Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Reading Roundup: Wars Past and Future

Not a lot of gaming or painting getting done of late.  I have my head down trying to generate the first draft of my MA thesis in time to meet an April defence date and a return to the uniform and whatever military posting awaits me.  In between thinking and writing about religious pluralism in the Canadian Armed Forces, I do however pick up the odd book or read something non-thesis related just to give my mind a rest.  Here are some reports and recommendations from that front.
 I never blogged anything about the Brad Pitt film Fury when I saw it last fall.  I went with my brother The Mad Colonel, a retired infantry and staff officer, and he was somewhat non-committal about it.  For my part I thought it excelled at catching the feel of tank warfare in World War Two, and the interaction between the characters rang true to what I know of soldiers.  Mind you,  I had some issues with the final scene, where a happy, intact SS battalion was marching around Germany in the last days of the war, singing lustily but had somehow forgotten its antiarmor drills, but I digress.



Recently I stumbled across this interview with Steven Zaloga, an American defence analyst and historian, who thought that given “the limits of what you can do in Hollywood … I thought it was very authentic”.  That made me feel a little more kindly towards the film, and even want to give it a second look.

I was also interested in some of Zaloga’s criticisms of some of the accepted truisms on tank warfare in NW Europe, specifically that the Sherman was a deathtrap (Zaloga says the “Ronson” image is “nonsense”), or that the Allies paid five Shermans lost to take out one German tank (Zaloga attributes this to cliche to an over reliance on British authors and their experiences of Normandy, not true of US-German kill rates at all).  Anyway the article is quite interesting and worth a read.  I found this bit especially interesting, given how war gamers and modellers love the big German tanks and often over-represent them on the table.

“To give you a general sense, in April of 1945 the Germans have about 90 tanks on all of the Western Front.  All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers.  They had a handful of Tigers.  They had about 400 other armoured vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that.  So they had just short of 500 armoured vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany.  At that point in time the United States had 11,000 tank and tank destroyers, to give you some sense of the disparity in forces."

Zaloga's forthcoming book Armored Champion is on my wish list - coming out from Stackpole this May.   Zaloga also recommends a book from his colleague Robert Forcyzk, Shwerpunkt: Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front, 1941-42.  Forcyzk knows German and Russian and uses sources largely unused by popular military historians.

The other day I posted on an oddity from the Cold War.

If future war is your thing, you might want to look at five short pieces imagining what the first shots of the next world conflict might look like.  A US think tank called The Atlantic Council and the War On the Rocks website recently sponsored a contest for creative writing submissions that imagined how such a conflict might spin up, and the five winners are posted here.  Hopefully it’s not a spoiler to let you know that drones and the internet figure prominently in these submissions, as does China and the kind of undeclared, deniable proxy wars currently being perfected by the Russians.   If you’re a resident of a Pacific country, these scenarios might be disturbing.  The conflicts imagined here pose an interesting challenge for wargames designers, in that a generation ago, all you had to do was imagine the Red Army and the Warsaw Pact rolling across the West German border and you’re away to the races.  These submissions suggest that the next war will be a lot more chaotic and fluid than that - see Sydney Freedberg’s Talinin is Burning for an example.

Speaking of World War Three, I used to be quite a fan of WW3-themed wargames back when they were plentiful in the 1980s. They were so plentiful that I recall an interview with Jim Dunnigan in which he said that they kept SPI afloat until ’89, when the Cold War ended and the bottom fell out of that market.  I always wanted SPI’s monster game The Next War, and if you have a copy you want to sell, let’s talk. I did recall a game I  haven’t played in ages, Anyway, I dug out my copy of this classic, and am hoping to play it at some point if I can get another thesis chapter done this week, and if I can get my Longstreet game finished.



The only problem I have is that there isn’t a kitten-proof surface in the house.

Finally, returning to books, our friend Edwin King, wearing his bookseller hat, has started carrying reprints from the History of Wargaming project.  I’ve treated myself to a reprint of the Peter Young classic, Charge! (Ross Mac says it’s an essential read, and who am I to argue with Ross?) as well as Paddy Griffith’s book on Napoleonic Wargaming.  Check out Edwin’s blog and send some business his way.
Blessings to your books,  MP+

19 comments:

  1. If you have a large plastic storage tub you could up-end it over the map and put something heavy on top. That might keep the feline felon off of your game long enough to finish it.

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    1. That's a brilliant suggestion. He was wreaking havoc on the wargames table last night. I'd put him down, he'd jump off, nibble a tree, get put down, jump back up, attack a battery. He's got sand, that lad.

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  2. Thanks for the links to the what if, future world war 3 scenarios

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  3. Thanks for the plug Michael, I hope you enjoy your books when they arrive!

    The link you've put to the History of Wargaming books goes to a Pen & Sword title on tanks though ;)

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  4. A treat awaits for you in the form of Charge- it is a delight I return to again and a again.Enjoy!
    Alan

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  5. I'm ashamed to say unlike most of the wargaming world I've not seen Fury......yet! I never really got into the WW3 thing, anything past WW2 and I find the weapons are too good to make a decent game, but hey that's me???

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    1. Ray, you make the LaceWars look so pretty, why would you do anything else?

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  6. The History of Wargaming project is a rich store of good things and you are in for a real treat with Charge! and Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun. Charge! is like being given sherry behind your mothers back by a disreputable uncle. It's beautifully written and vastly entertaining decades after its written.

    Napoleonic Wargaming is a great book by one of the great iconoclasts of the hobby. Intellectually fearless and thoroughly good fun. I have often pondered what it would cost to create a computer program to run the back end of the Generalship game.

    As for Fury, it wasn't bad, It probably is the best film about armour that Hollywood could make, considering it was made by the chap behind U571.

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    1. The disreputable uncle is a brilliant metaphor, CK. I quite like it.
      I've always thought that what Griffiths had to say about ACW combat was a breath of fresh air, you're right to call him an iconoclast.
      I never saw U571 - after Das Boot, I didn't think I needed to. Now, whenever I want a submarine movie, I just wear dirty stinking clothes in the shower and pretend I'm being depth-charged.

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  7. Your review on Fury is pretty much my own take. Still, it's Hollywood and I expected little else.

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    1. I expected worse. I was pleasantly surprised. I actually thought that Brad Pitt approaching middle age will be an interesting actor to watch.

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  8. This was a very 'meat and potatoes' posting, Michael: lots to digest. I was interested in seeing Steven Zaloga's comments. A few years ago I read an autobiography of a tank repairman, who had some interesting remarks on the Sherman's vulnerability. As far as he was concerned, the Sherman was as vulnerable as alleged - but there was a lot of them. The US was quite capable of building and sending better AFVs (e.g. Pershing) long before it did, but (apparently) Gen Patton pretty much knocked that on the head. One problem US armour did face was shortage of trained crewmen. They often went into battle with 1 man short in each tank.

    This guy did mention an incident in the last weeks of the war in which a US column was attacked by King Tigers whilst travelling along a road as it passed through a cutting. The cutting being quite shallow, the column appeared to the Germans like a fairground duck shoot, and they shot it up terribly. But the Yanks managed to get in a few licks of their own. From the back end of the column, a bunch of Shermans fired white phosphorus all over the front glacis plate of at least one King Tiger, whereat its crew abandoned ship.

    At the other end of the line, the lead Sherman got out and shot at a KT from a rear flank. The shot caught the corner join at the rear, causing the plates to fracture and leave a big hole. It seems that armour manufacture was getting problematic by this time for the Germans. At any rate, scratch another KT. The Germans got the better of this action - it was a very effective ambush - but they lost at least two King Tigers to Sherman gunfire.

    Back in the day I collected SPI games that interested me. One was Global War, which I have never played - indeed several of the counters are still on their sheets. Basically, it's WW2 - the whole thing. A couple were ACW games under the 'Terrible Swift Sword' game system, which I rather like. I used some of its ideas in my table ACW rule set (Bluebellies and Greybacks). The games were Cedar Mountain and Pleasant Hill.

    SPI also did a naval one with a similar topic and fairly contemporaneous to AHs Wooden Ships and Iron Men. Fighting Sail I think it was called.

    Berlin 85 was not one of mine, but I have played it. I had the WARPAC forces - four Motor Rifle Divisions, I think, though I could be wrong about that. Can't say I made much of it...

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    1. Great comments Ion. Meat and potatoes served with love and a pint of Guiness is what we aim for here.
      To give your anecdote about the Sherman ambush even more weight, note Zaloga's comment about how it took 3 times the money to make a Tiger as it did to make a Sherman. If the Germans had standardized on something simple and relatively deadly, a German version of the T34, perhaps akin to the Hetzer, they might have been able to field more armour than they did. Instead they over engineered, which was disastrous given their degraded industrial capacity. Your comment about the plates fracturing points that out. Can you imagine being a German tanker in 1945, and relying on lit made by a demoralized slave workers in widely dispersed / ruined factories out of substandard parts? I'd rather take a Sherman fresh off a Detroit assembly line.
      SPI games, either love them or hate them.

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  9. Something else I thought of. I have read about German AFV inventories in Normandy. They had no Tigers on D-Day, only the 112 PzIVs of 21st Panzer Division, and the StuGs and Marders integral to a few infantry Divisions (such as the 352nd). and possibly some French AFVs, But several Tiger Is turned up with SS units as I recall from my reading. They probably had over 100 taken all together, but that's not a huge number. Only 12 King Tigers were ever sent to Normandy before the breakout - a single company - and all of those were the Porche turret variety.

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    1. Half way through the Normandy campaign the Germans did commit at least one SS Heavy Tank Battalion to the fighting, against the British. On June 6, most of what they had in their OOB were either PzIVs or French crap. I'm not even sure the infantry had Stugs - I'd be surprised if 716 did, and I'm not sure about 352. I think it was all leg infantry. And most of the good stuff got sent to oppose the Brits, whose subsequent publications, as Zaloga notes, have a different take on armoured warfare than the US sources do.

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  10. I loved Fury, but I'm no expert on WWII warfare, tank or otherwise, so just wanted something that was gritty and entertaining without being too obviously unhistorical. If it hadn't been for Godzilla it would have been the best thing I saw at the cinema last year :)

    As for SPI Cold War games, I used to love the old magazine game 'Revolt In The East', which looked at various real and hypothetical uprisings against the Soviets, and always ended in a NATO invasion/intervention. At least it did when I played it :)

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  11. Great post! I haven't seen Fury yet in part because of the critics. I'm going to give it a spin now. And I appreciate the book recommendation and discussions about the Sherman and German armor. I was thumbing through a recent book on Shermans. From late war on, the pics showed Sherman crews putting all sorts of stuff on their tanks to "uparmor" them-sandbags, sandbags covered with concrete, really anything they could get their hands on. That was probably to protect against the panzerfaust since there were so few German tanks at that point.

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