An Incomplete Summary of Armed Conflicts: 1918 to 1939

(1) Wars between the successor states of the Russian Empire
Russian Civil War (including Mongolia) 1918-21
Russo-Finnish War and Finnish Civil War 1918
Russo-Latvian War 1918
Russo-Estonian War 1918-19
Russo-Lithuanian War 1918-19
Russo-Ukrainian War 1918-20
Russo-Polish War 1919-20

(2) Wars following the breakup of the Ottoman empire
Turkish National Uprising 1918-20
Destruction of the Armenian Republic 1920-21
Greek-Turkish War 1920-22
Kurdish rebellion 1925

(3) Colonial Wars
Afghan War of Independence (v. Britain) 1919
Syrian uprising 1920
Riff revolt in Morocco (v. Spain and France) 1925
Revolt in Lebanon 1925-26

(4) Chaos in China
Warlords fight for control of North China 1916-26
Chinese incursion into Tibet 1918
National Revolution 1925-27
Nationalists take North China 1928
Nationalist-Communist War (Long March) 1930-35

(5) Japanese expansion in Asia
Mukden Incident: occupation of Manchuria 1931
Occupation of Jehol Province 1933

(6) Fascist expansion in Europe and Africa
Invasion of Abyssinia 1935-36
Austrian Anschluss 1938
Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia 1938
Occupation of Memel territory 1939
Italian occupation of Albania 1939

(7) Other wars
Romania invades Hungary 1919
Irish Rebellion and Civil War 1919-23
Hejaz War (Hussein v. Ibn Saud) 1924
Chaco War (Bolivia v. Paraguay) 1932-35
Saudi Arabia v. Yemen 1934
Spanish Civil War 1936-39

Now that GR/D has released March to Victory, the first of their The Great War series, and War of Resistance, the first of their Glory series, the time has come to consider expanding the boundaries of Europa. Sharp intake of breath from hundreds of Europa players. Does this upstart mean to sully our favorite game system by replacing dynamic armored warfare with all of that dreadful foot-slogging and jungle and trench warfare? Well, not really. Let me explain.

Europa was originally conceived as a series of games covering the entire European segment of World War 2, at a level of detail that would put players in the role of battlefield and front commanders. Players would be able to make the sort of decisions that a Patton, Zhukov, von Manstein, or a Montgomery would have made. This meant that the three variables of distance, time and unit size would have to be set at some intermediate level between what we see in a grand strategic game like World in Flames or Third Reich, and the micro, tactical minutiae of a Advanced Squad Leader. The scale used in the Europa games is 16 miles to the hex, two-week turns, and divisions, brigades and regiments (mostly). The game system also emphasizes ground operations over air or naval operations. Much of the latter was completely abstracted and moved off the board, and even the air units were dealt with in a greatly reduced level of detail than were the multitude of ground unit types.

Now, some of the games have non-standard scales or rules. First to Fight uses 3-day turns. After all, if you played the German attack on Poland with two-week turns, the entire game would only last one and a half turns (Germans move, Poles move, Germans move, Poles surrender). Not very interesting if you are the Polish player. Narvik also has 3-day turns, plus a feature found nowhere else in the system: combat only occurs between units within the same hex. Looking over the orders of battle, we also see that unit sizes are a lot wider than just from regiments up to divisions. Europa's smallest units are artillery batteries: one such, in Scorched Earth, represents just a single very large gun, while its largest units are the Soviet armored corps.

Europa has also spread out of its original time frame of September 1939 to May 1945, with the inclusion of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the Spanish Civil War game. That game includes units and rules for the inclusion of Spain and Portugal into the rest of the war, specifically Operation Felix: a hypothetical German attack on Gibraltar, with or without Spanish permission. [An upcoming edition of TEM will focus on Spain.] A semiofficial Europa-style game, Africa Orientale, published in the magazine Strategy and Tactics, was a notable attempt to extend Europa into Africa, with the campaign in and around Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1940-41. AO used a map with 32 miles to the hex, and so units "paid double costs" for movement, but unit sizes and the time scale were compatible with the rest of the Europa series. The Glory series will include Europa-style games on the Japanese invasion of the Philippines (The Damned Die Hard) and the war in China, 1937 to 1941 (War of Resistance).

My point is this: if Europa can be extended in time (pre- 1939) and space (into Africa, Asia and the Pacific), where do we draw the boundaries of Europa? This question will be of particular interest to those "Grand Europans" who want to put the whole series together into a seamless whole. The Spanish Civil War is already part of Europa. A game on a hypothetical "early WW 2" has been suggested, involving Czech resistance to the Germans in 1938, and what the French, British, Italians and Russians and Poles might do if the Germans didn't win right away. AO is at least "honorary Europa:" after all, Egypt isn't in Europe either, but War in the Desert is a Europa game. The games in the Glory series, although far away in space, overlap in time with the Europa games. And what about The Great War? If we include the Japanese attack on China in 1937, why exclude the German attack on Belgium in 1914?

Problem?

The problem is that there is no clear distinction or cut-off between WWII and the wars that led up to it. In a sense, there was a global conflict from 1914, when the system of interlocking alliances designed to prevent a major war finally broke down, to 1945, when war was changed forever by use of the atomic bomb. There was a long armistice on the main European fronts in the middle of that period, while fighting continued in other parts of the world. (From 1945 on, of course, there was a dramatic change: conventional wars could still be fought, but would now include the potential threat of nuclear attack.) For those of you who still think that the first half of this century only had two wars in it, take a look at the list below:

Let's take an unscientific survey: tell us which of the above wars should be included in future Europa (or The Great War, or Glory) games, or in the pages of this magazine, and why. If you think that Europa should only include the conflict in Europe from 1939 to 1945, then tell us that. I'll collect the results and print them in a future TEM.