Magnifico
Approved user
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2015
- Messages
- 257
"Volksgrenadier": closer the mark than "Wehrmacht" but still no cigar
I get that the veneer of historicity covering this game is pretty thin and that, yes, it's just a game. But history is sort of my thing, so I still have to get this off my chest. If gratuitous historical inaccuracies don't bug you, feel free to move on to another thread.
I will give BHG this much credit: at least this time around, they have managed to find a name that's not laughably anachronistic. (The Industrial Age is meant to be roughly the WWI period. The IA German UU is called the "Wehrmacht". But "Wehrmacht" was a term used to refer to the German army only during the Nazi period.)
Unique units are supposed to be elite versions of their type, better than the garden-variety kind other nations have. The special Global Age German assault infantry are called "Volksgrenadier". But here's the thing. While the Germans did indeed field Volksgrenadier units during WWII, they were anything but the best the German army had to offer. Volksgrenadier units were created late in the war, when combat losses from years of fighting created a crippling manpower shortage for the Wehrmacht. They included many men who would have been turned away from military service earlier in the war: teenagers, old men, people who required a special diet (e.g. the 416 VG division, known as the Schlagsahne ["whipped cream"] division), etc. Volksgrenadier units generally received little in the way of training or equipment. Despite all of this, some fought tenaciously, but Volksgrenadiers were a last-ditch expedient, not a handpicked elite.
I get that the veneer of historicity covering this game is pretty thin and that, yes, it's just a game. But history is sort of my thing, so I still have to get this off my chest. If gratuitous historical inaccuracies don't bug you, feel free to move on to another thread.
I will give BHG this much credit: at least this time around, they have managed to find a name that's not laughably anachronistic. (The Industrial Age is meant to be roughly the WWI period. The IA German UU is called the "Wehrmacht". But "Wehrmacht" was a term used to refer to the German army only during the Nazi period.)
Unique units are supposed to be elite versions of their type, better than the garden-variety kind other nations have. The special Global Age German assault infantry are called "Volksgrenadier". But here's the thing. While the Germans did indeed field Volksgrenadier units during WWII, they were anything but the best the German army had to offer. Volksgrenadier units were created late in the war, when combat losses from years of fighting created a crippling manpower shortage for the Wehrmacht. They included many men who would have been turned away from military service earlier in the war: teenagers, old men, people who required a special diet (e.g. the 416 VG division, known as the Schlagsahne ["whipped cream"] division), etc. Volksgrenadier units generally received little in the way of training or equipment. Despite all of this, some fought tenaciously, but Volksgrenadiers were a last-ditch expedient, not a handpicked elite.
