Reply To: A Couple of Questions About National Characteristics

[Guy Farrish]

I think its easy to deride ‘National Characteristics’ as sublimated racism (and I did when I read Quarrie’s variant of them in the 70s) and utter tosh. However when they are put in a context like Storr did they make more sense (he may have done it elsewhere but this is the bit that made a difference to me:
‘The creation and exploitation of surprise was central to German tactics in the Second World War. It does much to explain the difference in battlefield performance between German and US armies as described by van Creveld. As the Canadian military historian John English put it: “The German Army was, in fact, an army saturated with surprise. Mobility and manoeuvre were but the respective means to effect it in time and space.”‘(Storr, Jim. The Human Face of War, London: Birmingham War Studies
These are not racial characteristics but something flowing from a training regime and a command ethos. The acceptance that all German units performed better than US ones is a big one of course but the idea, for me clarifies something we could seek to include in wargames (whether you want them to be toy soldier, reality free, fun fests or something seeking to have some bearing on reality).
So – when and where? In conflicts where national training regimes can affect significantly an army (or some professional trained components thereof) but not in conflicts where ‘racial’ grouping is being portrayed as the only influence on an army (eg Austrian Napoleonic German units were stolid and slow, Hungarian units were mercurial, fast but brittle). So if an element of ‘nationally’ applied doctrine adversely or positively affects an army’s performance so be it, include it. After all, with hindsight we probably wouldn’t start from the position of the material many generals had to work with.

Practically however: what would you do to reflect the ‘steeped in surprise’ of the German army in a wargame? Well you could let it react more rapidly to reverses – organise a counter attack on a lost position faster. Allow tactical manoeuvre faster – not ‘they run faster’ – but the junior NCOs expect and react faster to the idea of counter attack and envelopment as a response to positional loss. This assumes a mechanism to reflect the transmission time of orders and/or the reaction times of commands.

So ‘All French people inherently possess the ‘Furia Francese’, perhaps not. ‘Troops thoroughly inculcated with the spirit of the ‘flight to the front’ using the the pas gymnastique’ perhaps.