Crete

Tuomo

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I'm reading Anthony Beevor's book on Crete.

MAN the Brits just could not get out of their own way at that point in the war. "Let's go help Greece! Whoops, that didn't work, we gotta evacuate. Let's defend Crete - hell, we even have Ultra intercepts telling us the time and place! Whoops, the leadership at Maleme botched it up and the Germans are airlanding in force - we gotta evacuate."

Dudes. Head. Out of. Ass. Please.

AT ANY RATE. Several thoughts:

* Best Crete Scenario? I haven't played all 71(!) that the ASL Scenario Archive tells me are there, but my own personal favorite is T15 The Akrotiri Peninsula. The German glider-borne force is chock fulla Fallschirmjager goodness, including a 9-2 and a 10-2. How do you make scenarios with -2 leaders less brittile? GIVE 'EM TWO.

* Looking back with fondness on the Operation Merkur map I did way back in the day. Actually not as awful as I'd expect. Would love to update it to modern standards.

* Does any Crete scenario invoke armed civilian action via SSR? Certainly the widespread tales of Cretan Yayas with kitchen knives are perhaps a TAD overblown, but at least according to Beevor, them Cretans wasted no time getting out into the olive groves and hunting down the invaders in a mass 1941 version of Get Off My Lawn. I'm wondering if an Urban Guerillas type of SSR might work here - use a high SAN and let Partisan 127s and Heroes (skip the leaders) pop up onboard.
 

Cpl Uhl

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Loved your Merkur map and especially playing the Op Merkur Tavronitis Bridge scenario in Crete the evening after visiting the real location. You captured the terrain well. Those reed beds are incredible!
 

Tuomo

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Ah, the Greeks. Tough to say who has more vowels, them or the Finns.
 

PTY

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View from the trenches - Brit Pack - Expect the Cretans to be Friendly
 

PTY

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I'm reading Anthony Beevor's book on Crete.

MAN the Brits just could not get out of their own way at that point in the war. "Let's go help Greece! Whoops, that didn't work, we gotta evacuate. Let's defend Crete - hell, we even have Ultra intercepts telling us the time and place! Whoops, the leadership at Maleme botched it up and the Germans are airlanding in force - we gotta evacuate."

Dudes. Head. Out of. Ass. Please.

AT ANY RATE. Several thoughts:

* Best Crete Scenario? I haven't played all 71(!) that the ASL Scenario Archive tells me are there, but my own personal favorite is T15 The Akrotiri Peninsula. The German glider-borne force is chock fulla Fallschirmjager goodness, including a 9-2 and a 10-2. How do you make scenarios with -2 leaders less brittile? GIVE 'EM TWO.

* Looking back with fondness on the Operation Merkur map I did way back in the day. Actually not as awful as I'd expect. Would love to update it to modern standards.

* Does any Crete scenario invoke armed civilian action via SSR? Certainly the widespread tales of Cretan Yayas with kitchen knives are perhaps a TAD overblown, but at least according to Beevor, them Cretans wasted no time getting out into the olive groves and hunting down the invaders in a mass 1941 version of Get Off My Lawn. I'm wondering if an Urban Guerillas type of SSR might work here - use a high SAN and let Partisan 127s and Heroes (skip the leaders) pop up onboard.
I have often wondered how many of those civilians were veterans of WWI or of the war with Turkey.
 

The Purist

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First off,.... approach Beevor with caution. He is not amongst the top tier of historians such as Overy, Hastings, Stahel or Glantz and House. He tends to rely a bit too much on secondary sources despite available access to primary and archive files.

Freyberg (NZ) does gain a bit of a blot on his otherwise very good record regarding the (mis)use of intelligence. The one caveat here is that he was not aware that the source was Ultra. Only very few people had such knowledge and Freyberg was led to believe the source was from an operative. That is one of the reasons he clung to the possibility of a seaborne landing.

Anyway,... Crete means Parachutes and Gliders

I am not aware of any involving 'partisans' but its an interesting campaign all the same.

I've always liked the triple scenarios set in Annual 89 - A1 Tavrontis Bridge, A2 Bofors Bashing and the combining of these into A3 Descent into Hell.

I believe all three are reprinted/updated in FKaC as 93, 94 and 95 along with A Desperate Affair (97), On Silent Wings (98) and Probing Layforce (99), all good scraps
 
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Carln0130

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I'm reading Anthony Beevor's book on Crete.

MAN the Brits just could not get out of their own way at that point in the war. "Let's go help Greece! Whoops, that didn't work, we gotta evacuate. Let's defend Crete - hell, we even have Ultra intercepts telling us the time and place! Whoops, the leadership at Maleme botched it up and the Germans are airlanding in force - we gotta evacuate."

Dudes. Head. Out of. Ass. Please.

AT ANY RATE. Several thoughts:

* Best Crete Scenario? I haven't played all 71(!) that the ASL Scenario Archive tells me are there, but my own personal favorite is T15 The Akrotiri Peninsula. The German glider-borne force is chock fulla Fallschirmjager goodness, including a 9-2 and a 10-2. How do you make scenarios with -2 leaders less brittile? GIVE 'EM TWO.

* Looking back with fondness on the Operation Merkur map I did way back in the day. Actually not as awful as I'd expect. Would love to update it to modern standards.

* Does any Crete scenario invoke armed civilian action via SSR? Certainly the widespread tales of Cretan Yayas with kitchen knives are perhaps a TAD overblown, but at least according to Beevor, them Cretans wasted no time getting out into the olive groves and hunting down the invaders in a mass 1941 version of Get Off My Lawn. I'm wondering if an Urban Guerillas type of SSR might work here - use a high SAN and let Partisan 127s and Heroes (skip the leaders) pop up onboard.
Headhunting for Bloody Huns by Tom Morin had civilians. Awesome scenario BTW.
 

asloser

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* Looking back with fondness on the Operation Merkur map I did way back in the day. Actually not as awful as I'd expect. Would love to update it to modern standards.
I acquired this module only recently and have been itching to play something on the map. Had an opponent lined up for DB150 Falschimjäger Graveyard but this was posponed due to the plague situation - he is a doctor working in university hospital.

Having visited Maleme several times I like the map a lot!
 

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View from the trenches - Brit Pack - Expect the Cretans to be Friendly
One of Mike Rudd's efforts that one. I really should play it. Along with V16 The Eagle Has Landed.

The best quote that I heard about that period of the war was "Churchill wins every debate in Parliament and loses every battle".
 

Craig Benn

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I agree Beevors not in the top notch of military history but Max Hastings isn't either! He basically chooses anecdotes to support his preconceptions without doing any proper analysis. Both can write of course.

Crete isn't the biggest feck up of British arms by a large margin. The battle was close - Students planning was poor and the amount of Ju52s wrecked at Maleme would really hurt the Germans air transport.

I mean Singapore, Leros, Dieppe, Norway - lots of head removing to do.

Liked too little too light from the Operation Merkur module. Starts with British night attack then at daylight transport aircraft landing Gebirgsjager under fire, German mortars from a commanding hill knocking out Brits at 30-40 hex range. Stukas. Light Tanks. Absolute chaos.
 

Cpl Uhl

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I agree Beevors not in the top notch of military history but Max Hastings isn't either! He basically chooses anecdotes to support his preconceptions without doing any proper analysis. Both can write of course.

Crete isn't the biggest feck up of British arms by a large margin. The battle was close - Students planning was poor and the amount of Ju52s wrecked at Maleme would really hurt the Germans air transport.

I mean Singapore, Leros, Dieppe, Norway - lots of head removing to do.

Liked too little too light from the Operation Merkur module. Starts with British night attack then at daylight transport aircraft landing Gebirgsjager under fire, German mortars from a commanding hill knocking out Brits at 30-40 hex range. Stukas. Light Tanks. Absolute chaos.
Played that one and lost when a German sniper took out my HS guarding a gazillion prisoners, who of course rearmed to take back the village. Great fun.
 

Michael Dorosh

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Crete isn't the biggest feck up of British arms by a large margin.

I mean Singapore, Leros, Dieppe, Norway - lots of head removing to do.
Dieppe was a Canadian show. Churchill Mann did the detailed planning IIRC. Montgomery had actually insisted on heavy fire support and parachute landings, and was quietly removed from the project when the original RUTTER was cancelled and JUBILEE remounted in August 1942 by which time Montgomery was in Egypt. The British commando raids on the flanks were largely successful (at Yellow only a handful of commandos got through but sniped the German coastal guns to such effect, they were combat ineffective, while at Orange Beach they did so well one of their number got the VC). The Canadian landings were disasters.
 

JoeArthur

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Dieppe was a Canadian show. Churchill Mann did the detailed planning IIRC. Montgomery had actually insisted on heavy fire support and parachute landings, and was quietly removed from the project when the original RUTTER was cancelled and JUBILEE remounted in August 1942 by which time Montgomery was in Egypt. The British commando raids on the flanks were largely successful (at Yellow only a handful of commandos got through but sniped the German coastal guns to such effect, they were combat ineffective, while at Orange Beach they did so well one of their number got the VC). The Canadian landings were disasters.
There needs to be a Dieppe historical module. You could do the early war stuff with the Germans going in, then the raids, then the liberation.

I'd buy it in a heatbeat and I'm skint :)
 

Michael R

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There needs to be a Dieppe historical module. You could do the early war stuff with the Germans going in, then the raids, then the liberation.

I'd buy it in a heatbeat and I'm skint :)
A regular beach landing is tough enough on the attackers. A Dieppe beach landing is not something I would want to play.
 

Michael Dorosh

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A regular beach landing is tough enough on the attackers. A Dieppe beach landing is not something I would want to play.
The appeal to me would be to see how the different landings interact with each other. This has always been an appeal of Operation Market-Garden, where each bridge on the road to Arnhem has the ability to throw off the whole operation.

A series of linked scenarios around Dieppe could work similarly - the Orange and Yellow beach landings if successful would lessen the ability of Germans to intervene on the forces landing at Green and Blue beaches. The forces landing at Blue and Green would similarly be able to lessen the ability of the Germans to effectively deal with Red and White beaches. The trouble with the historical set up is that Blue Beach was a sheer disaster (60 Germans shot up 500 Canadians landing at the base of a cliff) and Green was not much better (Canadians landed on the wrong side of the river instead of on both sides as planned). Might be interesting to use the original RUTTER plan with airborne landings and naval gunfire - but I agree the actual situation was a bit of a dog. You'd have to also reconsider the VC - if you can get the Intelligence Assault Unit into naval HQ and get the German rotor wheels, it all becomes worth it. But it would be hard to write the main landings without the Germans knowing the real object of the raid was the rotors. The real defenders would have had no idea so in the game the German player would unrealistically be attempting to cover the HQ building. One way around it might be a chit draw before the scenarios began where each beach has an intelligence bonanza which counted for a large chunk of the Allied player's VP total - the radar station at Green Beach, the rotor codes at naval HQ, etc - and the Allied player is only secretly looking for one of them. The Germans thus have to defend all of them.

14195
 
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von Marwitz

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MAN the Brits just could not get out of their own way at that point in the war. "Let's go help Greece! Whoops, that didn't work, we gotta evacuate. Let's defend Crete - hell, we even have Ultra intercepts telling us the time and place! Whoops, the leadership at Maleme botched it up and the Germans are airlanding in force - we gotta evacuate."

Dudes. Head. Out of. Ass. Please.
Bytimes, the Brits seem to have the knack of it. Nowadays, they are evacuating from Europe... ?

von Marwitz
 

Michael Dorosh

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MAN the Brits just could not get out of their own way at that point in the war. "Let's go help Greece! Whoops, that didn't work, we gotta evacuate. Let's defend Crete - hell, we even have Ultra intercepts telling us the time and place! Whoops, the leadership at Maleme botched it up and the Germans are airlanding in force - we gotta evacuate."

Dudes. Head. Out of. Ass. Please.
It's not like the Americans did so fantastic at the start of the war, either.

Philippines was a disaster. "I shall return" - yeah, 3 years later.

TORCH - the only thing that saved the day was the fact the French were wafflers.

Kasserine Pass - Atkinson goes into detail about US forces in general in North Africa - spoiler - they were not good, though Fredendall was not an inspired commander to say the least.

Sicily - started by shooting down their own paratroopers, fouled up the loading tables for the amphib landing, narrowly avoided a rout by the Hermann Goering (thanks to the Navy), charged headlong to the west side of the island to find places that the Germans weren't, then got into stubborn resistance fighting to Messina - victoriously arriving after the Germans had evacuated with most of their equipment.

Cue Salerno and Anzio

Safe to say the Germans got to have a say in how well the Yanks did, but that of course was true where the Brits were concerned as well. If had been easy to defeat the Germans, the Russians would have done it in '41....
 
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