Well, Brand X tried it and for a while, numbers were pretty good.
The problem was that after a while, people began noticing how unbalanced the plane sets were. And since the gameplay was based on bombing bases to close them, the plane set imbalance led to a lot of frustration.
A bigger problem is that, as any student of WWII will tell you, the Axis had NO CHANCE OF WINNING THE WAR. If you look at any board wargame based on WWII, you will see that they get around this, using a variety of cheats.
1) They use victory points to judge who wins...so you could be the Axis and still WIN even if you lose the war if you do better than the historical Axis. This...doesn't feel right.
2) They assume that the Axis will get all the nifty secret weapons that they were working on...but for some odd reason, the Allies never get the A-bomb.
3) They end the game before the actual end of the war, i.e. usually the point in the war when the tide began turning against the Axis.
None of these cheats feels right. But they're necessary because the only time the Axis really had a chance to "win" was before the shooting actually started, i.e. they could've "won" had they just rattled their sabers and bluffed more and more concessions out of the free world. And even then, it's doubtful how long their "wins" would've lasted, especially in the case of Nazi Germany, which depended a lot on a government controlled economy in order to keep inflation under control and artificially keep the standard of living for the average German high; the whole house of cards would've eventually collapsed.
Another option is to try to design a game with "WWII flavor" but not totally like WWII (in order to address the game balance issues)...well, you end up with something like WWII Online.
Be careful what you ask for...you just might get everything you wanted and it may not be to your liking.
