Archives for WW2 - Page 11
Battle of the Hills, 21 January 1943
Image via Wikipedia This is a short article about the advance of the 51st Highland Division in Tunisia in the follow up from El Alamein. I wrote this to be played as a tabletop wargame using Command Decision. Ground The coast road between Homs & Corradini in Tunisia. On the right (from the perspective of the British advance) is the sea. The coast road lies a few miles inland at places. There is a steep coastal ridge on the left flank of the battle area with desert to the south. Within all this there are a large number of steep sided, but small, wadis running from the hills to the sea. There are also one or two significant hills that sit astride or on the road. To quote Captain Watt (OC B Company 5th Seaforths). “At the Assembly Area we…
Book Review – Field of Fire: Diary of a Gunner Officer by Jack Swaab
Field of Fire: Diary of a Gunner Officer by Jack Swaab My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read the hardback version very shortly after it came out. I collect first hand accounts of the WW2 and unit histories of the 51st Highland Division in particular, so this one was a must buy. That said it is one of the best first hand accounts that I have read, and certainly the best from a gunner (it comparies favourably to George Blackburn's Guns of War series - he was also a Forward Observation Officer). You can have no doubt about the hardships of war, what the conditions were like for both the gunners on the gun line and the infantry on the front line. The book is very descriptive without becoming flowery and it avoids glossing over some of the less…
Tank Tracks, Peter Beale
This is the story of 9 RTR in WW2 written by one of its officers and including material from many of the survivors and contemporary diaries, including the battalion war diary, the brigade history and at one point the radio logs. It is packed with a wealth of material, much of which is directly quoted from a primary source. If you want a feel for what life was like for a heavy tank battalion then this is the book to read. The stories told by the survivors and in the diaries don't pull any punches, and some of what is described is quite horrific, many of the casualties in the battalion are well documented and the nature of the injuries suffered by tank crews tend to be severe. The battalion re-formed in and was one of the first to be equipped with Churchills. It trained in the UK…
CLWG December 1999 – Offside Report
What you missed at the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group (CLWG) December meeting. In December we started from 12 at John Rutherford's house and played until after 9pm and chatted with the aid of several bottles of wine until almost midnight. In total we had 13 members at the meeting. It started with a fairly light-hearted game called 'Battling Druids' which was originally designed by Trevor Farrant as a participation game for wargames shows for another club that he is a member of. This involves four 100mm models of druids, four fountains, a cloud with a lighting bolt, hordes of hedges, magic spells and a whole lot of fun. A sergeant air-gunner mans his Vickers 'K' gun from the rear cockpit of a Fairey Battle. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Next up was an RAF Aircrew RPG which I ran with the help…
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Chaos, Confusion, Cowardice & Incompetence (C3I) – Onside Report
One of the things you missed was C3I which actually turned up and was played in the afternoon (because I always turn up at lunchtime and much prefer twice as many half-day meetings). Although this was a figure game it was scenery light and what was used was pretty abstract and flat, despite the original scenario being set on a hill. C3I is really a morale-based system for infantry combat which is intended to show how everything goes for a ball of chalk once the shooting starts. The outcomes it produced appeared to be reasonably realistic based on the reading I've done on infantry actions. My aim was to produce a very simple quick system that used morale as its key attribute and would give a realistic result for infantry actions. Most of the psychology of warfare stuff I've read…