This is being written less than two weeks after I got back from HISTORICON 97' which I attended after dropping in on ORIGINS 97 and spending a few days in between looting and pillaging in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. As usual, the month of August starts with me in a daze, surrounded by piles of new rules, lead, books, and notes!

By the time you read this most of the new stuff introduced at the conventions will be in the stores and advertised all over the -slickie" magazines. In fact, since I have barely had time to read most of the new rules, let alone play them, you may know more about them than I do now. A swift perusal of the rules being introduced and played this summer does show up an I interesting trend in the World War Two gaming - we seem to be going Back to the Future.

For those of you who remember the Old Days (1970s, about when we stopped having to chip figures out of rock), a peculiarity of the rules played was that Napoleonics, American Civil War, Ancients - all other periods except World War Two, used figure ratios: one figure represented 20 to 50 actual men in a unit. For WWII alone, It seemed, virtually all the rules used one model = one tank, and one figure = one man. It was years before we got away from that, helped first by Arnold Hendrick's 1944 rules and then by Frank Chadwick's Command Decision. In the past ten years or so, about the only one: one rules have been Western Gunfight sets, and has joined the rest of the gaming world in using Units on the table top, where a given stand or model represents (usually) a platoon or more of actual troops/vehicles.

Now, the ol' pendulum seems to be swinging back towards smaller scale gaming: skir- mish, or very nearly skirmish-size actions. There were no less than three sets of rules based on that level of WWII game released at HISTORICON:

1. CrossFire, by Artie Conliffe: each stand represents a squad, with separate figures for platoon, company, or higher commanders.
2. Battleground from the Midwest, in which each figure represents one man, each model one vehicle/gun.
3. Point of Anack, the WWII module for Bob Jones 'PICOUET' rules. This is a triple- threat set of rules, with no less than three different scales. The lowest level is, you guessed it, Skirmish, with each figure representing one man.

There is also at least one other set under development at the 'near skirmish' scale of one stand = one squad, but just from the rules already out there you get the point: there is a con- siderable move away from the larger-size game of the Command Decision or Spearhead type and back to the lowest-level of battle. Parenthetically, when I started doing this column al- most 18 months ago I asked people to write in and tell me what local garners were "up to' in world war two gaming. In almost every response there was some comment about the local group trying to write rules, or modify board game rules (Avalon-Hill's Advanced Squad Leader being mentioned most often) for games at a lower level than the platoon used in Command Decision and Spearhead.

Now, I am not going to try to comment specifically on the rules just released. Except for CrossFire, which I already reviewed last issue, I have barely had a chance to read the other sets, let alone play them enough to evaluate them properly. I would like to make some comments concerning skirmish level games in the world war two period. I'm going to group these into two major areas, which I call Modern War Is Not An Individual Sport and Common Sense Is Not Enough.

Modern War Is Not An Individual Sport

Although all modem armies write and speak a lot about individual initiative and the individual soldier in their publications, the fact is that, In practice, the individual never acts alone In modern war. Even a sniper is part of a team, usually including a second man (or woman) as a spotter. Having just spent some time going through US, German, and Soviet infantry manuals for the WW11 period, I found one thing common to all three: the rifle/ infantry squad was the basic tactical unit. Even when it was divided into light machine gun and rifle gruppen, or 'fire teams', the squad was expected to act as a single unit. In fact, the only infantry squad I've found in the WWII period that was not the most basic maneuver and tactical unit was in the US Marine Corps. There, after the example of Carlson's famous Raider Battalion, the Corps by mid-war was using the two Fire Teams, each of which had a light automatic weapon (BAM, as the basic tactical unit.

With crew served weapons like mortars and machine guns the individual is even less likely to act on his own - that's why they call them -crew served', after all. This is equally true of armored vehicles, where, as one astute observer noted, 'the crew is carried along together regardless of their individual propensities..." What we have in a"skirmish' game, then, is really a squad level (or "fire team level") game. Even at this level we have to allow for some individual action, though, despite the official doctrine and manuals. Why?

Because War is a human activity, that's why. Regardless of the importance of the squad or team, there are occasions when one individual makes all the difference between success and failure. This can be an official leader - the inspiring lieutenant or knowledgeable sergeant. It can also be the classic "hero" - the single soldier with a bazooka who takes out the tank, or the single surviving machine gunner that stops the entire enemy company. On the one hand, these exceptional individuals are the reason that medals are issued, on the other hand, they are one of the major components that make low level gaming interesting

All of which leads me to believe that the best WWII skirmish-level game will have to combine elements of the unit games at higher levels with the Wild West Gunfight rules that emphasize individual skills, but the individual aspects will only come into play in exceptional circumstances. If figures are individually mounted, the answer might be to have the entire squad test for movement/ action as a group. Individuals who stray from the group being much less likely to accomplish anything (in the individual, military tactics tend to take a back seat to Self Preservation!).

One possibility (which I'm going to work on myself as soon as I get some time - like about Labor Day if I'm lucky) would be to modify a semi-skirmish rules set from another period. I have in mind the Brother Against Brother rules from HO. These were originally written for the US Civil War, and have recently been issued in a new edition with modifications included for the French & Indian War or American Revolution. They use a 10-man "squad" or section for the basic unit, with one Leader in the squad and figures mounted individually. Squads move, act, and test morale as a unit. Since WWII squads ranged from about 8 to 13 men with a squad leader and one or more assistants, the basic move/act/morale functions could be practically the same. BAB requires passing morale to 'charge', which could, in WWII terms, be modified to require a morale pass for any action where the squad members expose themselves to fire. On a suitably seldom and random card draw or die roll, some individual in the squad, instead of reacting according to doctrine and good sense, might become eligible for a Heroic Act. This sort of combination of Squad level action by doctrine with occasional attacks of total irrationality Is, I think, the proper way to simulate world war two skirmish fights.

Common Sense Is Not Enough

There is an interesting problem that shows up at the lowest level of world war two gaming, or at least, at levels below the "platoon stand" that has been common in recent years. I confess this is a problem that I never noticed until I began running games for play test purposes last year at the squad-section level. The problem is that most garners don't know much about real world small unit tactics. As I said, I never would have noticed this because I spent twenty years in the US Army, and many of the people I game with are veterans or active duty soldiers from Fort Lewis. The most common complaint from garners that played world war two scenarios where they had to actually maneuver platoons and companies was, however, that they weren't really sure they "knew enough about the right tactics'.

Blinding flash of the obvious: the real armies send people to schools for six months or more to learn how to be platoon leaders. Arguably the best of them, the German army in world war two, spent up to 13 months training junior lieutenants before they'd let them take charge of a platoon, and they had to have experience as a squad-leading sergeant before they'd even let them start the training!

Which means that, inevitably, world war two skirmish games are going to resemble Hollywood a lot more than they are going to resemble Fort Benning or Wildflecken. If we were out to train new lieutenants, this would be a Very Bad Thing. Luckily, we're here to have fun ideally to learn a little while we're at it, but first and foremost, to have fun. Therefore, although a good set of WWII skirmish rules should be reasonably realistic, they don't have to be morbidly so. Bottom line is that a front line Infantryman in world war two lasted 90 days in the front lines: at the end of that time, he was either dead, wounded, or went crazy (at one time the US Army was evacuating more men for 'battle fatigue" or psychological casualties than for physical wounds). So, a little Hollywood isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as ridiculous activities aren't rewarded - historical with a bit of fantasy, rather than hysterically fantastic.

There is one final thing to note about world war two skirmish-level games. Scenarios come from different sources. For a large scale game involving, say, a brigade or division, as In Command l:)ecision or Spearhead, most of the scenarios either come from, or bear close resemblance to, historical engagements. Down at the squad - platoon- company level, the historical battle is usually just background: whether the woods you're advancing through is the Huertgen Forest or the Nameless Copse is not material to the platoon leader on the spot. For the gamer, this means that a lot of skirmish scenarios can be generated by all kinds of 'micro battles': .we was trying to take that farmhouse so we could dry our feet off, or'-this patrol don't have to fight, or even take a prisoner; all you gotta do is go out there and see how much fire you can draw..."

The best source for these are actual individual accounts of the fighting in world war two. Believe me, no one has enough imagination to make up even a fraction of the strange situations that occurred in the course of the war, and luckily, we don't even have to try. World War Two, In addition to official documentation literally by the ton, has also generated a mass of veteran's memoir material in all languages. You can find them everywhere, but just to keep you busy until the next issue, here are a few very good 'ground level' views of the war that I have found recently. Since a few columns ago I gave you some German material, here are some Allied accounts:

Roll Me Over: An Infantryman's World War II by Gantter, Raymond. 1997, Ivy Books (paperback). This is right down in the foxhole, a front line US Army "grunt" who arrived in Normandy while bodies were still washing up in the surf and made it all the way to Czechoslovakia by the end of the war.

Payoff Artillery - WWII by Armstrong, Frank H., 1993, Bull Run of Vermont . This is ac- tually the unit history of the US 283rd Field Artillery Battalion. However, the author was a Forward Observer with that battalion, so there are a lot of "vignettes" of how artillery and infantry worked together out on the "sharp end" of things.

Commanding the Red Army's Sherman Tanks by Loza, Dmitriy, 1996, University of Nebraska Press. For once, this is a low level account from the Russian side that is not over- whelmed with the usual Communist Ideology. Loza ended the war as a battalion commander of a tank unit equipped with Shermans, which Is interesting enough, but he includes a lot of small unit stories which just beg to be gamed.

On Infantry by English, John, 1984, Praeger. Not a scenario book, but the best single source guide to understanding how everybody's infantry expected to fight. Before you write or modify any set of rules for twentieth century skirmish-level gaming, reading this book is virtually required.