Al Nofi's Combat Information Center

Al Nofi, longtime wargamer and game designer and the one whose $100 loan got SPI off the ground, has a long running column over at Strategypage.com which is called his Combat Information Center.

The CIC format begins with military trivia then continues with a series of random military history articles, some longer, some in depth, others just a paragraph or two of interesting items.

Highly recommended for the interesting topics presented from a lifetime of gaming and game design.

Despite the lack of visual appeal of the web site and no index to content of over 400 posts there is a wealth of goodness in here that can be used by game designers and researchers.  You just have to dive in and find it.  Example on the next page.


I've copied one of his topics, German Occupation Troops in WW2, in total below.  Imagine if you are designing a strategic WW2 game and were looking for occupation troop levels in order to determine partisan activity and sabotage random events. The only weakness in some of these articles is that references are missing.

German Occupation Forces in World War II
Having conquered most of western and southeastern Europe in 1940-1941, the Germans found that they had to occupy these regions as well, both as to prevent invasion by British and American forces and to insure that the local populations remained docile. This proved costly in men and equipment.

Occupation Forces, 1940-1943
Country	Pop	Area	Troops	Ratios
				Pop	Area
Balkans	21.0	403.9	200	105.0	0.5
Belgium	8.0	30.4	100	80.0	3.3
Denmark	3.6	22.7	40	90.0	1.8
France	40.0	550.7	500	80.0	0.9
Netherlands	8.5	34.2	100	85.0	2.9
Norway	2.8	324.0	150	18.7	0.5
Total	83.7	1,365.9	1,090	76.8	1.2
Note: Pop, population is in millions; Area is in thousands of square kilometers. Troops, German occupation forces in thousands. Ratios are Pop, number of local people to each German soldier, Area, number of German troops per square kilometer.

The table gives some idea of the forces which Germany used to occupy her conquests in southern and western Europe, figures for Poland and Russia not being available. They are for German troops only, and are averages, as the actual number of occupation troops varied considerably from year to year. It's important to realize that the figures omit local forces maintained by collaborationist governments, as well as Italian and other allied personnel who undertook occupation duties in France and the Balkans. Occupation duties in these areas required an average of more than a million men. The surface area of the territories to be controlled was not as important as the number of inhabitants. Thus, the size of the occupation force was essentially dictated by the population. The ratio of occupiers to local population was fairly constant in most areas, roughly one German for every 80 or 90 locals. The exceptions can easily be explained. In the Balkans - Yugoslavia and Greece - German occupation forces were supplemented by sizeable Italian forces until September 1943, as well as some Romanian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops, and by equally strong collaborationist contingents, Croatians, Bosnians, and Albanians, all of whom proved adept at massacring their erstwhile neighbors. While there were collaborationist forces in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Norway, they were by no means as numerous as those in the Balkans. In the case of Norway, Hitler's obsession with a possible Allied threat dictated that a large force be stationed there, which helps explain the relative inactivity of the Norwegian resistance when compared with that in other countries.