Creditare - Debitare - ALL MONEY IS PHONY BALONEY. All wars are won by money. There is a game of South vs. North on the old commodore computer. There were so many factors you could vary (four) to refight the classic battles of the US Civil war. There was soldier's pay, weapons,(amount of munitions) attack type i.e. flanking, frontal, bombardment etc, and food ration. After you appportioned your resources the program would come back at you, you are on the defensive, morale is poor, high excellent, you are holding falling back, etc, then it would cogitate a while and tell you who won. I don't know the exact algorithm it used but is did model the actual factors that have been historically found to have been the main causatives in winning and losing. Generalship, training, tactics and timing notwithstanding, the main factors that you could control easily in a modern or ancient army would win at this game every time! The secret was you went for the best morale. Every time the army that had the highest morale took the field in the Civil war. What produces high morale. In the program you apportioned the food, ammo, and pay so that the soldier always had a high morale. Food and pay being the most important. Select any tactic and voila! You won. In WWII it seems that according to people I know rather well who were there, that their units had few setbacks at the Seigfried line, Monte Cassino, and Sicily. What I heard emphasized time and time again was how much fun they had. They traded jeeps and nylons, and cigarettes for farm fresh eggs, pork, and beef and ate fresh food every meal. The cook never had to wear a uniform, go into battle or do a stitch of work. He was the king of the unit. In the kitchen his word was law. Food was cordon bleu.
If they had to attack some loathsome bunch of strom troopers they would trade with some american unit some of their finest champagne for some hardware, (or German units as well, 88's were great), bribe some British airmen who flew Typhoons to aid their cause with generous allowances from stores, and attack with more firepower than ten armies. They knew the Germans would run out of ammo in a short while. They had trucks of the stuff and simply outgunmned them. They lined up 20 88 MM AA dual Bofors outside an Italian town from 3 miles away (Same in the Scheldt) and bombarded for 24 hours, 4 rounds per second per gun. Surrender was at dawn from what was considered an impregnable fortress. It was just too much for the Germans. Instead of vulnerable tanks, which just caved to panzerfaust shaped charges, they tacked on 5 inches of steel to a Cat blade a drove a D6 at the enemy positions. The D6 could clear all tank traps and was invulnerable to frontal artillery. If you had to do things by the book, you generally lost a lot of men and the day. About midway through the war, the Canadian brass, realizing that the men had developed better ways of fighting modern war than they could come up with, held schools where they asked the guys how they cleared trenches, and destroyed tanks, etc. They used these men to train the new guys.
The US had lost the war in Korea except for one thing. Aircraft carriers. They had inferior plane to the Aleyushin, and the troops were not as good artillerymen as the Chinese. The general army, poorly trained, tended to scatter under assault, was poorly prepared for cold weather and poorly disciplined. Only the Marines held their lines. But the US had lots of ammo, mobility by sea, and could re-outfit their army easily. The Chinese under heavy casualties of their frontal assault tactics, lost lots of men per unit and morale plummeted. Lots of their units had to be decommissioned when losses skyrocketed. New troops, even with the good organization and dedicated officer corp, did not have the morale from the winning, because the cost was too high. Eventually the allies ground the Chinese advance to a halt as supporting the huge army became a logistical nightmare for the chicoms. The allies could resupply many hard points and dull the Chinese assault to where it could no longer break through decisively without horrendous casualties. Firepower was the answer. Neither could the allies break the deadlock without massive superiority of equipment. This they did not have. They were to fight one more war with inferior hardware and vastly inferior morale, Vietnam, where they finally learned they would have to upgrade the iron to outfly and out manoeuver the 3rd world countries to where they could afford the casualties and the enemy could not. They were a long time learning. They should have listened to Rommel and Patton. Organisation, training, weapons. But the men gotta want to fight.
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