OI, HOHENZOLLERN, NO!
"I have no reserves but the sentries at my gate. I will take them with me to where the fighting is thickest, and the last of the English will die fighting."
The Great War has become fashionable again, and there is a great deal of long-overdue revisionism underway. The two recent chunky paperbacks published by Leo Cooper are packed with fascinating essays on the Somme and Passchendaele respectively. So I was interested to see that S&T are developing an operational level game system for the entire war; issue 186 includes games on both Mons and the Marne, future battles will include Verdun and the Argonne in 1918. I have to say that I strongly doubt whether a single system can work for the very different styles of warfare practised in 1914, 1916 and 1917-18 but that may reflect my own difficulty coming up with the same thing. It would be very instructive to produce an overall system in which the progressive tactical developments could be introduced.
The copy I bought has a problem with the map: The Marne appears in grey (as if among the slag heaps of Mons) but the Mons map is fine. The counters are clearly printed and sensibly colour-coded across the top to identify each corps. This makes setting up much quicker and should be made compulsory. The BEF appears in red, which jars here, just as it did in David Isby's To the Green Fields Beyond. What's wrong with Khaki? I suppose every thin line of Brits has to be red. Scales are 2 miles per hex and 2 turns to the day. The basic tactical unit is the brigade, so a typical German corps consists of four infantry brigades, the corps artillery, the integral cavalry regiment and the headquarters. Combat ratings are generally 7 for a British brigade and 6 for a German: since British brigades had four battalions to the Germans' six, that makes the Old Contemptibles almost twice as good man-for-man as the average beer-swilling, sausage-eater. Quite right too. Worse is to follow for the men in grey. Their fearsome artillery has a firepower rating of 5 against 2 for the British, but the British get two artillery units to the Germans' one. And the British guns have a four hex range, against a three hex range for the Krupps.
The rules are short, clear and the map fits on to the kitchen table. There are only ten turns in the Mons scenario and 12 in the Marne. This looks dangerously like a playable issue game. I had a go at the battle of Mons, which I will quickly recount before assessing some of the problems with a system intended to simulate both the open (almost 19th century) warfare of 1914, trench warfare at Verdun, and the utterly different (virtually WW2-style) combat of 1917-18.
The German objective at Mons is to exit as many units as possible off the bottom of the map. Unfortunately the way is barred by the canal du Nord, with two British corps plus the cavalry division lining the banks. The BEF's objective is equally straightforward: kill as many Germans as possible. There is a problem with this, but I'll come back to it.
Game Opens
The game opens with three German corps swarming on to the map. Mons and its vital bridge were hit by III Corps, IX Corps went for the east flank and IV Corps for the western end. No takers for the central section of the canal, with its waiting line of SMLEs. Taking terrible liberties with Alexander von Kluck's surname, just as the BEF did at the time, the plucky Brits of 1st Corps promptly crossed the canal west of Mons to deliver a spoiling attack on some of the approaching Huns. One sneaky move overran the artillery of III Corps, which was a neat trick. Go! Dougie Go! General Haig's surprise blitz caught the Huns by surprise and severely upset their timetable for taking Mons. Although Mons eventually fell and the canal line was outflanked at the extreme western end (held by much weaker units of the cavalry division), the Germans lost a lot of combat factors taking it. They sustained further heavy casualties when the BEF concentrated eight brigades and most of their guns to recapture Mons. This counter-attack was followed by a well-timed withdrawal to the long ridge running parallel to and four-six miles south of the canal.
Just as the BEF position fell apart at Conde (where the canal du Nord joins the river Schelde), and German reinforcements piled on to the map, so elements of the British 4th division arrived in the south and hastened to plug the gap. For one turn, a German Jager regiment occupied Le Cateau with a whole German Corps hot-footing it down the road in a sort of 1914-style Arnhem, but the Jager were ejected and the line re-established. Although a few German cavalry units slipped past and off the map, the BEF was able to maintain an effective blockade across the map until the end of the game. As the Germans hurried forward, their leading units were regularly mauled by British counter-attacks, concentrating four or six brigades to inflict repeated losses on the Huns. This was done with increasing profligacy in the last two turns, as there was no downside to losing several units in the process: the front-line, although very rickety, did hold. The Germans lost enough combat factors to produce a British decisive victory.
Was this 1914? Well, the victory conditions make no account of Sir John French's acute consciousness that he commanded the only army we had. This can easily be fixed by giving the Germans VPs for enemy combat factors eliminated too. After all, if they fail to exit the map in time, but wipe out the BEF in the process, picklehaubes will remain in fashion for another hundred years.
The movement rates are a little strange. Infantry brigades have 4 MPs, and if "in command" (within 2 ordinary or 4 road hexes of HQ) they can move another 2pts. This translates to a possible 6 hexes (12 miles) per 12 hour turn; or 12 hexes (24 miles) if on a road: 48 miles in a day!. This is unlikely, as HQs only have 2MPs so a rapid advance by the infantry takes them "out of command". However, even if unable to use the second movement phase ("breakthrough phase") a brigade can cover 16 hexes (32 miles) per day along a road; and 8 hexes (16 miles) cross country. J.M. Craster's fine book, Fifteen rounds a minute is the edited diary of Major "Ma" Jeffreys, 2/Grenadier Guards. Entries for this period emphasise the sultry August heat and the debilitating marches the BEF had to make. On 21 August the Grenadiers travel ten miles ("very hot, tiring marches"); they cover 12 miles the next day and 14 miles on 25 August; on 28 August the make "another long march, about 19 miles" starting at 3.00 a.m.; a similar early start on 30 August begins "a very trying march in great heat and about 23 miles"; an eleven mile journey on 31 August is followed by another 22 mile marathon on 2 September. The marches of over 20 miles generally began at about 3.00 a.m. and were not completed until late afternoon: 4.30 p.m. and 6.00 p.m. are mentioned.
On the scale of the map here, a ten hex move is about the maximum infantry achieved in the actual campaign. Of course, all these marches were made on roads: the difficulty in the game stems from only showing a few of the historical roads and then doubling movement along them. The War Office maps of the Le Cateau area reveal a very extensive road net (and one of the key differences between this theatre of operations and eastern Europe -- remember we are looking at a game system intended for the whole war on all fronts). In the game, the few roads shown assume enormous importance. I wonder if they shouldn't have left them all off, or used something like the little triangles between hexes in BAOR. That way you can still see the towns, villages, ridges etc.; the detail is not obscured by a massive road net.
The uncluttering of the map produces another unwanted effect. The movement rules state that crossing a river requires an additional 2 MPs on top of the cost of entering the hex. So to cross the canal du Nord into a clear hex costs 3MPs. Headquarters units only have 2 MPs, so the Germans face a real bottleneck: their forces can only get past the canal on the bridge next to Mons. The bridge opposite Conde is not shown on the map, nor are other crossings between the two towns. Several VCs were won by Royal Engineer officers busy with the gun cotton in 1914, but the Germans did repair the blown bridges eventually--and this system doesn't allow for the odd unguarded gap. We ignored this rule, and allowed a German HQ to cross any river by spending its whole movement allowance doing so.
The game saw some very fluid fighting that ensued south of the canal, which pointed up another oddity. The phasing player moves, then fires his artillery, then the defender fires his guns, then the phasing player conducts infantry assaults. Hence an attacker can bring forward his guns and carry out a bombardment before the defenders' artillery opens fire. OK for the BEF with their longer ranged guns, but a bummer for the Huns when Dougie Haig and his Corps launch one of the Brits' sharp counter-attacks. It somehow seems more appropriate that the non-phasing player's guns should have first crack: something I'll experiment with later.
In both scenarios the Germans receive a single replacement point per turn. To bring back a complete unit (even a 1 step one) costs two points. This implies that the Germans cannot rebuild any artillery units they manage to lose; whereas the French, who get 2pts per turn in the Marne scenario, obviously have a few "75"s to spare. This was a double problem in the Mons battle, as the British have two artillery units per corps to the Germans' one (albeit factor "2" as opposed to "5") but consequently better able to take damage. We allowed the Germans to rebuild their guns by saving up their replacement points, but this needs to be clarified or addressed in the errata.
Command and Control
The command and control feature central to the game is the "breakthrough" phase in which everyone except HQs and guns can move up to half their MP allowance again, provided they are "in command". Since HQs are very slow, and friendly units do not negate enemy ZOCs for line-of-communication purposes, so you can easily end up "out of command" after a modest advance into enemy front-line. Column shifts penalise units for being "out of command" and "suppressed" by artillery strikes: the tactical method the BEF repeatedly succeeded with in our test game.
There are two predictable exceptions to the breakthrough rules. Those sneaky fellows the stosstruppen do not have to be "in command" to use breakthrough movement, so your front-line will leak like a sieve once Ernst Jünger and his pals show up in the 1917-18 scenarios. And in an embarrassing instance of patriotism triumphing over historical analysis, American infantry brigades have the same ability. (CHV: Aha, the America Must Be Best syndrome sighted again, full speed ahead ramming!!!!). In reality, they weren't horny-handed sons of the frontier, with some sort of instinctive appreciation of the latest tactics; US infantry suffered severe losses at first, emulating the British in 1916, although they did learn very quickly - see Infantry magazine during the 1930s for numerous examples.
The people with the greatest right to take umbrage with this are of course, the Canadians: the Canadian Corps was without doubt one of the most professional units of its size in the world by 1917. It also reflects the "traditional" view of 1917-18, that the clever Germans invented modern infantry tactics while the British built tanks. However, it is becoming increasingly accepted that the British army was tactically on a par with the Germans (if not actually better, as Paddy Griffith has persuasively argued) by early 1917. Tactical quality was also more evenly spread, with the possible exception of certain divisions annihilated in 1916. Whereas the Germans concentrated all their best men into the attack divisions, and by extension all their worst men into the rest. (CHV: A colonelcy available for me in the 5th Rest Division then?).
I have to say that the Mons game failed to convince, but I will persevere because I like the subject. In addition to the above, there are no provisions for digging in, which the BEF did, admittedly in primitive fashion, and even the Germans sometimes managed if their officers really insisted (see "The Advance to Mons", Captain Bloehm). One feels that a brigade that has had one or two turns in which to prepare its positions should be a tougher proposition to attack than one that spent the previous 12 hours marching 16 miles...The artillery rules need changing too. British accounts repeatedly stress the power of the German guns and lament the fact that we only had a single 4-gun battery of 60-pdrs at divisional level for long range counter-battery work. The Germans had long range 15 cm guns and batteries of 20.3 cm howitzers; British infantry officers remembered the hail of "Jack Johnsons" and "Woolie Bears" that landed on their shell scrapes. I plan to let the non-phasing guns go first and bring the BEF batteries in line with the German organisation: one counter per corps. Then perhaps, Alfred von Schlieffen's cunning plan might come a little closer to fruition. CHV: Enough of these Baldric references Monsieur!
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© Copyright 1998 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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