Gentlemen, your sensitivities and sensibilities do you great credit. My father went to war in 1939 in the British Army. His three brothers all joined the Royal Navy. All survived - thank Goodness, but I remember my two uncles who were in destroyers talking about some of the things they had seen. It was actually their silences which spoke loudest.
If the game we play recreated the true horror of ships struck by torpedoes - men mutiliated, burnt, scalded, blinded and choked by swimming in fuel-oil, I don't believe any but the sickest minds would go near it. But, thankfully, the game concentrates on the mechanics and tactics of submarine warfare, not its human consequences.
And in the game, you're not sinking Brits, or Japs, or Yanks, or Jerries - you're firing a virtual weapon at an often anonymous virtual ship whose flag delineates that it's "one of theirs" rather than "one of ours."
A great computer game SH IV certainly is - as is SH III. War they are definitely not.
|