Air Battles in Miniature

Fear not, gentle reader. You have not opened the wrong blog, nor have I gone totally mad, or, hopefully, even slightly. Nevertheless, the title and topic do need some sort of explanation, in this case, a delve down memory lane.

A long time ago I read a couple of issues of Airfix Magazine. As with many of my generation, there was a lot of model making of ships, aircraft and tanks, along with divisions of little soldiers to be stood up, have marbles rolled at them, lost in the garden trenches and so on. One article stuck in my mind, however, was about the use of model aircraft in air wargaming.

The author of the article (there might have been two) was Mike Spick, and there was a book. Being impoverished and also in a small community, my only hope was the town library, which carried a fair few wargaming books, but Mr Spick’s never appeared. Who knows what might have happened if it had.

Still, many years later the memory returned and the second-hand book market turned up trumps:

Spick, M., Air Battles in Miniature: A Wargamers’ Guide to Ariel Combat 1939 – 1945 (PSL, Cambridge, 1978)

With the blessing of the Estimable Mrs P. the tome winged its way to my door, although I had to promise not to start off a World War Two aircraft collection. One quiet Friday afternoon I settled down to read.

The most obvious problem with air combat is the third dimension. Aeroplanes operate in the along, side-to-side and the up and down, while land and sea forces only have to contend with the first two. How this is represented on a wargame table is a matter of some perplexity. Mr Spick has his own answer, at least for the tactical game.

I did manage to reduce the Estimable Mrs P to laughter with some of the solutions to the 3-D problem of air wargaming. Telescopic car aerials, for example, were treated with a little derision. See-through plastic stands fared slightly better, although not a great deal as it was pointed out that aeroplanes operate at different heights. Criss-crosses of thread or fishing line hanging over the table were, I am afraid to say, simply laughed at, along with a look which said ‘Don’t even think it’. I suppose that this solution needs a permanent wargame table.

Still, Mr Spick’s solution is obvious to a mathematician. On the basis that the three dimensions are the same, we can alter the slice of space in which our aircraft operate. That is, instead of the table representing the side-to-side and the along, it represents the up-and-down and the along. Instead of height being bodged, depth is.

The upshot of this is that when making your Airfix aircraft kits, you need to make them in two halves. Depending on in which direction your aircraft is moving, you use a different half. Up and down is obvious, while in and out is, largely, ignored, or at least, reduced to a projection of that dimension on the other two, such as when an aircraft turns.

This certainly gives another view of air combat, and the rest of the book, after accepting that compromises are rife in wargames and in particular air wargames, the tactical rules are worked out with respect to it. So far as I am any judge here (which is not far) they seem workable but, as aircraft vary widely in performance, horribly complex and technical. Air combat is also, it seems, nasty, brutish and short, and a turn length of 4 seconds seems to suggest as much.

So far, so fascinating but, for my poor little brain which can just about cope with half-a-dozen troop types, navigating the differences between a Bf109G and a Spitfire Vc is a bit much. For me, the book gets more interesting when it turns to air-to-ground interactions (bombing, strafing and anti-aircraft fire) and larger-scale campaigns. Here, the x-z plane for the wargame table is abandoned, and the whole is given over to the operational map.

Spick suggests a number of possible limited campaigns. I learnt that the air war on the Eastern Front was mostly fought in support of ground activities, which brings us back to the 3-D problem, but some of the other activities could be recreated. Most obvious is the Battle of Britain, with Luftwaffe air raids and their limited fighter support. Another possibility is the raids by night and day in Germany starting in roughly 1942. Here, considerations of weather and wind are important in planning, and I also learnt that one of the points of pathfinder missions was to measure the wind speed local to the target to aid navigation and the ability to actually hit something.

Interactions of aircraft with naval vessels are also covered. The purists might not like the solutions proposed, but they seem workable to me, but most would probably replace them with whatever their naval rules suggest. Spick does emphasise he is looking at the subject from the air side, not the ground. The book does include dashes of humour: he notes it is easier to keep track of damage to naval air bases than land ones because the former tend to sink.

The best idea in the book, so far as I can tell, is air operations around Malta. Malta was important because of the convoys from Italy to North Africa. Mr Spick notes that when bomber forces were sent to Malta, the Axis air forces went into overdrive. The game could include various aspects of naval warfare, such as the Malta convoys, but can be treated as a pure air campaign. All that would be needed is an outline map of Sicily and Malta, and if I could find one on the Internet I might give it a go.

The forces involved in the Malta campaigns were, on the whole, smallish and included, of course, Italian air units, which are a must, it seems to me, for those who like less fashionable aircraft. The game could conceivably last for three years, from 1940, and the units available varied considerably, as Allied reinforcements got through (or did not) and units of the Luftwaffe were called away to other duties, mostly on the Russian front.

So there you are. A trip down memory lane, a teenage daydream fulfilled and some interesting stuff. But I will probably keep my feet on the ground.