Viking Saint

Now there are two words that are not normally associated: ‘Viking’ and ‘saint’. Vikings, after all, are usually depicted as bloodthirsty pagans, barbarians in all sense of the word, who appear out of nowhere, plunder, murder, rape, and rob, and then vanish whence they came. Oh, and they have these peculiar helmets with wings on them.

Inevitably, modern historiography has rather reduced the brutality of the Vikings. Originally, of course, they were raiders, and they did raid churches that were, after all, fairly rich. In fact, the early Viking raids did largely destroy the Christian infrastructure in the north of England in the ninth century and distinctly jeopardized Christianity in England, at least until the reign of Alfred in Wessex. But things are never quite as simple as older histories like to make out.

There are a few things to ponder. Firstly, the Norse invaders (as opposed to the early raiders) quite quickly settled and were Christianised in England (and other northern British territories). Secondly, many Vikings came as farmers, not warriors. I am not sure of the evidence, but I suspect that quite a lot of assimilation went on; certainly, some people I know hereabouts have Scandinavian blood according to those DNA tests you can buy (of, to me, unknown reliability). Thirdly the interactions of Britain with Scandinavia needs to be taken into account. Since the Normans, England has been largely focussed on north-western Europe, the southern coast of the Channel. While this was of perennial interest in the defence of England, before William (and, in fact, until at least 1086) there was as much interest in, and threat from, Scandinavia as there was from Normandy.

This brings me, by a roundabout route, to the subject of the latest book:

Carr, J., The Viking Saint: Olaf II of Norway (Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2022).

As you can see this is a new book, which is unusual for these pages. The Estimable Mrs P saw a review of it and decided that I might like it for Christmas. She was, of course, correct.

Olaf might not be terribly well known in this country, although as a very young man, he was involved, perhaps even the key person, in Cnut’s campaigns, and he stands accused of being the Viking responsible for pulling London Bridge down. This event was possibly the origin of the ‘London Bridge is falling down’ nursery rhyme, although perhaps not, as who knows where such things come from really.

Anyway, this is a complex tale of intrigue, violence, treachery, and so on. Really, I think that we do not know how lucky we are to have had primogeniture in northern Europe for more or less a thousand years. Things have been bloody enough with it; if every passing noble thinks he could make himself king it could have been a lot worse.

Anyway, Olaf was a pagan who converted, became king of Norway through a complex web of intrigue, violence, and diplomacy, reigned for about fifteen years (1015 – 1030), and was killed in battle in his mid-thirties. He then became a saint, due to assorted miracles associated with him, and is recognised as such by Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox churches, which is a pretty good track record of a saint, especially a warrior.

His efforts at Christianising Norway had mixed results, it has to be said. He did upset a number of people, mostly those away from the coast who had received less influence from already Christian lands. He also was not the first person to try to bring Christianity to Norway, including earlier kings Hakon the Good and Olaf Tryggvason. But he did a bit more and when his body was recovered for reburial it was found to have not decomposed and, as I mentioned, there were miracles.

Actually, Olaf’s fall was not directly due to his Christianity, or his occasional habit of executing those who refused to be baptised (now, that is muscular Christianity). In fact, his reign was undermined by King Cnut, who claimed suzerainty over Norway as well as Denmark and England. The point here is that, in relative terms, Cnut was rich and his money was a persuasive argument for some more independent Norwegian nobles (of whom there were many) to abandon Olaf. The last battle, at which Olaf perished, was at Stikelestad, near Trondheim.

This is an interesting book on a subject about which I know little. The names are a bit confusing, but that is because most of the key players are called Olaf or Hakon. The geography is a bit tricky too, particularly as the borders between nations were, shall we say, a bit porous. But it is a rattling good tale, albeit without much analysis.

In wargaming terms, there are some splendid opportunities. There are a number of naval battles with dragon ships lined up against each other, followed by hand-to-hand combat on the decks. There are land battles ranging from murders and assassinations to full-scale set pieces. There is a great deal of diplomatic skulduggery. For example, Olaf was supposed to be marrying the legitimate daughter of the King of Sweden, but the latter substituted an illegitimate daughter. Olaf seems to have accepted this; the legitimate daughter, Ingegerd was married to Grand Duke Yaroslav of Novgorod and Kyiv. She died in 1050 as Saint Anna of Kyiv.

The tendrils of the Viking world spread far and wide. Olaf’s half-brother was Harald Hardrada, whose military career spread from Italy to Constantinople, much of northern Europe and, as most wargamers probably know, died at Stamford Bridge in 1066. The Normans, too, were sort of Vikings, in the same way that the inhabitants of York were. The Viking merchants, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, ranged far and wide in northern waters, from Newfoundland to Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles and, as just noted, Baltic nations.

The scope, therefore, is enormous. There are plenty of opportunities for island landings, invasions, set-piece battles, sea battles (I know most wargamers ignore them), desperate deeds of daring do, and so on. I am nearly tempted.

Difficult Passage

‘I am sorry, but I really cannot let you pass.’

‘You permitted the Sarmatians to go through your lands.’

‘I did not. They fought their way through.’

‘Well, if you do not permit us, we shall have to fight our way through.’

‘Look at it from my position for a moment. The Romans are very unhappy about the Sarmatians. They have invaded my lands twice in retribution, and I could really use not giving them another excuse.’

‘But a little bird tells me that there is also the question of an unpaid bill between you and the Romans on your account, as well as your help to the Sarmatians in storming the Roman camp.’

‘I got the money from the Sarmatians for services rendered. I have no interest in where the money came from, it was due to me.’

‘The service rendered, though, was fighting the Romans and beating them. And it was Roman money, because they had bribed the other Sarmatians onto their side. But they changed sides.’

‘Yes, but now the Romans have come for what they regard as their money, twice.’

‘And you have beaten them, twice.’

‘So you see we are a tough army. So you do not want to fight us. You can go around my lands, you know. I’ll give you a guide.’

‘It is so much easier to go along this road, my friend. The Romans build such nice roads, so convenient for invading places, I find.’

‘Convenient for them as well, of course.’

*

Poor Dubolwhiskos is, of course, being invaded again. His realm seems to be the motorway from barbarian lands to invade rich Roman territory, and no-one seems willing to go around. It does lay him open to charges of collusion with the invaders. He did fight the Sarmatians under Vodkaschnapps, but the Romans still blamed him, and now it is happening again with a Germanic tribe.

The occasion for this wargame was, firstly, my recovery from a bit of a cold (“there is a lot of it around”) and also a celebration of completing my Dacian and German armies, the final 132 figures of each. So, what else should I do except revive the Sarmatian Nation campaign, with the Germans as a further complicating element? Sooner or later, Vodkaschnapps will catch up with his cousin (or brother) of the other Sarmatian tribe, and that will cause another wargame, very different from this one.

A bit of dice rolling yielded a clash in the hill country. The Germans are nearest to the camera, seeking to proceed along the road to the far edge. The river is, in fact, fordable, but that is known only to the Dacians. Dubloswhiskos’ plan was to delay and disrupt the Germans with his light troops and archers, hold any attack with his tribal foot, and then counter-attack with his reserves and the Sarmatian cataphracts.

The German plan was to sweep in the light troops and mask the archers and tribal foot while the German tribes deployed four deep, and then charge home.

A few moves in and the plans are developing. The German skirmishers on the right are giving the Dacian light horse a hard time, while the Dacian skirmishers are in some jeopardy from the German cavalry. The German foot is just starting to deploy.

I have to confess that Dacian dice rolling was awful on the day. The light horse was routed by the skirmisher bases, and the Dacian skirmishers were routed by the German cavalry, which trotted into them and thus did not pursue into the archers.

The German left developed into a bit of a stand-off between the archers and German cavalry, who were hanging around screening the tribal foot. On the other flank, the Germans were also deploying, covered by their skirmishers.

The Germans took their time before launching their right flank foot, but won the initiative just at the right point, charged through their own skirmish screen, and then routed the Dacian foot on a flukey 6-1 roll. I told you Dacian dice rolling was rubbish on the day.

Dubloswhiskos has already got his left flank reserves moving into position and they managed to countercharge the Germans in the confusion but to no avail. While they did manage to push back one of the German columns, at the end of the turn the dreaded morale roll was required. Having already lost three bases, and then adding another four, the total was, well, it was not quite a rout. Let us say that the Dacian interest in defending their land against the next wave of invaders evaporated at this point.

So a decisive victory to the invading Germanic tribe, and another failure to defend his own country by Dubloswhiskos. It was a lot tighter than you might think from the casualty list, however, and quite tense. It really came down to the question of who won the initiative on the move when the two sides were in charge range, and then a really bad Dacian roll on the charge resolution. If they had managed to hold on, the first round of combat might have been kinder to them and anyway, the Germans had committed 8 bases to beat 4, which is not really a decent rate of return.

But there is always, I suppose, the bigger picture. The Germanic tribe is now about to invade the Roman Empire proper, and we shall have to see what the Romans make of that.

*

‘All right, all right. I’ll let you through. But you have to fight the Romans. You’re not getting any help from me.’

‘It would seem, my friend, that we do not need any help from you.’

‘Have you fought the Romans before?’

‘No. They are just soft southerners. Why should I bother about them?’

‘They are quite a lot tougher than you seem to think. And they do not stop. If you beat them, they shrug it off and come at you again. And again.’

‘And yet even you have beaten them, my friend. We shall see. They think they are soft.’

‘That is just Latin rhetoric, you know….’

Viking Nations

The long-term reader of this blog will recall, I dare say, a riff during the lockdown and its associated life-inverting activity, about the Anglo-Norman state in England and other, related, matters. This came alongside an avowal that I was not getting into early medieval wargaming, although some of my comments do seem to have provoked some Anglo-Norman wargames among my reader.

The potter through the history of the British Isles has continued, however, although perhaps a bit more on the quiet. The latest rummaging in the remainders box pulled out the following work:

Knight, D., Viking Nations: The Development of Medieval North Atlantic Identities, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2016.

This is a thesis, it would seem, which has been ‘re-written’ for a less specialist audience, in my estimation. The scare quotes are because, well, the re-writing shows. In spade loads or bad editing, sentences which do not make sense or in which words and word sequences repeat, typographical errors, and incorrect references to figures, of which there are, inevitably in a work of archaeological anthropology, a lot.

In short, the work needs a great deal more cognitive effort from the reader than it ought to, and that is a great shame because there is an interesting work struggling to make itself heard above the din of proofreading gaffes and other infelicitous errors. I should just mention, I think, that I hope that the original thesis, which was presented to the University of Nottingham, had a lot fewer errors than this. While examiners are a little more laid back than they used to be, lack of clarity is a Ph.D. thesis sin still, I believe.

Still, more positively, the work attempts to summarise the archaeology of Viking sites across three zones of the North Atlantic. The first is the North Atlantic archipelagos of the Shetland and Faroe Islands, which have rather less in terms of archaeological work associated with them than the Hebrides and Orkney Islands. The second zone is Iceland, and the third is the Norse sites of Greenland and North America.

The idea that the Vikings, when they came into contact with Western Europe were basic, uncivilized, pagan barbarians can, I think, be reasonably discarded now. While the entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are, to say the least, not positive about the Vikings, and they did disrupt and destroy much of the civilized life in the North-East of England with their initial plundering raids, they quickly started to settle and assimilate with the locals, and even, within a generation or two, became Christians.

In the islands, things were a little more complex, depending on the situation. The Vikings came to settle and farm, basically. They might have taken over indigenous sites or they may not have done, depending on whether there were any. There is also the issue of the Paper, who seem to have been the pre-existing Christian hermits and priests, presumably of what we would now call the Celtic tradition. There is not much information about as to whether the Norse and the Christians clashed, co-existed or the latter converted the former. Ultimately, of course, the Christian prevailed.

It is quite interesting that the Norse in England converted quite quickly to Christianity. Guthrum, for example, was defeated by Alfred in 878, and the latter then stood sponsor to his baptism. The Norse subsequently settled in East Anglia. The main Viking states, however, Norway and Denmark, did not convert until the Eleventh Century, and, as Knight observes, this was as much to do with the formation of the states as it was anything else.

As the military aspects of the wave of Norse invasions subsided, the trading elements increased. One of the interesting things about the book is the discussion of Norse shipping and its development from a coastal raiding and trading system of light, flexible and shallow draught boats to more capacious but deeper-keeled hulls. The main propulsion method switched also from mainly rowed through rowed with auxiliary sails to mainly sailed. These latter ships used less manpower and hence the carrying capacity was greater (as there was less need for provisioning the crew) and the voyages could be more profitable.

Fewer crew meant that the wars of plunder and conquest were over, of course. But then, in Iceland and Greenland there was a lot less to conquer. Norse farming was adapted to the relatively harsh environments encountered in the North Atlantic zones, even during the relatively benign period before the Little Ice Age. Even so, farms in Greenland struggled to maintain viability. Quite a lot, it seems, was predicated on the export of walrus tusks to Europe for ivory. The re-opening of trade routes to Africa rather put paid to this trade as elephant tusks are much better for carving, and this chipped away at the sustainability of the Greenland farms.

The most useful chapters are those relating to trade and to religion, it has to be said. They are also relatively uncluttered with typographical errors, which does make them a little easier to read. The structures of Norse farms in the archaeology discussed in the three zones are interesting but do get a little repetitive, although I still do not know why the early Norse longhouses had bowed walls and the later ones went straight. Some of the other insights from archaeology are quite interesting, such as the positioning of the longhouse on a slope, with the landowner’s bed at the highest end and the animals at the lowest. The drain ran downhill, so the lowest-status farm hands had to be careful where they stood. On the other hand, they did get the benefit of the warmth from the herd.

An interesting book but, as I said, rather a flawed one, unfortunately. I know I perpetrate my fair share, and probably more than that, in my own waffling, but a little more care and attention could have raised this one from a struggle to read to something really quite worthwhile and interesting. Proofreading is boring, I grant, but it is rather necessary.   

When is a Historical Wargame Historical?

 

It is always fascinating to see what other people are up to. That is one of the advantages of the wargame blogosphere. There is the chance to eavesdrop on other people’s games, just to see what they are up to. It is also nice when the accounts match up, that is when you get two accounts of the same game. Sometimes they set me wondering, however, but that is just me. In what follows no criticism of any wargame or wargamer is intended; it is just me being a bit puzzled.

As someone who has a more than a passing interest in the Hundred Years War, I was drawn to an account of a refight of the Battle of Auberoche, 1345, initially by Peter of Grid Based Wargaming, subsequently by Jon of Palouse Wargaming Journal. As I am sure you know, this came about in the early years of the conflict when a bunch of English and Gascons under Henry, Duke of Lancaster jumped out of some trees at the French forces besieging Aucberoche and, after a bit of a fight, routed them. The actual details are a bit obscure.

The game, which was played remotely, was based on Neil Thomas’ One Hour Wargames scenario 22 (Ambush). This itself was based on Donald Featherstone’s account of Auberoche in Wargaming: Ancient and Medieval. Featherstone, I seem to recall, actually wrote about the battle several times, at one point re-inventing it as a rescue by British paratroops of a party trapped in a ruined castle (I think it is in Featherstone’s Complete Wargaming, but I could be wrong).

The puzzlement which arose in my mind was how the final wargame (as I said, I am not criticizing the wargame at all) was related to the original, historical battle. After all, the original has been filtered through a number of levels. I suspect that Featherstone based his account on that of Burne’s The Crecy War because he uses that quite often, as well as being a fan of Burne’s ‘inherent military probability’ theory.

So we have a chain from the sources, whatever they may be, to Burne, to Featherstone, to Thomas and then to the wargame we have blogged before us. Perhaps I have a slightly twisted mind, but I could not help but wonder ‘is this really a wargame re-fight of Auberoche?’

It chimes in with one or two other thoughts and puzzles I have come up with over the years. I have in my possession Asquith and Gilder’s The Campaign of Naseby 1645 (Osprey, 1979). The last section is on wargaming the campaign. There is a discussion of the ratios of real troops to wargame figures to be used. The suggestion is that there should be 540 or 409 figures for the New Model, and 300 or 227 for the Royalists. It is asserted that strengths based on a 1:50 ratio detract from the fact that Naseby was a major action. Even as a youngster that always irritated me, in that I wondered why Naseby fought out with, say, 90 figures for the NMA and 50 for the Royalists should not be a re-fight of Naseby, especially as I think might have managed to muster 140 wargame figures, but had no chance at 636.

There are also questions raised towards the end of the section about ‘injecting alternative courses of action’ into the re-fight game. The response there is of a horns of dilemma format: either you re-fight Naseby or you stage a typical ECW battle. You can do either, but they are not compatible. Again, I do find this a little questionable. History, including battles, is contingent. Part of the aim of wargaming, in using dice throws, is to model that contingency. If we only follow the historical script we are no longer wargaming.

I do not pretend to have an answer to all of this. It all gets a bit Aristotelian, as the Estimable Mrs P. observed when I discussed it with her. For those of you whose classical philosophical education was a long time ago, I will refresh your memory with a brief excursus into Socrates’ boat.

Suppose Socrates has a boat. After a while it needs mending, so he removes some of the planking and replaces it. Not wishing to let anything go to waste, he preserves the planks. A little later the boat needs a new mast. He removes the old one, replaces it, and preserves the old one. And so on. Eventually, when Socrates has replaced all the parts of his boat, his brother comes along and uses the old bits to build a boat. The question is now: which boat is the original? Is it the one rebuilt by Socrates with all new parts, or is it the one built by his brother, with all the original parts?

I hope you can see the analogy with wargaming historical re-fights. We have already replaced a great deal of the original, an original of which, in all probability, we have limited knowledge. And we now have to try to tell the story of the battle. How closely do we need to stick to the original before we have to say ‘this is just a typical ECW battle’ rather than ‘this is Naseby’? How much can we deviate from the historical script before someone shouts foul?

Perhaps we are back to Burne’s inherent military probability. Can we invent stuff because it looks plausible? Could the French have noticed the English army creeping up on them at Auberoche? If we allow that, can the subsequent wargame be given the Auberoche? And so too with Naseby. For example, if Goring had arrived with the Royalist cavalry reinforcements and reinforced the left with some experienced troops, would Cromwell’s wing have had such a relative walk-over? The New Model infantry was struggling in the centre, after all. But if we allow that, are we still doing Naseby?

I do not pretend to have any answers to these questions, but I do find them intriguing. We can go a lot further, of course, and re-fight Naseby using Space Marines and Imperial troopers: would that count? But, mercifully, I have run out of words….

Wargame Heresy

I hope you are in a forgiving mood, because I think I might be about to commit the unforgivable sin of a wargamer, and that is to say that I am not, in fact, that keen on one of Featherstone’s books. Before you rush off to join the lynch mob, please note that I live in a relatively inaccessible and overlooked part of the country, in a small village, where the lamp posts are not strong enough to support the requisite rope and noose arrangement which is traditional in these things. Additionally, it being the middle of winter, lighting a bonfire might be a bit hard, because most of the available wood has been collected by the peasants to warm their toes (and other appendages).

So, what has caused this outburst? What could I possibly say that might occasion a mob of outraged wargamers descending on the village where I live? (If you do come, try one of the local hostelries; they serve a decent pint and good food).

As you know, I have been reading through the classic wargame library, and I have, finally, made my way to:

Donald Featherstone’s Wargaming Campaigns (ed. John Curry, History of Wargaming Project, 2013).

Perhaps the reason for my relative disappointment in the book was my fond memories of it from my teenage years. I frequently borrowed it from the library. It was a tome I perused in great detail, and attempted to use in my own games. I discovered, after some experimentation, that I could repurpose the content to match my figure collection, and there was even an English Civil War campaign included.

I think the reason for my less-than-impressedness with the work is that it has not really aged well. To be fair, it was first published in 1970 and things, including historiography, have moved on rather in the fifty or so years since. The most pressing example is in the introduction to the Vikings, the first potted campaign chapter (p. 93). ‘… they wore iron helmets sometimes fitted with horns or raven’s wings…’ No, I believe that they did not. The paragraph on berserkers is similarly, I think, out of date.

I think the problem here is relying on Victorian historiography, which I suppose was still fairly rife in the 1960s. It takes a while for academic revaluations to permeate popular history, particularly, I think, military history. These sorts of statements, however, are simply untrue by today’s measures.

I am not sure that reliance on out-of-date historiography is my main problem with the book. The main cause of relative disappointment is that the campaigns are short, mostly on a very small scale and, in some cases, resolved by a single action. This seems to me to be rather an abrogation of the phrase ‘wargame campaign’.

Now I grant that one of the problems with wargame campaigns is that the scope often suggests that a single wargame can determine the outcome. However, that, in my view, is something to be worked against. Why go to all that trouble for a single wargame? I admit that my Jersey Boys campaign admitted only three actions, one of which was very small, which might not be a great return on investment, but a single action is surely even worse.

Another irritation was the constant intrusion of tactical rules into the campaign scenarios. This might have been appropriate in 1970, I suppose, but it did rather annoy me after a while. This issue, however, is probably more of a matter of taste than anything else. On the other hand, wargaming has moved on rather from singly mounted figures and bang-you-are-dead (except for a saving throw) rules. I know there are exceptions to that, but really I think that of all the older books I have read time has treated it least kindly.

That is not to say that the book is without merits, of course. The enthusiasm is there, as ever with Featherstone’s works. The campaigns have potential, even as one-off game scenarios rather than as wargame campaigns in their own right. There are some good ideas. I particularly liked the description of the English Civil War club project, where the only forces permitted to be deployed were those of the players who actually turned up. It makes an important point, I think, in these days of army lists and careful selection of units: historical commanders had little or no control over the constitution of their army.

Perhaps the fault is mine. I recalled this book with great affection, but I last read it over thirty years ago. Maybe distance in time had graced it with a rose-coloured glow that it did not deserve at the time. Or, perhaps, by comparison with other works on wargame campaigns, such as Bath’s ‘Setting Up….’ its scope and aim feel to be a bit diminished. The aim is a variety of periods from medieval to World War Two. Bath’s aim was an imaginary world. Maybe I veer towards the latter.

The early chapters are quite useful still, at least in posing the questions that aspiring wargame campaigners have to tackle, such as movement, lines of communication, and so forth. The solutions may or may not be as useful; as with so many things, a lot depends on what you want to achieve and how you intend to get there. And as I said the scenarios, albeit more suited to a single wargame than what I would call a campaign, are helpful.

So far as I can tell this work more or less finishes my wander down memory lane. Some other works have escaped, of course, including Grant’s books, The War Game, The Ancient Wargame, and Wargame Tactics. The first two were good fun, and the latter was a very good book, but I’ve not seen it for years at an impoverished wargamer’s price.

So the wander down my teenage wargames reading comes to a close. It was fun, even though the last book of the sequence was less inspiring than the others. That, I suppose, is the cost of being a (tiny) bit older.

Naval Wargaming

I bet you think I am repeating myself. Naval wargames last week, naval wargaming this week. Aside from trying to reduce further the number of readers of the blog, you might be forgiven for wondering what is going on here. The answer is, of course, another wander down the odd recesses of memory lane, or at least, my memory lane. As you might have noticed, it has some very odd recesses.

Anyway, today’s memory is a bit more recent than some of the others:

Hague, P., Naval Wargaming: From Ancient Galleys to Modern U-Boats, Yeovil, PSL, 1992.

This one is in fact another memory cruncher. I had to resort to a search engine to tackle my puzzlement, but I did manage to resolve it. This was, in fact, Mr Hague’s second book on naval wargaming, the first, which I also vaguely recall, was titled Sea Battles in Miniature, published, it seems, in 1980. I have not managed to find a copy of that work at a price I am willing to pay for it.

Rather cutely, this has a publisher’s tag thing on the front cover, announcing that the book is ‘An essential manual for the hobby’. Well, maybe. It is certainly an interesting book, although how modern U-boats are might be the subject of a question in the history of technology.

There are the inevitable introduction, hints for the beginner and then a few pages on available models. This is short, which is merciful because of all the ideas contained in older wargame books, the lists of models, manufacturers and distributors are the first to go out of date. Mind you, some recent books commit the same error by putting web links in, which are even more ephemeral than bricks and mortar makers of model toys.

I do think, however, that the idea of cardboard cut-out ships might have legs (sorry – water wings, of course). After all, there are plenty of silhouettes and deck-plans available of modern warships, and there are increasing ranges of paper soldiers around, so why not. Rather than a silhouette, however, I would go for a deck plan, partly because it is a lot easier to cut out, and partly because it makes it easier to use aircraft. The idea at the back of my mind is to print out a load of aircraft on a piece of acetate sheet and cut them out, so they can really fly over a ship.

Anyway, I digress, albeit modestly. The rest of the book consists of rule sets for various different eras. The first is the age of the trireme, with a discussion of the diekplus and the periplus. These always cause a bit of head-scratching with me, as I am by no means sure they really took place that often, a bit like my scepticism about the caracole in the Sixteenth Century. These might be ideal manoeuvrers from the point of view of an armchair admiral, but achieving them must have been a lot more difficult. The kyklos, which I know is reported in Thucydides, is more possible, but again, to attack from it like the Athenians did must have been a challenge.

Anyway, after explaining that big galley models are a thing of the past for him (as opposed to the earlier book, which I believe had about 6 galleys in the reported action), this goes for larger quantities and a hex-based board. Larger, here, means about eighteen 1:1200 galleys a side. The recording is still on a ship by ship basis of damage and orders, which must have bogged things down a little, but ramming, oar-raking and boarding are all included.

Moving on there are rules for the ship-of-the-line ear, which extends from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic Wars. The rules are specified more for the later Seventeenth Century and the reported action is from the Nine Years War, at a rough guess. It shows the difficulties of sailing ships on lee shores, as the English fleet is embayed in Drumcloggy Bay. Again the ships are balsa wood and paper sails, and look impressive. However, modern wargamers have a plethora of models available.

Next along are the dreadnoughts, 1906 – 1941 (-ish), along with improvements in gunnery before the First World War. The chapter includes how gunnery worked, and how deployment was supposed to work, and how it really did at Jutland. I suppose a difficulty here is the relative paucity of large ship to ship battles in the period. Aside from Jutland, most of the rest consisted of Royal Navy ships eventually pounding German battleships and battlecruisers to bits. I generalise wildly, of course, but some imagination seems to be required to justify all that investment in models of Graf Spee and Bismark.

The rules are fairly straightforward, although they do use a pack of playing cards to assess damage of shell hits. The cards have a fifth suit, as well, called blobs, which must make life a bit interesting, if you can see that the next card is a blob and know that the centreline of your ship has just been hit. Still, so far as I am a judge the rules seem to be workable.

The aircraft carrier is next, and here we do get a step up in complexity, now that we have to worry about a third dimension. Hague suggests some straightforward ideas for using aircraft, such as ignoring differences in range and endurance. Also he acknowledges the importance of aerial reconnaissance. He suggests making 1:3000 scale aircraft out of piano wire and plastic card, or a flight of 1:4800 aircraft using clear plastic and painting on wings and a fuselage. It would need a steadier hand than I have. After the rules Hague makes a plea for naval wargamers to be less callous, or engage in campaigns so they do not let the planes just ditch after an extreme range strike.

Finally, we get to U-boats. I confess to not being an expert on U-boats, and unsure whether they tended to strike from the surface or from submerged positions. Possibly it varied. Hidden movement is, of course, required for this, and the various sorts of delivery system for depth charges are discussed. Again, without trying it out it all seems to work, even the idea of using bent pins stuck through bits of card to indicate periscopes.

I rather like these older books on wargaming, I confess. They have a bit of a simplicity to them, and a practicality, which perhaps some more recent books lack. The marketplace is now crowded with war and wargame related material, of course, and that might make a difference too. But most of the authors I have recently read argue that compromise is necessary to create a playable game, and I am not going to argue. True realism in a wargame is not something any of us would really want, I think.

Naval Wargames

Another trip down memory lane this week. I remember, a long time ago reading this work. Just vaguely; I was not and am not particularly interested in World War 1 and World War 2 naval wargaming, but some people are, and more power to their elbow.

I have been reading this particular tome:

Carter, B. J., Naval Wargames: World War I and World War II, Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1975.

As I said, I remember this one from being a lad. I suppose it is a book of its time, listing the possible sources of model ships, discussing scratch-building ships, and then constructing some rules for naval wargaming. Included are air and submarine rules, so they do aim at being comprehensive. Rules, of whatever age, always have some fascination, if only to examine what is kept in and what is abstracted away, and what sort of compromises are necessary.

Carter’s rules use a squared grid with the advantages and problems that that entails. In this case, movement is along the edges of the square, it seems, so at least one problem of a square grid is compromised over. Still, the grid does mean that ship speeds are reduced to a number of squares, although we also get some alternate long and shorter moves (two squares one move, three the next at 16-19 knots, for example) which must get a little confusing.

Ranges are calculated without using diagonals, so ranges are calculated using ‘knights moves’. Damage is via attrition, it seems, with each ship being given a sinking rate. Nasty explosions are not included, so far as I can tell; ships are pounded to pieces. Fair enough.

Interestingly, some actions using the rules are included. One is the escort of a convoy down the Adriatic coast from Pola to Cattaro. The escorts are a mix of Austro-Hungarian and German warships and some Austrian submarines. Their opponents are some Italian naval vessels and a British squadron.

The game, which lands up with an Austro-Hungarian victory, is quite interesting. Not because it is a particularly interesting era of naval warfare, although it might be, but because it is more or less a campaign game, with hidden movement, U-boats, and minefields. To cut a several-page story short, the Austro-Hungarian convoy makes it to Cattaro, while the damaged Italians withdraw to Bari.

Aside from the fact that this sort of submarine activity forms part of the backdrop to The Sound of Music, and that it is an interesting narrative, the distinction between a naval wargame and a naval wargame campaign is blurred. The sheer scale and scope of naval wargames automatically push them toward the campaign, even if only a single action is really envisaged.

The second game report is a hunt for a Japanese heavy cruiser commerce raider in the Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean in the Spring of 1942. The raider is being sought by several groups of allied warships. This game brings out the need for air reconnaissance in WW2 naval wargaming. Many years ago, when building Airfix warship kits, I wondered why so many of the cruisers and above had seaplanes aboard. Now I know.

Again, this game, while, it seems, it was played in one session as with the convoy escort, has the hallmarks of a campaign game. Eventually, the raider was pounded to bits, although not without meting out a fair bit of damage to her pursuers. Again, this looks a bit more like a campaign than a single battle to me, although the difference is a bit moot.

Next along is an idea for a campaign, set in the Far East in 1918 and involving naval and land forces from China, Korea, Japan, and Russia. This is a fictitious campaign, of course, but interesting. The land activity is very abstract, but the game does include fuel usage and differing port facilities. The Sino-Korean alliance has an advantage in ground troops, and the Russo-Japanese an advantage in naval units. It is quite an interesting set-up for a limited-scope but ongoing campaign.

Overall, this is an interesting book, at least to revisit after <mumble> years. The ideas are still good, although I imagine that there are many other tactical rules of varying complexity that the wargamer can try. The other difference relates to available ship models. If your main possible scale is 1:1200, then your wargaming models are going to be that scale. Of course, this means significant compromise on the ground scale, ranges, and movement. Now, I think there are extensive ranges of models in 1:3000, 1:4800, and 1:6000, which allows for a rather better match (visually, at least) between model and table scales. Not perfect, I will allow, but better.

The smaller the scale, the larger the scope, of course, and modern naval warfare brings in, as I have noted, some considerable issues of range and reconnaissance. In fact, after about 1942, the number of shooting matches between ships in sight of each other was limited, and it does seem to me that much of the Pacific War, at least, could be fought out as a map game without models at all. But, as wargamers, we do like our model representations of soldiers, ships, and aircraft.

The more recent warfare gets, the more complicated and technological it becomes. Perhaps this is why I see rather less Twentieth Century naval wargaming around than might be expected. Mind you, I recall playing Seastrike in the 1980s, and that was both fearsomely technological, had enormous ship counters and practically no maneuvering room, and largely came down to who could drop a missile on the enemy headquarters first.

Perhaps there is no really happy medium in modern naval warfare. The scales and timings are both long and short. After all, the naval rules suggest moves of minutes, if not hours, gunnery strikes in terms of rounds per minute, and air strikes should really be times in seconds. Ranges face similar sorts of problems, and it seems really hard to square all of these circles and still have a good game. But maybe I am simply unaware of more recent developments.