I received a call from Rick Vietmeyer that Fred Vietmeyer died quietly in his sleep during the afternoon of May the 2nd. I'd recommend that contacts with the family be kept to a minimum. So many of us had written or talked with him that Rick was a little worried that this could turn into a circus his mother couldn't handle.

I first met Fred Vietmeyer in 1969. I'd been a board gamer for years when some of my regular opponents pushed their way into the Midwest Napoleonic Wargamers' Confederation. Once I'd seen a miniature battle, I was pushing and shoving with the rest. I can't have been much of an asset: no table, no money, very little knowledge of the period. The Baron looked over this rather unpromising material, and only asked one question: "What are we going to call you?

Can't have two people around the table with the same name, and we already have a Bob and a Rob. You're going to be Robert." Then he began weighting me down with information on any army he approved of my building, and sent me on my way with a few sample castings (as loans) and addresses of manufacturers. That was pretty much how he ran things--as a firm but benevolent dictator. He'd already been doing it for about 10 years, and he had about 20 to go. And I've been Robert in wargaming circles ever since.

Later, I found out some of his personal history. He came to Fort Wayne Indiana at the age of one when his parents fled Nazi Germany. He went back to Germany with the occupation forces, and after a few years spent tracing down war criminals, returned to the United States with his bride Edith, descendant of a long line of Hessian soldiers. [Their son Rick remains an active and talented (if largely solo) wargamer.]

Luckily preceding bilingual education, he had gone to Kindergarten not speaking a word of English, and emerged from school without a trace of accent, fluent in both languages. After his service time, he went to college and majored in industrial chemistry. This would fill his working days, but already by the early 1950's the wargaming "bug" had bitten him. What seems to have intrigued him most were periods of balance between different tactical systems; what he would later term "unbalanced equality."

The two prominent examples were the Mediterranean of the Hellenistic era and the "high" Napoleonic era after the "Glory Years" when the Allies were seeking countersystems compatible with their societies and strategic situations. Of the two, he chose Napoleonics, being roughly familiar with the formations from his World War II training, and he sought out the nearest Napoleonic miniatures players in Dayton Ohio.

What happened next has passed into wargaming legend, and vaguely resembles tales of Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan. Fred Vietmeyer found them playing tables lengthwise, and unable to complete games. He turned the tables 90 degrees. He found them organized in a uniform battalion, and at 1:3. He introduced 1:20, and national organizations. He found a game in which individual castings were being wounded, trooping to aid stations and returning to the front, and left Column, Line and Square, a clear fast-playing system based on the integrity of battalions and squadrons.

No doubt other people had good ideas, and he symbolizes a generation of wargaming development, but symbols aren't picked out of a hat. Fred Vietmeyer would become the driving force, and most of use parted company with him would fade from the hobby altogether without his energy and enthusiasm to recharge them.

Legend

The capper to the legend came about 1968 in the first of the "Vittoria"-series games, where or more players would assemble 4,000 30mm castings and refight major Napoleonic engagements corps size battles. "If you lose, I'll have you shotH "Napoleon" promised in the game write-up, It if you Wit',, I'll mace you a grand duke." Fred Vietmeyer "drew" thanks to a die roll a game he'd n tactically, and the host, by way of consolation, "declared" him a Baron. Within a year, no one led him anything but "the Baron." I suspect to this day there are wargamers who believe him to the heir of some lost German estate.

It was the high point of his glory. For decades total strangers from all over the country-- really all over the world--wrote the Baron looking for information. What did Hanoverians wear in '15? How were Portuguese organized prior to Wellington? When were the Bavariari cuirassiers sed and disbanded? And for decades the supply of information and goodwill never faltered. No ery was so naive, so ignorant or so all-encompassing as not to rate a reply. But he never gave more help than was needed. If you spoke a little German, your answer was likely to be a quote from German source--and your job to translate it. If you seemed bright enough to work out an oranizational question, you got the raw data--though he'd check the final answer.

But the Baron wasn't an antiquarian. He was a wargamer through and through. Over the years I received lectures on why certain battalions were organized as they were--"they can't just be historically accurate, Robert. They have to be historically accurate and playable on a wargame table."

On the playability of certain periods--"Hoplite warfare might be interesting if they were going burn the loser's city. Not otherwise." and on the fundamentals of rule-writing--"Your table's nine feet wide, Robert. That means a viable command can't occupy more than three." He was opinionated though in politics, economics and the fringes of science, but when speaking about wargaming, at that--periods, rules, organizations in the abstract--he had a terrific batting average.

As the years went by he was more and more reluctant to answer questions outside the Napoleonic Wars. There was more and more material out there, and his answers had to be right. It didn't keep him from maintaining and playing with ancients, ACW, fighting sail or WWII land naval for his personal enjoyment. He just refused to set himself up as a guru outside of his area expertise.

He was also more and more reluctant to change his beloved Column, Line and Square because he knew it was perfect--I remember yet him pointing out a passage in one of the Petre tomes and wishing he'd caught the significance before he wrote CLS- -but because he was very reluctant to disturb a working system and because he didn't want to leave behind players geared to previous version. When I look at rules going into their fifth (or more!) revision, or requiring complete rebasing, I can't call him wrong.

For about three decades, his MNWC held two to four games a year, with the Baron commanding one army and a vast rotating cast commanding the opposition. When he retired, full years and honor, the Confederation disbanded, but it left behind a generation of wargamers not t in the mid-west but all over the country who started off in wargaming with rules, uniforms and organization provided by the Baron.

Paper Heritage

Of course, he left a paper heritage as well. The sum of his articles--contributed to virtually every wargame magazine in America for many years--would be a decent book, and greatly to his credit he was as likely to be asking questions as providing answers. Why were there two facing colors given for a Neapolitan regiment? What sort of troops were the Regiments de la marine? To the Baron, knowing 95% of the uniforms and organization of a given period meant you'd better buckle down and work on that five percent!

I think what he was proudest of was Column, Line and Square. Though many wargamers had a hand in one feature or another, it was the Baron who put it all together and worked with it for years, and it was the Baron who saw to it that for decades there would be two to four "formal games" a year--thousands of castings in 30mm scale fighting out historically based Napoleonic battles, with players coming from half the country.

All over the country, they're known as the "Vietmeyer rules" and rightly so. CLS has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, at least partly because it's still being played, and has been played so widely. Why beat a dead horse, after all? And Napoleonic rules include more dead horses than the Grande Armee of 1812. CLS is too bloodthirsty, it is said, or luck plays too big a role, or possibly it doesn't accord with the latest and most fashionable guess at what happened when two Napoleonic battalions collided.

Funny thing, though: it's 1:20 organization remains the standard for tactical Napoleonics. I can take my CLS 30mm castings off the shelf and play In the Grand Manner or Playable Napoleonic Wargames with them. And if anyone is under the impression that luck was not a major factor in low-level Napoleonic tactics, or that regiments and brigades did not sometimes suffer ghastly losses when they closed to within canister range--well, that impression was not shared by the participants. Follow a tactical action out of Oman Fortesque or Adams, and CLS is as likely as the latest and most fashionable to give the same result.

Perhaps his most influential work was "Napoleonic Army Organization". A slim volume: basically the basing appendices in the back of CLS with a commentary. Today, we can pull more and more detailed information from many sources. When the Baron put it together, though, he was working in a complete vacuum. Russian organization, for instance, came from working with the son of a Czarist officer with access to Russian sources in New York. Austrian material came from corresponding with embassies. Don't compare him with those who built on his work.

Compare him with the generic "Napoleonic Battalions" of Young and Grant. And his work has held up well. A good few garners complain that Russian battalions should be stronger, or Austrian weaker, but when the Russian Reserve Army marched to war in the fall of 1813, it was spot on CLS 400-man battalions, and the better I refine the data for Austria in the spring of 1809, the nearer I approach the "mythical" 1,200 man strength. Almost never is he off in the internal organization of a Napoleonic battalion, and those cases generally come from building on something marked "tentative" in big block letters.

More important than the articles, the organization or even the rules, though, remains his untiring "missionary work" providing the necessary information to turn a young enthusiast into a historical miniature gamer. I remember yet him shaking his head and muttering that another elder wargamers success at selling job lots of castings without r~iles or painting guides would mean more questions in the mail, and he could barely keep up as it was. It never occurred him to decline his voluntary and unpaid labor, though. That just wasn't his way. A lot of the Grand Old Men of wargaming have a memorial of paper--magazines, rules or books. Some have left a legacy of beautiful sculpted figures. Fed Vietmeyer's legacy is people.