Innholdsfortegnelse for WSS 120 i Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy

“Attack is fire and movement, and the armoured fighting vehicle unites these two elements in one fighting device!” – Ludwig Alfred von Eimannsberger The concept of Bewegungskrieg (manoeuvre warfare) wasn’t new in 1940; it had been practised for many, many centuries. The domestication of the horse allowed mounted armies to travel at speed and catch their enemy unawares. Over two-and-a-half thousand years ago, Sun Tzu famously wrote, “Speed is the essence of war.” A mobile army can cause great damage in the enemy’s rear. The Mongols were undoubtedly masters of the arts of deception and of movement, often catching their enemies unawares or striking at their most vulnerable spots. Emperor Napoleon was also a master of manoeuvre, using cavalry and fast-moving infantry to catch his opponents off-guard. With steam power,…

Antiochus sent an expeditionary force into northern Greece hoping to win local Greek support and overthrow the Roman rule there. The reaction from the Greeks was disappointing at best. The recently defeated Philip of Macedon threw in his lot with the Romans, and only the Aetolians seem to have been forthcoming in any numbers. The arrival of a force of 20,000 Romans to intercept the Seleucids threw Antiochus into retreat. Seeking a suitable location to hold off the superior Roman numbers, his forces fell back on the famous pass of Thermopylae. This had of course played a much more famous role in attempting to halt the Persian invasions several centuries earlier. The pass at Thermopylae had sea on one side, with marshy ground and even quicksand nearer the water, and…

There is a great challenge in warfare: generals need to plan for the next war, not for the last war. France and the Allies had won the Great War with static defences to prevent the enemy taking ground and by a war of attrition, which eventually led to a breakout and the defeat of Germany. Germany’s position was quite different: having lost the Great War, it was clear that new tactics and innovations would be needed to win the next war if and when it came. There was a general consensus amongst military planners that some form of innovation would be needed to break the stalemate of the trenches and to go over and through the enemy’s defences. Mechanization was clearly the way forward, as tanks had proved in the…

This scenario is penned primarily for Chain of Command but can be played with minimal adaptation using other rule sets (notes are included below). It pits Belgians against Germans, although it is again easily adapted for other nations. The Belgian platoon has been chosen purposely for this scenario. Belgian platoons are big units, perfectly organized for defence and backed up by a strong support option in their integral grenade launcher team to knock chunks off an enemy forming up for the attack. Against them stands the adaptable and aggressive German infantryman of 1940. BELGIAN BRIEFING The German army is pushing forward in overwhelming strength, advancing strongly against defensive positions that have been either systematically beaten back or outflanked. Vital bridges have been captured and rumours abound that the fort of…

Things have changed for the better since I started wargaming in the 1970s. Information on your chosen armies was hard to come by. We were not just gamers but model soldier collectors and modellers, rules writers, and very amateur military historians. Getting the information you needed was part of the game. Knowing our military history was important; if we didn’t know what happened when and how, how could we take any period to the wargames table? We had to think for ourselves. Of course, in our ignorance, we often got it wrong, but we tried, we learned, and we enjoyed it all. Thankfully now we can do most research without getting out of our chairs, Googling away to our hearts’ content. Military history books are being published at some speed…

“Everything Worked Like Clockwork...” The Mechanization of British Regular and Household Cavalry 1918-1942 By Roger Salmon ISBN: 978-1915070968 (Helion & Company Ltd, 2016) – £25.00 It was gratifying, upon opening this book, to be greeted by a preface from the editor of the whole series of which it is a part: a tip of the hat to Helion for including this, for it does a grand job of contextualizing the work within that series – one that I felt was needed. Salmon’s book is unashamedly a piece of academic work, and whilst it’s entirely accessible to the lay reader and could comfortably grace any wargamer’s bookshelf, its structure and style are inextricably collegiate, to the point whereby footnotes frequently take up a third of the page. That said, Salmon has…

Published in 1548 by Edward Hall, this volume details a history of England from Henry IV to Henry VIII. Though it has a healthy serving of English bias, some of the narratives are excellent and really come alive to the reader. From here we can then research some of the key characters, some of whom we will end up painting in miniature. Certain professional soldiers and commanders feature regularly; the detail shown often gives an insight into the nature of their character and the breadth of their career. From there, you can really end up in the rabbit hole of looking at the landscape, seeing what still survives and finding out more detail of the particular campaign. Hall has taken us to some lesser-known engagements and theatres of war in…

In this article we have chosen a wide selection of manufacturers. The focus has been on the French and British forces for 1940. We have not covered the minor powers, such as Belgium, Denmark, or the Netherlands, but we will probably return to them in a future issue. As always, the limits of time and magazine space prohibit us from covering every single manufacturer. We classify ranges as follows: Basic (basic infantry); Standard (has the essentials: infantry, support, and command); Comprehensive (as Standard, but with heavy support); and Complete (you’d have to think hard to come up with units they don’t have). Blitzkrieg 1/56 and 1/48 Range: Standard (tanks and vehicles) Size: Vehicles available in 1/56 and 1/48 Price: £18.33 per tank Blitzkrieg makes a selection of early war tanks…

The four pieces of terrain were again built up on 3 mm thick plastic card bases that have been trimmed into rough lozenge shapes with the edges sanded smooth. I superglued wooden lollipop sticks onto the bases (which adds strength and stops warping of the plastic card) and started the building process as detailed in the earlier articles using more plastic card, insulation foam, and scrap wood (used fruit crates picked up for free). I now have more than enough pieces of linear terrain features to use in my skirmish-based games. In addition, I prefer short sections of walls, hedges, and fences, as I can use them in so many different ways. WOODEN FENCE & STONE WALL The fence was built with the same techniques seen in the wooden stile…

Echelon’s Black Powder Red Earth is described as taking place in a near-future post-apocalyptic setting, but I would describe it as very-near future. In fact, it could be an alternate history – and THAT is where I feel this ruleset differs from its peers. The setting is that of a middle-eastern country called Awbari, a country plunged into civil war by corruption and the infighting of its own leadership. Crisis Team Scorch find themselves pitted against the Aayari network and their military advisors. In-game, military intervention has become largely the domain of the private military contractor. There are a few different factions in the game and we are provided with cards and figures for each. The Shurta are not designed for subtlety; they are designed to work as mass-formation cannon…

In my time I have found myself doing everything from building huge armies and large fleets to small skirmish forces, or even just a few cowboys for a gunfight game, or two or three Sop-with Camels for dogfighting over the trenches. What has been consistent across all these projects has been the fact that whatever force I plan to get, the project always grows like Topsy and ends up costing more, taking more time, and involving far more effort than I had ever initially envisaged. But so what? Were I responsible for building a highspeed rail network or running a department in a big business, I’d have budgets that I would be responsible for and time restrictions to meet. The great joy of our hobby is that no such limitations…

So on that note, the initial request was pretty broad, basically for a French tank. Immediately, I jumped to my reference photos folder to resurrect the garishly painted French schemes as portrayed on the H35 at Musee des Blindes Saumur. Unfortunately, after a little research, I found that the vehicle is currently unavailable and the nearest variant, the Hotchkiss H39, would have been extremely unlikely to have worn those colours in early 1940. I stumbled upon a few pictures of an abandoned H39 in a field; it grabbed my imagination, so I thought I would work from there. A single small tank is not much of a challenge, so I decided to add something slightly contrasting in the shape of a Panzerbefehlswagen III with extended telescopic mast. The command panzer…

Soldiers of Napoleon By Warwick Kinrade (Atorious Games, 2022) £30 for book and cards D6, card activation It is with great expectation that I commence a review of this recent entry into the Napoleonic wargame rules vast stable. Having been involved in this period for a good part of 25 years now, I have always been on the lookout for a ruleset that can deliver a divisional-sized game that is fun to play, will be engaging for all players, and can provide a result in 3-4 hours. Having tried several different rulesets over the years, nothing has quite hit the mark; as a result, I have ended up selling two large collections and moving on to other wargaming periods. My previous Napoleonic collections were all-consuming, as once you are bitten…