The Battle of the Java Sea is a must-do scenario, what with all of the various participants. Oh, how that battle would have changed if the Prince of Wales and Repulse would have been able to "attend" it :wink: . Also, a more-likely "what if" variant is to add the firepower of USS Boise. My favorite cruiser design (along with St. Louis and Helena), the Brooklyn-class USS Boise would have been in the battle had it not run over an uncharted pinnacle before the battle and had to retire for repairs. Adding those 15 fast-firing 6" guns would surely have helped out the ABDA fleet!
I'm not contesting your statement, but I will perhaps qualify it a bit. The Canadian ship numbers were in the smaller ship categories like the excellent Flower class corvettes. Canada got third place due to the fact that at the end of the war (when that ranking is found) the axis had most of their ships sunk. So yes, it was the 3rd ranking naval power, but that's after the 'party' was over. If one was to have a convoy scenario in the North Atlantic, I would expect to see the Canadians in it with both feet, to be sure. They were a very important part of the convoy supply effort to Britain and the Russians. Just be sure to pick your battles carefully when Victory at Sea comes out, such as going after U-boats. You wouldn't want to face a ship like the Scharnhorst or Bismarck, which is what would have happened had the HMS Hood and Prince of Wales not been able to block the Bismarck (and Prinz Eugen) from going after Atlantic convoys. I am sure a future supplement of the game will offer a list of the Canadian ships that participated, but I just hope that your convoy scenarios have a few British heavies mixed in with the Canadian escorts if the Gneisenau or Tirpitz decide to drop in. One particularily good piece of trivia that showed Canadian participation in a major action in WW2 was indeed a ship chock full of Canadians that had the audacity to attack the before-mentioned Tirpitz in it's fjord parking spot. The escort carrier HMS Nabob, while a Royal Navy ship (built by the US) was fully manned by Canadian sailors, and participated in operation Goodwood III (gotta love the name, heh). If a penetrating hit from the attack hadn't ended up being a dud, the Tirpitz might have ended its career before any "Tallboy" bombs sealed its fate.
It looks like the Canadians accounted for around 23 of the u-boats sunk in the war. I'm sure they did that using the ages-old "incentive plan"- If you didn't sink them, they would surely sink you.
Regarding "colossal fleet engagements" I'm pretty well read on Russian naval activity during WW2 and I'm not aware of anything that fits that description. What actions were you thinking of?
We ran a Baltic evacuation campaign at the NWS a few years back - a fascinating action with lots of unusual ships (and we had all the hard b*****ds playing the Russians so that they didn't have any qualms about launching massed atacks on liners full of civilians!)
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