Fighting on the Beaches

Those of you who follow me in another place, or even those of you who have kept awake long enough here to read the posts here and here, will know that something Far Eastern and naval is brewing. Well, sort of. In a flurry of ‘I can’t possibly do that’ the whole of the invasion of Korea was dismissed as being impossible, the overblown concept of a tired and hyperactive wargaming mind. A much smaller campaign was envisaged, with the Channel Islands as the map.

However, megalomania will out. The whole project was delayed while I assembled and painted a Chinese fleet. I confess, as, again, followers of Facebook will know, that assembling the ships was a task the likes of which I do not intend to attempt again (I say that with every naval project). Still, they are done but, critically, I started to read Kenneth Swope’s book on the invasion. A full review of the work will follow (promise) but my eye lighted on a map of the eight provinces of Choson Korea.

My wargamer synapse twinged a bit at that. Obviously, my subconscious was ringing bells and waving flags. It looked rather familiar, and I was not quite sure why. Eventually, I twigged. I could use my Machiavelli rules ideas in this different context. Hmmm….

A bit of Googling and some manipulation of a map landed me up with this.

This is a slightly redrawn map of Korea in 1592, pinched off the Internet with extra bits drawn on by yours truly. If you look really closely you can see vertical lines from the printer, which has still not quite recovered from its sojourn in the wargames room while recarpeting operations were in progress. The extra bits I added were the sea regions and the border between the Ming Chinese and the Jurchen (who, united, will become the Manchus shortly.).

I also bunged in a staging zone for the Japanese forces. Historically, Tsushima was the final jumping off point for the Japanese forces, with other islands behind them back to mainland Japan. Rather than laboriously add these to the map, I just put in a staging area, coloured it a fetching shade of red, and called the job a good one.

As the assiduous reader of the blog will know, I have had a few ventures into the Japanese Invasion of Korea. I have three small Japanese armies, a Korean army and some Ming Chinese, as well as sufficient Mongol types to make up a Jurchen army if required. I thus already have Japanese commanders – Clemmy, Mango, Satty, and Tango. Tango got command of the fleet, and the other three got armies. There is also, on the map, two Korean armies and a fleet, with a Ming army and fleet, and a Jurchen army, inactive in the north. I need to work out what activates them.

April 1592 proved to be a damp squib, as the Japanese fleet failed it initiative roll. May was a bit better, with the Japanese fleet setting forth on a critical initiative roll, followed by a successful initiative from Clemmy with army 1 (JA1). JA1 was therefore transported to left Gyeongsang province, near Daegi. The Korean army in right Gyeongsang province managed to react, again on a critical initiative roll and, in my reckoning, got to a defensive position to block Clemmy. Here we go, first battle.

The Japanese fleet is, evidently, to the right. The dice rolling for terrain did not favour the invaders. Aside from the village on the coast, a river bisected the board lengthways, and two streams added to the defensive capability across the battlefield. Not only that, but the Koreans are drawn up on substantial high ground. This was going to be tough for Clemmy, I though.

Japanese dice rolling did them no favours, either. The first initiative roll gave them precisely no tempo points to get their landing boats away, and so the general set out, alone. This was to dog them throughout the game, as they could just not get their landings coordinated.

The picture shows the problem compounded by the Koreans having sent their cavalry forward to fight on the beaches. On the right you can see Clemmy and his first landers struggling against the might of Korea and coming off distinctly second best. To their left another newly landed base of Samurai is not supporting them nor drawing off their foes. Further left stillmore troops are arriving but are also threatened by Korean cavalry. In the centre you can see a puff of smoke. This was where the Korean rockets hit some incoming boats and destroyed them – this required a roll of six and then a six-one result on the combat dice. I told you it was not the Japanese’s day.

It did not really get any better for Clemmy, or Tango when he arrived to take over command after Clemmy bit the sand. More Japanese arrived to be overwhelmed by Korean cavalry. Even two organised bases of Samurai lost when they advanced into the Korean horse on the left, on what should have been even rolls the Samurai lost one base and had the other driven back. The only slight glimmer of hope was when an Asigaru base managed to dispose of a Korean cavalry base in the centre, but it was small compensation.

Japanese casualties were mounting, and it was evident that it was unlikely to be turned around. Before Tango could give the decision to withdraw, however, more casualties on the left took it out of his hands. The Japanese lost seven bases, mostly Samurai, and a general (Clemmy), plus a bow unit abandoned on the beach. I am not sure whether Clemmy survived or not at this point, but his army has been pretty well destroyed.

As I mentioned above, lack of coordination was a problem with this, plus the Korean willingness to get stuck in on the beach before the invaders had time to organise. Coupled with some dismal Japanese dice rolling at critical points (and some fluky Korean rolls) and the combat could appear to be a bit one sided.

As it is, one Japanese army is destroyed, or nearly so. In a one off game, or a campaign where that was the only invading army, the game would be over. As it is, I need to be a bit more careful, and the Japanese a bit luckier, with the next landing effort.

Another Marathon

Recently I was feeling the need to play a wargame. Endless painting and my frustration with the Chinese navy (or at least glueing the masts in place so they are straight and do not wobble) had made my wargamer edge a bit blunted, so a battle was required.

The first question was ‘What?’. I do not really have a campaign going at the moment – the Japanese invasion of Korea is in the offing, but not ready yet – and so it needed to be a one-off action. Taking my own advice (yes, in that book) I needed a simple, low-stress wargame. After some thought, rejecting the ECW and a Romans versus Celts bash, I rewound right back to Marathon.

I am sure Marathon needs no introduction to most wargamers. It is probably one of the most famous battles of the ancient world, and has been immortalised in story and song ever since, or at least, up until World War One when the world which looked back to classical Greek civilisation collapsed, at least according to some accounts.

Anyway, Marathin is not a complicated battle. The Athenians and their allies lined up at one end, the Persians at the other. The contest is between the Persian archery and the Greek prowess in close combat (plus their armour). There is not much room for manoeuvre. The only real question is about the presence and role (if any) of the Persian cavalry.

Anyway, I have, according to my record, run five Marathons previously, and each time I have increased the number of Persian infantry, following Phil Sabin’s suggestion in Lost Battles. It has to be said that each time the Persians have lost, and so I am not at a break-even point yet.

This time the Persians had 28 bases, two of cavalry and the rest of infantry. Charles Grant’s write-up of Marathon from years ago suggested that the Persians might have had some Ionian Greek hoplites in their lineup, but I ignored that here, although I have used them before. He also added some Greek skirmisher javelins, but again I did not use them. The Athenians and allies have 20 bases, so the Persians are getting towards a healthy numerical advantage.

As I said, the setup is simple. The Greeks are to the left, with their doubled wings and slightly denuded centre. In the original, the Greek wings beat the Persians and then turned in. The Persians have matched the frontage of the Greeks with a double line of infantry, with a couple of bases in reserve, and the cavalry on the far right of the picture. At the top is a line of steep hills and nearest the camera, obviously, is the sea. There really is not much room to manoeuvre.

The trick, it seems to me, for the Persians is to break up the Greek formation with archery, so they can get the overlaps when in contact. This is quite hard to achieve as the dice rolls are matched, but it is not impossible. The Greeks just need to get into contact as quickly as possible and rely on their depth and advantage of advancing to give them the edge.

In the game the Greeks advanced, although their centre was slow to get going. The above picture shows them just in bow range, and the Persian arrows have achieved some minor damage. This will take the Greeks some tempo points and some general time to fix, but nothing too serious.

The first clash was not very clear-cut. On the Greek left there was some delay caused by Persian bow fire. I also allowed the Persian infantry to move back half a move to suggest that they would try to extend the time they had to cause damage. I do not know if this is justified, but I am trying to find out how the Persians can win this. The Greek centre is also delayed slightly, but this does not matter as they were not supposed to be the battle winners. On the Greek right, nearest the camera, the furthest left block has been hit by bow fire, while the next one towards us was previously delayed, The next hoplite block has successfully driven back their foes, who are in trouble. Nearest the camera it is the Greeks who are in trouble, having been defeated in close combat and then hit hard by bow fire. Lucky dice rolls, of course, but it does hint at the possible.

A move or two later and it is starting to go pear-shaped for the Persians. On the Greek left (top), aside from one bounce, they have lost two bases routed and the other two sets of infantry are in trouble. On the Greek right the leftmost bases have hit home and routed their opponents. The only Persian success has been routing the Greeks nearest the sea. The Persian morale has started to wobble, understandably.

The end came a move or two later, as seen above. On the Greek left (top) the Persian infantry has fled, except for one brake block still peppering their foes with arrows. On the upside, the Persian cavalry charged home against the inmost hoplite block and routed it, fortunately for the Greeks not taking the attached general with them.

On the Greek right the block attached to the general has turned in and taken the leftmost Persian infantry of the centre in flank. I discovered a lacunae in my rules at this point, as it did not say what happened if the troops were recoiled from that onto another base of friendly troops. I invented the best possible outcome for the Persians, so they simply shuffled back a bit. But at this point, having lost 12 bases, Persian morale collapsed and the army routed. That said, Greek morale also was wobbly after the cavalry attack and they got a fallback result, so there was no pursuit.

So another victory for the hoplite over the hordes of the East. The Persians did get lucky to cause the damage which they did cause, but it must be possible to beat the Greeks somehow. Actually, the extra Persian infantry used as a reserve did not really contribute much, so there may be a need for more pondering there.

Still a good, fun and quite quick wargame, and I feel the better for it. Now, back to the Chinese fleet...

Dreamers and Rivet Counters

Every once in a while I read a book that makes me think ‘Hmm…’ and wonder about its wider application. I might be a bit late to the party on this particular volume, but it has made me reflect as just noted. The book is:

McGilchrist, I., The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, Yale, 2019).

The book was first published in paperback in 2010, it seems, but I have only recently become aware of it. It is not a work about wargaming, it has to be said, but it does have some interesting things to say, perhaps, about how we wargame and the diversity of wargamers.

The basic premise of the work, backed up by more scientific data on neurophysiology and psychology than you can shake a stick at, is that the human brain is divided into two hemispheres and that they have rather different takes on the world. The left hemisphere deals with detail, grasps the world, and manipulates it. It is also responsible for a lot of language, although not all, and tends to continue with its own world, rather than take much account of context and what is going on around it.

The right hemisphere, by contrast, is open to the world, to the new, to context and innovation. It handles metaphor, in terms of language, and aims to integrate experience into a bigger picture, one that has depth and perspective. McGilchrist traces these tendencies over the centuries, from evolutionary traces such as the origins of language and music to the Enlightenment and scientific revolution.

The point he is trying to make, insofar as there is one point, is that over the centuries since the Enlightenment the left hemisphere, that of detail and lack of a bigger picture, has slowly taken over dominance. There have been a few hiccoughs along the way, of course, such as the Romantic movement of the early Nineteenth Century but, broadly speaking, the Western world is mostly left hemisphere in its thinking now. Science has made such progress that its method, reductionism, is king.

In reductionism, we break things down into their smallest components and try to understand them. This is not a bad thing in itself, but it does have the unwelcome consequence, in my view, of dismissing anything which is emergent as ‘nothing but’ something else. Hence, for example, ice is nothing but dihydrogen oxide in a certain arrangement. Any other description of ice is simply adorned language and is to be, if not dismissed, then taken with a certain pinch of salt. It is poetry and not science.

That is true, as far as it goes, but in fact, in human terms, what can matter is the poetry, rather than the science. We do not necessarily act on scientific fact. We might even say that we cannot, because we do not know enough about the world. We could ask the scientist who believes only in scientific fact to conduct an experiment to prove that his wife loves him. If he does so, in my view, he may well find that she does not, at least now.

So, to wargaming. You might have wondered what the relevance of all this to wargaming is, and I have been pondering that too. Wargaming is a fairly recent phenomenon, at least in its more popular, more democratic form. Hence it is probably subject to the hemisphere interactions (or lack of them) described above. That is, we, as wargamers, do detail and grasp objects in the world as tools to manipulate that world. Hence the ‘rivet counters’ of the title. At some level we want to determine the muzzle velocity of a Brown Bess musket, or the speed and maneuverability of a FW 190, or whatever. We try to reduce such things to numbers and manipulate the numbers to our advantage. This all seems fairly left-hemisphere-located stuff.

When it comes to the wargame itself we have a slightly different situation. We have to look at the wider picture and integrate. If I believe that my squadron of King Tiger tanks will win the wargame all on their own, I could well be wrong, especially when I encounter an opponent wielding a combined arms force with infantry, anti-tank guns, and their own tanks. The bigger picture, courtesy of the right hemisphere, matters here.

We also have to make things up in wargaming. I have mentioned this before, but history does not deliver all the things that we, as wargamers, would like to know. The left brain is quite good at making assumptions and filling in gaps, but it tends to do so to its own advantage. Thus, for example, a squadron of unknown German tanks is more likely to be represented as Tigers or Panthers rather than Pz 38(t), I suspect. The right brain can more easily dismiss such ideas as fantasy, and bring the projection down to earth by suggesting Pz IIIs for example.

Overall, of course, the idea is that the two hemispheres interact to give as full a picture as they can. In fact, the way they do this is to inhibit each other. The right hemisphere takes in the world and presents it to the left. The left hemisphere works on that and represents its results to the right, which then reintegrates it with the world. Both hemispheres dismiss irrelevant and perhaps silly ideas from the other, focussing on what they find to be important. The problem is that if the left hemisphere becomes supreme, as McGilchrist argues it has, then balance is lost and we are at the mercy of the left hemisphere and its delusions, which do not attach to the world in any particularly meaningful way.

Wargaming, then, as life, demands a balance between the two views. We cannot just count the rivets on a tank and think that our wargaming job is done. On the other hand, we cannot simply keep focus on the big picture ignoring what is happening at the level of detail. But sometimes, it seems to me, we do focus too much on, say, the capability of a particular weapon system at the expense of how, in fact, it was used in conjunction with others.  

The Reign of Elizabeth I

Those of you who read my notes in another place will be aware that I recently finished this book:

Levin, C., The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2002).

It goes along with my interest in the Elizabethan age generally, of course, and seems to be at about the level of an undergraduate textbook, to my untutored eye. I really got it because of the chapter on the problems of the Succession to Elizabeth. Obviously, she had no children and for a considerable chunk of the reign the heir presumptive was Mary, Queen of Scots, her cousin, a Catholic, and a former Queen of France.

The first chapter is an overview of Elizabeth’s reign. It describes her birth, the difficulties she had under her sister’s reign, and then her own accession to the throne. It then discusses the problems facing Elizabeth concerning religion, foreign policy (including, of course, Scotland), her own future marriage, and, as mentioned, the succession.

There were problems in all areas. The country was more or less conforming Roman Catholic at Elizabeth’s accession. Her own religious persuasion is a little difficult to discern, no doubt deliberately. After all, she kept William Byrd, an avowed Catholic, in the Chapel Royal. On the other hand, Levin notes that while the bulk of the country followed Catholic rites, they did not see why they should be ruled by the Pope. On the other hand, Elizabeth wanted to be Queen of all the English and so needed to carry the bulk of the nation, at least, with her.

The religious settlement of the early part of Elizabeth’s reign can be considered, I think, something of an enduring monument to her, although the current form of Anglicanism owes quite a lot to the next century. Be that as it may, she did carry many people with her into a new sort of church, not Catholic but not entirely Calvinist either. This, of course, upset some people at both ends of the spectrum. The Catholics were dangerous in the earlier part of the reign, due to foreign links and meddling (the Spanish ambassadors in particular), assorted religious crises and massacres in France, and, of course, the advent of Mary, Queen of Scots after she fled from Scotland in the 1560s.

These strands all came together in the 1570s and 1580s with Elizabeth’s excommunication, the Ridolfi plot, the rising of the northern earls (1569), the Throckmorton plot, and so on, down to the Armada. Some of the plots, at least, were thoroughly penetrated by Walsingham’s agents, and there is some doubt as to whether they really existed aside from the government. Others, however, were highly dangerous.

Foreign policy was tricky, of course. Elizabeth wanted to support her co-religionists in Europe – the Huguenots in France and the Dutch, in rebellion against the Spanish. There was also the issue of Ireland, regarded as a back door for the Spanish into England, and Scotland. Elizabeth was, on the whole, fairly pacific, regarding warfare as wasteful of both money and lives. However, the policy of keeping England safe and free was paramount and, of course, culminated in the 1588 Armada. Whether the Armada could have succeeded is a question for another day – the money is on ‘possibly’ at the moment, but English foreign policy was, in the main, defensive.

The execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the failure of the Armada stopped neither plots nor warfare. In fact, the wars got worse (and more expensive) during the 1590s, with further rebellions in Ireland and English interventions in France and the Low Countries. There were also, as I am sure my reader will know, further attempts at Armadas, aimed either at England, Ireland, or the Netherlands. These were defeated by the weather, but English countermeasures were not much more successful. The burden of war taxation, impressment for foreign service, and a series of poor harvests in the 1590s rather tarnished the end of the reign. Levin observes that if Elizabeth had died 15 years before she actually did, her reign would be one of unparalleled success and embellishment. As it was the wars thrust upon her, and, perhaps, the feeling of the age coming to an end with an elderly monarch, made the country rather restive and parliament rather less cooperative.

Still, we should not forget that at the end of the reign, there were spectacular cultural achievements as rarely befall a country in any age. The start of Shakespeare’s career is, of course, the jewel in the crown, but he did not drop out of nowhere. The systems of plays and theatres, and theatre-going for most people (even the relatively poor could afford to go to a play every once in a while) meant that Shakespeare stepped into an already flourishing scene. It just so happened that he was a genius.

It probably also helped that England’s view of the world was widening. The voyages of discovery and increased sailing activity beyond home waters brought stories of the exotic, the foreign, and, on occasion, the downright weird. This had the consequence of widening England’s cultural field, although it was distinctly shaded by racism. Thus Shakespeare can, through Othello, both play to the expectation of the behaviour of a Moor (any person of colour seems to have been classified as a Moor) and also break it. We have a similar situation with Jews, of course, such as Shylock and the case of Elizabeth’s physician, Roderigo Lopez, of Portuguese Jewish extract, who was accused of attempting to poison her.

England was not a multicultural country at the time. In 1601 Elizabeth issued a decree banning Blackamoors from the country. They were, it seems, coming over and living of poor relief, as well as being infidels. She appointed Captain Caspar van Zenden of Lubeck to transport them out of the country (p. 120-1). Given more recent events in the UK regarding immigration, we can see that, perhaps, some things do not change.

Overall, a very useful book as a short introduction to the reign of Elizabeth I. While the actual warfare content might be a bit limited, for those who want their drums and trumpets, there is a lot in it, not least about the plots around Elizabeth in the 1570s and 1580s. These are surely worthy of a role-playing or skirmish game series. I mentioned that on Facebook and someone commented that I should sharpen my quill. Perhaps. Perhaps….

Moral Combat

There are some books that are an easy read, and there are some which are much harder. There are some whose subject matter is trivial and banal, and some whose subject matter is so horrific and important that the reader is impelled, perhaps by some sort of sense of justice or moral outrage to continue, no matter what the consequences for their own well-being may be.

One example of the latter, for me, at least, is this:

Burleigh, M., Moral Combat: A History of World War II (London, Harper Collins, 2010).

Those of you who are avid readers of my Facebook page will realise that it has taken me a while to read this. I started on 9^th May (albeit this year) and finished on the 23^rd July. Granted it is a big book: 560 pages or thereabouts, but I discovered that I really could not read a great deal at a time. I have, in recent days, put in some effort to finish it. On the other hand, as hinted above, it is not really the sort of book that you can simply stop reading and put into a cast-off pile.

What you do not get is a military history of World War II, nor a history of the Nazis or anything similar. As the author notes, there are plenty of those around anyway. What you do get is a discussion, with plenty of examples, some more gruesome than others, of the sorts of actions and considerations that the players had to make before and during the war. It is not a pretty read.

On the whole, the Western allies come out of it fairly well, although not scot-free, as you would expect. There are questions, in the book, what, if anything, they could have done, for example, to prevent or disrupt the Holocaust. In some senses, this was a non-question. Diversion of resources to attempt to bomb, say, the railway lines to Auschwitz would probably have been a waste of time and lives. The resources, in Burleigh’s view, were quite correctly retained by the effort to win the war as quickly as possible.

Furthermore, he notes, that Stalin was not in the mood to cooperate. He was reluctant to permit Western bombers to land on Russian territory to refuel anyway, and the concentration camps were mainly in the east. Stalin regarded Russian prisoners of war as deserters and traitors anyway, and he was not going to put any effort into saving Jews, although he was not personally anti-Semitic. On the whole, Burleigh concludes, it was better to put the resources into trying to destroy Nazi oil production.

Further questions are raised over the bombing of German cities. Some might argue that Burleigh rather whitewashes the decisions made, but, on the whole, there was a belief that bombing cities was going to shorten the war. Whether that was the case or not is a bit moot, and some of the calculations that it would were, at least, wildly optimistic. But the decisions had to be made based on the information and opinions that were available, not what was actually the case.

The chapters on the invasion and rape of Poland are, for me at least, the most disturbing. The brutality meted out was awful, not just on Jews, but on Poles in general. Some of the other chapters on resistance movements and Churchill’s Special Operations Executive speak of desperate and largely ineffective activities in which usually, civilians bore a large price.

We all know, of course, that World War Two was a brutal, vicious war. The book brings home exactly how brutal and vicious it was, especially on the Russo-German front. How many wargamers, I wonder, deploy NKVD battalions behind their Russian front lines to shoot anyone who runs away? I did wonder what would happen if those battalions were themselves pushed back – did they shoot themselves? All in all, the account of the fighting in Russia and Eastern Europe is enough to give even the most diehard World War Two wargamer pause for thought, I feel.

There are some interesting bits and pieces to chew over as wargamers, even beyond the sheer nastiness of much of the activities. For example, in 1937 Chamberlin diverted the British aircraft industry from building bombers to building fighters. As strategic thought at the time was that the bomber would get through and win the war, this might be thought of as a startling insight. However, it seems that the basis was that four fighters could be built for the price of one bomber. It just so happened that it was the right decision.

Another item of interest that caught my eye is the logistics for Barbarossa. The Germans suffered from chronic logistical problems. Army Group Centre needed 24 train loads per day, and got only 12. Army Group North needed 34 and was lucky if it got 18. Army Group South needed 24 and got 14. The numbers dropped, as well, over the duration of the campaign. This was not, at least solely, due to enemy action. Russian railways and roads were simply not up to the task.

Overall, this is a good but highly disturbing book, which would possibly be more so if I were a World War Two wargamer. The consumption of tobacco and alcohol by some of the leaders and generals was prodigious – apparently, Eisenhower was up to 40 a day just before D-Day. We cannot blame him, the stress of launching the world’s largest amphibious operation was immense, not to mention the knowledge that he was sending thousands of people into harm's way and that many would not come back. Such considerations bore less heavily on the totalitarian leaders, of course, although occasionally some of their subordinates might (briefly) question the casualties that were being taken, and what was being inflicted on civilian populations. On the other hand, for both Germans and Russians not instantly obeying was a ticket to being shot or worse.

As Churchill is reported to have said, the Russo-German war was won by the lesser of two evils. That is not exactly a comforting thought, particularly in light of the last few years and the rise of authoritarian and far-right groups across the world. Now, who has the location of the nearest bunker?