In 1974, Great Britain and Germany did a wargame to analyze what the outcome of Operation Sea Lion would have been, had it taken place. Have any other similar war games been done to answer other major historical military what-ifs?

by [deleted]

More specifically, has anyone of significance wargamed what would have happened had Hitler not made the choices he did regarding Stalingrad?

Note: I'm not asking a /r/HistoricalWhatIf question, I'm asking if other people of note have performed wargames to answer what-if questions, especially related to WW2.

Wikipedia article on Operation Sea Lion

More info on the British-German war game here: http://www.wargaming.co/books/paddysprawling/articles/sealion.htm

Nutella_Sandwich

What exactly is a war game and how reliable are they for determining how a battle would have unfolded? How can you even say that this particular war game unfolded even remotely close to how a real war would have?

LeonardNemoysHead

Related question: wasn't this a big part of the peacetime duties of von Moltke's General Staff, as part of the contingency planning that the group was tasked with?

Cogito96

I don't know how much this relates to your question (in fact, on reflection, I don't think it overly does), but for this general kind of "war game", there was a show called "Time Commanders" on the BBC, in which sets of people were tasked with commanding an army in classic historical battles in the Roman/Greek era. If you're interested, you can find most of the episodes on Youtube.