Modern Infantry in Wargames: Organization and Tactics Davies "I could not agree more that we tend to overweight games with heavy weapons as& have been carrying out experiments to try and overcome this I have found that one man "scale down" the genuine establishments pretty accurately to a factor of 1/6 which gives a fighting strength per battalion of about 1109 and, with a few modifications can reproduce organisations at a factor of 1/9. (The main problem there is that one must lower the power of mortars and artillery, ant simulate them at 1/6 to be able to include them in their correct 'places' in the formation. To show what the result is, a British infantry battalion at 1/9 appears as tb following - company officers are supernumerary if one wants them. H.Q. - 1 officer, 6 rifles. A Coy. - (1 officer), 12 rifles, 1 LMG, 1 Piat or bazooka. B Coy. - (1 officer), 12 rifles, 1 LMG, 1 x 2" mortar. C Coy. - (1 officer), as "All Coy. D Coy. - (1 officer) 12 rifles, 1 LMG, 3 SMG H.Q. Coy. - 1 officer, 3 SMG, 1 LMG, 1 Piat, 1 X 3" mortar, 1 x twin LMG for AA work, 12- 18 riflemen for defence only (signals, admin, etc). Transport allocation for a typical "marching" battalion would be: 2 x bren gun carriers and 1 Lt AA truck in H.Q. Coy., and a battalion allocation of 1 x 3 tonner, 3 Lt. trucks and one car or jeep (i.e. not enough to transport all troops). I am now trying to symbolise down to 1/12 which should produce a battalion of some 50 men and an artillery regiment (British) of two guns. There are some problems but no doubt they can be overcome. As you can see, the "weighting" of rifles in an ordinary rifle company is even greater than Mr. Scott supposes and the same, with slightly less force applies to the German side." Clark "I read Mr. Ian Scotts article with mixed feelings. While seeing the logic of his theory that infantry battles are best fought at battalion level, from a tactical point of view, I can see little in his article that bears upon the majority of wargamers, namely these who fight campaigns. His criticisms of the small company are very valid and I believe that the company should be dropped as the basis of a wargame force, and that it should be replaced by the battalion. After all, individual companies could do little in Wellington's day except fight another company, why then should we assume that the average infantry company could do any better in W.W.II when faced by tanks etc., which Mr. Scott claims that they can. The last World War proved that infantry, although the largest, were far from being the most important part of the army, a subordinate role to armour. If this had not been so, a situation not far different from 1914-18 surely would have resulted? Unless terrain favoured them, as in such situations as Stalingrad, the Bocage, Cassino, Keren or they were behind carefully prepared positions (Kursk) the modern infantry formations had difficulty in holding up one armoured force, let alone several divisions. I fail to see Mr. Scotts reasoning over support weapons, that they are there to support the fire of the infantry. In any number of books one reads of infantry advances being held up by 'cunningly' placed MG nests or of tanks thudding to a halt before a line of A/T guns. I have never read of an advance crashing down before a withering fire of a few infantrymen scattered over several hundred yards of ground. Seemingly, the beat and most effective infantry formations are those which are armed entirely with rifles and have the minimum of support and A/T weapons! All I can say to that is tell it to the Italians who, despite their lamentable image, had just as many guts as anyone else and were repeatedly smashed by armour, due to a lack of the very things that Mr. Scott says they did not really need. It rifles are so important why, by 1943 were nearly all Russian units armed with sub- machine guns, the Germans were upping their number of sub-machine gunners and developing a general purpose weapon to supersede the rifle and the sub-machine gun, and the British and Americans were going ever to light machine guns. In an attempt to preserve the role of infantry Mr. Scott seems to have hacked up the facts to preserve his own ideas. If this be so, and he is in so much love with the infantryman I suggest he goes back to the days of Napoleon, or Moltke, or the Beer war but please don't let him romp all ever World War II in such a fashion. I think that I should say something about my own rules which I would be the first to agree are about 50% off the actual events that they attempt to portray although the overall picture does conform to reality. Tanks do advance through infantry formations, unless they are well dug in or the armour is very weak or the dice run very badly against the arsour. Infantry who fight infantry on an even basis usually results in stalemate, as it often was (which started the practice of using S.P. and Assault guns in the German and tanks in the case of the allied army to support the infantry), another point against Mr. Scott's down-grading of support weapons, although it is also a negation of true armoured theory, We are fighting the Russo-German conflict which is a rather difficult war to fight battalion by battalion so that battles are nearly always fought on a divisional scale or larger. This leads to rather cramped battlefields and high casualties but does make us keep a wary eye on losses and one of us pulls out before things get too ridiculous, leaving large numbers of prisoners behind. This is quite realistic when you think of the number of prisoners taken during the last war. Formations are based around the battalion (German - 15 infantry, 1 officer, 1 20m A/T, 1 MG, 1 flamethrower; Russian - 14 infantry, 1 officer, 1 MG, 1 Mortar; 'Others' - 10 infantry, 1 officer, 1 MG) the German A/T and Mortar units are grouped about the Brigade/regiment (3 battalions) as are the Russian A/T guns. In all cases field artillery is based on the division and heavy guns are based on the division in the German army and on the Corps in the Russian. This adoption leads to the German division having an edge in gun and manpower (except in mortars) which was close to reality while the 'Others' (Italians, Rumanians and Hungarians) are materially weaker. They were in 1942 when, an the Don the Rumanian front cracked in under a week and the Italian in about two days not as many believe due to cowardice but because of a lack of heavy and even medium support weapons. Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 104 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1970 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com