But digging into the rules, hacks and kluges of HoI3, and real life history, the game is frighteningly accurate.įiring up the "Politics" interface I was at first amused to find my president, Albert Lebrun, classified as "barking buffoon", prime minister Albert Sarraut as a "happy amateur" and my intel boss as a "dismal enigma" - but not amused to find that I could not change any of this before the scheduled election in 1940. 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.Īt first I thought this was a pretty unforgiveable glitch. My population's "neutrality" was too high and the popularity of my ruling party, the Radicals, too low. 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. So, over Christmas, I decided to test this out on the geekiest computer game known to man, Hearts of Iron III, in which you can play any nation (including if you so desire Panama) right the way through from 1936 to the outbreak of the Cold War, modelling not just fighting, not just production and research, but also diplomacy, intelligence and internal politics. There is a theory among some historians of the Second World War that, if only the Allies had declared war on Germany to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938, Nazism could have been defeated in a short European war.Īfter all, the Czech army was fully mobilised in 1938 three out of the nine panzer divisions that invaded the low countries in 1940 were to be equipped at the Skoda works in Pilsen and revisionist historians now explain Germany's successful blitzkrieg operation before Dunkirk as the result of French blunders and defiant anarchistic gestures by German tank commanders, not genius.
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