Tag Archives: History

Books, design, WW2

The Stress of Battle – Part 3 – Op Research on Terrain Effects

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504th Regiment, 82nd Airborne troops advancing...
504th Regiment, 82nd Airborne troops advancing through snow-covered forest during the Battle of the Bulge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is the third part of my extended review of The Stress of Battle by David Rowland. It is such a strong piece of operational research that I thought that it would be useful for wargame designers (and players) to understand what the research evidence is for what went on in WW2 battles.

Fighting in Woods

The data comes from an analysis of 120 battles that took place in woods or forests from the US Civil War to the Korean War. It also applied all the things from the previous research and tried to see how woods differed from combat in other types of terrain.

Woods Open Urban
Attacker casualties per defence MG (at 1:1 force ratio)

0.818

2.07

0.76
Force Ratio Power Relationship

0.418

0.685

0.50
  • Defence is less effective in woods, most likely because limited fields of view mean that the engagement ranges are shorter
  • Combat degradation is greater in woods during night battles
  • Artillery suppression is less effective in woods (presumably because the trees absorb some of the shell splinters)
  • Attack casualties reduce with attacker experience (after ten battles attacker casualties are half of that of inexperienced troops)

Continued in Part 4 – Operational Research on Anti-Tank Combat

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Books, design, WW2

Stress of Battle – Part 2 – Op Research on Urban Battles

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Belgian soldiers during an exercise
Belgian soldiers during an exercise (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is the second part of my review of The stress of battle: quantifying human performance in combat by David Rowland, which is an essential piece of Operational Research on WW2 and Cold War combat operations.

For this part I thought that I would focus on the lessons on urban battles. Rowland and his team used historical analysis on lots of WW2 urban battles and then compared this to a series of field trials using laser attachments to small arms and tank main armaments in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  The approach was to find battles where single variables could be controlled, and then use them to work out what the effect of that variable was on outcomes.

Here’s an interesting table on how attacker casualties vary by odds and the density of defending machine guns. Interestingly, in successful assaults the defender casualties are constant.

Force Ratio Attack Force(100 man Inf Company in Defence) Attack Casualties        (killed and wounded) Defence Casualties (Killed, POW & Wounded)
1 MG / Section 2 MG / Section

1:1

 Infantry Only

16

24

80

3:1

 Infantry Only

27

40

80

1:1

 Heavy Tank Support (no def AT)

3

12

80

3:1

 Heavy Tank Support (no def AT)

5

20

80

1:1

 Trained attack – infantry only

8

12

80

1:1

 Trained attack – Heavy AFV support

2

6

80

The interesting thing for me is that training/experience counts for a lot, halving casualties. Also attacking with the conventional 3:1 odds for success increases the casualties that you suffer, without having any appreciable difference in those inflicted on the enemy (although it does make it more likely for succesful attacks with untrained/inexperienced troops).

English: Cilieni This is a fake village that i...
English: Cilieni This is a fake village that is used for training for fighting in a built up area (FIBUA). The village has been named after the adjacent river, and all the street names are in Welsh, although it is most representative of an East European village. This area is not often open to the public. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Adding armour support makes a huge difference too. Although tanks in urban areas are more vulnerable if they lose their infantry support. However with infantry they significantly reduce attacker casualties.

  • Defence experience gave no detectable benefit to causing casualties, but attack experience does (in urban combat)
  • typically three times as many defenders will surrender (some wounded) as are killed or withdraw, the only sensitivity on this is being completely surrounded (so 20% dead, 60% captured (incl wounded) and 20% withdraw);
  • attack casualties are less affected by force ratio in urban attacks than in open counrtyside;
  • successful defence of urban areas is best achieved by light defence with counter attacks supported by armour

Rubble & Prepared Defences

This another area covered. There is a general increase in attacker casualties by about 50% when defenders are in rubble or prepared defences. The primary effect of rubble though is to slow down rates of advance.

  • Rubble halved the rate of advance compared to undamaged urban areas
  • maximum unopposed advance rates were about 800 metres per hour in urban areas (400m/hr for rubble)
  • Opposition slowed the advance by a factor of 7

An interesting aside on this was the relative effectiveness of different types of German Infantry. Parachute troops and Panzergrenadiers were reckoned to be tougher opponents than normal infantry. However the analysis showed that the extra stubbornness was a factor of the higher than normal allocation of MGs to those troops. The rate of attacker casualties per defence MG wasn’t significantly different.

Continued in Part 3 – Operational Research on Terrain Effects

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Books, History, WW2

Book Review – In the Face of the Enemy by Ernest Powdrill

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In the Face of the Enemy: A Battery Sergeant Major in Action in the Second World WarIn the Face of the Enemy: A Battery Sergeant Major in Action in the Second World War by Ernest A. Powdrill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I borrowed this from the library and liked it so much that I bought my own copy. I found it very interesting because it is unusual for an other rank to write a memoir. Especially one where the author was a battery sergeant major who also had access to the battery clerk’s notes. So, much of the 1944-45 campaign is very well documented with grid references for gun positions, ammo expenditure and times of moves. It is a fantastic reference book for WW2 operations of a Royal Horse Artillery battery in self propelled guns.

There is also some of the human element to it as well. I was especially moved by the mystery of Gunner E T Jones who disappeared in the middle of a battle between the authors casualty evacuation runs. Gunner Jones was never found and is commemorated on the memorial for the missing at Bayeux.

View all my reviews

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Books, History, WW2

For Fuhrer and Fatherland: SS Murder and Mayhem in Wartime Britain

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This was the first time I have read a prisoner of war story involving Germans as the POWs, apart from having read the official history of British Intelligence in WW2 (which only dealt with the captured German spies). I have, however read lots about the prisoners of the Germans.

It was interesting that security in British camps seems to have been quite lax. Despite many apparently successful German breakouts there is only one well known instance of a German POW making a home run. This book comes across as having been well researched where it comes to its primary subject matter, although there is quite a lot of preamble with a summary of how WW2 went which is not as well researched as the main subject. This lets it down for those well versed in WW2 history.

Once the preamble is done there is a specific history of the camp in Devizes that is obviously the author’s initial exposure to the story that he decided to write about. There is a lot of original research included where the author has spoken to locals about the camp before researching it in the national archives. The story follows the efforts of the British authorities to keep control in the last year of the war when prisoner numbers increased dramatically.

The German POWs were graded according to their sympathies to the Nazis, the believers being black, the anti-Nazis being white and the majority Grey. The camps were initially mixed, and the Nazis outnumbered the anti-nazis. This meant that the camps were run by the Nazis and had a hostile tone for those Germans that had worked out how the war was going to end.

After a riot in Devizes a number of the POWs were transferred to a camp in Scotland. When they got there some of the hardliners decided that some of their fellow POWs weren’t ardent enough Nazis. This came to a head with the lynching of a German prisoner who was accused of collaboration with the British.

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Books, History, WW2

Allies at Dieppe – 4 Commando and the US Rangers by Will Fowler

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This is an excellent history of a small unit action set in the wider context of the war, and well explained for those not steeped in military history or the second world war.

Lord Lovat, Newhaven, 1942 IWM caption : THE DIEPPE RAID, 19 AUGUST 1942 Lt Col The Lord Lovat, CO of No. 4 Commando, at Newhaven after returning from the raid. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The author starts with setting the background, explaining the grand sweep of the war and the events that lead to the formation of the commandos in mid-1940 and then a high-level overview of the commando training and the early operations so that you understand what commandos are all about, and the strategic context that lead to the assault on Dieppe in late summer 1942.

The build up to the attack is well covered, based heavily on the account by the embedded journalist that accompanied 4 Commando. After that the assault narrative splits into two, one for each of the groups that landed, and based on a mixture of accounts and interviews with various survivors of the operation.

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Books, design, History, WW2

Book Review – To Reason Why, by Denis Forman

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This is more than just an infantry officer’s memoir. Denis Forman was closely involved in the Battle School movement that transformed the British Army’s infantry training during the second world war. He then went on to serve alongside Lionel Wigram (the primary proponent and intellectual leader of the Battle School movement) in Italy. The story is as much about Lionel Wigram as it is about Denis Forman himself.

However one of the stand out pieces for me is the honest treatment of how men deal with battle. The psychological impact and how unreliable things become is often not mentioned in most memoirs, there is an unspoken need not to embarrass anyone, or bring up things better left to lie. This book manages to discuss it without shaming anyone.

Also, the appendices have copies of the reports into the lessons from the Sicily campaign drawn by Lionel Wigram. Not published at the time because they were too controversial they tell an interesting story of how the theory met reality.

More on Denis Forman’s war experiences are available on the web at http://www.war-experience.org/collections/land/alliedbrit/forman/default.asp

Just before the war started Denis Forman graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1939. He was certain that there was going to be a war but didn’t want to commit himself to the Army until it started, so he took a short-term post with a shipping agency to avoid being sent to the Far East to make his fortune (which is where he was being directed by his elders). When war broke out he was in the Netherlands, and he returned to join the Argylls where he was promptly sent off to be an officer cadet.

His description of joining an infantry battalion and his efforts as a subaltern within it are priceless. He honestly shows how desperate the British Army was in the Summer of 1940 and how it was manning (and ‘leading’) its infantry battalions. More than enough to make you wonder about what would have happened if the Germans had invaded (although I like to believe that they probably had some very similar issues).

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Books, History, Scottish, WW2

Black Watch by Tom Renouf – Book Review

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This is a campaign history written by a veteran of 5th Bn Black Watch who later became the secretary of the Highland Division Association. Direct personal accounts, both from the author and other veterans, are used to tell the story of the 51st Highland Division in a very personal way. This book offers some new perspectives on the battles of the 51st, especially those in the final months of the war in which the author was personally involved.

Continue reading Black Watch by Tom Renouf – Book Review →

Books, design, History, WW2

Defeat Into Victory

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IWM caption : THE BRITISH ARMY IN BURMA 1945. ...
Image via Wikipedia

A friend sent me a copy of Field Marshal Bill Slim‘s Defeat Into Victory. It has always been on my list of books I’d like to read, but somehow I’d never quite got round to acquiring a copy. The version I have is a reading copy of the original edition, with fold out maps all through it.

The reading style is very engaging and easy to read, especially if you have the space to fold out the map at the end of the chapter so that you can follow all the places when they appear in the narrative. It was the first time I’d read about the ebb and flow of the war in Burma (even though my grandfather drove a DUKW out there). So I found it very interesting, the nature of warfare was hugely different that both Europe and North Africa (and I suspect even the Pacific Islands). In some respects the war fought in Burma was more like recent modern wars with low troop densities, long logistics tails and a massive reliance on air power.

The other engaging bit about the book was that Slim shows you the development of the army from a road bound Western linear fighting force into an all arms, all round defence, jungle fighting machine. In the beginning the British Army is out of its depth and way beyond the ken of its commanders or troops. The Japanese have infiltration tactics that the British just can’t cope with, and are so stubborn in defence that they cannot be shifted when they gain a hold. The British just dissolve and retreat rapidly out of the way (mostly).

It isn’t just a story of the British Army, as well as colonial forces (Indians and Africans mostly) there is also the alliance warfare aspect of the war. He liaises with Vinegar Joe Stillwell and the Chinese Army too.

Later, the British manage to shorten their lines of communication, build defences and work out how to deal with the Japanese. Once they do, then the tables turn, although it takes much stubborn fighting to shift the enemy. There is a good narrative that explains the constraints the 14th Army was operating under, the logistics challenges and how these were overcome and also the details of the operations. Occasionally there are little personal vignettes of visits to the front, or reports of battles.

One of the things I noted was the commentary on how few prisoners were taken, mostly it was a grim fight to the death by both sides. A typical note on a Japanese attack was that there was one prisoner taken and 600 Japanese bodies recovered from the 14th Army positions.

However, great as all this is, the last section of the book is the best. In the last chapter Slim gives his opinions on why things turned out the way that they did and also on what he draws as lessons for the future. Given that this was written in 1957 he has a lot to say that I think was quite prescient about current operations (and it might also have been right for the post-nuclear exchange as well, but thankfully we’ve avoided that).

The thing I do wonder, is why are all our operational games about the European war? The furthest East we manage is the Russian front, when there is whole load of interesting stuff going on out in the Far East. I suspect I may well return to this when I have some time to sort out another game design.

 

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alternative, Ancient, CLWG, design, games, History

What you missed at CLWG in September 2011

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Three interesting games and a load of cake! We started with Peter Merritt’s 1814 political game which looked at how Napoleon’s Marshals dealt with the oncoming defeat of France and the transfer of power. Following that Andrew Hadley brought out his game about the Athenian invasion of Sicily. We then finished with Rob Cooper’s game about the seizure of the Mecca Grand Mosque in 1979, complete with head-dress.

1814 and all that

Peter put on this game to try out some ideas about how you could run a game about the decline of the French First Empire. The players were mostly Napoleon’s Marshals (although Jim Wallman was Napoleon). There was an interesting mechanic of collecting cards to show which of the likely candidates for ruler of France you could evidence support for (five in total, including Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Bernadotte, Napoleon’s son and A.N.Other-Bourbon). The decisions per turn were relatively simple, and the operational game was quite abstract, so no real need to pay attention to it as a Marshal.

We had a good post-game discussion for this, helped by Jim’s notes which he’d made as Napoleon was under-worked. I’m not familiar with the actual politics of the period, so will confine comments to some of the mechanical aspects rather than the rest of it. There could be an interesting game to be had with the Marshals deciding to attribute their actions to either military or political activities (with enough actions per turn to be able to do a little of both when required). Without a played Napoleon the Marshals have to work collaboratively initially to keep France in the war long enough for them to build some support for a likely new ruler. They also need to try and choose (as a small faction) how to prosecute the war in a way that will bring their chosen favourite to the top of the list for the allies.

One of the ways to modify the current game to support this would be to explicitly get the Marshals to club together in the Paris crisis phase to work collaboratively to deal with the crises, perhaps using a hidden card in the pool way to resolve it, like the Battlestar Galactica board game. For those that haven’t been lucky enough to play BSG each crisis has a value and a suit (colours in BSG) that are needed to resolve it. Cards that don’t help add to the difficulty of resolution (allowing players to secretly sabotage things). This would allow them to either club together to resolve things while they want to prolong the game, or to swiftly end things when the time has come for Napoleon’s end.

Added to this there could be some stacked decks with support for each of the candidates, allowing players to take cards to suit their chosen candidates. It would also support attempts to get rid of support for other cards and having a broad range of cards for dealing with crises but at the players choice rather than being dealt completely randomly.

On the operational side, I broadly agreed that the map could be further simplified from a point to point system to a track for each of the main armies, although possibly with some cross over points to allow forces to be shuffled from track to track. The mechanisms could be relatively simple, some sort of stacking limit for the allies, units move one spot at a time (or even the die roll mechanism allowing 0,1,2 spaces according to weather, command allocation etc). Any track with Napoleon in it would remain static (assuming Napoleon is supported by troops and the odds aren’t too great against the French) but with the cost to the Marshals that Napoleon in the field makes it harder to keep control of Paris. Some simple battle rules to show whether or not contested advances happen would also be useful, and then one or two French Marshals could probably handle the whole thing on their own (although others may be required to allow sufficient military actions to happen).

Lastly the end game piece probably needs some thinking about, and perhaps a way to be influenced by the players.

Athenian Invasion of Sicily

I didn’t quite catch the proper name of this game. Andrew Hadley continued his series of ancient Mediterranean themes games with this one about the Athenians invading Sicily around 415 BC during the Peloponnesian war in the late 5th Century BC (431-404 BC). We were randomly dealt some key characters from the Athenian assembly and given a few pages of background telling us what happened, key arguments for and against the invasion and some intelligence of the cities on Sicily and nearby (allegiance, attitude to Syracuse, military forces etc). We then engaged in a debate to agree a plan, commit force levels and appoint command.

Once we’d sorted that out we began a campaign, although time pressure (and having a third game to play) meant that we had to wrap up relatively early into the execution of the plan. There were some interesting aspects to this, but in a lightly implemented way. There were pre-printed cards with a variety of words (one per card, e.g. Treachery) which could be used to get a +1 to a relevant die roll. Only one of these could be used per turn unless the action was planned, committing you to it regardless of other events. There were also some personal bonuses, e.g. +2 military for generals. Each situation was assigned a difficulty score by Andy to be beaten on a d12 plus any bonuses. For our small game this didn’t present any problems, but in a larger game there would need to be more guidance on probabilities and scores etc to ensure consistency and players being able to resolve some of it themselves.

Certainly this was a fairly workable and enjoyable game that needs a longer time slot to do it justice.

Seizure of the Grand Mosque (1979)

Our third and last game was a kriegspieled scenario run by Rob Cooper about the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 (on the first day of AH 1400) by some Islamic dissidents claiming to be the followers of the Mahdi.

In the scenario we were all playing either members of the Saudi royal family (and by extension the Government) or, in Jim Wallman’s case, the senior cleric on the Ulema and spiritual adviser to the King. Daniel was King Fahd, Richard Hands as the Crown Prince, Peter Merritt as the second in line, Dave Boundy as the Minister of the Interior, Andrew Hadley in command of the Saudi Arabia National Guard (SANG) and myself as the Defence Minister. Giles also arrived about now, but decided to observe rather than participate.   To add flavour and get us all into the appropriate spirit for our characters Rob had brought along some headgear, you can see the pictures that Daniel took on facebook. We also had to stop every now and then for prayers, underlining our devotion.

There is a good account of the historical events on wikipedia, and I’m not going to repeat that. However the scenario opens with a group of Islamic dissidents (variously numbered from 30-40 up to about 500) seizing control of the Grand Mosque during prayers, locking the gates and shooting some policemen. At the time there were somewhere in the region of 50,000 pilgrims inside the complex, which is vast, several hundred metres across in each direction.

The Saudis have two initial problems, the first is that they don’t have appropriate resources close enough to respond immediately, it takes time to assemble a response force. The second problem is that violence is not allowed in the Grand Mosque, and also the Ulema (the religious council) are unsure whether or not the chap claiming to be the Mahdi is an apostate, or the real thing.

So there was a soft start to the game, during which I ordered up all my airborne special forces and also a company of tanks and some APCs just in case. Although the latter would take some days to arrive.

The first response was from the police, being locals. All they could do was herd the fleeing pilgrims away from the Grand Mosque. Any time that they went close they got shot at from the minarets. Shortly afterwards some of the local SANG turned up and tried unsuccessfully to approach the Grand Mosque. About six hours in a company of my Airborne turned up and set up Observation Posts all round the Grand Mosque to see where the terrorists were positioned. We also tried to get some helicopter recce done, but the terrorists used a .50 cal on the helos, so they quite reasonably gave that up as a bad job.

A family conference call took place while all this was getting under way. There was a unanimous agreement to censor all media and cut off all communications with Mecca other than official government lines. We also refused to even acknowledge to the outside world that there were any problems.

Also after some deliberations the Ulema decided that we could use force to eject the terrorists from the Grand Mosque, although we had to be careful not to damage the Grand Mosque and also to avoid harming any of the pilgrims inside. Certainly attacking the minarets to take out the snipers was off the table.

By the following day we had a few hundred police, a similar number of SANG and just over a Battalion of Airborne forces. So I decided to make an attempt on the long gallery which was a panhandle to the main part of the Grand Mosque complex. This meant that there was some cover from fire on the approach to it from the street on the outside as it was in dead ground from the minarets. Waiting until dark we brought each of the minarets under small arms fire while two companies of Airborne forces made their way into the Grand Mosque. Initially things went well, an entry was effected using explosives and both companies passed inside, when radio comms were lost because of the thickness of the walls. Follow on SANG and police were then met by the survivors of an ambush retreating back out of the complex. Apparently the supposed ‘Mahdi’ had ambushed them, he had been seen to be immune to small arms fire, escaping being hit under intense fire, and also had been picking up grenades and throwing them back.

By now we were coming under pressure to get the Grand Mosque cleared in time for Friday prayers (it was Wednesday night that the first assault went in). The Ulema decided, after much more deliberation, that while the Grand Mosque was inviolate, this only really applied to the original area and not the entire complex. So the only area we couldn’t use violence in was the central courtyard.

Early on Thursday morning another Airborne Battalion arrived, as did two companies of APC mounted infantry. The tanks were en route on transporters and were due for early afternoon on the Thursday. SANG and the Police also had their commandos in Mecca as well. The gloves were off, which the family council reluctantly agreed. My Airborne support companies used TOW missiles on the minarets and each of the three doors. Not waiting for the tanks to be ready, we put APCs through each of the main gates and followed through into the complex en masse. This co-ordinated response seemed to work and we rapidly gained control of the complex, although it was clear after an hour or two that we didn’t have the number of prisoners (or bodies) that we had expected, and that some of the notable personages were missing.

It transpired that they were in the undercroft, which fortunately was on a suitably massive scale that we could use the APCs to break through the barricades to get into. At this stage time stood against us and Rob hand-waved the second stage of the game to get us to a wash-up where he told us how we’d done compared to real life. Surprisingly to us it turned out that my ‘gloves off’ approach had been far more restrained than had happened historically!

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Books, Iraq Wars

Condor Blues – British soldiers at war

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A very interesting book about the British Army experience from the point of view of two platoons embedded in training the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC) in the aftermath of the invasion (so the first half of 2004 approximately). Both platoons belonged to the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, but one was on secondment from the PWRR.

From the content of the book it is clear that it was not authorised by MOD as it is highly critical in places. Also none of the main players come out of it looking terribly good, you see their flaws and the bad side as well as the bravery and the compassion in places (as well as other emotions at other points). For example,  after a severe contact two of the Iraqi insurgent casualties were found to be carrying ICDC identity cards – which spelt the end of the Argylls trying to teach them military skills.

It is a warts and all portrayal, which makes it all the more convincing. Life in the camp appears to be well described, and feels honest in its descriptions of what the Jocks get up to in combating the boredom they suffered from. I can’t be sure not having been there myself, but having grown up in the same area as some of the Argylls (with references to places I went to as a teenager myself) I can see some of the soldiers I met as a territorial 20 years ago in these men. The perceived authenticity of the camp life makes the stories of the contacts with insurgents more believable.

However although there are proper war stories in here, the book is as much a lament to the lost opportunity to get a peaceful settlement and a sort of disbelief that the British Army apparently abandoned its own doctrine and instead pursued a heavy metal retaliation to incidents, which drove the locals to be insurgents.

Definitely worth reading.

 

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