A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

  © 2017 Killerfish Games If you are a regular – or semiregular – reader of A Certain Point of View, you probably know that in July I purchased Killerfish Games’ 2017 submarine game Cold Waters from Steam. I had been wanting to get it for some time, but I waited till it was on sale; I didn’t want to shell out nearly $40 for a computer game, even if said game billed itself as the a spiritual heir to MicroProse’s 1988 classic, Red Storm Rising. Like Red Storm Rising, Cold Waters has Training, Single Mission,  and Campaign modes; unlike Sid Meier’s game, which is based on the late Tom Clancy’s 1986 best-selling novel, it gives players the option to play as an American, Soviet, or Chinese submarine commander in Cold War-turned-hot campaigns set in three distinct eras (1968, 1984, and 2000) in alternative histories which take a turning point in world affairs – say, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of ’68 – and tweak it so that the two blocs that waged the Cold War find

British paratroopers make a combat jump in Operation Market Garden. Photo Credit: Imperial War Museum  Someone on Quora asks: Was World War II a continuation of World War I? In many ways, yes. In fact, I’ve read (in Antony Beevor’s 2012 one-volume history,  The Second World War,  I believe it was) that some historians consider the European war of 1939–1945 to be the conclusion of a single European conflict that began in August of 1914 and, after a two-decade intermission in which both sides rearmed and reconsidered their strategies, resumed in September of 1939, ending only with the destruction of Germany and the old European world order and the rise of the Soviet Union and the United States as the dominant superpowers. There are even convincing theses floating out there that suggest that if you add the Cold War to the mix, you can connect most of the chaos and misery of the 20th Century to the yin-and-yang struggle between the Left and the Right that began with the Bo

©1987 Simon & Schuster (U.S. Edition) On November 1, 1987, Simon & Schuster published the U.S. edition of  The Korean War, a one-volume history of  a 1950-53 conflict that pitted the United States, South Korea, and 20 member-states against North Korea, the People's Republic of China, and - behind the scenes - Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union in a bloody struggle for control of the Korean Peninsula. Written by British historian Max Hastings and originally published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph, The Korean War examines the controversial clash of arms that is sometimes known in the U.S. as "the forgotten war" from a British perspective, with a sharp focus on the American, Soviet, and Chinese foreign and defense policies in the early stages of the Cold War that made the war inevitable. In retrospect, the Korean War is eclipsed by the conflict - World War II - that came before it and the one that came after it:  Vietnam. The former was a titanic struggle th

(C) 2007 Hyperion Books The Korean War is, as the shopworn cliche describes it all too aptly, America's "forgotten war." Sandwiched between the last undisputable and clearcut victorious conflict - the Second World War - and the tragic quagmire that drove a stake through the nation's heart (Vietnam), Korea is only on the national consciousness due to a few factors: the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, which was set in Korea but deep down was really about Vietnam; the long and eventually successful campaign by  Korean War vets for a monument in Washington, D.C.; and more recently, President Donald Trump's bizarre attempt to take credit for the first tentative attempts toward  detente between the Communist dictatorship that has ruled North Korea since 1945 and the democratic (and U.S.-allied) South.  The three-year-long Korean conflict was, in retrospect, doomed to be forgotten except, sadly, by the brave men and women who served in a U.S.-led United Nations for

Package of the DOS version of M1 Tank Platoon (C) 1989 MicroProse Software In 1989 - that annus mirabilis marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, MicroProse Software published the original version of M1 Tank Platoon: The Definitive Simulation of Armored Land Warfare.  Part vehicle simulator and part real-time tactics map-based game, M1 Tank Platoon was the first tank warfare game to break away from the "one tank against the entire Red Army" trope in other games set in a conventional World War III scenario. Instead, M1 Tank Platoon put the player in command of a four-tank platoon of M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks and, depending on the mission type selected, a wide array of supporting forces that included M2/M3 Bradleys, AH-64 Apache attack helos, OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopters, A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jets, Improved TOW Vehicles, infantry squads, 107mm mortars, 155mm artillery, and Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS)

Map Credit: Wikipedia In 1979, Simon and Schuster published Peter Wyden’s Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story, a hard-hitting and critical examination of one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s biggest blunders – the failed attempt to topple Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s regime with an invasion force of 1,500 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles that landed at Playa Giron, a beach on the Bay of Pigs, located on the southern coast of Cuba.  (C) 1980 Touchstone Books/Simon and Schuster. Planned during the last year of the Eisenhower Administration but never officially approved by the lame-duck President Eisenhower, Operation Zapata was not intended to defeat Castro’s forces at Playa Giron with such a small force. Instead, the Brigada de Asalto 2506 (Assault Brigade 2506) was originally assigned to land at Trinidad, 170 miles to the southeast of Havana. There, the five small battalions would seize the port and airfield, carve out a beachhead, and once a perimeter was secured, a governm

DVD Cover Art (C) 2012 Cable News Network, Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. CNN Presents: Cold War (C) 1998 Turner Original Productions, Inc.   In 1998, seven years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, CNN and Britain's BBC Two network aired Cold War, a 24-part miniseries co-produced by Turner Original Productions and Jeremy Isaacs, a British producer who is best known for his 1970s series about World War II, The World at War.   The idea of the series originated with Jeremy Isaacs Productions and was financed by CNN founder Ted Turner. Isaacs then put together a team of writers and producers to make 24 46-minute-long episodes that are presented in the same style and format of The World at War. Many of Isaacs' collaborators, including co-producer Pat Mitchell, writers Neal Ascherson and Jerome Kuehl, and composer Carl Davis, had worked on the earlier series. Thus, Cold War can be considered to be a sequel to The World at War.  As you might expect,