World War Two: Biggest Period in Wargaming?

I can hear you thinking out there - What's he talking about? Napoleonics got a lot more figures available, Ancients covers thousands of years and hundreds of different armies, and the American Civil War has had more books published about it (in English). Whuffo is World War Two so big?

There are two answers to that.

First, let's take the topic itself. From the end of the twentieth century, we can now say that World War Two was The Big War of the last hundred years. Historically, it defined the international politics, political philosophies, and the economics of the last half of the century. Whether you were alive then or not, that war defined the conditions under which you lived your life from 1939 to the present day. That gives the war an immediacy no wargaming subject prior to it has. Although more books have been published in English on the American Civil War, the sheer size of the topic of World War Two overwhelms. The published material, in languages from Chinese to German, Russian, and English and a hundred others, is a huge mass.

The last bibliography published in the old Soviet Union listed over 16,000 published books on the period 1941-1945 in Russian alone. In addition, since the war was waged by professional, bureaucratic institutions, both civilian and military, the amount of "raw data" is almost unbelievable.

Soviet archives run to over 10,000,000 documents just on the Red Army alone (not counting the navy, NKVD troops, or many militia units) and the German archives in the US National Archives, even on microfilm, fill a large, wall sized bank of cabinets.

Second, in wargaming the Second World War is unique because it straddles several types of gaming. In historical miniatures, one of the best-selling sets of rules of all time is Command Decision in all its variants, a WWII set from GDW. In historical boardgames, over half of all titles published concern WWII. In computer gaming, leaving aside the Arcade-style games, the historical computer games are overwhelmingly on WWII topics. There is no other single wargame topic that is as popular in so many different types of games. In addition, there is an entire secondary (to us) hobby of building and collecting models of world war two equipment. The plastic model industry, of course, isn't secondary - in money terms, it overwhelms all aspects of historical gaming miniatures, and a large percentage of the plastic models sold are of world war two subjects.

In other words, both as a wargaming topic and as an historical topic, world war two covers a lot of ground. It's legitimate, then, to let you know over what parts of that ground I plan to tread in this column.

A Sharp Background

Some background. I spent twenty years in the US Army, as a tank driver, artillery fire direction chief, instructor at the Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and a first sergeant. I have a degree in history, have provided historical research data for boardgame designers, lectured on Soviet military history at conventions (ORIGINS, among others), and am writing a series of booklets on the Soviet Army in world war two. I've read extensively on world war two in English, German, and Russian, served in the army with veterans of the war, visited and lived in Europe in the middle of battlefield of the war, and both my parents were veterans of the war.

My own expertise, then, is on the military history of world war two, specifically the Eastern Front. I've played WWII miniatures going back to the old Tractics rules, and WWII boardgames going back to the original Avalon-Hill D-Day and Afrika Korps. At one time or another, I've collected 1/72 plastic models, 1/200 metal, 20mm metal, and now I'm painting 15mm WWII infantry and equipment. You'll notice I didn't mention microarmor: I've seen lots of it, I've even bought and painted some, but I confess, if I can't tell what the infantry are, I lose interest quick: and my eyes just aren't good enough to pick out an antitank rifle on a 5mm grunt!

Having been an NCO for years, I tend to be more interested in the troops - their training, morale, and leadership, than in their equipment. Yes, I can drop statistics on arcane WWII ordinance with the best of them, and there are folks who think that's the basis of all good rules, but I disagree. The best weapon in the world is no help if the crew isn't trained, the doctrine hasn't been worked out, or the command misemploys it. The examples are almost too numerous to list, but, for examples, I give you the Tiger tank introduced in the swamps near Leningrad in 1942 and the Me-262 jet fighter - first fielded as a bomber.

Although history is the basis of our hobby, I don't want to turn this into a history column. There are plenty of references for the history out there all ready. What I will do is steer you towards some really useful material that you might have missed, and I hope that individuals out there will share with the rest of us sources of historical goodies that they've discovered.

Ideally, this column will help you to have more fun gaming world war two. That's a simple enough objective that even a second lieutenant could understand it, but what it will take to reach that objective is up to you as much as me. I know what makes my gaming enjoyable: playability, realism, historical lessons. What you need or want, may be different or you may have a different emphasis: we'll develop the proper tone and mix in this column together.

Request for Information

For now, I'd like to throw out a request for information. What's going on in your neck of the woods in world war two gaming? I'll start by letting you know about the trends I can see up here in the Pacific Northwest, but I know there are some very different things happening elsewhere.

The Tacoma Wargamers Group that I belong to has a bunch of enthusiastic microarmor WWII gamers. They run an average of a game every other month, sometimes more than one a month. Favorite rules are eclectic: There are at least three sets of home grown or extensively modified rules played, plus Panzertaktic and Spearhead. One thing that may or may not be peculiar to this area is the amount of "cross over" rules taken from boardgames. I know of two groups using Avalon-Hill's Squad Leader as a set of miniatures rules, and there is a local Tacoma project to convert The Gamers' GD:40 game into a miniatures scenario, rewriting the company's Tactical Series rules for miniatures.

In modeling, while the Tacoma Mob is all microarmor (except for my fledgling 15mm collection), there are groups of 20mm WWII players in Seattle, and over the border in the Vancouver area of Canada. At the Northwest HMGS annual auction in February 1996, I did notice one interesting thing: no less than three different people were selling off 20mm WWII collections at the auction. When I talked to the people involved, every one of them was selling 20mm because they were converting to 15mm! My own conversion was partially fueled by the advent of Old Glory's WWII 15mm line last year, and the wide scope of Chuck Cook's Quality Castings collection of 15mm models. My questions for the readership, then, are these:

1. Is conversion from 20mm to 15mm happening elsewhere? How many? How fast?
2. Are any microarmor folks "moving up" to the 15mm size?
3. What WWII rules are being played in which scale?

I get the impression, from conventions in both the west and east coasts, that rules like Battalions in Crisis are mostly being played in 15-20mm, while Clash of Armor and Command Decision have more microarmor adherents although, to tell the truth, the largest CD games I've seen have heen 15mm and 20mm divisional games at conventions. Finally, for those scenario-builders out there, here's a Gamer's Organization for the Soviet Tank Corps of 1943, formatted for the Spearhead rules. You tell me: is this material more useful already prepared gor a specific set of rules, or would you prefer the date "raw" so that you can rework it gor your local group's favorite set?

Gamer's World War Two Data: The Soviet Tank Corps (1943)

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© Copyright 1996 Hal Thinglum

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