How to cripple a WWII army

[cosmicfish]

As Anthony said, it all depends on what else you want to be going on! If you use petroleum-eating bacteria then the entire world economy tanks. If they eat steel, then congratulations we just returned to the Bronze Age! Kaiju attacks would not cripple an army, it would just give it a new enemy.

Honestly, the easiest might be to go with a limited nuclear war. Have both sides develop the bomb almost simultaneously. When one side starts losing badly, that side starts dropping the nukes, which devastate the industrial and military base of the winning side - remember that in WWII there was little incentive to spread things out, even the modest nukes of the day could easily wipe out entire divisions! As this is happening, the side under nuclear attack retaliates, resulting in both sides with a savaged military and industrial base. Both sides start to realize how bad this can go if it continues, and negotiate a truce.

[Fred Brackin]

Remove all rational restraints on the Quartermaster Corps. The issuing of expensive consumables such as ammo, fuel and food will cease immediately.

They will be replaces with Instruction Manual M-1 "Rocks Are Your Friends" which will explain where to find the best rocks and how to divide them into separate piles for eating and for throwing at your enemies.

Instruction Manual M-2 will explain how to make new boots out of rocks.

[SionEwig]

The Nazis manage to start Ragnarok? I seem to remember a game with that as the premise.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by SionEwig

The Nazis manage to start Ragnarok?

There's "Thor Meets Captain America", short fiction by David Brin.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by RyanW

If it was TL 8, I could just say EMP, but that doesn't do much to TL 6/early TL 7 equipment. So how am I going to create Twilight '45? ...but with demons?

A magic spell that imposes a an upper limit on how fast anything can combust. This eliminates the internal combustion engine, and guns and bombs.

Have the demon portals open up in the oil producing areas the army depends on. This has no immediate effect, but if they can hold on long enough will force them to restrict the use of planes and armour.

Envelop the area in a thick fog to neutralize air power and ranged weapon targeting

[Nereidalbel]

Jam radio transmissions. No communication means bad things for everybody.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Demons of the sea should do the job. Somebody dropped a depth charge in just the wrong place and awakened something horrible that had slept for a few thousand years. The allied armies in Europe were crippled without supply convoys, and the Germans were able to reorganise once the allied air forces were out of fuel.

I think that would work quite well. Make the oceans uncrossable by ship and the global economy is in bad shape even *without* a war on. With America (and substantial chunks of the British Empire) effectively out of the war this starts to look like a much more even fight in Eurasia. With radio and air links intact everybody knows what's happening, and you can send adventurers anywhere in the world, but trade and troop movements are no longer a real option.

Of course if you can't get ships across the Channel, there's not much hope of finishing off the UK - the air war could go on a *long* time. Japan is in a similar situation as the UK, starved for resources but immune to invasion.

You don't quite get a post-apocalypse out of this, because it leaves North America in a pretty good place. There is some damage - the Depression is likely to return for a while - but that's way short of Twilight.

[thrash]

Most populous cities are located on the sea coast. You could have some initial kaiju attacks on (say) Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk/Hampton Roads, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, that would approximate the effects of a limited nuclear strike on these ports.

I'd be interested in how Hawaii would fare if largely cut off from the outside.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by malloyd

I think that would work quite well.

Well, it does make an interesting setting. Whether it works for the purposes of the OP is less obvious. Also, does whatever it is spread to encompass all seas, or just one?

If you want post-apocalyptic (but with lots of military vehicles around), which is the basic T2K setup, you probably want a whole bunch of people dead. It might actually be amusing to have a zombie plague, though you don't want shambler type zombies, you want zombies that retain enough mental capacity to shoot weapons (and, presumably, do not spread the disease by biting people; most likely the zombies are just a side effect of the plague). This allows you to have a wide variety of "dungeons" full of this or that WWII unit, which have all turned into zombies.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

Jam radio transmissions. No communication means bad things for everybody.

Most WWII armies kept radio silence for some of the time to avoid interception in any case and a number kept it for most of the time. Landlines(if it was dug-in) and couriers were partially relied on by everyone. If radio was shot all that would mean was that no one could do a theoretically ideal blitzkrieg. Campaigning would still be possible.