Mostly for campaign purposes, but also as a warehouse for widely different wargame terrains it may be useful to have available a "continent" of a reasonable size, surrounded by the sea. Let's take the generally little known Madagascar, an island one thousand miles, 1,600 km, long and 300-500 km broad.
This island is around 600,000 sq. km - a little more than France. It has a narrow eastern coastal plain with lots of rainfall, ending in steeply ascending mountains from which descend rapid rivers. The center is a high arid plain with altitudes 800 - 2,000 m, to east and west limited by mountains, and criss-crossed by green valleys with lots of herds and irrigated fields. The west side winds slowly down to the coastline with its mangrove swamps; here there are several major rivers navigable for river steamers up to 150 km from the coast. The southern tip of the island is rather arid, and the northern tip is mountainous with a deep fjord that could be an excellent harbour for a high sea fleet.
In the middle of the central plain one finds the capital Antananarivo on the top of a hilly area; some smaller towns with second-rate harbours are dotted along the east and west coasts with distances between them of several hundred km. To add a little extra naval interest there is one smaller island near the northeast corner and another one near the northwest corner of our continent.
Part of the population is of a relatively fair colour, another part is dark skinned, and mixtures exist. Originally the 18 tribes in the island each had small nobility, a group of freemen and a group of similar size of slaves. Within each tribe one can normally find more than one religion. The majority is of Indonesian and Polynesian descent, but mainly on the west coast also many Bantus and mixtures of Bantus and Arabs can be found.
Europeans tried for centuries to colonize the island, but without much success until around 1900 when France conquered it in a long campaign starting 1895, and deposed the queen. (There were no British international objections, as France around the same time accepted the British occupation of Zanzibar.) The planning was made by the French War Ministry, which had no experience in tropical regions, the general in command had a pronounced disdain for the auxiliary services like transport and health, and there were by far too few labourers, doctors and hospital beds. The French invading forces consisted of 13 battalions of infantry, 1 cavalry squadron, 2 batteries, 4 companies of engineers plus administrative troops, in total 15,400 soldiers. Also included were 7,000 porters, 7,000 draught mules and (on insistence of the general staff) 5,000 mule-drawn "Lefebvre" carts - that forced the soldiers to build roads for them in the road-less country. The Malagasy had 45,000 reasonably armed, but low-class troops without competent leaders. Until the official Malagasy surrender, the French had lost in battle 20 dead and 100 wounded - but 6,000 soldiers had died from disease, mainly while building the road. Low doses of quinine were distributed to the soldiers, but control of their intake of it was lax; the mortality rate was 330 per thousand of the enlisted men, but astonishingly only 58 per thousand of the officers. It took the French around eight more years to subdue the population.
To the above physical features one can, after the French occupation, add a canal close and parallel to the east coast for many hundreds of km, and a railway from a harbour on the east coast to the capital.
In WW II the island was held by Vichy forces that for 6 months put up a quite good fight against the invading British. Briefly before the attack the German and the Vichy governments had offered the island to the Japanese as a fine base for attacks on Allied shipping between the Suez Canal and India. A British cruiser in the fjord was torpedoed and seriously damaged by a Japanese midget U-boat, otherwise the campaign losses were rather small.
After the war a rebellion against the French cost the largest tribe 10,000 deaths. The island became independent in 1959; the government tried communism for a period, and today Madagascar with its population of about 15 million (around WW lit was only 3.5 million) is one of the poorest countries of the world.
For wargame purposes one should of course look up far more details than above in encyclopedias at the local library and buy a decent map. Dependent on the object of the wargame, one could place the island in a different climate or a different part of the world, just as one could invent a totally different history.
In spite of its size, not too much has been written on Madagascar, but some further information can be found in:
Colonel C. E. Caliwell: Small Wars. A Tactical Textbook for Imperial Soldiers. 3rd ed. 1906. Reprint. Greenhill, London 1990. ISBN 1-85367-071-5. Pp.60, 99,153, and 217.
Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht 1942, Teilband I. Annotated by Andreas Hillgruber. Bernard & Graefe, Munchen 1982. ISBN 3-88199-073-9. P 338-39 with note.
Mervyn Brown: Madagascar Rediscovered. A history from early times to independence. Tunnacliffe, London 1978. ISBN 0-908396-0-4-X.
Winston S. Churchill: The Second World War. Tome IV, Part I, Chapter XIII. Philip D. Curtin: Disease and Empire. The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa. Cambridge Univ Press. Cambridge 1998. ISBN 0-521-59169-4 (HB) and -59835-4 (PB). With 20 pages on 1895.
George MacDonald Fraser: Flashman's Lady. Reprint. Fontana, G.B. 1989. Fiction but well researched and very entertaining.
Andre' Maurois: Lyautey. Chapter V. It probably exists in an English translation.
Hubert Lyautey: "The Role of the Colonies" and "In the Southern Madagascar (These two books I have not read, and maybe they only exist in French.)
The Royal Army Service Corps: The Story of the Royal Army Service Corps 1939-1945. Bell & Sons, UK 1955. Pp.178, 188-92.
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