I love it!
May. 19th, 2012 12:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerBattlefront (the company that produces the game Flames of War (FOW), not to be mistaken for Fire & Fury Games, who produce the game Battlefront: World War Two (BF:WW2)) are such manipulators.
I fell into playing their rules back before I knew very much more about World War Two than what I had read in general histories, seen in very fine-detail games liked Advanced Squad Leader, and seen in movies. ;-)
I quickly found out, after buying a certain amount of kit, that they are past masters of talking up some marvelous and little known piece of equipment or armour so as to give force X something distinctive (and possibly, just possibly, to sell a pile of kit that no one would otherwise buy).
The first example of this that I ran across I did not fall afoul of, and so I felt very superior. They put out an army list for Finnish troops, allowing them to use the excellent Russian T-34 tank. Well, as it happens, the Finns captured some Russian T-34s, and a few more, captured by the Germans, were handed over to them. The entire Finnish complement of T-34s, at its height? Nine (9) tanks. But they're terrifically good tanks, so every wargamer who builds a Finnish army in FOW has a unit of T-34s. Is this totally ludicrous? Well, each vehicle in the game represents one actual vehicle, so not entirely. But it's the sort of "someone had one, so I'm going to have one...or maybe three" thinking that leads every 18th century reenactor to have dark glasses, or the exact same something that Lord So and So holds in his portrait by Gainsborogh but which no one can trace an example of being made or sold in Britain or America.
So I had a good laugh at the silly FOW Finnish players and moved on. Well, not very far. Because I found that my lovely Indian Western Desert troops suffered from the same problem. First of all, the figures all had turbans on. In battledress. Turns out, only Sikhs were fanatical enough to wear their turbans in combat (it *is* a religous observation that a lot of them take seriously). Everyone else (Jats, Dogras, Pathans, Hazaras, Rajputs, Mahrattas, Garwhalis, Hyderabadis, and probably even the Muslim Punjabis had the sense to put on a tin hat if there was going to be shrapnel raining down. (Gurkhas put on helmets too, but they had other sorts of cool headgear for parade or field dress, not turbans). So all the figures I had bought better end up as Sikhs.
Then it turned out that they had sold us all another big whopper. All the Indian units came with something called a Blacker Bombard, which FOW swore up and down was the anti-tank weapon of choice for the Indian regiments. Turns out, not so much. This odd contraption, the gangly older cousin of the PIAT, had proven unpopular and unwieldy. No one used it if they could get anything else (presumably even homemade petrol bombs)..And while the special wheeled India Pattern Carrier *was* actually used by the Indian Army, it wasn't simply substituted for the Universal Carrier as our game books assured us.
So I wasn't terribly surprised when I found that the StuIG33, a boxy self-propelled gun that packed a whopping punch but was unfamiliar to me, was something custom-built by the German Army for fighting in the urban nightmare of Stalingrad. Total number ever produced? 24. Twenty-four, Compared to, for instance, the first armoured assault gun the Germans used, the StuG III, of which over 10,600 were produced. But does every German player who expects to be digging Russian infantry out of heavy cover come equipped with four of these bad boys? For sure, including the job lot of German tanks I bought a few years ago from a friend.
Come down to a few years ago. The D-Day guides for FOW were coming out, and while I don't play the game, I do use their figures (since almsot every shop carries them and they make a satisfying, if pricey, instant-gratification purchase). And their books seemed well researched and nicely illustrated. No harm in just getting them to look at the pretty pictures, right?
Well, I made the mistake of reading. And as I was building up a 6th Airborne force (everyone does American paratroopers for Normandy or British 1st Abn. for Arnhem--why not do the overlooked 6th that held the east flank of the Brit-Can landing zones and "held until relieved" at Pegasus Brisge? And, here, historical tidbit--they had a squadron of light tanks attached! Coolio.
Why didn't I learn? Why didn't I pay attention? Why didn't I learn from past experience that if FOW tells you you need something that you've never heard of before, you might want to be skeptical?
Turns out, this is even rarer than the obscure German assault gun. Twenty, 20, of these were attached to the British airborne forces. They didn't even make the trip to the Med in 1943 for the airdrop on Sicily. They didn't get lifted into Normandy until late on the 6th. One tipped over its glider and crashed it into the ocean. Three more were totalled by glider accidents on the ground. The remainder got jammed up in parachute lines and had to be cut free. Two were lost the next day in action. At which point the division commander had them taken out of front-line, anti-tank service as being unable to take part safely. A couple of months later, the Tetrarchs were replaced with Cromwell tanks.
So, how many of these did I end up with? Five. At the larger BF:WW2 scale (each piece represents a section or squad of men or 2-3 guns or vehicles), that's the entire functional force of 6 Abn's 6th Airborne Armoured Reconnaissance Squadron. Which I can use in maybe one or two actions. :-)
Never mind. I can play a skirmish game and have them represent the Tetrarchs sent in 1942 on the invasion of Vichy France-held Madagascar. There were actually a whole six sent to the Indian Ocean, but one was stuck in the samd when landing and abandoned, giving me just the right number to represent every one. Mind you, the demoralized and undergunned Vichy troops knocked out two more in the long, long two days of combat before they surrendered. The Tetrarch, raw fighting power! (Very raw...)
I fell into playing their rules back before I knew very much more about World War Two than what I had read in general histories, seen in very fine-detail games liked Advanced Squad Leader, and seen in movies. ;-)
I quickly found out, after buying a certain amount of kit, that they are past masters of talking up some marvelous and little known piece of equipment or armour so as to give force X something distinctive (and possibly, just possibly, to sell a pile of kit that no one would otherwise buy).
The first example of this that I ran across I did not fall afoul of, and so I felt very superior. They put out an army list for Finnish troops, allowing them to use the excellent Russian T-34 tank. Well, as it happens, the Finns captured some Russian T-34s, and a few more, captured by the Germans, were handed over to them. The entire Finnish complement of T-34s, at its height? Nine (9) tanks. But they're terrifically good tanks, so every wargamer who builds a Finnish army in FOW has a unit of T-34s. Is this totally ludicrous? Well, each vehicle in the game represents one actual vehicle, so not entirely. But it's the sort of "someone had one, so I'm going to have one...or maybe three" thinking that leads every 18th century reenactor to have dark glasses, or the exact same something that Lord So and So holds in his portrait by Gainsborogh but which no one can trace an example of being made or sold in Britain or America.
So I had a good laugh at the silly FOW Finnish players and moved on. Well, not very far. Because I found that my lovely Indian Western Desert troops suffered from the same problem. First of all, the figures all had turbans on. In battledress. Turns out, only Sikhs were fanatical enough to wear their turbans in combat (it *is* a religous observation that a lot of them take seriously). Everyone else (Jats, Dogras, Pathans, Hazaras, Rajputs, Mahrattas, Garwhalis, Hyderabadis, and probably even the Muslim Punjabis had the sense to put on a tin hat if there was going to be shrapnel raining down. (Gurkhas put on helmets too, but they had other sorts of cool headgear for parade or field dress, not turbans). So all the figures I had bought better end up as Sikhs.
Then it turned out that they had sold us all another big whopper. All the Indian units came with something called a Blacker Bombard, which FOW swore up and down was the anti-tank weapon of choice for the Indian regiments. Turns out, not so much. This odd contraption, the gangly older cousin of the PIAT, had proven unpopular and unwieldy. No one used it if they could get anything else (presumably even homemade petrol bombs)..And while the special wheeled India Pattern Carrier *was* actually used by the Indian Army, it wasn't simply substituted for the Universal Carrier as our game books assured us.
So I wasn't terribly surprised when I found that the StuIG33, a boxy self-propelled gun that packed a whopping punch but was unfamiliar to me, was something custom-built by the German Army for fighting in the urban nightmare of Stalingrad. Total number ever produced? 24. Twenty-four, Compared to, for instance, the first armoured assault gun the Germans used, the StuG III, of which over 10,600 were produced. But does every German player who expects to be digging Russian infantry out of heavy cover come equipped with four of these bad boys? For sure, including the job lot of German tanks I bought a few years ago from a friend.
Come down to a few years ago. The D-Day guides for FOW were coming out, and while I don't play the game, I do use their figures (since almsot every shop carries them and they make a satisfying, if pricey, instant-gratification purchase). And their books seemed well researched and nicely illustrated. No harm in just getting them to look at the pretty pictures, right?
Well, I made the mistake of reading. And as I was building up a 6th Airborne force (everyone does American paratroopers for Normandy or British 1st Abn. for Arnhem--why not do the overlooked 6th that held the east flank of the Brit-Can landing zones and "held until relieved" at Pegasus Brisge? And, here, historical tidbit--they had a squadron of light tanks attached! Coolio.
Why didn't I learn? Why didn't I pay attention? Why didn't I learn from past experience that if FOW tells you you need something that you've never heard of before, you might want to be skeptical?
Turns out, this is even rarer than the obscure German assault gun. Twenty, 20, of these were attached to the British airborne forces. They didn't even make the trip to the Med in 1943 for the airdrop on Sicily. They didn't get lifted into Normandy until late on the 6th. One tipped over its glider and crashed it into the ocean. Three more were totalled by glider accidents on the ground. The remainder got jammed up in parachute lines and had to be cut free. Two were lost the next day in action. At which point the division commander had them taken out of front-line, anti-tank service as being unable to take part safely. A couple of months later, the Tetrarchs were replaced with Cromwell tanks.
So, how many of these did I end up with? Five. At the larger BF:WW2 scale (each piece represents a section or squad of men or 2-3 guns or vehicles), that's the entire functional force of 6 Abn's 6th Airborne Armoured Reconnaissance Squadron. Which I can use in maybe one or two actions. :-)
Never mind. I can play a skirmish game and have them represent the Tetrarchs sent in 1942 on the invasion of Vichy France-held Madagascar. There were actually a whole six sent to the Indian Ocean, but one was stuck in the samd when landing and abandoned, giving me just the right number to represent every one. Mind you, the demoralized and undergunned Vichy troops knocked out two more in the long, long two days of combat before they surrendered. The Tetrarch, raw fighting power! (Very raw...)
