I find the squeamishness in some of the posts above a bit perplexing.
Firstly, because so much media focuses on war (often with great realism - and how many times do you see "based on a true story" flash across your screen?), I struggle to feel squeamish about playing WW2 games, or watching WW2 films (and isn't refusing to watch these the logical conclusion of a refusal to play wargames for moral reasons?), and tabletop games are several stages more abstract or remote than either of these. Much of the media in this area has a story to tell, or a point to make, and I don't really see bolt action, for example, any different - I suspect there are very few people who went into bolt action that didn't learn at least a little bit more about ww2 as a result, and as long as the material deals with the war sensitively (which by and large I think it does), I can't really see a problem with it.
In that context, it's also worth remembering that the first WW2 films were released... in WW2 (no doubt partly for propaganda purposes, but still - convoy, which I think is on UK Netflix at the moment, was made in 1940, for example), and veterans often appeared in war films after the war as well. If the people that fought in the war had no problem with media portraying the war (and indeed in appearing in those portrayals), I'm not really sure why I should have an issue with it.
Looking more towards wargaming (or at least model making) it's interesting to see as well that model companies, like airfix (for example) began to take off making ww2 era models about 10 years after the end of ww2, so very much in living memory of the war.
Second, I understand that wargaming was used in ww2 to problemsolve. There's an interesting YouTube video by lindybeige on how abstracting the battle of the Atlantic into a wargame helped Britain develop tactics to tackle the U-boat threat. Wargames are essentially an abstraction of war, whichever skin you put on your particular wargame, and a way to develop strategic thinking, relevant not just to war but all sorts of other situations as well - more well-thought-through strategic decisions ought never to be a bad thing, in any walk of life.
Additionally, to return to another idea from this thread, I also wouldnt see adding names, real or fictional, to your models, as a step too far. If anything, it helps focus the mind on the fact the models in a wargame are, ultimately, abstractions of people - and for me, seeing a squad made up of models I've spent a few minutes assigning names to get blown to shreds by a single HE shell is a reminder of the terrible human cost of war.
Two completely different examples of this:
I) I watched a YouTube bolt action batrep the other day, in which one of the players had named his sniper character after himself - i struggle to believe that the fact that his sniper later got removed by an HE shell didn't resonate with him at least on some emotional level.
II) George MacDonald Fraser (author of the brilliant Flashman novels), in his excellent autobiographical account of his experiences of WW2 makes an interesting point about soldiers and civilians, in the context of the atomic bomb - that a civilian he talked to long after the war held soldiers' lives cheap, relative to those of civilians, since soldiers (by virtue of being soldiers) were 'meant' to fight by virtue of their jobs (ignoring that many of those fighting in ww2 were there due to conscription). As a result that civilian would have preferred to avoid dropping either atomic bomb, even if the end result was that the conventional war continued for another year or two, and (the key point here) even if doing so would in the end have cost far more in terms of lives (albeit, as the civilian saw it, soldiers' lives) than dropping the atomic bombs.
There are books to be written (and no doubt have been) on the relative moral and practical merits of dropping or not dropping an atomic bomb, but to the wider point, I'd suggest that viewing soldiers as a secondary, inferior class of being, who are consequentially more disposable than 'regular civilians' is at the very least problematic. Anything that reinforces the idea of soldiers as people must lead, at least incrementally, to a more humane outlook than one which does not - so I can absolutely see merit (and indeed benefit) in assigning names to individual models.
By contrast, I find people's revelry in the videos (and associated statistics) of destroyed units commonly found on news sites at the moment from the Ukraine war pretty disturbing, since ultimately, whichever side the individual soldiers are fighting for (and the relative merits of the two sides & motivations in fighting the war), those cheering on each tank or aircraft destroyed are essentially revelling in the death of the individuals piloting them who, by and large, had little choice as to the war they are fighting. The problem here is that people are forgetting the individuals, seeing only the destroyed armour and what it means in the context of the wider war - rather than what it means for thst individual and his family.
) that don’t glorify sex and violence, same for a lot of TV/Streaming, kids toys and media in general.
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