Battle of The Bulge in PG!

[Matt W]

Norman Davies wrote a fascinating book on WW II in Europe whose name completely escapes me at this point and since I'm not home I can't figure it out right now. One of the best pieces in it was a table showing man-months invested by the combatants on each front. While we all know that the bulk of the fighting in the war was on the Eastern Front. I compared this table to the scenarios by front to see how well the war was being presented in PG. I was stunned to see that the western and desert campaigns were incredibly overrepresented in comparison to the Eastern Front.

If I remember correctly there were over 400 million man months spent on the eastern front in comparison to 50 million on the western front (including 1939-940 and 1944-45). Remember how very short the campaigns were in the west in comparison to the four years of insanely intense combat on the eastern front. If I remember correctly Davies did try to control for logistics troops as non-combat so the number of man months should be comparable to combat situations.

While my initial review focused on the fronts themselves I also noticed that the eastern front scenarios were highly concentrated in 1941 (EFDx) and 1945 (RtB) and didn't look at the conversion of the Soviets from a mob to an effective force which occured in 1942-1944. Recent additions (the GD trilogy and Kursk:SF) have started to address this but the well is hardly touched as yet in comparison to the much more deeply mined west front. Consider the Bulge numbers previously noted, or the 50 scenarios in the Invasion of German collection.

I'm not arguing that a proportional representation would be appropriate (heck I'd have never been able to play the Slovak experience then!). That would be a great way to go out of business, because the 1,248th scenario of city fighting in Stalingrad probably won't sell anywhere nearly as well as 25 scenarios of Patton against Montgomery (oops I mean the Herman Goering Division (oops I mean dispirited Italians for most of the campaign)). It's merely to say that an objective view of the combat in the war will ultimately lead one to a discussion of the underrepresentation of the eastern front.