| Second
World War at Sea:
Black Sea Fleets
Second Edition
Enemies of the proletarian state believed that after their intervention
in the Civil War the Soviet Union would be incapable of becoming
one of the great sea powers again for a long time.
— Pravda, December 1935
 In early 1935, General Secretary Josef V. Stalin ordered the Red
Navy to draft plans for a massive fleet based around large battleships.
The Second Five-Year Plan, already under way, had called for huge
coastal-defense forces. Under the Third Five-Year Plan, that would
be extended to sea control far beyond Soviet shores.
Technical assistance, armaments, plans and even entire warships
were pursued or purchased in Germany, Italy and the United States.
Powerful battleships armed with the heaviest guns would be the fleet's
backbone, with flocks of cruisers and destroyers to support them.
A few aircraft carriers were acceptable for scouting purposes, Stalin
allowed, but would never amount to a major weapons system.
  
A future war, Soviet naval planners believed, would pit the Soviet
Union against the fascist states of the Axis plus their sympathizers.
The capitalist democracies would probably hold to a neutrality favorable
to the Soviet Union's enemies. In the Black Sea, the Red admirals
("flagmen" in the pre-war egalitarian rank structure)
believed the Italian navy would join with the Turks and operate
against Soviet ports. A powerful fleet would be needed to first
defeat this aggression, then to seize the Turkish Straits leading
into the Mediterranean and project power into that region.
Black Sea Fleets is a 64-page supplement for the Second
World War at Sea series. It covers Stalin's plans for a dominant
fleet in the Black Sea, plus the fleets and naval air forces of
Turkey and Romania. Background articles cover Soviet shipbuilding
plans, the Soviet naval air forces, the Second World War campaigns
on the Black Sea, Turkish and Romanian fleets and plans for larger
ones, and more. Scenarios cover both the actual operations in the
theater and the campaigns foreseen by the Soviet staff in their
assessments before, during, and after the Second World War.
  
Black
Sea Fleets includes die-cut, mounted game pieces: 70 "long"
ship pieces and 140 standard-sized pieces, most of them representing
aircraft. There are battleships like Parizhaya Kommuna, Novorossisk and Sovietskaya Ukraina, the battle cruiser Sevastopol, several proposed aircraft carriers, plus cruisers and destroyers
ranging from re-conditioned veterans of the Tsarist navy to the
"Blue Beauty," the destroyer leader Tashkent. Romania
has her long-desired cruisers, while Turkey fields the battle cruiser Yavuz plus the ships she desperately sought to buy in the
1930s. Aircraft range from the PZL-11 fighter in Turkish service
through Romanian Fi.167 torpedo bombers to the Soviet I-15 biplane
fighter and IL-2 Sturmovik attack plane.
Links:
Stock Code: APL0871
Price: $29.99
Status: This book is not yet available.
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