[Whirlwind]

Thanks very much for posting, it was interesting to read your comments on the show and the games. It is good to see how the show has got bigger over the years – that at least is an encouraging sign I think. And I second your hope that Dr Mike will be back next year.

I echo your thoughts on the shared responsibility (not quite the right word, but I can’t think of a better) that the gaming media, the manufacturers and the fans have for promoting their favoured scales and periods etc.

And lastly, I hope to get a couple of those Stugs on the table in the next month or so…

[Whirlwind]

That’s very kind Martin, I will have a look.

[Whirlwind]

Noel wrote:

It got me thinking about all the projects I spent loving hours upon hours researching, finding models, building and painting, buying books and rules and themed accessories… and then eventually giving away or selling. It seems to happen to a lot of us.

It still surprises me that people give away or sell projects that have completed miniatures and terrain.  Unless money or space are critical issues (this does not normally seem to be the case, although obviously if you have to, you have to), why not just keep them for the day when circumstances change?

[Whirlwind]

Hi Donald,

Some similar ground was covered in this one.

 

[Whirlwind]

@Just Jack,

Interesting.  That seems to mirror UK WW2 experience, but with less radios so more runners.  One surprising thing that I found was when researching for stuff in a recent thread – possibly the one on fire teams – a US Army study decided that radios actually made the soldiers carrying them slightly less effective at fighting, although it was still maybe worth doing anyway.  As you say, runners were very widespread in the British Army at the lower levels too until the widespread adoption of PRR, although there were lots of the improvised signal device type things too.

 

[Whirlwind]

Thanks both, I appreciate it.  I like to think of it as Sgt Cherry’s speed and aggression allowed him to be lucky…except for that German grenadier who missed at point-blank range.  That was pure fluke!

More seriously, because of the lack of morale rules and the fact that wounded enemies in these rules can still be fairly dangerous, it is mechanically harder to be in a position to take prisoners than in say Nuts! or the WRG Infantry Action rules and that is a definite weakness.

[Whirlwind]

Thanks kyoteblue – you  are too kind!

@JustJack – Thanks very much for the kind words and detailed comments.

Quite a few gamers have made DIY mats in the same way I have: some examples of the instructions are here and here and here

Agreed on the tactics side!  I wanted to at least start it out as you had in your game though and then see how it progressed from there.  Thanks very much for taking the time to detail how you would do it.  It does lead me onto a question though: were low-level signal plans common in WW2?  I have no real idea myself, except to say I don’t think I have read of many incidences of such things at low-level (section and platoon) although I have read of it in bigger operations.  Where any such plan is used, whistles and bugles and so on still seem to occur.  My sense is that runners – or if the commander does it himself, running – seemed to be used a lot more than in more recent times.  I would welcome some more knowledgeable input here.

Just Jack wrote:

And a summer break??? Surely you mean a break from work so you can get more games in 😉

I’m off work, but away from my stuff!  Some boardgames might happen.  August on the other hand is looking great so far for getting a ton of games in…

 

 

 

[Whirlwind]

Very nice, I really enjoyed that.

 

Jemima Fawr wrote:

Time and time again, we fight games that don’t end! It doesn’t matter how much time we allocate… 🙁

How does that happen (genuinely curious)?

[Whirlwind]

Thanks Jack.  I was kind of forced to bring it forward to Italy, since I don’t have any buildings in 15mm suitable for Tunisia, and no Germans in tropical uniform (which I imagine they were in Sicily?).  And thanks very much for the kind words about my set-up; I think it needs “a lot” of work before it is where I want it to be but for various reasons that will have to wait for 12 months or so.  So the focus will be on the figures and vehicles until then.  I have taken a bit of inspiration from your small unit campaigns and there are a couple of areas I would like to explore.

Sgt Cherry definitely showed why he was wearing the extra tapes in the attack on the first house, which was taken with a mixture of skill (using the ground) but also encouragement (keeping his men going in the face of fire – in game terms, consistently high rolls in the reaction to fire tests).  After that, it was lots of breathless work, getting his commanders together and re-organizing for each attack  – I am hoping that John D Salt will be pleased with the O Groups in the game!).  Of course, the Germans were ‘helping’ by carrying out a simple static defence.   Incidentally, right-flanking was definitely the way to go here: the left-flanking attack was a death-trap.  I played it so that the Germans would shoot as soon as they could draw a bead on a target, but it would have been much better for them to hold fire and then open up a bit closer.  I figured that the Germans wouldn’t know that they were left-flanking and it might just be a recce patrol moving up into the trees.  As luck would have it, the German main position around the two buildings was fairly blind towards the US right flank, so Sgt Cherry could carry out his “textbook” assaults – more knowledgeable people than me will have to comment on whether US troops would have approached the problem this way in the ETO 1943.  Anyway, as you say, although it looked similar, your Sgt Cherry actually faced a much tougher problem than mine did.

Hopefully there will be a couple more games over the next 10 days or so, then there will be a summer break for a month.

 

 

 

[Whirlwind]

Very nice.  What are you using for the mat and how did you make your flight stands?

[Whirlwind]

It is a big old slope, no doubt:

 

Mike wrote:

Can’t go far wrong with Baccus and Total Battle.

I think I bought some of the Total Battle Stuff from you.  They have done brilliant service, probably the most efficient pounds-for-use purchase I have ever made!

[Whirlwind]

How long did the game last?

[Whirlwind]

Thanks Norm.  No comments have come through yet, so possibly Blogger is playing up.

It is hard to make attacking a hedgerow a good bet in the rules.  It is quite hard to disrupt the defenders since fire is so relatively ineffective, and charging straight in is always going to be at less than even odds.  However, it is also quite difficult to attack out of enclosures, because the unit doing it will become disordered (unless there is a handy gate!).  So in this game neither side felt desperate enough to take the risk of bringing things to a conclusion, unless (unlikely) the musketry fire could make it a better than even proposition.

 

[Whirlwind]

Yes, great piece John. Given all that, I was wondering what you would consider the strongest (and weakest) historical sections in terms of firepower were?  I was just idly thinking that there really wouldn’t have been that much difference between a 1944-5 Panzer Grenadier section with StG44s and two MG42s and a US/UK 2013 section/squad with M4s/SA80s and two Minimis.  Although I do notice that a 3 BAR USMC squad should be the equal of a 2 MG42 German section.

John D Salt wrote:

Col. Gore-Langton, head of the Small Arms School when Jac Weller (“Weapons and Tactics, Rome to Berlin”) visited in 1966 was of the opinion that, while the German MGs were twice as good as Brens for keeping people’s heads down, a Bren was worth three of them when it came to hitting people.

I suppose that once you factor in the very low hit rates in combat, this is actually to the German MGs favour, if unintended.

John D Salt wrote:

One of Shelford Bidwell’s books contains the gunner proverb that “In peace, the cry is always for speed into action; in war, for weight of shell.” I would paraphrase that for the infantry to say that in peace, the cry is always for accuracy, in war, for weight of fire.

Very nice! (although there always seems to be more emphasis on having an accurate weapon for long-range sniping too).  The argument I have heard for the Bren / LSW type weapon (although agreeing with your preference for the first from these two) seems to be that that type of weapon actually achieves suppression better by getting more of the actual rounds fired to be within a distance where troops on the receiving end are going to be suppressed.  The crux here seems to be how close a round needs to be to achieve that: if it really needs to be within 1m, then the more accurate weapon would have the advantage, if it is wider then the one getting more rounds down would be the one to pick.  The historical record seems to favour the latter.

John D Salt wrote:

From Lex Macauley’s “Long Tan” I gather that charging magazines in action is nothing like as straightforward a task as it is in training, and it is better to have ammo supplied in mags

Absolutely to the last, although speed loaders are good too. Trying to load individual bullets by hand in the jungle in action with sweat and the shakes must have been an absolute nightmare.

 

[Whirlwind]

I humbly disagree with James Holland.  I will submit 3 reasons:

1 – The “man hours” & “raw materials” argument is fine, but you wouldn’t want to make the mistake of thinking that thereby a Sherman was a better tank than a Panther.  It may be strategically better to have more inferior weapons than fewer quality ones – that doesn’t make the inferior weapon better, in itself.

2 – The author makes the mistake of thinking that because accuracy diminishes as the barrel heats up, that is a key deficiency in the MG34/42 series.  It isn’t.  Having a weapon that you can just keep on firing for more seconds than the enemy (regardless of precise accuracy, within reason) is going to win you the firefight.  It is a tangible thing, and the German MGs made a crucial difference – as the soldiers on the ground at the time explained (and soldiers today tend to agree with them).

3 – The author wants to downplay the testimony of the soldiers facing these things.  Fine.  But then surely there is a wealth of German testimony explaining the equally fearsome qualities of the BAR and the Bren?  As far as I can tell the average Allied serviceman  was quite discriminating in his fear for things which really needed fearing.

 

 

 

[Whirlwind]

John D Salt wrote:

Mind, 4% seems to me like a fairly brutal chop rate, as, if it were maintained, it would mean that only 36% of crews would complete a 25-mission tour.

I haven’t got it with me, but IIRC John Terraine, quoting a late 1942 study (16 Nov 1942, AIR20/2859?), said that the actual survival rate for torpedo bomber crews on a 25-mission tour was 17.5%.

[Whirlwind]

John D Salt wrote:

As always, the figures available are never quite the figures we want, and all this says nothing about the (probably much more important) effect of putting the ground attack pilot off his stroke.

Just thinking out loud, but I wonder if this could be done by comparing air attacks on ships as an easier dataset to compile?  The difference in effectiveness between attacking unarmed ships / surprised ships and defended ships might at least give an order of magnitude for the effect.

[Whirlwind]

Slightly OT, but anyone looking to do the thing in a few hours could do worse than have a go at Vulcan

Also slightly OT but maybe of some use, the Megablitz rules have a slightly reduced Tunisian campaign scenario inside.  It is designed for miniatures to represent units in a playable way (typically a unit/stand is a Bn/Regt, except Recce is done by Pl)

[Whirlwind]

Hi John,

See here for US tech kit (without ECM).  Seems to be in-line with the New Scientist article.

Here is the current Brit kit list.  If you add the missing comms and ECM kit back in, then it does seem to reach the weights that soldiers were actually carrying.

All the best

 

 

 

 

[Whirlwind]

Various Baccus Napoleonics being re-purposed as War of 1812 US Army:

[Whirlwind]

John D Salt wrote:

One of the things that has been rather forgotten since then is that two equal fireteams was only one of the possibilities. Another suggested option was to group the section as a gun group containing both LSWs and a rifle group with the rest of the secton, it being claimed that two LSWs firing 60 rds/min could offer the same degree of suppression of the objective as a GPMG firing 120 rds/min.

Yes, somehow that finer point never seemed to trickle its way down.

 

Many thanks for some very interesting posts, everyone.

[Whirlwind]

Many thanks Mike

[Whirlwind]

I’m actually right at the bottom of my lead pile.  I am going through unused 6mm figures and seeing if I can make a few additional bases worth of troops, plus a few extra command stands, casualty markers and such-like.  There are a couple of random 28mm figures in there too: mainly old Partizan freebies I think!  Am I really going to get round to painting Mrs Marple…actually if there is anyone who desperately needs any of the more recent Partizan free figures let me know, I may have one going spare…

I am awaiting the arrival of a parcel from Baccus with lots of new Scots Covenanter foot in it.

 

[Whirlwind]

MartinR wrote:

Modern Armies, British included, can only really be said to be organised that way once each section had a couple of Minimis.

I think the usage in the British Army comes from the time of the adoption of the LSW.

[Whirlwind]

Les Hammond wrote:

Fireteam sounds like something we’ve recently imported from across the pond?

I can’t find anything for the phrase “fire team” before the USMC used the term in WW2, having used the term “fire group” in the few years preceding that.

See here for details.

 

[Whirlwind]

Les Hammond wrote:

Is there a British WWII equivalent? Fireteam sounds like something we’ve recently imported from across the pond?

Rifle group and gun group.

WW1 had a bomber group too.

 

[Whirlwind]

It is very interesting to notice the effect that it had.  I wonder if there are any reports from armies other than the British.  And more key perhaps, it would be great to find a German artillery officer’s memoirs who mentions doing this trick deliberately.

Of very tangential interest, the only instance  I can think of someone employing similar psychology at the least was also German from WW2:  IIRC Adolf Galland would fire his own guns if bounced to convince the following pilot on seeing the additional tracer that he himself was being fired upon (Galland claimed that it did work).

 

[Whirlwind]

Yes, the orders of battle contain information down to unit (regt/bn/bty) level for the Sikh army too.  But unfortunately it appears the book won’t be out until 2019.

[Whirlwind]

I didn’t ask him specifically about the Sikh units, I just asked generically about the detail.  There are plenty of orders of battle for individual Sikh armies though here, so maybe there is that detail.  I would email the guy on The Virtual Armchair General site and ask him to tell you.

[Whirlwind]

Hi,

I did get in touch with the author Andrew Preziosi to ask him about this.  He says that the orders of battle in the book are very detailed – “the final word”, down to regimental / battalion & battery strength and including unit commanders’ names.

The Virtual Armchair General also sells his orders of battle.  Link here, including a sample OOB to show the level of detail (loving the “Officer Along for the Ride” section!).

 

Hope that helps

 

[Whirlwind]

@Paskal,

This really isn’t my period, but FWIW…

Most of the standard works don’t seem to have this detail.  This seems to be because the published / available / surviving reports seem to be focused on the divisional-level and above (although there are some really interesting accounts) – the stuff out there on the internet seems to be based on Fortescue and Gough et al.  A new book is supposed to be published about it: http://www.helion.co.uk/new-and-forthcoming-titles/the-sikh-wars-source-book-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-khalsa-1799-1849.html

That said, the author’s work up to this point only listed divisional strengths plus individual unit names, so unless he has found something new then you may be stuck.  I haven’t checked Nafziger.  I know the author is active on TMP so you could ask him there, if that is an option (if not, for any reason, would you like me to post the question up there for you?)

I must re-iterate, this isn’t my period at all, so hopefully I am dead wrong.

 

 

 

[Whirlwind]

Thanks Norm.  Polemos really doesn’t stint on its requirement for bases of Horse (4 bases of Horse per 500 troopers, as opposed to 1 base of Foot for 500 infantry – that said, the rules work fine, if a little differently, if one uses slightly different ratios.  Halving the number of Horse bases works fine, as does 1 base of Foot to c.750 Foot and 1 base of Horse to c.180-200 Horse).

The Polemos rules use the Brigade as a meaningful command element, but not one for morale.  I would be very interested in hearing from those who know more, as to whether the brigade and the “wing” did have morale effects as well as being part of the command structure.

[Whirlwind]

John D Salt wrote:

Are these 1/300th scale, or 1/285th?

I would be interested in knowing this too.  IIRC the scale Baccus uses for its figures is about 1:275 (According to some posters on TMP!) but if it is done using 3D modelling then I suppose the exact scale should be easy to determine.

[Whirlwind]

No, I haven’t unfortunately.

[Whirlwind]

Howard Whitehouse wrote:

…and then the Warhammer version, which is the worst possible version of the mechanism…

Why was that version the worst possible (not a Warhammer player)?

 

[Whirlwind]

Ha! Thanks Guy.

I’m not quite sure how things will turn out, my life isn’t that predictable, but I imagine there will be a hiatus when I reach December 1643: this will be the period when I am painting up a Covenanter Army.  Baccus have stated that they will release the Foot at least at Salute, but I don’t imagine that the Horse will be out until May.  It takes a while for new figures to reach me, so I don’t think I will be able to advance to January 1644 before June at the earliest.  July is looking busy for me, so the second half of the re-fight may well get underway in earnest in August.

 

[Whirlwind]

Bandit wrote:

• “So you can control the user experience” – More true than one realizes, at least in the intent, PDF only does so much, ePUB – as an example – offers drastically more options, so when choosing a platform one evaluates the feature set and says, “Hey look at all the cool[er] things we can offer!”, whether those happen ends up being a separate decision point down the road.

This is the interesting one to me, in that, for me, it sells me a lot of features I have no or marginal interest in (e.g. spinning around a picture to give the impression of 3D) but eliminates simple but key features that I do want (ability to transfer the product between hardware of *my* choosing; not being dependent upon internet access to access the material).

I would be happier with the idea of buying content through proprietary software if that were given specifically as the reason for doing so and so everyone had to do it- but I can’t remember that ever being mentioned.  For example, when Battlegames was taken over by Atlantic and the digital side was run through exact editions, no party involved said “and we need to do this because Battlegames is losing out on significant sales because of pirating”.  This wasn’t given as a reason when Miniature Wargames did the same with Pocketmags after the Warner takeover.  And one would wonder what WSS, TooFatLardies and THW are doing by still selling pdfs, in that case.

[Whirlwind]

Mike wrote:

Is there a price difference in content you can buy and own to some you can access via a service?

Not AFAIK in the examples I gave above, it appears to be a more universal move.

Mike wrote:

Using Amazon as an example… You can buy films on Amazon to watch. They are stored online and you access them via your Amazon account. As soon as you delete your Amazon account you can no longer access those films even though you paid for them.

Yes, sort of.  But the difference being that (again, AFAIK) Amazon didn’t sell downloadable films in a more open format first (so I could use whichever player I liked for instance) and then decided to stop doing that and only let you watch stuff through there online service.

[Whirlwind]

Mike wrote:

Not familiar with those platforms but it seems like they are moving away from downloading files that can then be passed on for free to other people, to a system that reduces/prevents that?

Possibly Mike, I am really not sure.  Although if true, it would seem odd that everyone wouldn’t then do it; and that I can buy a music mp3 from Amazon that can easily be passed for free but can’t do the same for a recording.

[Whirlwind]

Really interesting Norm, thanks.  I am going to have a long think about that before replying properly.

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