#96 w/War Plan Z

War Plan Z: The Kriegsmarine Strikes

On 21 June 1919, the Imperial German High Seas Fleet sailed to the main British naval base at Scapa Flow. It was supposed to be turned over to the British as part of the Versailles Treaty settlement of World War I. However, the commanders and crews of those ships had clandestinely decided on a final act of defiance—they scuttled their ships and in that way denied them to the victorious British.

Articles:

• Tulagi, The First Step As the summer of 1942 began, the Japanese were establishing a presence in the Solomons. For the Americans, that became the most worrisome aspect of the Pacific War. As a new base of operations, those islands could support Japanese efforts to overturn the results of Coral Sea and Midway. Accordingly, American assaults on Guadalcanal and Tulagi came quickly, designated Operation Watchtower.
  
• Red Thunder, The Soviet Baltic Offensive: Jan–Jul 1944 In the third winter of the Russo-German War, the Red Army broke the siege of Leningrad and then launched further offensive operations intended to trap and destroy all of Army Group North. Against determined German resistance, winter weather, rugged terrain and command control challenges, the Red Army failed—narrowly—to achieve that final goal.
  
• Logistics in the North Africa Campaign Few campaigns in history highlight the importance of logistics more than North Africa in World War II. Local sources of supply were unable to support the armies, particularly in regard to food and water. That forced both sides to import over 95 percent of their supply requirements. Since neither side had land transport links to their homeland production centers, control of sea lanes and ports became critical.

War Plan Z assumes that Adolf Hitler had not canceled the Kriegsmarine (Germany Navy) expansion program in 1939. World War II in Europe does not begin September of that year. Instead, Hitler waits until War Plan Z is complete (in various stages). The game is a strategic two player simulation of the ensuing hypothetical naval campaigns fought between the Germans and the Allies sometime in the 1940s. One assumption of the game is that since Germany concentrates on increasing the Navy, there is no campaign in the west, so France remains an Allied power. Germany and the USSR still divide Poland, and an uneasy peace remains in effect on the Eastern Front.

The game system shows the effects of various operations. Players conduct actions that encompass discrete combat, logistical, intelligence and other operations. A player can conduct one or more actions per turn, depending on control of bases.

Each area on the map is about 550 miles across. Each turn represents one month of operations. Ship units represent two fleet aircraft carriers, divisions of two or three battleships, four to eight cruisers, flotillas of 19-40 destroyers, or various numbers of other ship types. Most ground units in the game represent corps or divisions. Aircraft units represent six to twelve squadrons of aircraft.