possible to get past 10 missions now.
The latest FAQ entry: So, here is the challenge: some players visualize the antitank-gun unit as this army-sized mega formation holding cutting-edge battleground changing weapons (that cut through tanks and bunkers at easy) with unlimited aerial support and never-ending supply of armor for the offense and clearly this unit type should always crush any opposition anywhere! Yet, and here comes the trouble. Half of the player visualize the antitank-gun unit as one single weak, out-of-date antitank gun (that can't make a dent even to a cardboard box) with two soldiers, and these players get bent out of shape if this unit ever does anything else than very clearly lose a battle. Maybe, just maybe, there is some middle round, where the antitank-gun unit has some limited means and strength, it's mostly defensive unit, and sometimes it wins, and sometimes it loses, and let's call this super crazy place 'reality'.
Article: America's Oldest Board Game. Travelers' Tour Through the United States, published in 1822 by Frederick and Roe Lockwood, is the earliest known American board game. This geography-centric game, for 2 to 4 players, is based on a map of the United States at the time. It features 24 states, ranging from the Atlantic coast to new Southern ones such as Missouri and Arkansas. The map includes 139 numbered cities and towns, which serve as spots for players to move to.
D-DAY Through German Eyes: "I saw that whole landing craft go up in flames within seconds, and sink very quickly, surrounded by men struggling in the water. I thought, 'If many more try to turn away like that, there won't be enough Americans to replace the perished ones on the beach, and so we will win this dreadful fight.' ... I did see, in the distance, one single tank emerge from the sea. It was a Sherman type, very recognizable. I had the impression that it was coming up from the sea bed, that is how it looked to me. That was an incredible sight. I had no idea it was even possible to make tanks travel under water. I never heard of our forces being able to do such a thing. But this single tank was on its own, and it was fired on and halted by PAK guns further down the beach... After that, I saw a very large landing craft approach several hundred meters away, and as it lowered its ramp I saw a Sherman tank come out and roll down into the shallows. This tank had some kind of screen or tubing around it, and it traveled slowly but effectively through the shallows and onto the sand, and began firing up at the Resistance Points on the cliffs down there. Other tanks came out of the craft behind it, I am not sure how many, but several. At the same time, we began receiving very accurate mortar fire onto our position. So the moment when I thought that we might win was very brief."
Youtube video: What happened to Surcouf: the largest cruiser submarine of WW2
Poland between Germany and USSR: Okay, oops. I found out that some German divisions were still set on the passive defensive mode, so, the version 1.4 might increase the difficulty level a bit. And by 'a bit' I mean I have no idea how much this changes things. So, if the difficulty level happens to skyrocket, let me know.
Operation Barbarossa version 6.4: Axis unit type split into Romanian, Hungarian, Italian unit types. Siberian and Guards Infantry split into two separate unit types. Added German Antitank Gun Units (late 1941 reinforcements). Rewrote the decade-old reinforcements schedule, tweaked and fixed the starting OOB and added a tiny bit of variation. Setting: Axis units can only rest in Berlin, Vienna, Bucharest (default OFF). Call-for-Support resource now works between various tank units. Added strafing by Soviet air force (inactive during the few first months). Plus all the usual upgrades from this round. Hopefully rewriting the reinforcement schedule does not completely break the flow of the campaign. Let me know if it does!
Facebook post with posts: Warships/boats from the German Black Sea fleet recovered from the river Danube
A big update to Kursk too with version 6.6! Notice, if you have lived under the rock the last two years, then a quick heads-up. Kursk, Korea, and First World War Western Front games are no longer available via Play Store, and you can only get them via Amazon App Store. See the older segments of this blog for details about the whole debacle.
Switzerland offers cash prize to get munitions out of lakes
- For years the Swiss military used the lakes as dumping grounds for old munition. In Lake Lucerne there are 3,300 tonnes of munition, and 4,500 tonnes in Neuchatel. Now, the Swiss defence department offers $58,000 in prize money for the best idea to get it out.
AI: Summer 2024 update: The next round of updates (starting from 2024 August 18) will bring forth an AI that has higher priority to tackling the player's dugouts and minefields and supports units like generals, artillery, aifroce, fuel delivery units, etc. In addition, the route selection will have more variety and hopefully better unit-type-based logic. The first game to include this will be Panzers to Leningrad version 3.2 so check it out and let me know if you detect anything going horribly astray.
I'm not claiming that managing the current number of apps/projects in app stores is impossible, but after working ridiculously hard for two months my to-do list is now longer than what it was when I started two months ago :-I So, if you're hoping for a new game, you're out of luck. Also, sincere preliminary apologies to my very likely angry outburst to anyone happily and merrily suggesting adding even more new features and trying to increase my workload even more. All I want is a few hundred hours more per each day, is that really too much to ask for?
Lost wreck of WW1 Royal Navy warship found in 'remarkable' condition off the Aberdeenshire coast
- HMS Hawke was discovered by a team of divers about 70 miles east of Fraserburgh. More than 500 of the ship's crew perished when it was attacked by the German U-boat U-9 in October 1914.
Battle of the Bulge: Version 6.2 updates the German order-of-the-battle and corrects the ancient HPs/strengths/behavior/naming of the German armored unit types. In addition, German replacements/strafing/etc decline at a slightly faster rate. This new setup should be more tolerable to play and more historically accurate. It goes without saying that the Hall of Fame will see bigger cleanups in the future to reflect the fact that the flow of the entire campaign has been tweaked.
Invasion of Norway (version 4.2): Added 3 HP Norwegian King & Government unit that starts north of Oslo and tries to reach one of the still Norwegian-held coastal cities. Capturing it will give small combat bonus plus one +1 MP resource per turn for the rest of the game.
Demyansk Pocket: Total HOF reset will happen soon after 2024 August 12: In the biggest screw-up of the last 20 months, I both messed up the initial location of units on half of the devices and learned that secondary filters of HOF (Hall of Fame) failed. Since I have no way of knowing which score is from a properly functioning scenario, I'm forced to zero the whole Hall of Fame and only play-throughs STARTED with version 6.4.1 will be included in the new HOF for Demyansk Pocket. Apologies!
Battle of Moscow 1941: Massive update with version 6.0 (okay update to 6.0.0.1 on its way), generals can summon security divisions, tripled Soviet cavalry, rewrote a lot of old code like cold weather effects, new icon for Siberian divisions, AI tweaks, etc... Let me know if I managed to completely break something...
Unbelievable numbers, should we believe them or not?
During the Battle of Kursk, the 653rd Heavy Panzerjäger Battalion using Elefant tank destroyers reported knocking out 320 Soviet tanks, for the loss of 13 Elefants.
"For three hours our Ferdinands fought in the cavalcade of enemy fire and proved to be immune to enemy fire! In the evening of the first day, first enemy tanks were destroyed, while others retreated. Crews of field and anti-tank guns run away after firing few uneffective shots against our Ferdinands. In first engagements 656th Panzerjager Regiment destroyed numerous artillery positions, bunkers as well as 120 Soviet tanks"
— July 19th of 1943 Report by Platoon commander Boehm
After a quick glance at the metrics, I think I'm currently actively maintaining roughly 10 million lines of highly complex code. None of that is auto-generated code, I have manually written every single line, and especially written it to be very dense code. So pardon me if I at times act like a Looney Tunes character.
"One of the last remaining operational WWII-era liberty ships is at risk of falling into disrepair and losing its certification from the US Coast Guard. The SS John W. Brown, docked in Baltimore, Maryland, is slated to head to dry-dock for repairs, and the volunteer team charged with her upkeep is requesting the public's help to fund $500,000 of the over $1 million price tag." (Article)
Features rolling out: Selecting a unit will once pop-up any possible defensive battle results from the AI movement phase. Marked with red B1, B2, etc tags with black background on units. This feature is disabled if the whole combat pop-up dialog is turned OFF. The latter part of the roll-out will also include a setting to enable/disable this. A setting will be added to ask for a confirmation when trying to move a unit that is actively resting at the moment to prevent accidentally ruining the rest and refit process. Set minefield icon to REAL, (triangle) NATO, default (this option can override the default icon set). Unit graphics will undergo a contrast increase. Provinces will be calculated in a new improved way, that might change the province borders a tiny big mid-game as the system switches to the new method.
The first encounters of Siberian troops as Germans push towards Moscow
"At Borodino the regiments of the 2nd WSS Division and the "Hauenschild Brigade" of 10th Panzer Division with the 7th Panzer Regiment, as well as a battalion of 90th Motorized Artillery Regiment and the motor-cycle battalion of 10th Division, had their first encounter with the Siberians: tall, burly fellows in long great-coats, with fur caps on their heads and high fur boots. They were most generously equipped with anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, and even more so with the dangerous 7.62cm multipurpose gun nicknamed by the German troopers the "Crash Boom." They fought impassively. There was never any panic. They stood fast and held on. They killed and let themselves be killed. It was an appalling battle... In spite of the soft roads the 98th Infantry Division had come up by forced marches. At Detchino it had fought its way through cunningly devised field positions and pillbox lines arranged in deep echelon and manned by Siberians. These men took no prisoners. For five days the furious fighting raged. The battalions suffered heavy casualties. The 282nd, 289th, and 290th Infantry Regiments were greatly reduced in number; most of the battalion and company commanders had been killed or wounded. The sapper battalion lost 100 men. But Moscow, the great objective, spurred the men on..."
Guadalcanal: A big update that added separate Tokyo Express units (low strength Japanese ships trying to land reinforcements near the current front line).
Youtube series: The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Article: Bud Anderson, America's last WW2I 'triple ace,' dies at 102. Brig. Gen. Clarence "Bud" Anderson, the last American fighter pilot known as a "triple ace" for downing 16 German planes during WW2, passed away in California at the age of 102.
Price of Kiev: Largest WW2 Encirclement dropped to normal (from 'new').
There are no words to describe how much I miss the early days of Internet when I could get hold of a grown adult human being from any company if there was an issue. These days, I'll just face 999 layers of poorly automated trash bots spewing out totally unrelated automated replies. I guess I'm turning into an old man yelling at kids staying off his AI generated lawn unless they do in-app purchases and watch 80 hours of forced ads.
Article: How a captured Luftwaffe Fw 190 led to the development of the Spitfire Mk IX, the best close-in fighter of WWII. The capture of an Fw 190A belonging to JG26 on Jun. 23, 1942 led to the production of the Type 361 Mk IX Spitfire. This had a strengthened airframe, a four-bladed propeller and a 6o-series Merlin engine...
I have added a SeaLift feature (moving troops between a few selected cities) to Defending Spanish Republic, and I'm hoping to add it to other scenarios too. It won't necessarily be super useful, unless the front lines happen to be at a certain way, but I think the feature still adds a bit of that famous 'something else', AKA new dimensions. Interesting to see in how many games this can be meaningfully implemented, and it goes without saying that in some games I'm starting slow with only a few routes, and then expand once the initial issues have been addressed. The basic logic is that the player can transport one unit per turn, both cities and area around them must be controlled, and there is a tiny chance (depending on the game) of losing HPs during the transport. The sealifts are indicated by anchor symbols adjacent to cities with text label indicating it is a sealift ('sealift to Valencia').
Google Play Store had started a more rigorous developer-account verification process. This is good news overall, as the brand-new accounts publishing trash will have a much harder time to do their usual hit-and-run tactics. Unfortunately, the verification process is turning out to be stressful for me, since documentation from the various Finnish systems and global databases just doesn't fit well with the requirements built on USA-logic and Google'e US-only out-of-date data. And to make matters worse, I have had accounts in various Google departments literally forever, and as a result, my info inevitably has tiny dot-comma-level differences ('address' vs 'address.' spot the critical difference that makes these totally different addresses) that the nitpicking automated processes get hung up on. Sigh, operating in global world is painful at times... EDIT: Well, it took a ridiculous amount of back and forth emailing before Google finally admitted their data is out-of-date and escalated the support case upwards enough times that my issues finally got solved. You would think that Google could handle basic tech, basic data, basic software, basic engineering but, no, nope, no they can't. How many of these cases I have been forced to go through over the last 14 years of doing business with Google. I can't even keep tract anymore. And most of the time Google has been in the end forced to admit that their policies made no sense, algorithms were erroneous, reviewers made mistakes, or Google simply had bad data. Okay, I'll admit that one time it actually was my fault, since I had forgotten to update my info in one particular registry.
Forgotten D-Day cameramen
-- The world's collective memory of D-Day is often summarized by the work of Robert Capa. Amazing yet blurry photos of Omaha Beach have become legendary. But, under German fire, Richard Taylor was also documenting history. His unit was meant to take images of the landings, but he was the only one to bring home video footage of American troops that day in Colleville-sur-Mer.
— News story
— Footage
How 'effortless' was the legendary 1941 Kiev Encirclement that resulted in the largest capture of enemy soldiers in history:
"Although organized Soviet resistance varied from haphazard to almost non-existent, a more formidable obstacle slowed Guderian's forces. According to German war diaries, the Soviet 'roads' south of Roslavl could barely be dignified by such a distinction. Typically they consisted of little more than sandy farm tracks, more accustomed to the light traffic of small horses and peasant carts. The advent of dozens of tanks and hundreds of heavily loaded trucks soon turned them into quagmires, even in the absence of rain. In the 4th Panzer Division's sector south of Unscha the trucks were constantly getting bogged down and those that could not be dug out had to be pulled out with tractors. The war diary of Lemelsen's XXXXVII Panzer Corps noted that movement was 'exceedingly slow and difficult'. Indeed, the many small streams that crisscrossed the area and could not be skirted were even more of a problem than the dire state of the roads. Their bridges had to be reinforced or rebuilt as they were too weak to support the traffic, and in the worst affected areas even the deployment of all the available engineering units could not avert hours of delay. Even Guderian, who was traveling in the area, got stuck so badly that he had to signal for replacement armored command vehicles, personnel trucks and motorcycles. As he noted in his memoir, the experience 'was a grim omen for the future'...
As Model's 3rd Panzer Division fought its way towards the town of Novgorod-Severskii on the Desna, it received reports that its great bridge spanning the river had been destroyed. These reports, however, proved incorrect and through a combination of Soviet ineptitude, good luck and swift action on the part of two German lieutenants, the bridge was seized intact on the morning of 26 August. The importance of this achievement was summed up in the 3rd Panzer Division's war diary: 'Given the wide riverbed and swampy banks the bridge, with a length of 800 metres, spanned an otherwise almost impassable obstacle.' As Model remarked to one of the two lieutenants involved in its capture, 'This bridge is as good as a whole division.' Guderian recalled that the news was 'surprising and most gratifying'...
Yet the sunken roads plagued the long motorized columns of Panzer Group 2, which even in the best of circumstances tended to grind small roads out of existence. On 5 September Bock noted that Guderian's only success was seizing the small town of Sosnitsa, and two days later he added that the panzer group's advance was 'only mediocre'. By contrast, the typically less mobile infantry of the Second and Sixth Armies was managing to force multiple bridgeheads across the Desna. The implications of the changing conditions, as well as the fatigue of the German motorized units and the fanatical Soviet resistance, discredit the references to Guderian's oft-lauded, seamless blitzkrieg into the Ukraine in August and September 1941. Aided by Weichs's Second Army, Guderian's panzer group fought a tough, grinding and sluggish campaign, advancing on a broad front with a long, thinly defended left flank. Meanwhile, Kleist's Panzer Group 1 and Stulpnagel's Seventeenth Army made no progress, aside from the costly house-to-house fighting in Dnepropetrovsk and the more recent bridgehead across the Dnepr near Kremenchug. This is not to say that the offensive in the Ukraine did not enjoy a measure of success - and the potential rewards multiplied at an almost exponential rate the longer Stalin insisted on holding Kiev - but the German advance was by no means rapid, trouble free or inexpensive in blood and materiel."
NEW GAME: KIEV 1941: LARGEST WW2 ENCIRCLEMENT
You are in command of the German armed forces planning to create the largest encirclement in the military history by using two fast-moving panzer pincers, one from the north and one from the south, to encircle the huge number of Red Army formations located at and behind the city of Kiev. Historical background: Due to the economic importance of the southern USSR, the most and best Soviet units were placed here. This meant, that when the Germans invaded in 1941, the southern group advanced most slowly. Eventually, Germans postponed the middle group's advance towards Moscow that was evacuated and empty, and decided to turn the panzer divisions led by General Guderian southwards towards the rear area of Kiev. And if the southern group's own panzer army could get their act together (they were also tasked with seizing the industrial city of Dnepropetrovsk) and advance north to link up with the Guderian's panzers, a million Red Army soldiers could be cut off. In spite of his generals' pleas, Stalin refused to empty the Kiev area until it was too late, and instead kept on sending more Red Army reserve troops towards Guderian's armored pincer in order to stop the German encirclement movement and hold on to the industrially key area. The result was a gigantic battle that pulled in more and more divisions from both sides as overstretched Germans simply struggled to cut off and contain such an unprecedented number of Soviet Armies. Do you have the nerves and maneuvering finess to drive two narrow panzer wedges deep in the USSR to pull off the historic encirclement in a timely manner, or do you cave in and choose a wider yet slower attack? Or maybe your panzer pincers themselves will cut off...
⊕ Full paid version on Play Store
⊕ Full paid on Amazon
⊕ Free turn-limited demo version on Amazon
⊕ Free turn-limited as APK file for side-loading on your device
The encirclement of Kiev in 1941 inflicted devastating losses on the Soviet Red Army. Here's a breakdown of the estimated figures: Soldiers: Estimates in Soviet sources range from 452,700 to over 616,304 killed, captured, or missing. Armies: 5th, 37th, 26th, 21st, and 38th armies, totaling 43 divisions, were almost entirely wiped out. The 40th Army also suffered significant losses. Equipment: 2,642 guns and mortars, and 64 tanks were lost. German period sources mention the losses as 665,000 prisoners, 3718 guns, 884 armoured fighting vehicles.
"The battle and encirclement of Kiev was the Wehrmacht's greatest triumph of the war in the East and the Red Army's greatest single disaster."
— Historian Evan Mawdsley
Maps: It is time for my annual whining about maps. You might think that a city-name is a fairly solid thing. Wrong! WW2-era German maps use completely different city-names than period Soviet maps, and the USSR had a funny tendency to rename cities later on. Plus, Finnish and Western maps might use a third and a fourth totally different city-name. For example, one map has Wroclaw, other maps show Breslau, the next Vratislavia, another shows Boroszló, and the list goes on and on, and they are all referring to the same city. And at least for the bigger cities there is proper info available if you dig, but for the smaller ones, there is nothing online. So, does this bend of a river have nine different towns or are all the wildly different names referring to the same place? Who knows...
Kursk and Korea updated, obviously only applies to Amazon App Store, as both games are still outlawed in the Google Play Store. Thanks for all the messages telling me that you have filed a complaint in the Play Store, it's annoying to keep on eye on an app for years, see that it's valid and regularly updated, and buy it, and then have it randomly and suddenly removed due to a random Friday night outsourced-kid drank-too-much and needed to meet his ban-performance goals. I do miss the old days when actual grown-up humans managed app stores and had enough time to consider all the angles, instead of out of control algorithms and outsourced kids hastily whooshing around wiping out decade old businesses.
Emails, released as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google, tell a dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google search WORSE to make the company more money. source/
Underwater Panzer tanks on WWII Eastern Front
"An interesting new secret weapon was employed here for the first time-underwater tanks, also known as diving tanks. They were to cross the river under water, just like submarines. Then, on the far bank, they were to go into action as ordinary tanks, smashing enemy positions along the river and intercepting any counter-attacks. It was an amazing plan. In fact, it was over a year old and had originally been intended for a different purpose-forwith Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England. The idea was that they would be unloaded well off the south coast of England, in about 25 feet of water, to advance over the sea-floor to the flat beaches. There they were to have emerged from the waves, like Neptune, to have fought down the British coastal defences on both sides of Hastings, to have formed bridgeheads for the first German landing craft, and eventually to have advanced inland, causing havoc and panic in the coastal hinterland.
The idea was immediately put into effect. In July 1940 four diving-tank sections were formed from eight experienced Panzer regiments, and posted to Putlos on the German Baltic coast for special training. It was a strange course for the tank crews. In their Mark III and IV tanks they virtually turned into U-boat men. The operational task required manoeuvrability in water of twenty-five to thirty feet. That meant that the tanks had to withstand a water pressure of about two atmospheres and had to be appropriately sealed. This was achieved by a special adhesive. Sealing the joint between turret and tank body was done very simply by means of an extended bicycle inner tube which could be inflated by the gun-loader inside the tank. The gun itself was fitted with a rubber muzzle cap which could be blasted off from the turret within a second.
A special problem, however, was the supply of fresh air to the engine and the crew. Here the principle of the later U-boat snorkel was anticipated. A special hose about fifty feet long was fitted by a special suction device to a floating buoy, which, at the same time, carried an aerial. The tanks were steered with the aid of a gyro-compass. Towards the end of July 1940 the four detachments practised in strictest secrecy at Hörnum on the Island of Sylt. An ancient ferry of the Rügen service would take them well out to sea; there they would slither down a hinged ramp to the sea-floor, and make their own way back to the coast. The unevenness of the seabed did not seem to worry the monsters. The experiments were highly successful. But then, in mid-October 1940, Operation Sea Lion was called off for good. The dream of the U-boat tanks had ended. Of the special detachments three were united into a plain tank regiment, 18th Panzer Regiment, while the remaining detachment was assigned to 6th Panzer Regiment, 3rd Panzer Division.
In the spring of 1941, when the High Command of the Army was discussing the crossing of the Bug north of Brest, in connection with the planning of Operation Barbarossa, somebody on the General Staff remembered the diving tanks. "Surely we had those things . . ." Inquiries were made. Questions were asked at 18th Panzer Regiment. "Oh, yes, we still have those old diving tanks." An order came for diving basins to be built near Prague. 18th Panzer Regiment tested the diving capacity of the old tanks. Since they were no longer required to move under the sea, but merely to cross a river, the fifty-foot-long rubber snorkel was replaced by a ten-foot steel pipe. The exhaust pipes were fitted with one-way valves. Within a short time the U-boat tanks were again in perfect condition. On 22nd June 1941 they passed their ordeal by fire.
In the sector of 18th Panzer Division fifty batteries of all calibres opened fire at 0315 in order to clear the way to the other bank for the diving tanks. General Nehring, the divisional commander, has since described this as "a magnificent spectacle, but rather pointless since the Russians had been clever enough to withdraw their troops from the border area, leaving behind only weak frontier detachments, which subsequently fought very bravely."
At 0445 hours Sergeant Wierschin advanced into the Bug with diving tank No. 1. The infantrymen watched him in amazement. The water closed over the tank. "Playing at U-boats!" Only the slim steel tube which supplied fresh air to the crews and engine showed above the surface, indicating Wierschin's progress under water. There were also the exhaust bubbles, but these were quickly obliterated by the current. Tank after tank-the whole of 1st Battalion, 18th Panzer Regiment, under the battalion commander, Manfred Graf Strachwitz-dived into the river. And now the first ones were crawling up the far bank like mysterious amphibians. A soft plop and the rubber caps were blown off the gun muzzles. The gun-loaders let the air out of the bicycle inner tubes round the turrets. Turret hatches were flung open and the skippers wriggled out. An arm thrust into the air three times: the signal "Tanks forward."
Eighty tanks had crossed the frontier river under water. Eighty tanks were moving into action. Their presence was more than welcome in the bridgehead. Enemy armoured scout-cars were approaching. At once came the firing orders for the leading tanks: "Turret-one o'clock -armour-piercing-800 yards-group of armoured scout-cars -fire at will." The monsters fired. Several armoured scout-cars were burning. The rest retreated hurriedly. The armoured spearheads of Army Group Centre moved on in the direction of Minsk and Smolensk."
-- from Moves East by Paul Carell
What Happened To The WWII German Saboteurs Who Tried To Blow Up America? -- As early as 1940, Nazi spies had been scouting and mapping the U.S. for potential targets should America enter the war, and although that group was busted in 1941, the precedent was established... to send in teams to start blowing things up, the planning fell first to Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence outfit... Chief among the assigned targets were facilities belonging to the Aluminum Company of America, which would have devastated the U.S.'s war machine... Walter Kappe and a longtime New York resident George Dasch chose 11 others who would attend a sabotage school together... The saboteurs split into two teams when they left France, with one group heading to New York and the other to Florida. Unfortunately for the New York team, they hit a sandbar and had to walk the last 100 yards, which got the attention of a Coast Guard officer named John C. Cullen...
Hello you one player who updated Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Norway and had crashes. The saved games on your device are several years old and in format no longer supported, so I recommend starting a new game. You can either uninstall and reinstall the app, clear the data of the game in question via system settings, or change your username to 'forcenewgame' to bypass trying to load the saved game. Sorry, for the inconvenience.
I'm rolling out tweaks to the City-Defense-Bonus system, if you would like to give early feedback, check out the latest 5.0.2 version of Ardennes Offensive (Battle of the Bulge will be also getting it soon). And yes, in this particular campaign, the city bonus is less effective during the first 10 turns (surprise attack). Tweaking combat in city: Factors for bonuses: distance to own city (applies to both sides, the point being, the defender obviously gets a bigger bonus the closer to the own city it is located, and the attacker will be penalized the more far away it is from an own city), size of the city (defense), setting (ramp the bonus up from weakest to strongest), penalty for motorized/armored attack, penalty for attacking with a weak/small/low-quality unit, extra bonus if defending own supply city, being encircled nulls some defense bonuses in addition of delivering its own combat penalty, possible special early/late campaign effects, etc. And to clarify, no city-bonus mention in combat dialog as this would be too much to parse into words.
News Article: Lt. Cmdr. Lou Conter, the last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, died at 102. Mr. Conter was a quartermaster, standing on the main deck of the Arizona as Japanese planes flew overhead at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7 that year. The battleship's dead account for nearly half of those killed in the surprise attack.
History Hit Podcast The British WW1 Hero-pilot Frederick Rutland Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor
Pricing: Defending the Spanish Republic (the latest game) is now priced the same as all the games.
Once a year I run into a note I have written to myself in the middle of the night about a particular scenario, but now, three months later, it does not make any sense to me at all. To do what, where, why? Was it a response to an email feedback, did I promise I would do this, whatever the heck it is. I can only take solace in the fact that I do get tens of thousands of notes right... but sometimes, there just is too little information to make any sense out of it later.
Changes rolling out: I happened to notice a bug in the underlying game engine that gave the AI generals and AI artillery an extra MP between turns from time to time. A fix to that will be rolled out starting late March. I'm also slowly starting to unify the rear-area-extra-MPs across the series, as it has been massively different in certain scenarios, this will be a fairly long roll-out, as there will likely be tweaks to making the campaign both easier (most of the time) and harder. The old 'getting extra MPs in rear-area' rule was absolutely, the new one tolerates one or two enemy held hexagons within the big range that is used to calculate the likelihood of getting extra MPs. I'm also looking into blocking unnatural combos of various movements methods, i.e. in the future it will not be possible to combine railway movement and operational movement to dash across the map.
Grandchildren's Longevity and Their Grandfathers' POW Trauma in the US Civil War
- An association exists between a grandfather's ex-POW status and the longevity after age 45 of his sons and male-line grandsons but not of his daughters, granddaughters... Male-line grandsons lost a year of life at age 45 (4% of remaining life expectancy) if descended from ex-POWs who suffered severe captivity conditions.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38393987/
RIP Android on Windows: Microsoft will kill Windows Subsystem for Android on Windows-11 next year. Amazon has since sent out an email clarifying that Amazon Appstore on Windows-11 will no longer be available starting March 6, 2024. news article
Panzer Missions has finally reached a point that I'm slowly starting to make it easier, for some time it tended to be easy enough for the great players to simply keep on grinding almost forever, which precisely wasn't the point, as after 10th mission they were supposed to be close to impossible, but over the years all the extra resources and features gave the player too much oomph. And yes, I still tend to write out everything that I have one topic, in one huge 'sentence'.
News article: "The Air Force has decided to retire an F-35A stealth jet as it was seriously damaged by a bird strike. A comprehensive analysis with its U.S. manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, showed that the F-35A suffered damage in 300 components..." source
NEW GAME: DEFENDING SPANISH REPUBLIC 1936
The still loyal remnants of the armed forces of the Spanish Republic army find themselves in control of various disconnected areas inside Spain after a semi-failed coup by Nationalists. After the first small-scale militia struggles settle down, in the middle of August 1936, you are given full control of the Republican armed forces just as the rebels start to gather their forces for the attempt to take Madrid. While most countries choose a non-interventionist policy in the Spanish Civil War, you'll receive help in the form of sympathetic International Brigades, plus tanks and planes from the USSR. Meanwhile Germany, Italy and Portugal give support for the rebels in the form of troops and planes, not to forget that the battle-hardened Army of Africa also chooses to align with the Nationalists. Can you outmaneuver General Franco's wide array of quality forces intelligently enough, both in defense and attack, to turn the dispersed setup to your full control of the Iberian Peninsula to guarantee the continuation of the Second Spanish Republic?
⊕ Full paid version on Play Store
⊕ Full paid on Amazon
⊕ Free turn-limited demo version on Amazon
⊕ Free turn-limited as APK file for side-loading on your device
"You don't know what you have done because you don't know Franco as do I, given that he was under my command in the African Army… If you give him Spain, he is going to believe that it is his and he will not allow anyone to replace him in the war or after it, until his death."
-- Miguel Cabanellas Ferrer warning his fellow rebel generals at the start of the Spanish Civil War
AI: So, the good and bad news is that during the testing of the latest campaign, I have managed to find a way to coordinate the AI's efforts in a more grouped-together manner without causing a noticeable increase in processing. This is great news for scenarios that are too easy and potentially troublesome for the already very challenging campaigns, which might need some tweaking after the next round of updates. While crunching numbers for the Defending Spanish Republic, I also happened to spot a flaw in the movement-priority system that has caused the AI to excessively group together support units (generals, artillery, etc.). This flaw is in the underlying game engine, so it is affecting all games as of February 2024.
Mike Sadler, Intrepid Desert Navigator in World War II, Dies at 103. Maj. Mike Sadler, a WWII navigator on the trackless Sahara of North Africa, who guided Britain's first special forces across sand seas on daring behind-the-lines night raids that blew up enemy aircraft on the ground and troops in their billets, was one of the first recruits and the last surviving member of the S.A.S. from the year of its founding, 1941
News: US To Restore Tinian Airfield Once Home To Largest B-29 Bomber Fleet During WWII. Tinian currently houses one international airfield, while Tinian North Airfield, once the most extensive B-29 base during World War II, lies largely concealed by jungle growth. However, the runways and taxiways remain intact.
Utah & Omaha: Hospital fix rolling out.
Article: 8 Strange Tank Prototypes That Never Made It To Battle... Including Vezdekhod, CLB 75, Kugelpanzer, Lebedenko...
Changes currently rolling out: INFO/STRENGTH-MAP button on general's menu varies a bit, but will usually show three separate things (unless there is space in the menu to show these things separately): (1) Unit Type Info pop-up dialog, (2) Unit History pop-up dialog, (3) shade the mini-map in the upper-right corner with the current strength estimate of the forces based on known or recently known units. Certain actions in the menu of generals will alternate, most commonly requesting Sabotage and Call-for-Support, or building Hospital and Airfield. Fuel carrying trucks or depot units had some inconsistencies in their MP cost and likelihood of getting reward MPs for dumping fuel, these should now be uniform across the games. There are some new 'hardware' related settings in the options (dice) menu, including turning rounded display ON/OFF (pad the text at the bottom status line to avoid it being cut off in the corners) and allowing to turn making of the failsafe copy of the current going game ON/OFF (turn this OFF if you're playing on a decade old device which is totally running out of space and storage).
News: A senior American diplomat spied for Cuba for 42 years
- Victor Manuel Rocha, advisor to the highest executive decision-making body of the US government, the National Security Council and the US Southern Command, arrested
- Meeting with an undercover agent, Rocha spoke with a pride about his espionage for the Cubans over several decades
Pricing: Tinian changed to normal price!
Video: Two Vietnamese girls react as they watch Full Metal Jacket, a Vietnam War film by Stanley Kubrick, for the first time.
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