SIDE OF WINNERS

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by Fahnenbohn

Thank you for this respect. Do you think one will try to hurt me ?

In the eternal view (the only one that matters), no one can hurt you. You can only hurt yourself. I pray that you do not.

[jorgegonzalito]

It's amazing how sometimes a simple publication, you can trigger an interesting debate. In my case I can say that I like to read about the level of knowledge that show.

[Raptor_Pilot]

Okay, what just happened? Wait, stop, I don't even care. Wow!

jorgegonzalito, by all means come over to SH4! I think you'll find it a refreshing change. I'd recommend you make sure you have game version 1.5, then put Game Fixes Only mod on top of that. It works great.

[Zosimus]

To me, it has zero to do with the Holocaust. The situation between the Poles and the Germans is (and has been) very complicated for centuries. A simple look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territ...tion_of_Poland shows that the problem started in 1309 when the Teutonic Knights took over Danzig. Now to take that much history and lay it entirely at the feet of Hitler and say that he was the one and only aggressor in the situation is supremely naive. As I said before, I am not prepared to take sides in this matter, and I'm shocked that all of you are so willing to rip into over 800 years of grievances and boil it down to a simple right and wrong. It's complicated, m'kay?

Did the Holocaust occur? Sure. Now here are my questions:

Did the Poles persecute ethnic Germans in the Polish corridor?
How many ethnic Germans were killed on Bloody Sunday 1939?
If the English declaration of war on Germany was because Germany invaded Poland, then why didn't Great Britain also declare war on Russia? It had also invaded Poland.
Did allies forces firebomb Dresden? Was Dresden a legitimate military target? How many civilians died?

Acknowledgement of historical events goes both ways, people. Atrocities were committed by all sides.

[UKönig]

Before one can truly understand the war(s) one must really look at all the politics of all the major players involved.

It wasn't world war two, as much as it was world war one, part two. You really have to go back and relearn the history of 1914-1918, to get a better picture. Keep in mind, that for countries like Turkey, the conflict continued to rage (although a lot of it had been replaced by religiously motivated 'ethnic cleansing' then) to 1923.

Yes, the treaty of Versailles was hardly a fair document. It would be sort of like if you, yes, you the reader, had gone to a house party by invitation, got drunk and passed out, and the next morning you had awoke to find that the place was destroyed, all the other guests are gone, and you are stuck with the bill for damages only because you're the last one there. How fair is that? I don't agree that it required Germany to go to war over, but...

Zosimus asks "did the holocaust occur?" To which I also apply, yes, it most definitely did. But I often broaden the scope to include the entire European theater. What rolled over Europe, courtesy of Germany, via a madman from Austria, was certainly a holocaust. The only way that destruction could be more pervasive or all encompassing, was if nuclear weapons were involved. It took years to get over, and countries and their economies and infrastructures were slow to bounce back. Nobody had dealt with war on this kind of scale before. Even today, it is a good idea, in some parts of Europe and Italy to not mention any German ancestry, should you have any, because the memories are still so bitter. (So much so that my wife lost a job because she let slip that she is half German. Only half mind you, and this Jewish employer still found it enough to toss my wife on out the street -and this is in Canada!)

We play SH3 on the side of Germany. But nazi politics never went very far into the Kriegsmarine. The U-boat crews found more loyalty and common cause with their fellow sailor, officer and enlisted alike, then they did with hitler. That's why you will never see (I hope) a 'nazi concentration camp simulator', where you manage the 'resources,' often to their great detriment. The national socialist policies that allow for such things would be too obvious and apparent. The subsim stays away from all that and just focuses on sinking ships. As should we. Let the record show that I am very anti-nazi. And I highly suggest that everyone else be, too.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Zosimus

Did the Holocaust occur? Sure.

Question asked and answered. Thank you.

Did the Poles persecute ethnic Germans in the Polish corridor?

I don't know, but I certainly believe it's possible.

How many ethnic Germans were killed on Bloody Sunday 1939?

According to German historian Jochen Böhler, between 100 and 300, vs just under 100 poles killed. Other estimates range as high as 450. After the Bydgoszcz fell the Germans held a mass execution in which between 600 and 800 Poles died.

If the English declaration of war on Germany was because Germany invaded Poland, then why didn't Great Britain also declare war on Russia?
It had also invaded Poland.

Germany had been waging a "peaceful" aggression against the rest of Europe for several years. In the 1925 Treaty of Locarno, Germany agreed that the Rhineland would be a demilitarized zone. On March 7, 1935, Germany violated that treaty and sent troops into that area. Britain and France protested but did nothing more. On March 12, 1938, German troops marched into Austria.

In September 1938 Britain, France, Italy and Germany signed an agreement stating that Germany could have the Sudetenland in exchange for a guarantee of peace. On March 15, 1939, German troops marched into Czechoslovakia. On March 23 they moved into Lithuania. It was following those acts that Britain and France made their treaty with Poland.

Russia had committed no such acts, and Britain and France were likely unsure exactly what to make of the Soviet attacks.

Did allies forces firebomb Dresden? Was Dresden a legitimate military target? How many civilians died?

Yes, no, and too many.

Acknowledgement of historical events goes both ways, people. Atrocities were committed by all sides.

Yes it does, and yes they were. You get no argument from me there. The argument comes from your claim that Britain and France started the war and Germany was apparently just an innocent victim. Yes, Germany got screwed at Versailles in 1919, but it's also true that Germany was the aggressor in 1914 as well, steamrolling through Belgium to get at France. The French also wanted that war, because they felt they had been cheated over Alsace and Lorraine. Britain promised to stay neutral in 1914 if Germany would guarantee Belgium's neutrality. Instead they chose to violate it, just as they did in 1939.

[Kapt Z]

Boy has this thread gone off the rails.

[UKönig]

You mean, "gone off the deep end?"

[Kapt Z]

Originally Posted by UKönig

You mean, "gone off the deep end?"

Off the rails, through the station rear wall and into the bay....

....the deep end of the bay, as you say.

[Torplexed]

Awww. All the poor put-upon Adolph ever wanted was peace. Peace, Peace, Peace

A piece of Poland, a piece of France, a chunk of Ukraine, a plot near Bryansk.

[CCIP]

Returning to the original topic, because this was at one point about SH3, and SH3 vs. SH4, let me try to break it down for you...

What I see in that perspective is a lot of mythology that surrounds uboats, and I'm sad to see it drive away players, because SH3 is a wonderful game and the Atlantic campaign is so worth playing and experiencing. And I say that as someone who is predominantly an SH4 player. The problems I see with that view of U-boats is that I think it comes with a misunderstanding of what the experience was actually about.

Over the years since WWII, the subject of U-boats has grown over with various myths. Perhaps the first of these were promoted by, ironically, Doenitz and Churchill in equal measure. The view of U-boats as "greatest peril" and "grey wolves" and a sort of scary opponent that was oh-so-close to succeeding comes largely from people like them, because their historical legacy stood to gain from that. The truth is that the U-boats weren't close, and they were beaten decisively far earlier than most would think. As a campaign, the U-boat war was effectively lost by early-mid 1941, much in the same way the war on land was lost by mid-late 1941 when Barbarossa failed to get to its intended objectives.

If SH3 was a competitive game where you played as the leader of Germany, yeah, it'd get pretty frustrating because the other players would have you beaten by that point and it's not a great sport after that. But SH3 is not a sport, and you're not playing Germany - you're playing an individual U-boat commander, and in that role, I'd argue that you have no less to experience than in a game that's about commanding troops on a tactical battlefield after Barbarossa, or about flying an airplane after the Battle of Britain. It's VERY worth playing and you can achieve some outstanding success on your own personal scale.

The second set of myths is that "Iron Coffins" view you mentioned, of U-boats as death-traps full of doomed men who are hopeless and painfully aware of their coming demise, but stuck and unable to do anything amid crumbling morale. But that, too, isn't really the truth, especially as applies to U-boat commanders - and Werner and to a lesser extent Buchheim had their own agendas when presenting that view. Werner in particular had been heavily criticized, by both historians and other U-boat men, for distorting facts to create that narrative of doom and victimhood. Yes, it's true that most U-boats were sunk, and that the costs were heavy. However there is little evidence that any of the gloom suggested by these heavily anti-war works actually existed in the Kriegsmarine. What's more, the deaths in the U-boat force disproportionately affected the ratings, while many more officers and the vast majority of U-boat commanders actually survived the war, including most of the successful ones. And again, I remind that your role in SH3 is not the role of a low-ranking sailor or of an anthromorphized submarine - you play as the commander of a boat, and as such, the truth beyond the myths is that at any point in the war, your chances of surviving a career are not actually that bad. And to the end, you would have a crew who were ready and willing to go to sea, contrary to what some of the myths say.

Finally, the third problematic perspective is that promoted by historians such as Clay Blair. Blair is an excellent researcher and his work presented some really important archival evidence - but Blair was also an American navy officer and a man with an agenda. His agenda came from the fact that he was bitter to see the U-boats getting so much post-war attention, while for quite some time, the US submarine effort was forgotten. He wasted no opportunity to impose his own interpretation on the U-boat war, looking for the smallest bits of evidence that the U-boat force was ineffective, unprepared, corrupted by Nazism, and otherwise not nearly as good as his contemporaries might've thought. He wanted to portray U-boat officers as, in effect, liars and braggarts - while taking a very generous perspective on US submariners in equivalent positions in his other work. In breaking down - quite justly - some of the original U-boat myths, he'd also helped build his own, which I think is very unfair and in many cases absolutely forced. The U-boat story is one that absolutely is significant and deserves to be heard - and experienced, through games such as SH3. It is not one bit tainted by "losing", and the actual history of the U-boat war shows that there are some very significant things worth knowing and understanding about it, at any time in the war.

So in the original post, I see elements of all three mythologized perspectives - the "greatest peril" of Churchill, the "iron coffins" of Werner, and the "no-good lying Nazis" of Blair. All three of them are highly inaccurate and I fear they've distorted the views of a lot of people. I recommend learning more about history while letting go of those preconceived notions - and, I absolutely recommend playing SH3!

[Admiral Halsey]

Honestly some of the most fun I have is late war. Surviving to 44 is my goal every time I start a new career and I've only done it once. I wanna get the Type XXI but I wanna do it legit so I just keep banging away running into the brick wall that is May of 43.

[Kip336]

This topic taught me more about the start of WW2 than anything else.

[BigWalleye]

Originally Posted by CCIP

Returning to the original topic, because this was at one point about SH3, and SH3 vs. SH4, let me try to break it down for you...

What I see in that perspective is a lot of mythology that surrounds uboats, and I'm sad to see it drive away players, because SH3 is a wonderful game and the Atlantic campaign is so worth playing and experiencing. And I say that as someone who is predominantly an SH4 player. The problems I see with that view of U-boats is that I think it comes with a misunderstanding of what the experience was actually about.

Over the years since WWII, the subject of U-boats has grown over with various myths. Perhaps the first of these were promoted by, ironically, Doenitz and Churchill in equal measure. The view of U-boats as "greatest peril" and "grey wolves" and a sort of scary opponent that was oh-so-close to succeeding comes largely from people like them, because their historical legacy stood to gain from that. The truth is that the U-boats weren't close, and they were beaten decisively far earlier than most would think. As a campaign, the U-boat war was effectively lost by early-mid 1941, much in the same way the war on land was lost by mid-late 1941 when Barbarossa failed to get to its intended objectives.

If SH3 was a competitive game where you played as the leader of Germany, yeah, it'd get pretty frustrating because the other players would have you beaten by that point and it's not a great sport after that. But SH3 is not a sport, and you're not playing Germany - you're playing an individual U-boat commander, and in that role, I'd argue that you have no less to experience than in a game that's about commanding troops on a tactical battlefield after Barbarossa, or about flying an airplane after the Battle of Britain. It's VERY worth playing and you can achieve some outstanding success on your own personal scale.

The second set of myths is that "Iron Coffins" view you mentioned, of U-boats as death-traps full of doomed men who are hopeless and painfully aware of their coming demise, but stuck and unable to do anything amid crumbling morale. But that, too, isn't really the truth, especially as applies to U-boat commanders - and Werner and to a lesser extent Buchheim had their own agendas when presenting that view. Werner in particular had been heavily criticized, by both historians and other U-boat men, for distorting facts to create that narrative of doom and victimhood. Yes, it's true that most U-boats were sunk, and that the costs were heavy. However there is little evidence that any of the gloom suggested by these heavily anti-war works actually existed in the Kriegsmarine. What's more, the deaths in the U-boat force disproportionately affected the ratings, while many more officers and the vast majority of U-boat commanders actually survived the war, including most of the successful ones. And again, I remind that your role in SH3 is not the role of a low-ranking sailor or of an anthromorphized submarine - you play as the commander of a boat, and as such, the truth beyond the myths is that at any point in the war, your chances of surviving a career are not actually that bad. And to the end, you would have a crew who were ready and willing to go to sea, contrary to what some of the myths say.

Finally, the third problematic perspective is that promoted by historians such as Clay Blair. Blair is an excellent researcher and his work presented some really important archival evidence - but Blair was also an American navy officer and a man with an agenda. His agenda came from the fact that he was bitter to see the U-boats getting so much post-war attention, while for quite some time, the US submarine effort was forgotten. He wasted no opportunity to impose his own interpretation on the U-boat war, looking for the smallest bits of evidence that the U-boat force was ineffective, unprepared, corrupted by Nazism, and otherwise not nearly as good as his contemporaries might've thought. He wanted to portray U-boat officers as, in effect, liars and braggarts - while taking a very generous perspective on US submariners in equivalent positions in his other work. In breaking down - quite justly - some of the original U-boat myths, he'd also helped build his own, which I think is very unfair and in many cases absolutely forced. The U-boat story is one that absolutely is significant and deserves to be heard - and experienced, through games such as SH3. It is not one bit tainted by "losing", and the actual history of the U-boat war shows that there are some very significant things worth knowing and understanding about it, at any time in the war.

So in the original post, I see elements of all three mythologized perspectives - the "greatest peril" of Churchill, the "iron coffins" of Werner, and the "no-good lying Nazis" of Blair. All three of them are highly inaccurate and I fear they've distorted the views of a lot of people. I recommend learning more about history while letting go of those preconceived notions - and, I absolutely recommend playing SH3!

You seem to have formed your opinion from reading sources which are less biased than Werner or Blair. Which do you recommend?

[Sailor Steve]

I'm not really a gamer, at least not as I see it. I like the machinery. I play airwar games because I like airplanes and it's as close as I'm ever going to get to being a fighter pilot. I likewise play ship games because I like the ships and I like the history. I pretend to be a U-boat kaleun in both SH3 and right now SH4, and maybe I'll pick up SH5 again someday. I still have Aces Of The Deep and SH1 on my computer, and sometimes I take them out for a spin.

SH3 is still the best of the lot, immersion-wise, at least for me. It's funny but I've never felt that hopelessness. It gets harder, but that just means I have to work harder at it.

George, that was a great summation.