Since one of the "missing" areas of Europa is the partisan war in the Balkans, an interesting question is whether the guerrilla system from the soon to be released game War of Resistance, designed by Mark Royer, will be applicable to the Balkans.

From Mark's description and what I've seen in the WoR rules draft, it is only partially applicable to Europa partisan wars China has different conditions. However, the faction system used in WoR may be more applicable to Europa, particularly in reducing the multilateral situation of the Yugoslav guerrilla war (many separate factions that can be roughly organized into 3-5 different groupings) into a bilateral system applicable for a twoplayer game.

Here is part of Mark's description of the WoR partisan system that he wrote for the Europa e-mail list.

"The guerrilla system in WoR is designed with the Chinese Communist's three tiered, cyclical philosophy of guerrilla warfare in mind. The communists developed their concepts for conducting a guerrilla war during the Nationalist's communist suppression campaigns of the mid 1930s.

The communists would identify a remote, rural region where a political vacuum existed. With the Nationalists retreating in the face of the Japanese advance, but with the Japanese unable or unwilling to attempt to control remote regions, many areas were left without a functioning political system. The communists would infiltrate such places with elements of their Red Army (called the 8th Route Army by this time). The Red Army was a relatively conventional armed force. At the time (circa 1937), it was a small, well disciplined army and had high morale, but was sorely lacking in equipment - especially heavy supporting guns. A major decision within the communist camp was whether to commit the Red Army to conventional warfare or to utilize it as the underpinnings of a guerrilla war. Mao Tze Tung was pro guerrilla, but at the time Mao, while dominant in the party, was far from all-powerful. Many leading communists wanted to use the army conventionally, and the Nationalists were pressuring for its use in this manner.

After a debacle near Taiyuan in November 1937, in which Japanese forces handed the 129th Division (communist) a heavy defeat, Mao's view won the day.

Units of the Red Army would be sent into a region and would set up a "base." A base was far more than a military entity, it was a complete political, social, and economic power structure. It organized the rural regions around communist thinking, formed local governments, established schools, and formed village militia. In game terms WoR shows this by allowing regular CCP (Chinese Communist Party) units to establish guerrilla bases. For game purposes, bases are considered "guerrilla bases" and the game focuses on the military aspects of a base.

The village militia, the lowest of the three tiers of guerrilla warfare, was essentially composed of part time soldiers who trained on weekends. Thus, maintaining this type of force did not weigh heavily on the base's economic ability to support a military force. These units would remain very local and generally perform acts of sabotage. WoR shows this tier of guerrilla activity in a manner similar to partisan activity in SF. That is, each base gets a number of sabotage attempts depending on the base's current strength.

As the bases grew in strength and size, they became economically capable of sustaining regular, full-time militia units. While still not quite conventional forces, these units contained full time soldiers and ranged over a broader region. In theory, the best of the village militiamen would be indoctrinated into these units. In practice, these units came from a number of sources, including the village militia.

For example, various conventional forces caught far behind Japanese lines might be recruited wholesale or various semi-military, semi-bandit groups might be subsumed. Further, many regions already maintained local defense forces that might be subsumed. WoR shows this tier as actual guerrilla units that can be placed on map and can operate within the base's region.

Finally, to complete the three-tiered cycle, the Red Anny would recruit the best of the regional militia units as reinforcements or replacements to their own conventional army ranks. The conventional force itself was the third tier. As more and more bases gained strength, the conventional army would slowly gain strength until it could truly challenge an opposing force. In WoR , on-map guerrilla units can be used to replace regular CCP forces (or rebuild cadres to full strength).

How all this relates to conflict in the Balkans (or Europe) is an interesting question. Did Tito (et al) form bases and so?

At one level, CCP 3-tier bases were similar to what went on in some guerrilla movements in Europe, but in other ways they weren't. The similarity is that, ideally, active guerrillas in Europe would move from harassing the Axis to exerting varying levels of control over the countryside (in inaccessible areas). Eventually they would build up the strength to drive the occupiers out, either by themselves in conventional or semiconventional operations or in conjunction with friendly regular forces entering the area.

The dissimilarities, however, are large:

1) The CCP was not only resisting the Japanese invaders/occupiers, they were trying to seize control of as much as they practically could from the legitimate but weak KMT government of China.

2) China was mainly a pre-industrial agrarian society - while there were large cities, the great majority of the population lived in the countryside mostly as impoverished, uneducated, exploited peasantry. (Exploited in the senses that a) their excess (in good times) agricultural output was appropriated in various ways to feed the cities -- with other than the farmers mainly profiting by this, and b) the corrupt warlordism typically meant the peasants stoically endured whoever was currently "ruling" them, rather than feeling any national loyalty to the remote central government.)

3) This goes to say that the CCP, when taking control of an area, had to set up basic political and economic infrastructure to secure an area in any lasting way, and consequently the CCP's military strength was rather immobile - the first two tiers are essentially tied to their bases.

4) Add on top of this the large size of China and the rather low force levels the Japanese used to secure their occupied areas, and the CCP could invest in building up bases in remote areas which the Japanese were unlike to bother about.

Guerrilla wars in Europe varied from the above factors:

1) Few major guerrilla movements were trying to resist the Axis occupiers and gain control of the country from the legitimate government. The big exception to this, Tito's Partisans, did not face a legitimate government with conventional forces in the country - the legitimate government itself was in exile. The Partisans thus contended against various guerrilla forces that professed varying degrees of loyalty to the legit government but mainly were not controlled by the government (witness Mihailovic's Chetniks' occasional cooperation with the Axis against the Partisans).

Most other major guerrilla forces were loyal to varying degrees to their country's legitimate government. Admittedly, the proCommunist Polish guerrillas looked to Moscow and not to the Polish government in exile in London, but they were a small movement, dwarfed by the pro-government Polish guerrillas. Similarly, other communist guerrillas elsewhere, such as in France, were not per se particularly loyal to the French government. However, given the need for western aid to the USSR and western troops to fight the Germans, Moscow was hardly going to order western European communists to try to take over western European countries like France.

2) Hardly any place in Europe was a pre-industrial agrarian society, Albania providing the exception. (Many places in North Africa and the Middle East were, however.) Instead, they were either mixed semi-industrial/agrarian societies or industrial societies. Overall, urbanization was greater, and education of the populace better than that of China's peasantry. Control of the central government was much greater than in China, and most people had a sense of nationalism, although this varied greatly among Soviet ethnic groups, and Yugoslav ethnic groups felt loyalty to their group more than to Yugoslavia. Even in countries with large peasant populations (peasants almost always being the least educated), you had a population more nationalistic, more loyal to their government (or ethnic group), and thus less accepting of foreign occupation.

3) European guerrilla movements tended to be very mobile. The basic infrastructure was already in place to support guerrillas (essentially a population willing to hide them and not turn them in, while supplying them with food and information about the occupiers), so they didn't have to build up bases in the CCP sense. They did have "bases" where they could, but these were more HQs for guerrilla forces rather than politicaleconomic entities. When circumstances demanded, the guerrillas would simply abandon their current area and move on to a new location - this was usually in the face of an Axis anti-panisan operation, and the guerrillas' success in getting away depended on how tightly the Axis had scaled in the partisans with reliable troops.

4) Many areas of Europe were much more constrained in size than China. Although guerrillas typically operated in the most inaccessible terrain they could, they typically weren't remote from Axis forces, which correspondingly could fairly quickly go over to anti-partisan operations when the need arose. This varied throughout Europe - less so in the USSR, where the Gennans would go after guerrillas astride communication routes but often not those hiding out in remote forest and swamps (supposedly the guerrillas reestablished regular mail service in a remote part of the Pripet Marshes!), more so in places like Yugoslavia, where the Partisans had to flee back and forth across the country several times in 1941-43 to escape anti-partisan operations.

Accordingly, for Europa, I think a version of the current partisan rule from FitE/ SE will work well. For a wide Europa context, there probably needs to be three levels of guerrilla activity:

Resistance or Inactive Level

This is "resistance" warfare, with potential guerrilla forces being organized but not used much (the men remain in the civilian occupied economy rather than taking to the hills and forming guerilla bands). Intelligence gathering goes on, as does sabotage, but probably nothing shows up at Europa level (no rail breaks or airbase hits). Instead, the guerrilla forces are building up strength slowly and occasionally convert some of its potential strength into actual guerrilla units for Europa-level operations. The 1939-44 Polish Home Army and 1940-44 French Forces of the Interior are at this level, with very few actual guerrilla forces in operation at Europa level (although some are) but many men preparing for "the Day."

Guerrilla or Active Level

The guerrillas are in the field, organized in small bands, and engaging in various unconventional warfare operations. This level corresponds to the FitE/ SE partisan rules. Soviet and Yugoslav guerrillas are mostly at this level from their appearance in 1941; a portion at least of the French Forces of the Interior go to this level on or after D-Day (the cities don't activate much but various countryside forces do); the Polish Home Army activates and concentrates at Warsaw in 1944.

Conventional Level

Instead of operating as dispersed, small bands, the guerrillas concentrate and operate as conventional military units. I outlined how this would happen in a previous "Inside Europa" column in TEM. Soviet guerrillas mainly do not convert to conventional units (but instead mostly are disbanded and absorbed as replacements in the Red Army), so this level is not really needed in FitE/SE. Tito's Partisans convert to conventionals in 1944, and the Warsaw Uprising is probably represented by Home Army guerrillas converting to conventionals at Warsaw (although alternately the uprising might be represented by the Polish player moving tons of guerrilla-level partisans into Warsaw and the Germans doing anti-partisan operations against them).

Now, these three levels do bear some level of similarity to WoR 's three-tiered guerrilla bases, but there are sufficient differences to prevent it from being directly applicable.