Kings of War is a blog written by faculty and research students at King’s College War Studies department. A very interesting blog with lots of articles on a variety of different aspects of warfare, both modern and historical. I came across it when looking for things to help develop my insurgency game. I am enjoying reading it.
What you missed at Sunday’s CLWGÂ June 2010 meeting (unless you were one of those present) were some good conversations and two games:
Seeing as it was 6th June we couldn’t have a meeting and not have a session about the Normandy Landings.
I started as a company commander, but managed to get killed as I got off the landing craft. I then moved to being the senior platoon commander as the Company 2ic took over command. I then became the Coy 2ic as well as being a Pl Comd. We took about 40% casualties on the beach but managed to get mortars producing smoke to screen the closest bunkers from effective MG fire. The assault pioneers then blew a hole in the wire and I personally assualted a bunker because I couldn’t make any of the troops come with me. This proved decisive and we were then able to move more freely and outflank the central bunker and deal with it.
At the planning session we had a discussion about the plan to use, we were constrained to the historical planning directive issued by Hitler, but not to the historical operational plan. After a debate we decided not to follow the historical plan as that would allow the Allied player the option to use hindsight against us. Instead we developed a different plan with some different groupings of forces, and also changed the positions of the Army Groups and Armies concerned.
In outline, the main thrust is against the Belgians and it is intended to push onto the Belgian coast west of Antwerp and then sweep down the channel coast to the west (destination Dieppe). The thinking is that the Allies will not allow the British to secure their flank on the sea in fear that they evacuate. This ought to leave the Belgians on the flank and we believe that they are easier to defeat. If they are pushed back then this is likely to cause the British to retreat in fear of their lines of communication and in turn the French also.
Across the remainder of the line there will be a steady pressure so that if the enemy retire we will be able to close up and take any ground that they cede. In the North there will also be a determined assault on the western Netherlands to secure their capital and major conurbations.
All the available mobile forces have been used, and we checked with Jim that we had them all (a few that existed on paper, still forming or training but which played no active part in the campaign have been omitted from the orbat).
The attached documents show the chosen groupings of forces and their tasks. There is a preponderance of mobile forces in the Pz Gp (9 Divisions, 6 Pz 3 Mot Inf) with another mobile corps (1 Pz & 1 Mot Inf) in the flanking Army to ensure that it can also make progress. The remaining 3 Panzer Divisions have been allocated one to each army to allow them to make rapid progress along their points of main effort. In total we have 14 mobile divisions and 11 of these have been assigned to the main effort and will be working in a relatively narrow front, so penny packets is not a suitable description of their employment.
Airborne forces have also been employed to neutralise a choke point 48 hours ahead of the panzer group advance so that they can remain mobile.
The key to the plan is keeping the panzers mobile. I am sure that people can appreciate the importance of this.
PS – have now re-posted this to the brand new Megagamer Forum that I set up for megagamers to discuss games, both before and after.
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The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West by Karl-Heinz Frieser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As part of the planning for the megagame War in the West I bought myself a copy of Blitzkrieg Legend because it is the German Army’s official history (although it didn’t get written until the 1990s).
From reading the first couple of chapters and looking through the maps you can see the evolution of the German plan. You can see why the directive was written the way that it was in October 1939.
The most interesting thing for me is that there is no concept of a lightning war, the general staffs & high command all believe that the start of the world war was a gross mistake and spells certain doom for Germany as being too soon to be winnable. the strong belief is that the strength of the economy is what wins wars, not surprise attacks (and for my money they were right).
After the planning phase there is a fairly detailed examination of the attacks themselves. What becomes clear is how lucky the Germans were, although some of this is down to the way that the 100,000 man army has trained its troops, and this training continues into the expanded army. It is human factors rather than technology that makes the blitzkreig work. The Germans were exceedingly lucky, when they infiltrate forward and put small parties over rivers and obstacle the enemy retires rather than counter-attacks.
I would certainly recommend this book strongly to anyone who has an interest in WW2, and particularly the Fall of France in 1940.
Image via Wikipedia
Today has been an unusually inspiring day, I had two separate ideas for games both of which I reckon could be pulled off in the space of a couple of days basic research and writing briefings etc.
Tracy & I both woke up early and we got a couple of hours to do things before Alexander surfaced at the rather late (for him) 9am. In that time I unusually got to watch some TV of my own choice.
The first idea came from a programme on the freeview channel ‘Yesterday’ about the Glencoe Massacre (or more accurately the events leading up to it and the aftermath. This is the follow on to the two games I’ve done about the revolution in 1689-90 in Scotland. There was a meeting between Albany and the Highland Chiefs where two secret treaties were agreed, one for each of the Kings! It struck me that there was huge potential for one of CLWG’s traditional double dealing and money making deals in this. So much so that I went and checked my bookshelf to see if I had any books on the subject, but it was a bit thin. So I ordered the John Prebble book on the subject Glencoe: The Story of the Massacre
I was going to offer that as a session at the CLWG Christmas meeting until I got my second sleet of inspiration later on. After dinner Alexander decided that he wanted to watch a movie about dinosaurs, so we got to watching Jurassic Park III. This set the brain cells firing again, and I got to wondering what the Government reaction would most likely be to the news of the first Jurassic Park. The game idea is that I will brief one player to be the CEO of a corporation that has built the dinosaur safari park on an island offshore. The other players will be the various Government Ministers and officials. Depending on their reaction we might re-role and widen to take up other national government roles, and perhaps even military roles. Anyway no doubt I will do a little more on this as I get on with writing it up as a game.
Went to the traders fair today, mainly because there was an officer’s meeting for Fox’s. While I was there I bought a few books from Paul Meekins, a small pottery kettle and some marbles for Alexander. I also had a tour of Warwick because I was driving sans navigator and went left onto the A425 instead of the A423. Still got there in the end though.
Saw lots of people I hadn’t seen for ages including, Edmund & Emily with little Ed, Paul Meekins, Howard Giles, Charles Kightly, Mutts, and Sophia Sidney. Also saw a fair number of others that I managed to catch up with at Sherwood Forest pretty recently.
Gist of the officers meeting was simply that we need to do some more recruitment, and to assist that effort we need to sort out some flyers and then tart up the website to give people a better idea of what we do, how much fun it is and get them into the idea of joining, The primary audience for this recruitment effort are people who are interested in history but who have never tried re-enactment before. We’re looking at students, wargamers, and general history buffs.
Anyway, to get some momentum going we’ve set up a small working party to knock some ideas on design and content together. Paul Stinton (Fox’s 2ic & also Fairfax Publicity Officer), Marika and myself will try and get something sorted out over the next few weeks. Emphasis on getting it done rather than discussing it. Marika has done a fantastic website for Lord Orkney’s regiment, a 1660s group that portray what became the Royal Scots. we ought to be able to adapt the template for it to have similar material for the Fox’s website.
The other topic of discussion was about getting the bank account signatories updated. What is required is a copy of the latest minutes of the 2009 AGM so that we can confirm to the bank that our officers have changed and who we need as signatories on the bank account.
After the meeting I had a wee look around to see if I could get a small cauldron with a lid. Not being terribly certain what I wanted to buy from a historical accuracy point I didn’t actually buy anything, instead I picked up some leaflets. Best seemed to be Anvil Art although even those didn’t look quite the same as these ones I found on Somerset County Councils museums page about down hearth cooking.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/improper-propaganda-posters.php?page=1
A fantastic collection of propaganda posters that have been photoshopped to change the message. Very funny, especially the re-enactment one, and the Cthulhu poster. Worth a few minutes of browsing past in my opinion.
Rather than run a conversational design session at the November meeting I decided to try and do something that was at least vaguely playable. My reasoning was that I’d been somewhat frustrated at the conference with discussions of games that looked like they could actually have been played, and I’d felt that perhaps by playing it we could have tested whether or not the perceived problems were actually real.
Anyway, I did a sort of role-playing game about re-constructing an infantry company after the evacuation from Dunkirk. John Rutherford was the first person to arrive (after me) and so I cast him as the first officer to report to the village in Devon I’d decided to put the company in. Chosen only because the OS map of Devon/Dorset was the first to hand when I was collecting materials for the game, they might equally have ended up in Scotland! John’s character, 2/Lt Robson was a recently commissioned officer who had been sent to France within days of being commissioned and then evacuated a few weeks later.
On arrival in the village by train 2/Lt Robson discovered that he wasn’t expected, and nor was his company! He set about contacting the local policeman, the vicar, chair of the parish council and other notables in the village.
Staying overnight in the village pub he established that the company could be billeted on the Mill when it arrived. Within a day the remainder of the company arrived by train under command of the Major (Jim Wallman). Shortly afterwards Lt Hanse (Mukul) and 2/Lt Duff (Dave Boundy) reported for duty. The company was swiftly sorted out into platoons and sections, on the basis of sharing out the experienced men and the good NCOs as well as those with dodgier records.
The first few weeks were played out in organising the company, the accommodation, acquiring weapons, worrying about area of operations, responsibility for guarding bridges etc and also getting everyone to do lots of drill. Having worked all this out and got to the beginning of September I moved to monthly turns where the OC set the training priority and each month I asked for volunteers for Officer training (and later on Commandos) as well as setting some small incident for resolution, e.g. scrounging a coal lorry, or the Christmas do. If I was going to run this game properly I’d do some more research on some of these things and ensure that the players had some better background. As it was I was making it all up as I went along, including the mechanisms, so it was in areas no doubt thinner than it ought to have been, and probably quite ahistorical.
On the whole we managed to pass four and a half hours playing the game before I drew it to a halt so that we could have some discussion. For me the main point is that there is a game in all of this as there are many decisions to be made. Largely it is a building/development game in its purest sense, although what you are building/developing in this case are your soldiers. Probably the best way to improve the game would be to make a small card for each soldier which could be updatable with their stats, rank etc. That would simplify record keeping as the platoon commanders can just keep those in front of them organised into sections etc. The platoon commanders could also have a mechanism for developing people which would give them some decisions about how to improve their platoon, and also about how to interpret the OC’s training priorities.
We had some discussion at the end about leadership styles and now these should affect the development of a platoon/company. This certainly needs further thought, and I think it could be a good way to develop things, but I’m not sure exactly how it ought to impact on the game mechanisms.
If I do get further thoughts from people then I will do something on this.
One thing I am conscious of was not having a well thought out mechanism for exercises, partly this was because I didn’t think we had enough time to break into a proper wargame. My inclination would be to play this sort of game as a campaign, and play each exercise as a largely kriegspieled wargame using the figure resolution of the combat mechanisms (which I did prepare, but didn’t use and I think I’ll need to re-do in the light of the outcome of the session).
On another point, we semi-randomly picked 6th Battalion DLI to be the battalion that we were part of. A quick look at google afterwards showed that 6 DLI were a territorial battalion and went to France with 50th Northumbrian Divison in early 1940 and then were evacuated through Dunkirk, they went to North Africa in April 1941 (when we finished our game) and then fought through the rest of the North Africa campaign, Sicily & Italy. They came back to the UK at the end of 1943 and were in the assault troops on Gold Beach on 6th June 1944. Probably one of the few battalions to have been at the sharp end all the way through the war.
Here is the spreadsheet (Open Document Format) that I used to speed things up during play (although this will be printed onto cards before I next try this game). Company Roster.ods
This is a collection of first hand accounts, mainly posthumously published from three men who were ordinary soldiers in the 51st Highland Division in 1940. None of them were officers (although one was commissioned after his escape and return home). The main part of the book is a personal account originally published in Gaelic and subsequently translated into english as “A Cameron Never Can Yield”. This forms just over half the book and tells the story from the start of the German attack on 10 May 1940 through surrender at St Valery on 12th June 1940, escape on the march into Germany and then life in Marseilles in the winter of 1940-41 followed by a winter crossing of the Pyrenees and time spent in Spanish prison camps before returning to the UK. The other two stories are relatively similar, although neither of the men managed to return back to the UK and they both had different experiences in their prisoner of war camps and work details. All three of them had a horrendously rough time of it, which seems to be the norm for these early POWs (and the later ones too).
Even though I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about the 51st Highland Division and also lots of personal accounts of both combat and POW life this book was different. Each of the accounts started with a potted history of the person and what they had done before the start of the war, and then ended with what they did after demobilisation. That provided a bit of context, but the most refreshing thing about it was that it was about private soldiers and not officers, which is unusual. Most of the books are written by officers (if first-hand accounts) or by those that would have been had they not become history professors. This puts a different slant on life and makes for a whole different side to the story.
Also, unlike other stories of the 51st Highland Divsion in 1940, it didn’t end on 12th June at St Valery, in fact that was where most of the story started.
The title of Saul David‘s “Churchill’s Sacrifice of the Highland Division” is possibly erroneous, the book doesn’t come out for what happened to the 51st Highland Division in June 1940 as being a political gesture of allied solidarity on the part of Churchill.
It is certainly the fullest account of the 1940 campaign of the 51st Highland Division, expanding hugely on Eric Linklater‘s HMSO publication in 1942 (which perforce had to be limited for security reasons). The Highland Division was in the Maginot Line attached to the French Army when the German assault started on 10th May 1940 and so wasn’t with the rest of the BEF. By the time the ferocity and direction of the German plan was understood by the French & British High Commands most of the German Army was between the 51st Highland Division and the BEF; so there was no real decision to sacrifice them on the part of Churchill. Saul David makes this readily understandable in his narrative, although he does highlight some of the points where a clear directive to withdraw them could have made a difference.  However these would have to have been ordered by French Generals as the Division was part of the French IX Corps and under their command.
What is remarkable is that the Division only surrendered when surrounded and out of ammunition nearly a fortnight after the Dunkirk evacuations were complete.
