I have often wondered why no game has ever been made on the subject of the British night bombardment of Germany during the Second World War. One obvious reason is that the Americans hardly participated. A second reason could be that the campaign carries the stigma of a possible war crime. (CHV: good grief Charlie Brown!) Apart from that, it is possible that designers regard it as a difficult subject to game.
During the years I have waited for a game of Bomber Command's war to appear, I have of course been making my own thoughts about what elements to use in such a game. First of all, I think the situation favours a solitaire game. After Bomber Command AOC-in-C Arthur Harris had planned a raid, he had no influence on the course of the battle any longer, so he went to sleep and heard about the results next morning. Although planning can be very interesting, I think that most gamers would dislike just watching as the raid unfolds. The German side is entirely different.
The Luftwaffe night fighter command was continually able to influence the outcome of a raid, so the only active player during a raid would be the German player. On the other hand, a solitaire system where Bomber Command's actions would be governed by a raid-generating paper engine leaves the player to defend the Reich, and I realise that this situation would probably be of limited interest for many English speaking solitaire gamers. For this reason it could be necessary to design the game so that it can also be played by for two players.
As a working title I would suggest "Reaping the Whirlwind" from Harris' famous quote "They sowed the wind - and now they are going to reap the whirlwind". The game is after all about the attempt to torch the cities of Germany so if the emphasis is on solitaire play the title also suggests that the player is at the receiving end.
I imagine a game much like the equivalent of the old Yaquinto game Bomber (on the American day offensive). This is a one-map treatment with a scenario per raid and campaign scenarios for groups of raids. It features a simple but clever system to handle the varying day lengths that could just as easily be modified to handle night lengths.
Probably the only gameable period of the night bombing campaign is the period after the bomber stream was introduced in order to pierce the Himmelbett defences. The bombers were sent in waves, and the aircraft density rose steadily during the course of the campaign. A counter per wave and a "follow the leader" rule would do nicely. The number and types of aircraft (and their height bands) in the waves could be handled on a piece of paper, helping to lower the counter density.
The allowed number of aircraft in a wave could be handled by a rule allowing more and more aircraft per wave according to a fixed schedule, or possibly as a result of having taken high casualties in a previous raid. Crossing a Himmelbett hex could cause some attrition to occur, unrelated to the size of the wave, thus showing how dense waves could minimise the effect of the Himmelbett defences. Collisions could cause attrition proportional to the number of aircraft in the wave (handled after the raid, or when dropping the bombs). Higher height bands should make it more unlikely for the Germans to down a bomber, at the expense of bombing precision.
The scale is somewhat of a problem. Harris tried to plan the path of the bomber stream so that it avoided well defended hexes, and presumably also so that it avoided the various radio and light beacons that were used to guide the night fighters around in the dark. However, these were positioned so close that it requires a very large map to accommodate this. I think abstraction and reduction is necessary here, probably leaving out a number of cities and beacons in order to reduce the map to a manageable size.
The bomber stream must be rated for "compactness", indicating the navigational skills of the pilots, and having an effect on bombing results and vulnerability to flak and fighter attack. Bombers straying from the stream would not be covered by the "window" anti-radar clouds released from the bomber stream, and would be easy targets. The route to the target should be in a limited number of "legs", with each leg decreasing the compactness of the stream because of navigation problems. Wind should also be a factor decreasing the compactness.
Weather was an important factor, and sensible weather rules will be a challenge to design. There is the question of wind and cloud over Germany, and fog over the bases in England and Germany (could be different when starting and landing). A weather forecast would be the major factor to considerate when planning a campaign game and deciding when to launch a raid (another factor would be lighting). The weather can of course be different from the forecast and some plausible system for generating weather and forecasts must be devised.
The German side is best represented as single night fighter Gruppen, unfortunately making up a lot of counters. The main problem for the night fighters was their limited endurance. Accordingly, if the German controllers misjudged the intentions of the Bombers, many Gruppen would never reach the bomber stream. They could sometimes make up for the lack of endurance by refuelling, but most of the time, the raid was over before they could get airborne again.
There should be about four different kinds of German air defences: One kind would be semi-static flak that would be present at all possible target hexes. Some of these units could move about, but not from one day to the next, so this could really only take place in long-term scenarios. Compactness is important here because straying bombers would often hit flak areas that they were never supposed to pass through. I am not sure how this can at best be dealt with, but possibly this attrition should simply be applied at the end of the raid.
Another kind would be the completely static Himmelbett hexes covering the coastline from Belgium to Denmark. For simplicity's sake I would assume that they are always manned sufficiently to cause a light attrition of about two bombers whenever the bomber stream passes through one of these hexes. My reading seems to indicate that from a compact wave, at most one or two bombers can be downed, the odds of picking out a single bomber being about 1/3, and two bombers rather unlikely. Compactness plays a big role here because straying bombers would actually pass through many other Himmelbett hexes, here represented by doubling or tripling the attrition of a single hex. On the other hand, wave density (the number of aircraft per counter) should have no effect, so that the more aircraft that can be crammed into a wave, the more aircraft are going through unharmed.
Some cities also had smoke screen defences. These should only be effective if there is little wind and the German player has been able to determine the target city well in advance, in which case they create a "cloud" condition. Next come the active defences consisting of the night fighter Gruppen. All units were able to employ the Wilde Sau technique where they had to employ visual means of detection to shoot down the bombers. This was only possible over a searchlight-protected city, a burning target city, or (much less effective) by throwing out flares. The illumination from the ground would be susceptible to clouds, even though the defenders tried to make up for this by illuminating the clouds from below.
The night fighters equipped with window-proof radar could use the Zahme Sau technique. This consisted of teaming up with the bomber stream and taking out the bombers one after another. A running commentary over the radio informed all pilots of the whereabouts of the stream, but the pilots that still used the older radar sets had really a negligible chance of hitting a bomber.
As far as I can tell, the British never found a means to counter this, making night raids an expensive proposition right to the end of the war. When the American day offensive cleared the skies of German planes, Bomber Command increasingly turned to day raids for this reason.
When the anti-radar Window strips were first used, it was a complete shock to the Germans, and the bomber losses dropped sharply. But within a few days the German had already recovered partly by implementing the Wilde Sau technique and the running commentary that would be the main element of the Zahme Sau technique. Accordingly, the Allies should have the choice of when to start using Window, but once used, the effect will quickly wear off, and the Germans will be prompted to use Zahme Sau at an earlier date.
Bomber Command had lots of problems with navigation and bombing precision. For this reason a number of tactics and gadgets were introduced. Tactics such as using a special pathfinder force or a master bomber should probably be ignored as the results were very uneven, and in any case such tactics were used in most raids, so one raid would not be much different from any other raid. Gadgets such as the navigational aids like Oboe and H2S should have an effect on the bombing results. Oboe was the most accurate but had a limited range only including Hamburg and the Ruhr. H2S improved with time but in many cases did not improve accuracy by much. Possibly, only Oboe should be simulated with a special rule, assuming that H2S is used in all other cases. Maybe each city should be rated for their H2S profile and get a modifier for this.
One interesting tactic that the British used was the spoof-raids. These consisted of a few Mosquito bombers throwing out a lot of Window, thus looking like a main force bomber stream, but they only carried few bombs, and their effect were, apart from being a nuisance, to draw German forces off in a wrong direction. Having wave counters that only contain a few Mosquitoes easily simulates this.
The victory conditions should in some way represent the true purpose of the bombing: The stated aim was to terrorise the German people into submission, and although this was far from achieved, nobody knows what would have happened if the British had succeeded in pulling off a string of 'Hamburgs'. The German leadership certainly suspected the steadfastness of its people. While Bomber Command never achieved a victory, it was also never defeated. The bombers continued to spread fear and death to the cities of Germany right to the end of the war. I believe that any benefit the British had out of the strategic bombing campaign in the form of men and resources the Germans spent on their night defences was balanced by the enormous resources the British themselves spent on the bombing campaign.
On the other hand, the campaign was a political necessity: for a long time this campaign was the only way the British were able to strike back at the Reich. To make a complex matter simple, I would concede victory points for two things: For keeping down losses, and for successful bombardments.
After each raid there should be some sort of evaluation, according to weather and other factors, of how much was achieved by the bombers. The possibility of a firestorm should also be incorporated. On the other hand, that the British did not know what kind of damage they had inflicted, was an important factor. For instance during the Battle of Berlin Bomber Command sometimes did not know when they had a great success because of the bad weather conditions, and at other times they did not realise that they had been wasting bombers for nothing, and so did not quit the campaign in time. Perhaps this uncertainty factor should be ignored.
It will be very difficult to produce an order of battle for this game. It seems that there are plenty of books that can give a British OB, but the Germans largely destroyed their archives towards the end of the war, so there will be a lot of (guess)work figuring out the German OB. I have seen a few German books, but I have not found much useful so far. It seems that some historians have written histories for single Geschwaders, but I have only scratched the surface by collecting a few home pages that might be a starting point.
Well, these are my thoughts on this subject, and I sincerely hope someone will take the up challenge some day and design the game that so richly deserves to be designed.
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© Copyright 2000 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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