One of the great things about wargames is the reminder that our current era, despite the worst efforts of the Leftist-Islamofascist alliance, is a lot safer and more comfortable than most of the rest of human history. (Perhaps that’s one reason why it’s so hard to rouse Westerners to take the enemy seriously.) Here are a few notes on what I’ve been playing or looking at lately:
■ I found time over the past couple of weeks to play the Battle of the Marne game from the two-pack Clash of Giants. (The other half, with its own map and counters, is devoted to Tannenberg.) It is yet another Ted Raicer design, sporting a new and easy to comprehend system. The front stretches about 90 miles west to east, starting just west of Paris, at 3.3 miles a hex. Play runs from August 31 through September 11, 1914, at one turn per day. Units are divisions and an occasional brigade.
In the beginning, the demoralized French and British are falling back from defeat on the frontiers. The rules encourage them retreat to a line along or beyond the southernmost victory point hexes. That doesn’t look like a bad strategy, as it leaves the German line thinly stretched, vulnerable to a devastating counterattack. There is a scenario that begins at this point. According to the designer, it “strongly favors the Allies”. On the other hand, my play-through suggested that the Allies can halt while still in possession of a majority of the VP’s without much danger of being pushed back farther. I’ve read that some German players have successfully pursued the alternative victory condition, penetrating to the center of Paris. That looks dauntingly difficult. All in all, the game’s implicit lesson is that the Germans’ hope of victory on the Western Front vanished with the guns of August, well before the combatants realized what had happened. Most historians wouldn’t dispute that conclusion.
Interesting features of the game system are die rolling for movement allowances and a command system that makes the “seams” between armies visible and important (as they were in the real campaign). Each player’s armies move in random order each turn, and each army’s units have two to eight movement points, depending on the dice. A low roll isn’t necessarily a disaster, as an army can recover losses on turns on which it has an MA of two.
The combat system is innovative but not interesting enough to describe. Its effect is to make it impossible to guarantee that an enemy force, however badly outnumbered, will vacate its position. This factor strongly dampens the advantage that the Germans would otherwise gain from their first-line troops’ heavy qualitative superiority vis-à-vis the French.
In sum, a worthy addition to the growing stock of World War I games and a considerable challenge for players with confidence in German arms.
■ The new issue of Vae Victis (no. 68, May-June 2006) carries another game from the early stages of the Great War, La Fleur au Fusil, whose romantic title reflects the not-yet-disillusioned mentalité of August 1914. It deals with one day of fighting, August 22nd, on an 8½ mile sector of the Ardennes front. There the elite 3rd Colonial Division attacked toward Neufchâteau as part of a counter-offensive that was supposed to crack what General Joffre believed was a weak German center. Handicapped by inadequate scouting (cavalry had been stripped to form independent divisions), the French –
encountered the German 6th Army Corps and, in a day of desperate fighting, were defeated with losses of over 8500 officers and men. The loss of officers was frightful and included all three generals (two killed and one wounded and taken prisoner), almost all the officers of 1st Brigade and another 60 officers from 3rd Brigade. Only one officer survived from the divisional artillery. The French put 32 guns out of action; the remainder were either destroyed or captured. German losses were also serious but not as high as the French.
Like all Vae Victis games, this one requires assembly, so I haven’t tried it yet. Somebody could make a nice little business out of producing die-cut counters to sell to VV subscribers.
The issue also includes a smaller game (the second in three issues – will this become a habit?), Dernier Carré, portraying the famous 11-hour battle of 62 Foreign Legionnaires and three officers against 2,000 Mexicans at Camerone, April 30, 1863. All but six of the French died, after inflicting 300 fatalities on the enemy. This action, among the great “last stands” of history, fills the hearts of Frenchmen with martial pride. (Of course, the valiant men of the Legion weren’t actually French, though the officers, all of whom volunteered for the mission, were.) The game has only two pages of rules and looks promising.
Rounding out the game content are a set of simple-looking Foreign Legion skirmish rules (based on and requiring reference to a French and Indian War set in issue no. 64) and a new scenario for last issue’s principal game, Optimus Princeps. The subject of the original game was Trajan’s Dacian wars. This scenario is a prequel: the campaigns on the Danube under Domitian.
The major articles consist of a long piece on French military history in the 9th and 10th Centuries (“L’émergence de la France féodale”) and a shorter one furnishing background for “La Fleur au Fusil”. Featured reviews discuss Twilight Struggle, Silent War, Russia Besieged and Command & Colors: Ancients, plus a couple of computer games. Added to these are the usual batches of capsule game, miniatures rules and book reviews.
Because it’s in French, Vae Victis won’t show up in your local shop. I get my copies from Boulder Games or Le Valet d’Coeur.
■ Just to make this a unanimously WWI post, let me mention Command & Strategy #5, the house organ of Udo Grebe Gamedesign (a German company that publishes primarily in English), which includes a small card game, “Wings Over Arras”, on air combat above the trenches. The rest of the contents are a themeless pudding, with many pages occupied by another installment of what will eventually be a large “assemble in yourself” Pacific War game. (As a bonus, a revised rulebook for the company’s Empires of Apocalypse WWII game series comes with the issue.)
The most interesting item, to my way of thinking, is an article by Stefan Spett on a bit of history that I didn’t realize existed: Danish opposition to the German invasion of April 9, 1940. I’d thought that Denmark surrendered without resistance. In fact, its troops fought back in the southern part of the country from dawn until word arrived of the surrender signed at 8:00 a.m.
Ready to oppose the Germans was the Jylland Division, defending the Esbjerg-Kolding line 75km north of the border. This line was in no way fortified; no roadblocks had been prepared and no bridges rigged for destruction. South of the division’s main line, 2,500 men were deployed as a screen, some in bicycle and pioneer units, but most of them in motorcycle antitank platoons. These platoons rode big Nimbus motorcycles with sidecars. Every platoon had two Madsen machine guns with tripods and two Madsen 20mm automatic antitank guns M/1938. The latter could even be fired from the sidecar, but it was not a recommended procedure.
Unfortunately, these guns, though effective against armored cars, could not penetrate the thin frontal armor of a Panzer II tank. In one action, a tank took over 40 hits before running over the defending gun.
As one would expect, most of these skirmishes ended with the Germans either outflanking or driving through the Danish positions, but resistance was occasionally stout. At Bredvald near the center of the peninsula –
three armored cars charged the position, and the Danish Madsen jammed after just one shot. The jam was cleared very fast, and the first two armored cars were stopped before the gun jammed again. The third car did not spot the cannon. The crew managed to clear the jam and hit the car at 10 meters range. It rammed a house next to the gun, and its crew was taken prisoner by the bicyclists.
But the Danish triumph was brief. The gunner of one of the disabled cars started firing. As other German machine guns, mortars and even aircraft joined in, the Danes were forced to abandon their gun and crawl away. All four men in the gun crew were eventually wounded. Soon more armored cars were advancing, forcing the Danes to surrender. Oddly enough, they were released in the afternoon and cycled back to their barracks.
The final action before the cease fire took hold was at Haderslev on the east coast, where the garrison was –
strong compared to the other Danish units the Germans had run into during the morning. Four 75mm guns were ready, as were four 37mm Bofors antitank guns. These were able to wreck any German tank, but only one of them was deployed on the firstline. . . .
As the Luftwaffe dropped leaflets over Haderslev, the roadblocks were swarmed by civilians, either curious or demanding to be let through. The country was perhaps at war, but, as the border was 50 kilometers away, it was not supposed to be messing up traffic on the streets of Haderslev. To prove the populace wrong, the Germans arrived.
At the bridge, the road had been blocked with railway cars. Two Madsens and four machine guns were deployed in and around a mill next to the bridge, while the unit’s Bofors was deployed in the middle of the street, just in front of a white wall about 100 meters down the road. The gun team of five men commanded by cornet student Vesterby was surrounded by schoolchildren up until the moment before the leading German tank showed up.
Someone shouted that the Germans were coming and the Danes had all better surrender. The first tank, said to be a Panzer I, exchanged fire with the Bofors. Vesterby was mortally wounded, but the tank went silent. The Bofors crew managed to knock out another tank and disable a third before the entire crew was dead or wounded. A fourth tank ran over it just to make sure. Private Berthelsen was wounded five times trying to operate the gun.
The troops in the mill had engaged some armored cars and forced one of them to retreat. A Madsen gunner was soon shot in the arm. While leaving his post, he was shot again, in the head, and killed. A machine gun also took heavy fire, but the crew escaped unhurt. During this combat the cease fire was announced, and the Danes retreated.
The Germans, supposedly furious over losing comrades just seconds before a cease fire to an army they had been told not to shoot at [Hitler hoped for a bloodless conquest and ordered his troops to fire only if fired upon], continued firing, wounding a corporal at the mill. Then, ignoring an officer trying to negotiate, the Germans moved on to Haderslev’s barracks. They met some resistance on the way. A Danish motorcyclist was killed in one exchange, and a Danish corporal opened fire on two armored cars that shot back with everything they had. Despite this, the corporal escaped.
When they got to the barracks, the Germans briefly fired at it with machine guns and an antitank gun. A Danish air observer was killed, as were two construction workers who wanted to have a look at the fighting.
This was the last firefight of the four hour war.
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