"In my opinion everything happened outside this theatre is secondary or at least overshadowed by the titanic struggle between Axis and Soviet Union. This is the campaign that decided WWII."


Granted the Eastern Front was enormously important but what about the titantic struggle between USA and Japan in the PTO as a campaign that also decided WWII?

and the odds were in favour of it being lost there, since the Russians never managed to stop the Germans going where they wished prior to the first winter.

The Russians ran out of men by 1945. The average Romanian soldier was distinctly inferior to his Red army counterpart in 1940, but superior to him by 1942, which is a commentary on the destruction of the pre-war Red Army in 41.

The Japanese mobilised 5 million men and slightly less than half saw action.

The North-West Europe campaign was a sideshow compared to the Eastern Front, but Eisenhower considered the Pacific the "bush league". The war in the Pacific seems to have been a competition between Army & Navy who pursued two uncoordinated drives toward Japan, which was an enemy who appears to have been carefully preserved long after the pique over Pearl diminished: "it was the only enemy they had". Strong evidence for this is in the deliberately hobbled submarine war, which was proving too successful long before either service could claim any sort of victory. Some more can be found in sub production figures, which is the only area where Japan began to approach the US totals. There were even hints of scandals in US submarine production methods. The Japanese failed to do their bit, by not instituting effective ASW techniques in a timely fashion, but they did try to make peace, in a somewhat desperate manner, throughout the last summer of the war.

All this is completely dwarfed by China. There movements of hundreds of thousands of men are not worthy of mention. China's insignificance lay in its inability to feed their millions, let alone maintain them as soldiers. Not for nothing did the Japanese regard gas as useful but biological weapons as the only likely method to overcome the enemy's hordes.

Andy - you make some interesting points, and there certainly was rivalry at all levels between the Army and Navy in the Pacific. However, the above passage is one I would take exception to. My father served in the Pacific, and perhaps more importantly, my mother (who was not married to my dad at the time) had a number of her brothers in the war in the Pacific. My aunts and uncles were all from that era and lived through the war. I think my mom and my other relatives were pretty typical of Americans back then, and I can tell you that the "pique", as you put it, NEVER diminished. I don't know where you read this, but the hatred in American for Japan burned brightly during the entire war, and for some time afterwards as well. My mom hated the Japanese until the day she died. Frankly, if there was ambivalence towards the war on the American homefront, it was clear towards the war in Europe. The Germans didn't sneak attack Pearl Harbor (despite what John Belushi's character in Animal House thought!), and many Americans were European immigrants themselves and still had family in the "old country". There was never any ambivalence in the feelings of ordinary Americans about the Pacific War.

War in the East and War in Europe updates.

I added optional rules to bring the Russian Production in that game up to historical levels. The combat system was changed to allow combat during movement. Using Glantz's Colossus Reborn and Dunn's Stalin's Keys to Victory I found that the production levels were 1/2 to 1/3 of what they needed to be. For instance Glantz asserts that in the first part of the war Russia lost 821 divisional equivalence. That's 136 losses in a month or average! Now the combat system obviously buries part of the losses without an actual combat removal but still the ability of the Russians to sustain those levels of loss are not reflected in the production values at all.

So what I have done in increase Russian production but at the same time remove the system limitations to allow higher loss levels. The original goal was to allow the Armor to strike and pocket while using the same counter mix in the original game. This goal caused issues itself, for instance because combat is now allowed during movement, KG and BG units were lost many times in the mech movement phase. This forced an inclusion to allow those units to be rebuilt even though they were eliminated. It was a cause and effect change that had to happen if I was going to free the system from the WWI style combat that it lapses into into the summer 1942 campaign on.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13978

Anyway the bottom line is if you still own War in the East but consider the system dated and not holding to standards then I would ask you give it another look using the optional rules. They are a culmination of about 20 years of question and answers of whats wrong and whats right with the system.

Just know if you do use these rules then the things you did as both the Russian and German player are out the door, it is in effect a new game!

Enjoy!

Lets not forget that it wasn't only Americans fighting the Japanese. My granddad served with a black squadron out of Burma and India for the last year of the war. Their Liberators would fly seriously long missions with all weapons removed and replaced with fuel to drop agents and supplies and blacks ops squads behind Japanese lines. and an old neighbour of mine when I was a kid had been a POW working on the Burma Railway and was still suffering from the results of tropical diseases last time we spoke.