Wargaming is a synthesis of two contradictory concepts: gaming and history. On one level wargaming is simply a contest between (usually) two players out to determine a winner in a reasonable length of time by use of a map, playing pieces and dice. For some gamers the history aspect of the game is as relevant to their pursuit of happiness as a critique of the weapons and armor of the Jack of Spades would be to a poker player. The fact that the game purports to be set in a particular place or time in which certain material forces were involved in a dynamic is of no issue to the players. A recent .publication" by some gamers set the tone in their designer's notes by saying that their design time was not wasted in reading books, but was more productively spent fiddling with counter strengths to guarantee that the attacker could not get very many 3- 1's. Nevermind that this produced a game on the Soviet drive into Manchuria in which Soviet Breakthrough Artillery Corps weigh in with the strength of a Manchuko cavalry division. After all, who cares?

Of course, most wargamers would like a few more scoops of history on their dice and cardboard pie, thank you. The history is important to the gamers, and the game is not only a venue for competition but also a tool for the examination of history through a dynamic model.

Weakness

One of the weaknesses of a wargame as a dynamic historical model is the problem of defining what a unit is. This brings a designer immediately to the question of TO&E (Table of Organization and Equipment). Each nation has its own ideal model of what, say, an infantry division should be. A designer looks up in appropriate handbooks and finds three infantry regiments of so many officers, so many enlisted men, so many machine guys, mortars, etc etc, plus the division's artillery regiment, reconnaissance, antitank, and engineer battalions etc. So that is an infantry division, except that those organized in 1942 had less of this and those after 1944 had more of that. OK, so in your game the umptythird division is a little stronger because of that extra.

So far, so good. The designer must start somewhere, and when units are reorganized to a new TO&E, a game like Europa provides for the withdrawal of the unit and its' subsequent reappearance as a new counter with increased strength.

This is just fine, given the limitations of the format. However, for the sake of history, it is necessary for the notes that accompany games to give a clear explanation of the historical meaning that is abstracted so that it can appear in cardboard. This is sadly often neglected, and too many wargamers have a tendency to think of divisions as divisions (or platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, brigades what-have-you) as they exist in TO&E form.

The problem with this is that almost everything you know is wrong, to one extent or another. This was brought sharply to my attention when reading the designer's notes for the game "Great Patriotic War". The game is a simple one, on a large scale, with large scale abstraction to match. No problem there. However, my feeling is that the designer is a little incautious in describing typical unit organizations and strengths and failing to point out that TO&E is someone's idea on paper of organization, and almost never a reality in the field. The designer in this case is simply one of many who make this same mistake, and thereby mislead their audience as to what is being represented. In some cases, of course, the designer himself may be the one who doesn't realize that those nice charts of how many men are in a regiment or how many tanks are in a division are almost completely meaning less in the field.

OK, you have my opinion, now what backs it up? For example, let us examine the Korsun-Shevchenkovsky Operation in January-February 1944 in the Ukraine. By TO&E, a Soviet tank army of this period would have two tank corps and a mechanized corps. There were at this time six Soviet tank armies in the field and three of them took part in this operation. And how were they organized? Second Tank Army under Bogdanov had two tank corps, the 3rd and 16th, with 372 tanks and self-propelled guns between them. The 5th Guards under Rotmistrov had three tank corps, the 18th, 20th, and 29th, each of which had between 50 and 60 armored fighting vehicles (AFV) rather than the 240 they were each authorized. General Kravchenko's 6th Tank Army was organized just weeks before the battle, and consisted of the 5th Guards Tank Corps and the 5th Mechanized Corps, with a total of less than 150 AFV between the two corps. So of the six tank armies in begin at this time, fully half did not follow the official model (Katukov's 1st Guard and Rybalko's 3rd Guard did, the 4th was soon to emerge from high command reserve in the approved form) and all were far under strength.

Similarly a regular Soviet army in theory had three rifle corps of three rifle divisions each along with varying support elements (an antiaircraft division, an artillery division if on an important line of advance or several artillery brigades if not, an engineer brigade, etc). In fact, of the armies completely committed to the Korsun operation, namely the 27th, 52nd, 53rd, and 4th Guards (also part of 40th), the 27th had only three rifle divisions and two fortified areas with no corps organization at all, the 52nd had two corps with four to five rifle divisions, the 4th Guards was similar, although with somewhat better divisions, and the 53rd had three rifle corps with up to 13 rifle divisions.

There is nothing wrong, mind you, with representing a tank army as a 6 and a regular army as a 5 and giving the model of organization in your rules booklet, as long as you make clear that while TO&E is a lovely idea, the number of tanks in the line is equal to the number supplied, plus the number repaired from the last operation, plus the number of replacements received, minus the number knocked out, minus the number down for repair, and this number is almost always smaller than the authorized number. How much smaller is directly dependent on the length of supply line of the unit, the number and efficacy of its repair shops, the strength of its' nation's industry and population base, the durability of its equipment (and the inverse of its complexity), and the amount of time the unit has been out of combat.

Another example. In the baffles around Kiev in November and December 1943, seven German panzer divisions were engaged in a highly mobile battle of thrust and riposte. By TO&E, each division was entitled to 150 or so AFV, while the one SS panzer division was entitled to 231. But the real numbers were far different. The 1st Panzer started the operation with 171 AFV (over TO&E!) and was quickly reduced to 40, 3rd started with 18 (!) and was reduced to 5, 7th went from 25 to 4, 8th from 16 to 33 (by staying out of the worst of the action), 19th from 8 to 7, and the green 25th from 75 to 3 (!). The 1st SS started the operation with 137 AFV and was quickly reduced to 47.

Artillery Strength

Artillery strength of units is considerably less volatile, usually approaching TO&E and remaining fairly stable unless the unit is overrun or has to retreat in a hurry (especially in bad road conditions or in a situation of enemy air superiority), while infantry strength falls somewhere in between the two. But as you can see, TO&E is riot a relevant concept in dealing with this situation.

The only time during any war in which TO&E is a relevant concept as far as the actual make up of troops is the field is concerned is at the beginning of a major campaign, when the antagonists have had time to build up their forces to close to (or in some cases in excess of) TO&E, or when fresh units are committed to combat. In either case, there is still no guarantee that everything is as it is shown on paper, and units will have discrepancies from the ideal based on scarcities of weapons or personnel.

Another example, involving the United States Army concerns the Battle of Aachen. While working on the design, it was discovered that the father-in-law of a playtester had served in the 3rd Armored Division during 1944 and 1945. While further investigation showed that he had missed the battle (he was in the hospital recovering from a wound) he was able to give us a good insight into the question of TO&E. When asked about the TO&E of a combat command or task force (regiment and battalion sized combined arms teams the US armored divisions had a formal regimental structure that separated armor, armored infantry and engineers, but in practice it was superseded by combat command/task force), he replied, "What the hell is TO&E? I reported to the Division Commander and was told to take some tanks, armored infantry, tank destroyers and self-propelled artillery out of the division's replacement pool and make up a task force." It should be noted that the veteran in question was a major.

More Confusion

To further confuse the job of the historical researcher, the German Army had the widespread practice, particularly in Italy, to freely borrow regiments and battalions from one division to another, loaning batteries of artillery and antitank guns, battalions of infantry and even field training units for periods of days up to months. In some times and places divisions might give up a regiment of infantry and a battalion of artillery plus some antitank guns to a neighboring division, have an additional battalion extracted into corps reserve, gain half a sturmgeshutz battalion from corps, two battalions and a feld ersatz battalion from yet another division, only to have the whole situation rescrambled in a week or two.

The Soviets would freely trade divisions from rifle corps to rifle corps, corps from army to army, and less frequently armies from front to front. Indeed, while components of divisions were usually not traded around, the tank corps would more than occasionally detach tank brigades to be subordinated to neighboring rifle corps or armies. This was always a temporary attachment for a week or two, at which time the brigade would revert to its' original corps.

Antitank guns were perhaps the most changeable of items, no division in action having the same holding of AT guns for three days running. (One of the nicknames the Soviets had for the 45mm AT gun after 1942 was "goodbye comrades", the equivalent of the German tag of "doorknocker" for the 37mm in 1941.) Now you see 'em, now you don't seems to have been the practice.

The point in all of this confusion is that there is nothing wrong with using TO&E as the basis for designing counters, but it must be made very clear that reality had a way of being far more complex.

Other Pitfalls

For the unwary, other pitfalls await. For example, the Soviet rifle brigade. No doubt there somewhere existed a table for what these units should consist of, but since many of them were raised under crisis conditions out of whatever manpower was available and armed with the weapons that were at hand, one has to be very careful in generalizing about them. In the fighting around Novorossisk in February 1943, for example, there were 9 Soviet brigades involved. Two of them were marine brigades, one a guards brigade and the rest were rifle brigades. NO TWO OF THEM HAD THE SAME STRUCTURE!

Another more common trap is the question of Guards units. While the TO&E of a guards unit was somewhat higher than that of it's non- guard equivalent, that only had significance when a unit was rebuilt and temporarily filled out. When it was committed it would quickly assume the depleted state of the other units in the line. Consequently, a guards division in the line is not likely to be stronger than its neighboring non-guards division.

A unit just designated guards had undoubtedly earned the honor the hard way, and would have suffered heavy casualties in the process. Thus game designers that assign an automatic higher strength to guards units may be mistaking form for content.

Similarly the guards designation was used in somewhat erratic ways. For ex ample, a guards tank army might have no guards corps subordinated to it, and a guards rifle corps might have regular rifle division as most of its sub-units. A guards army might have guards rifle corps under it, but in at least one case an army was designated guards and consisted solely of elderly reservist units'. All rocket launcher (katyusha) units were automatically designated guards units, no matter what their previous experience as an honor to their weapon and in order that their commander might have more influence with whatever formation his unit was attached to. Likewise, all airborne units that were converted to airborne rifle divisions were automatically designated guards, although in this case there was a logic to it since the troops were of high caliber to begin with.

Of course as the war went on, and more and more material became available, units could be brought nearer their ideal strength before a major operation, but once the guns started going again, you would find units operating at a third of the strength they should have on paper.

One abstraction, that of SS units being stronger, actually has more basis in reality, because they had a priority for replacements and good equipment, so that an SS division might operate with many times the amount of equipment its neighboring unit would have. This was not so much due to its higher TO&E as to its being first in line when the new tanks arrived from the factory.