Bathtub WW2 or Global Domination by any other name....

An earlier version of Command Decision and the Barbarossa 25 campaign supplement.

As part of the 'Airfix generation' I have always been interested in WW2. I have fought many games of the years with land, sea and air featuring; from skirmishes up to full blown campaigns. The period is rich in gaming potential and lets be honest, there is a ton of material available to support the wargaming enthusiast from figures, models and books, not to mention a myriad of rule sets.

So why try something different?

What I want to do is not so much revolutionary as more evolutionary in concept. I want to fight a wide variety of table top wargames encompassing land, sea and air elements against the backdrop of WW2. This will mean games set in desert, the steppes of Russia, western Europe, the far East and the Pacific - on the ground, in the skies and at sea. I want to do this in a meaningful way so that the action relates to the map and how the war unfolds. In short the strategic situation will drive the tactical game - which is the essence of a campaign in any event.

I am merely looking at the bigger picture.

The forces I intend raising and using will be fairly modest as the main rules of choice will probably be the Portable Wargame as I believe these capture the spirit of what I am undertaking.

Many years ago Frank Chadwick of GDW published a supplement to his Command Decision WW2 rules called Barbarossa 25. The idea behind this was that the armies and geography for the campaign in question were divided by 25 (as I recall, again, I stand to be corrected) so that realistic forces could be raised to refight the entire war on the Eastern Front. I believe he also did something similar for the Battle of the Bulge but I stand to be corrected should any readers have a copy of this. His follow up WW1 version of Command Decision called Over the Top also featured a similar approach to the opening moves on the Western front in 1914 called ‘Home before the leaves fall’. 

A wargames campaign is always a compromise in terms of scale as the size of a collection usually determines the forces available. I always work on the basis that a campaign is a scaled down wargame which is in itself a scaled downed from reality. This ‘telescoping’ is fine and is probably the only way to field representational forces in a meaningful way. 

Using Axis and Allies as the basis for a campaign raises a number of challenges. The Infantry figures generally represent whole armies which of course are made up of various troop and equipment types. The area of TOEs for formations in WW2 is a veritable minefield as ‘paper’ and ‘actual’ strengths were usually very different, especially when a force had suffered a number of defeats or was short of supplies. This means that mapping across a map unit into a table top force is fraught with difficulty. I am thinking about using a force that is made up of a core of units with some options to add a little variety.

 

The naval and aerial dimension are something else to consider and as yet I have no thoughts about how I will tackle this. The games resulting from the map movement will be tactical but it is the challenge of mapping these forces back to the strategic picture that is where the fun starts.

 

In terms of the additional models I will need above and beyond the contents of the game the list is actually pretty modest. Trucks and halftracks are the main requirement for the land forces and a few extra aircraft types will be thrown into the mix. the naval side probably needs the most amount of material and, if I am honest, it is only because my old fleet building habits have not been totally erased....