Have you ever had a tactic in a wargame go completely wrong due to the dice throw? You must have done. You know the scenario of every move performed perfectly, every distance calculated and executed precisely and your best troops brought into their best killing situation, only to have a disastrous throw on the dice have them inflict no casualties at all! Then insult is added to injury as your opponent's throw is like something out of the national lottery and your unit gets shot to shreds before your very eyes. Then that's followed by another exceptionally bad morale dice which sends them scurrying back in rout, disordering the carefully assembled support attack you've constructed behind this believed-to beunstoppable spearhead! We've all been there and we've all muttered against the rules and cited historical precedent after anecdote as to why it just couldn't have happened; or could it? Last year a group of us came over to the USA to take part in a 17thC reenactment at Annapolis, near Baltimore in Maryland. Recalling that one of the roads on a particularly famous American Civil War battlefield was called the Baltimore Pike, and when our battle was all over, we piled into a hired car- cum- luxury-lorry and headed northwest for Gettysburg! None of us were what one would call avid ACW-buffs - the usual Airfix-&Wayne-inspired teenage mania followed by sporadic games of Fire & Fury - but as avid battlefield walkers, this was an opportunity not to be missed! Gettysburg has that certain magic for wargamers; and historians alike, because along with its strategic and historical importance and its association with stories of prestigious feats of arms and courage, it also poses so many tactical questions and problems. Having been prowling battlefields ever since Don Featherstone first took me to Waterloo in the early '70s, I have come to appreciate that you cannot really understand a battle until you have walked the ground, and seen the governing circumstances from the physical viewpoint of the men who took the decisions. Being there you 'see' the more complete picture, realize that you can hide a French Napoleonic Division in a fold in the ground, as Cole discovered at Salamanca or you 'discover' something unrelated by accounts which must have influenced the action, such as the steep riverbank across the French advance at Crecy. Certain battlefields open your eyes to different things and Gettysburg was no exception. For me it was to engender an even greater admiration for Lee. Previously I had seen the great man having an 'off day' or three at Gettysburg, but on seeing the lie of the land as he virtually saw it and studying what we know of the intelligence information that he possessed at the time, I think I know why he thought that grand central thrust known as 'Pickett's Charge'( at least to us in the UK) might have come off. And, as wargamers, walking the ground and discussing the events on that field our little group came to view the action of the dice on the wargames table somewhat differently. We found 'dice-tolerance' on Gettysburg! From the stories of the events and standing on the very spots we came to appreciate just what it is the dice do give you. In ACW games I believe they should give you those drastic results of conflicts that were even then quite unpredictable. Sometimes units got away with light casualties especially if they were fighting raw troops whose inexperience lead to ramming home charge after charge down a jammed barrel. At other times they suffered instant shredding as the technology of 1863, coupled with the close range fire-fights of the day, severely punished those who 'got it wrong' or 'plumb ran outta luck'. Whole units were reduced to less than operational strength in minutes: on the Union side the 16th Maine on Oak Ridge lost 232 out of 298, the 76th New York on McPherson's Ridge lost 234 out of 375 and the 1st Minnesota in the Peach Orchard lost 224 out of 262. Among Pickett's units 4 regiments lost more than 80% each! The random dice can give you those moments. Folds in Terrain The dice can also give you the reverse effect. Terrain-builders will tell you about their problems of height scale and the virtual impossibility of representing folds in the land. Folds give cover and render targets unseen, and while men in them may see balls flying over their heads, which is not that inspiring for morale, it is better than taking casualties. On the wargames table we don't have many 'folds', butjust in front of Lee's position on Seminary Ridge there is marked dip in which whole brigades could deploy for the attack in comparative safety. Added to this, the area advanced over by Pettigrew's men has at least three reasonably deep dips which would have protected them and instigated a Union gun commander to think he'd been throwing ls or 2s on the firing dice! Whole brigades would have just disappeared from sight as they marched towards the Emmitsburg road. This is too difficult to reflect on the table but the random dice can give the same effect - did the battery commander yell. 'Fire!' just as his target started down into a dip? However, no matter if this was the case with certain discharges, over the long march of Pickett's Charge the effect of these random bad throws would be equalled out and casualties built up over time to reflect the South suffering the terrible butcher's bill of that ill-fated charge - Pettigrew and Trimble both lost over 50% of their entire commands, while Pickett lost about 40%. Random dice may influence individual situations but they cannot negate the accumulative result. No matter the actual outcome of a historical event, be it as disastrous as Pickett's Charge, commanders who ordered them obviously thought they had a chance of success otherwise they would not have committed their men to the action. It is only afterwards the impact of a wrong decision takes effect. I recall Richard Ellis getting morose and dejected playing a colonial game as he hand-shovelled fuzzies back into their boxes after bringing them under the guns of several Nile river-boats but this can bear no comparison with Pickett's real-life misery, encapsulated in his, 'General Lee, I have no Division.' (it was in the film!) However, Lee must have thought he had a good chance of that massed charge being successful. I have learned it was foolish to simply accept that he was 'having a bad day' (no matter his illness) compounded by the fact that Stuart dropped him in it. I would agree that the move was a gamble, but one which an experienced general believed worth taking despite the reservations of Longstreet. Did he look at the protected form up point, calculate the distance to The Angle, subtract the time spent in the dips, and think it was still on? Did he mentally add +1 for Confederates charging - all to come unstuck because his own guns kept messing up their artillery accuracy tests and the Union dice, both infantry and artillery kept coming up 9 on the F&F D10 that day! One could also argue that both Lee's and Meade's tactics contributed to making each throw a high-count shot. The amount of damage inflicted on the Confederate units over those last couple of hundred yards also meant getting the very best out of the interplacing of small arms and artillery and judging the firing to get in as many rounds as possible before the probable melee. Maximum effect from maximum efficient deployment should be deadly. There is a particularly moving memorial a few yards north of The Angle. It is to the 10th North Carolina who had come round the turn in the wall and met another wall lined with infantry and a battery of guns - they took everything including flanking fire at point blank range. If my memory serves me correctly one side of the stone bears the words of the Union Gun Commander as he screamed out his last orders to meet the onslaught, 'Battery, Double Canister at Ten Yards!' Looking at that wall from that stone sends a chill down the spine. This is the moment you throw all those bad dice. This is when you here some wargamers moan, 'a few would have got through and bayoneted the gunners', 'the second wave would get them' etc... If a defending battery with small arms support delivers that sort of shot effectively, and that is what the dice tell us, and the attacking unit takes that sort of damage, I think that after standing on Gettysburg I know they wouldn't get into the guns - either wave of them. What was left of the 10th NC after its long approach march and double quick to the wall virtually ceased to exist in the teeth of maximum effect from maximum efficient deployment. However, they did have the chance - probably the same chance odds Lee took on behalf of his leading regiments. The dice dictates whether the situation exists for the to gamble come off. Are those gunners too flustered to prime properly? Does one drop the pricker? Have they got the barrels depressed to get maximum effect? Was the man carrying the charge to one of the pieces shot down before he could put it into the muzzle? There must be scope for variation of effectiveness and add to that the likelihood of a percentage of the infantry being ill-loaded or jam-shotted and there is a case for the random factor. They stood a chance. Some of Armistead's men got over the wall, the Light Brigade got amongst the guns at Balaklava - we need another 50 years of technological development before we say, 'No chance!' Thankfully wargaming is nothing like the real thing, but there is one aspect all those memorials on battlefields make you consider, and that is the effect on the decision- making of the likely cost in human life. This is a very real aspect of being a general and one which never touches us armchair variations! One is tempted to ask how many gamers would risk putting their metal-friends into a chancy situation, if getting them 'killed' meant nothing to do with dice but your opponent jumping on them and handing them back as mangled bits of lead - a practice I recall Pete Gilder enthusing about in the 70s well, he would: he made figures! Lessons As well as leaning about the battle itself, and being impressed by the superb museum, Gettysburg can teach us wargamers some very important lessons --not least the one about being tolerant of dice and rules which cause our troops to be ineffective, for whole units to be shredded, and their morale to be so 'brittle' they skedaddle at the least provocation. Learning from battlefields is a key element in wargaming as it provides us with the opportunity to see at first hand possibly the most influential element in the action - the terrain. The ground is usually primary source. Yes, some alterations do occur due to erosion, and other natural phenomena but they are not usually dramatic. Walking the field, especially in conjunction with original maps, is a most enlightening thing to do. This is even more rewarding when you know man's destructive hand has been stayed. You wargamers in the US are very lucky as Battlefield preservation is taken very seriously. We Brits can make cracks that is easier to preserve something from the 1860s than it is from 1470s and that you have more 'available land' than we do, but the shaming truth is that you appear to have a more heightened sense of your history, national identity and duty to the men who died for your liberties. It is not just the major sites such as Gettysburg, but lots of Battlefields in the States have been preserved and interpreted sensitively. Money has been spent on Battlefield Centres which are profit-making and there are numerous trails and audio- routes, commemorative stones and monuments - everything to make them ore easily understood by visitors. I think we have only one comparable Centre in England, at Bosworth, while Scotland can justifiably boast Culloden with Bannockburn and Killiecrankie trying hard. If we as wargamers are to really understand what it is we are trying to do on tabletops and appreciate the decisions made by generals of the past, we ought to be doing whatever we can to help preserve our battlefields from disappearing or being swallowed up by those who striving hard to make Pete Rowden's 60s song, 'Concrete Island', a reality. One Moan My one moan about my whole experience at Gettysburg was in buying a booklet called 'Civil War Commanders' by Dean S Thomas. A wonderful publication it gives a potted biography and a photograph of many ACW leaders but my copy had no pages 1-8 or 65-72, instead I had two of 9-16 and 57-64. To buy a book on Gettysburg field that misses Armistead is ironic to say the least. I wrote to both the Museum Shop and the Publisher, Thomas himself, seeking photocopies to insert into my copy. Neither could be bothered to even write a reply! 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