Date of publication (as given): July/August 1974

Context

• July 1974: West Germany wins the (Soccer) World Cup, defeating the Netherlands 2-1. Turkey invades Cyprus. The USA release of the film Death Wish (based on a novel by Brian Garfield) starring Charles Bronson and directed by Michael Winner.
• August 1974: USA President Richard Nixon resigns and Vice President Gerald Ford takes the oath of office to become the 38th USA President. Zaheer Abbas scores 240 for Pakistan against England at The Oval. RCA releases in the USA Harry Nilsson’s tenth Album, Pussy Cats, produced by John Lennon.

Game Included

Operation Olympic by James F. Dunnigan is a solitaire game about the hypothetical USA invasion of Japan in 1945. Each turn is a week, each hex is 6.5km and units are regiments, brigades, and divisions. There is a two-player option.

For more information about the game, see here.

Articles

• Operation Olympic – Frank Davis

During the last year of the war in which Japan lost one decisive battle after another, hundreds of thousands of Japanese had been sacrificed. If the Emperor prematurely agreed to surrender, these lives would appear all the more wasted. Thus, the war must be allowed to continue until Japan’s ruin became visible to all and the suffering caused by it had produced a popular clamoring for peace.

• Science Fiction Futures – Stephen B. Patrick, John Boardman, and Redmond A. Simonsen

The real object is to reveal human behavior under stress – and the stranger the source of stress the better. The “weird” factor in science fiction is what lifts it above other genre writing in importance. It provides a unique esthetic distance from which the reader can appraise the characters and the situation. It enables the writer to arrange all of the background to focus attention on the main players. It can, and consistently does, carry the reader beyond the narrow defiles of his here-and-now reality set so that he can more successfully turn back and see his life. Science fiction is a way of looking at the past.

• Outgoing Mail – editors
• Footnotes – everybody
• Sackson on Games – Sid Sackson
• Pass in Review (book reviews) – Albert A. Nofi
• Player’s Notes – Irad B. Hardy and John Michael Young

SPI Games Advertised

• Frigate ($8)
• Starforce: Alpha Centauri ($8)
• War in the East ($20)
• WW II ($7)

Somebody Was Paying Attention

From the Footnotes article, page 23:

Just wanted to complain about Hardy’s (IBH) comments in the Civil War rules folder. Deesigner’s notes should explain the historical considerations utilized or reflected in the game system. However, Hardy’s suggestion that the Union player set up in odd-numbered hexes to minimize Command Control problems is an example of gamesmanship rather than historical accuracy.

On a Personal Note

My knowledge of the war in the Pacific was sketchy. I knew nothing about proposed plans for the invasion of Japan. This issue of S&T went some way to fill in in the gaps. Although the historical article’s focus was on the later stages, there was some useful material about how the participants got to that part. As for the invasion, while I was happy to play the game, I think I took it less seriously because – perhaps naively – I found it a highly unlikely scenario. No power could have resisted the force of the USA’s nuclear arsenal. Surrender was inevitable.