A few years ago, I read that historian Niall Ferguson became obsessed with Making History, a World War II simulation game. I thought about picking it up. A few years later, I read that Making History 2 had come out, with input from Ferguson. I thought about picking it up. Then I read some reviews that mentioned Hearts of Iron III, and I stumbled across this story by the economics editor for the BBC’s Newsnight, who decided to re-fight World War Two in Hearts of Iron III — and lost:
I elected to play as France and my strategy was to re-arm as quickly as possible, intervene on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, sign a defence pact not just with Poland but also the Czechs — and attack Germany through the Netherlands at the slightest provocation, probably sometime around 1938.
But it wouldn’t let me.
My population’s “neutrality” was too high and the popularity of my ruling party, the Radicals, too low. So my tanks had to rev their engines in Toulouse, failing to speed to the aid of Barcelona; then they had to mass impotently while Germany re-occupied the Rhineland, then sit through the Anschluss, Munich and the annexation of the whole of Czechoslovakia, suffering a further indignity on the outbreak of hostilities in early 1939 because the Belgians refused my request for transit rights.
He learned a few lessons:
First, as with all god-games, how merciless strategy is towards tactics, human beings and trivial situations. I’ve been is several slightly chaotic situations as a journalist and the lesson of this top-down, realtime history game is clear: you never know what’s going on when it’s going on.
The second is quite topical: if you want to take a democracy to war, unless your country is actually being attacked, you have to relentlessly shape the narrative. This holds true in other times and theatres than 1930s Europe.
Finally, the 1930s were a complex reality. I’ve studied the period a lot on and off over the years and I’m dissatisfied at the simplistic picture that’s being created around it in recent TV dramas and movies, in which everybody is either fascist or anti-fascist, the war is always inevitable, and in which the focus is always the beleaguered aristocracy (King’s Speech, Upstairs Downstairs) or the fascist-friendly elite (Coco Before Chanel). The drama of the time — from Odets’ “Awake and Sing” to Coward’s soap-like “This Happy Breed” — was always a lot more focused on real people and the real situation. Even a serial like Granada’s “Family at War” (1970-72), written as it was by people who actually remembered the time, captured the complexities in a way we now seem unable to. And so in a way, and despite its ludicrous title, does Hearts of Iron.
I suppose I should pick HoI3 up.