To 27th January, 1941: Mediterranean Action

Just a month’s worth of action in this report, which almost completely centres around action in and around the Mediterranean.

North Africa

At the end of our last report, British and Commonwealth troops were crossing Libya from east to west none too tardily. However, there comes a time when all great military forces must pause to catch their breath, and that time in this case was around Christmas 1940, our beneficent Supreme Leader deciding the the troops deserved a well earned Christmas break. The need to reorganise and rebase for an invasion of Italy had nothing to do with, of course.

The push soon recommenced, with a total of seven divisions pushing into Homs, with three as backup to secure captured territory. This force should be sufficient to finish mopping up the Italians, even without air support (which has been reallocated to softening up Southern Italy).

Causalities have increased again, which is testament to Italy reinforcing the theatre. We might be able to do something about that, however. Fleet Malta, altered by our light forces operating in the area, sallied forth and destroyed a transport flotilla and its significant escort for no loss:

Those are some serious losses for Italy, but we can’t count our chickens yet. They still have a number of heavy vessels, and almost certainly still have transport capacity. The Sicilian Gulf is still a problem for us in fact, heavily patrolled by Italian submarines. Unfortunately, the situation in the Atlantic does not metric reallocating ASW resources yet, so there’s not a lot we can do. On the flip side, Italian convoys between Europe and Africa are getting through, being too heavily protected for our naval forces in the area. Once we have secured air superiority over the central Mediterranean, however, this will change dramatically.

The other major event we face at the moment is the surrender of Greece to German forces. This takes place at the very end of December, 1940. Defensive of Crete now falls on the British Empire, as we we don’t have enough to do already:

Although we’ve scraped together a new garrison for the task, bolstering it with at least one more division is probably a good idea. Germany is likely to want to finish its job in Greece.

Editor’s note: in reality, Greece surrendered in April 1941, so we’re slightly ahead of time here. This is down to the game slight limitations in the area of diplomacy. In reality, the conflict between Greece and Italy was  initially private, with Greece having the upper hand. Greece was only defeated when Germany intervened and applied overwhelming force. The game can’t really deal with this type of situation, however, so Germany was in this theatre from the start. Italy declared war, but barely contributed to the fighting.

In other news…

Things continue pretty much as before on our other fronts. The Battle of Britain is still going great guns, and we’re still waging a war of wits in the freezing cold waters of the North Atlantic and North Sea. We also finally finish mopping up Lebanon’s forces, and they subsequently surrender. We also receive our sixth (and last?) batch of destroyers from the US.

This is a quick look at our current production priorities:

We are building a lot of fairly pointless infrastructure, but what the heck, we may as well improve life for our people if we can. Reinforcements are an issue, but note our large stockpiles of pretty much everything. We’ll soon have some conversion plants running as well, so we’ll be able to do something useful with all that coal.

And finally, the obligatory look at the current situation at sea. Our recent victory over Italian forces has improved the balance a little:

Losses

• One MTB squadron
• Six destroyer divisions
• Two County-class heavy cruisers
• Three WWI-era aircraft carriers
• One modern light carrier
• Eight light cruisers
• One battleship
• Three long-range and two medium range transport squadrons

German vessels sunk

• 13 submarine squadrons
• Four destroyer divisions
• One light cruiser
• Two heavy cruisers
• Two transport squadrons

Italian vessels sunk

• 12 destroyer divisions
• Seven light cruisers
• Three heavy cruisers
• Three battle cruisers
• Two battleships
• Seven transport squadrons