Alternate history gives us the opportunity to imagine many “what-if” scenarios. However, if we are going to avoid flights of fantasy, we need to have our imagination conditioned by an understanding of why things happened the way they did. Often-times history is the result of accidents of personality, such as Rommel being away from his headquarters on June 6, 1944, or Hitler being asleep at a critical moment. But the deeper I look into history I find that often things worked out as they did because there was no better way at the time to handle the situation. In a conflict on the scale of the Second World War it is not possible to just wave hands and say, “what if it happened this way”, without giving thought to what that changed scenario would imply.
Let me give an example.
We know that the United States built a prodigious number of Liberty Ships – 2,680 to be exact – which carried the agricultural and industrial goods that in large measure won the Second World War. What did it take to construct these vessels?
First, it took new shipbuilding methods and new shipyards. None of the fifteen shipyards that built Liberty ships was in existence in September 1939, and most of them were not begun until 1940. Construction of the shipyards took an investment of more than $287 million (in 1940 dollars) by the US Maritime Commission before a single ship slid down the ways. Secondly, it took time. The first Liberty ship to be launched, the
SS Patrick Henry, took 244 days from keel-laying to delivery – on 30 December 1941. Her subsequent sisters took far less. Every shipyard and every shipbuilding way in those yards had a steep bathtub curve in production – by the middle of the war Liberty ship production time was generally below 60 days – but getting there did not take overnight. I’ve summarized the output of Liberty ships below.
As you can see, production did not really hit its stride until 1943, though the tide had turned by late 1942.
Twenty different firms built engines for Liberty Ships – including several Canadian companies. The number of subcontractors and suppliers to just the yards building Liberty ships was huge.
Should we take this into account in playing Wesworld? Given our rules, I believe we have to trust to the individual player to condition their actions to what they know and what they can discern about historical factors, or can make a reasonable case for. We are playing a game, not creating an economic model; but I think we ought to be cognizant of the art of the possible.