Slitherine

Italy has partisans after the Allies land. Can anyone tell me who these guys are supposed to be? Mafia?

Seriously, why would there be Italian partisans. Parmesan I can see, partisans, no. The majority of Italians (including the Sicilian Mafia) were delighted to see the Allies. There is no historical justification for partisans to occur in Italy.

In a recent solo game, I saw two corps of Italian partisans pop up in the "boot" of Italy, as I was closing in on Rome. CEAW otherwise quite accurately portrays Italy's manpower and production issues---so where in the heck would two entire corps of partisans come from?

IMO the only countries which should have partisans occur are Russia and Yugoslavia. Maybe a case could be made for Greece, although I think not for a game on this scale.

Additionally, in PBEM games partisans in Russia seem to appear with far less frequency than in a game against the AI or hotseat. Does anyone know why?

Everywhere gets partisans - I've seen reports of dutch partisans.

And of course yugoslavian partisans disappear after the country is conquered...go fighure!!

Originaly the game was not going to have partisans at all - only pressure from the beta testers had them put in, but even then all that happened was the current rather silly implementation. It's marginally better than nothing tho...IMO.

Actually, Italy after 1943 was pretty much one big partisan war. Of course, there were actually more pro-allied partisans than fascists, but there were fascists operating and a good number of divisions.

Yep - but het issue is, I think, Axis partisans operating behing allied lines prior to Italian surrender - which can only happen once Rome is captured whereas it actually happened 5 days after the first allied landing on mainland Italy hundreds of miles from Rome!

Interestingly this is one operation where Montgomery got it right - Clark had wanted the 8th army to land in the "Toe" and tie down German forces while they landed at Salerno and Taranto....but the Germans correctly saw the Brits as a diversion, blew all the bridges in the difficult terrain and kept their forces opposite the more likely landing grounds...the 8th made slow progress in the difficult terrain.

You can't even really plan on landing where the Allies did historically because there's no port at Salerno or Naples.

Note that the invasion of Taranto against no opposition consisted of the 1st Airborne unloading straight from ships into the undefended port - I dont' see many Axis players letting you do that!!

stalins_organ wrote:Note that the invasion of Taranto against no opposition consisted of the 1st Airborne unloading straight from ships into the undefended port - I dont' see many Axis players letting you do that!!

It could happend, if you had used the force somewhere else and left the country undefended (I might have done that in a game or two)

I didn't say it couldn't happen.....I said not may Axis players would let you...if they have 20 pp for the Italians they can build a garrison right in the city...or if they have any unit spare almost anywhere on hte map they can strat move it there.....it would be an unusual axis strategy to give up a port in mainland Italy without a fight!!