Bay 12 Games Forum

The nights are long, it's cold outside, and I'm almost done with my Christmas choir obligations, so it's time for some winter wargaming.

This year's selection is Rule the Waves 2. We'll be playing France, for its interesting position astride the border between Europe (where Germany and Britain vie for naval supremacy) and the Mediterranean (where there are a bunch of second-rate powers to beat up on), and the chip on its shoulder in re: Britain and naval matters.

I like to do some audience participation in these, so I'll bold occasional decision points throughout posts.

My plan is to post one update a week, each covering about two years of game time, which means a full game (from 1900 to 1955) will take us into summer. I'll aim to have the updates posted on Thursday, so I can play a little over the weekend and write in the evenings thereafter.

[ed. I'm writing these in Markdown and have to convert them to bbcode for Bay12, so I may be a bit behind getting them posted here.]

Vive la France!

In Rule the Waves 2, France has neither serious perks nor serious drawbacks. We do get two bonus techs (Hardened AP penetrator, which just finished researching, and Quadruple Turrets, which is a decade or two down the road—bonus tech just means we have a good chance of getting it early). Our budget ranks third or fourth, after Britain, Germany, and sometimes the US. We have a moderate budgetary edge over the Italians (but more overseas colonies where we'll have to station creaking, dilapidated armored cruisers years past their best-by date), and a serious edge over the creaking, dilapidated Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Looking north, we come to the Germans, among our historical foes, and the English, also among our historical foes. In the real-world timeline, England began making overtures to France not long after the present game date, as a way to counterbalance Germany. An alliance north of France, one way or another, might keep us safe from the other party, but might also drag us into wars we don't really want.

I guess Russia is also up there, but in a game about naval warfare, European Russia might as well be on the moon. (In the real-world timeline, France and Russia are allied, so they aren't among the six opponents the game chooses to simulate for us.)

Looking west, we have the United States. We don't have any reason to mess with them, and the only place where we have the bases to plausibly do so is Southeast Asia.

Speaking of which, looking east, we have Southeast Asia, where we're a major player. Japan is an obvious threat out that way, given that Southeast Asia is their backyard. The Americans, who hold the Philippines, also have interests out there.

Time for the first decision. Where do we focus our strategic interests? In the Mediterranean is my preference, but I could also see convincing arguments for expanding our presence in Africa or the Far East. Relatedly, how hawkish should we be? In Rule the Waves as in real life, it's much easier to get money appropriated for the Navy when using it is in the cards, but actually having to use it means we might lose parts of it, and if the part of the

Before I get too far ahead of myself, though, let's take a look at our starting fleet, custom-built according to the theory that France has historically produced some unusual warships.





If you don't want to zoom in on that, it's four battleships of the La République class, four armored cruisers of the Gueydon class, five light cruisers of the Tage class, and 16(ish?) destroyers of the Fauconneau class in active service. Under construction, we have another La République, another Gueydon, three Tages, and two Fauconneaus.

Because our ships are built nearly to the limits of our dockyards' capabilities, we have fewer of them than other nations. We have four battleships, while Italy has seven, Britain has nine, and the Germans have 10 with another four under construction. Our four armored cruisers put us ahead of the Italians, but we lag them in light cruisers and destroyers, although the Tages under construction will change that.

The Austro-Hungarians have less than half the battleship tonnage we do.



The La Républiques (Les Républiques?) are fast by the standard of pre-dreadnoughts, at a design speed of 20 knots, and well-armed with 13-inch guns. That's enough to outrun and outshoot their historical British counterparts in the Duncan class, although they give up a bit in terms of armor.



The Gueydons are oddball ships. They're relatively fast at 23 knots, and their range and internal accommodations support colonial operations. They have about the armor you would expect for the class and era. The strange part is the gun layout. Rather than the usual four 9" or 10" guns and broadside casemate 5" or 6" guns, they have an all-medium-gun layout: twelve 7" guns in six double turrets, with a broadside of 8 guns and a fore or aft throw of 6. They also feature three torpedo tubes underwater.

Time will tell if the unusual armament layout is a success or a failure.



The Tages are also strange, with turreted 5" guns fore and aft, and broadside 4" guns in casemates, along with torpedo tubes. They're lightly armored, and only slightly faster than the Gueydons at 24 knots. (That's still faster than contemporary light cruisers, though.) Their armament is a bit lighter than their peers', but their armor is heavier.



The first and only one of our starting ship classes which is notably slower than its contemporaries, the Fauconneaus make up for it with a few extra torpedo launchers.

Decision point #2: where do we focus our shipbuilding efforts? Is France to build a mighty battleship fleet to crush the Italians and the Austro-Hungarians? Should we focus on cruisers to scour the trade lanes in the event of war? Are submarines, destroyers, and torpedoes worth our time? Is there anything in particular we ought to build right now, or should be build a nest egg for when research begins to pay off? Bear in mind, building a battleship is about a two-year endeavor.

That decision also influences our research priorities. Should we change any of them for now?



Finally, finances and diplomacy. Tensions are low right now, and our budget is in near-perfect balance. At 6%, our research spending is a little low. It might be wise to increase that, as ships come off the ways and money becomes available.



That's all for this first update. This being Christmas week, I'll plan to do the next update the first Thursday in 2020.

Random Carrier Battles is a computer wargame simulating aircraft carrier warfare at the operational level between the mid-1930s and the end of the Second World War. It features a user-friendly design system for carriers, escorts, and aircraft, along with a large library of predefined types for your convenience. Planned features include a scenario editor and a random scenario generator, along with some premade scenarios covering major battles in the Second World War.

I had a goal in mind for the design tools, which I covered at length in a recent episode of my podcast. The short version is this: it should represent the differences between the major schools of carrier design—American, British, and Japanese—as simply as possible, but no more simply than that. We managed to get it down to 13 selectable traits.



In scenarios, the player fills the role of the admiral in command, controlling the composition and disposition of the task force or task forces under his control, as well as the tempo and target of air operations. Hands-on admirals will be able to control aircraft handling down to the individual plane aboard their carriers; big-picture admirals will be able to delegate those to the computer.

Both kinds of admiral will have plenty to sink their teeth into strategically: Random Carrier Battles will accurately model the uncertainties inherent in carrier warfare, including incorrect spotting reports and communications failures, incomplete information about enemies, and lack of direct control over aircraft.



Obviously, this project is still in its infancy. I'll be covering the development process at my blog and cross-posting here, and sharing more screenshots and videos as things progress. Stay tuned for more information in the months to come!

Hi, I'm Fishbreath. You may remember me from such AARs as Arsenal of Democracy (if you've been around for a while) and The Battered Bastards of Bastogne. Today I break a long drought of such content to bring you something new, and something out of the ordinary for me.

It's an audience-participation AAR of Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge and a scenario pack called Brabant Breakthrough. Authored by Matrix Games forum user tukker, it comprises three scenarios covering the mad dash from the German border to the city of Rotterdam in 1940, prior to the invasion of France. They're loosely continuous, with the option to fiddle with reinforcement and supply schedules to make performances in one scenario affect the next, and we'll be playing through all three.

I say we, and here's what I mean. Every eight hours of time on the game clock, or whenever something happens to disrupt previous plans, I'll post an update, and we'll decide democratically what to do next. You'll get to choose among three strategic directions to take for the next eight hours, or until the next major upset to our plans. To simplify things, I'll distill the full spectrum of potential actions into three options, roughly corresponding to the command personalities of three German generals. To vote, reply to the post with the name of the general in bold: Guderian, von Rundstedt, or Paulus.

Your options in detail


1. Friedrich Paulus
A longtime staff officer and noted battle planner for many years before the war, Paulus has a fine grasp of deception and a distaste for throwing away the lives of his men. He prefers testing the enemy and striking at his weak points. Will his more measured approach cost too much time in this fast-paced operation?

2. Heinz Guderian
A pioneer of motorized tactics, Guderian tends toward breakthrough and exploitation, no bad thing in an invasion. The divisions we have to work with move almost entirely on foot, though. Will his experience with mechanized forces bog down when applied to our infantry-heavy force?

3. Gerd von Rundstedt
A long-serving officer with a history in command reaching back to the Great War, von Rundstedt favors grand plans: vast flanking maneuvers and encirclements covering the whole of the field of battle. He lacks a sense for the finer details of his battle plans, though. Will the battlefield turn into a slaughterhouse as it did in von Rundstedt's last war?


That's all I have for this introduction. I'll introduce the first scenario soon.

In which I start another AAR without finishing a previous one.

Anyone familiar with my history of AARs and Let's Plays will detect the obvious theme of military history. The astute reader will gather that I'm a fan of military history. What even the most astute reader will be unable to gather is that I'm a particular fan of naval history, a topic I have not to date written on.

If I were a braver man, I'd be playing Age of Sail 2, a game that covers my very favorite naval history topic. Unfortunately, Age of Sail 2 doesn't have such critical features as 'turn in line', and so I can't love it as dearly as I'd like (why oh why can't someone made a modern remake?). Instead, I dive deep into the grognard side of the naval historical wargame pool to bring you Steam and Iron.

Steam and Iron covers the naval engagements of the Great War and a few 1914 battles, from Coronel to Jutland (and beyond, to all the comparatively boring stuff that happened after the Germans gave up on major engagements). Work began a while back on a playable campaign, and now it's far enough along that I'm more than comfortable putting it on display for all to see here. In the current beta, the only campaign available is Germany against Russia in the Baltic Sea, September 1914 to January 1917. In my (obviously German) campaign, I've made it to November, and things are going pretty well.





Here's the spartan main interface. Points of note: my force list on the left of the screen, with all of the non-destroyer divisions of the German Baltic Fleet expanded, and the Baltic Scouting Forces in the next image down. The High Seas Fleet and the High Seas Fleet Scouting Forces are occasionally available to me, but I can only rarely sortie them for reasons I'll go into later. Available to me are:

• Ten light cruisers of various classes, generally armed with eight to twelve 10 cm guns.
• A whole mess of destroyers, armed with torpedoes and a handful of lightweight guns. They're mostly useful for shooting at other destroyers; the very name 'destroyer' is a shortening of 'torpedo boat destroyer', which suggests their relative lack of use against heavier units. Unless they hit with torpedoes.
• Two minelaying light cruisers, Nautilus and Albatross, which haven't seen much use lately.
• Two cruisers, SMS Prinz Adalbert and SMS Friedrich Carl. They're old-fashioned by this point, dating back to the turn of the century, and armed with a main battery of only four 21 cm guns, along with a large secondary battery of ten 15 cm guns. They're not wonderful ships, but they can make 20 knots, which will serve to outrun the Russian battleships presently available to my enemy. Only a week ago was the modern armored cruiser SMS Blücher withdrawn from the Baltic Sea, a loss I feel most painfully. Blücher mounted twelve 21 cm guns and could make 24 knots, and although she couldn't stand up to a modern battleship, I would have wagered in her favor against a pre-dreadnought.
• The 'pride' of the Baltic fleet, seven pre-dreadnought battleships, outnumbering the Russian forces I know of two to one.

Since I don't know how many of you are familiar with naval developments from about 1850 to 1914, I'm going to spoiler this very lengthy digression on the meaning of 'pre-dreadnought'.


So, yeah. Pre-dreadnoughts. They're not worth much when there are dreadnoughts around, but in numbers they're still capable of putting up a fight, and especially capable of putting up a fight against other pre-dreadnoughts. In my fictional Baltic Sea, it's nearly the end of 1914, and I currently have that two-to-one pre-dreadnought advantage I mentioned. I'm supposed to receive a dreadnought as reinforcement soon, and a few more over the next few months, while the Russians are supposed to receive same.

Since my fleet is significantly more capable than the present Russian force, the threat of my battleships has kept their ships mainly in port. Since they've been mainly in port, I've mainly been using my cruisers in the role that gave them their name—to chase enemy merchant shipping. I've been very successful, and I even snapped up a light cruiser and a trio of destroyers.



My battleships met theirs once in October, but I had just run out of main battery ammunition sinking the Russian light cruiser Diana, and my squadron was forced to run. Theirs couldn't gain any ground, and though they fired on my battleships for about half an hour before turning for home, they scored no hits.

Once I have 600,000 more victory points than the Russians, I win the campaign. I've made a good start on that goal, but the appearance of dreadnoughts will certainly change things, and I believe the Russians will have more of them than I do to begin with. Since, to my knowledge, the Russians don't have any dreadnoughts yet, in the end of November, 1914, I intend to sortie all seven of my battleships along with scouting and screening forces in the hopes of catching the Russian squadron that radio intelligence suggests will be at sea this week, and that about brings you up to speed.

December 16, 1944

It's several hours before sunrise in the Belgian Ardennes, on the eve of the Third Reich's last desperate offensive:

Split seconds before 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, December 16, an American soldier from Company K, 110th Infantry, manning an observation post atop a concrete water tower along the Skyline Drive in the village of Hosingen, telephoned his company commander. In the distance on the German side of the Our, he could see a strange phenomenon: countless flickering pinpricks of light. Moments later both he and his company commander had the explanation. At Hosingen, along the rest of the Skyline Drive, and at many another point along what had become the quiet front in the Ardennes, the morning darkness suddenly came alive with a maelstrom of bursting shells.

To start there, however, would be to tell the middle of the story before the beginning, and I don't truck with clever literary devices like that.

The genesis of Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein came in autumn of 1944, shortly after British forces liberated Antwerp and during Montgomery's ill-fated airborne attack on Arnhem. In keeping with plans that received Hitler's personal support, it was bold to the point of delusion. Some twenty-five divisions would be pulled from quiet sectors of the western front, the quieter sectors of the eastern front, and OKW's (that's Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, for the uninitiated) strategic reserve, and would drive from the Siegfried Line between the town of Diekirch along the Our River in the south and Malmédy and Monschau in the north. The Panzers were to penetrate deep into the Ardennes through the Losheim Gap at the west foot of the Schnee Eifel, wheeling northwest once they reached the Meuse and covering the remaining forty miles to Antwerp. In doing so, they would drive a wedge between the British sector northeast of Antwerp and the American sector to the southwest, and Hitler hoped that the isolation and elimination of several corps' worth of British troops and American disillusionment over a major defeat would lead to a separate peace.

His misunderstanding of politics on the Allied home fronts aside, the generals at OKW and those placed in charge of the operation uniformly thought that Antwerp was an unrealistic goal. In no small part, they formed this opinion on the basis that the Ardennes is not what one would refer to as good tank country.

All Hitler wants me to do is cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go on and take Antwerp! And all this in the worst time of the year through the Ardennes where the snow is waist deep and there isn't room to deploy four tanks abreast let alone armored divisions! Where it doesn't get light until eight and it's dark again at four and with re-formed divisions made up chiefly of kids and old men—and at Christmas!

The Ardennes had featured prominently in two previous 20th-century battles: a dustup between the French and the Germans in the First World War, during which the counterattacking French were badly beaten and ended up losing territory, and the 'battle' during the Fall of France in 1940. The latter wasn't so much a battle, though, as a drive through the Ardennes: the French and Belgian forces defending the region didn't expect to see so many tanks, and were quickly driven back by the German forces, who promptly got bogged down on the terrible roads characteristic of the Ardennes, and were only saved from destruction from the air by the overwhelming superiority of the Luftwaffe.

Speaking of things characteristic of the Ardennes, I think I should be more detailed. It's a labyrinth of deep valleys, through which run fast-moving, steep-banked rivers almost impossible for vehicles to ford, separated by forested hills, connected by generally poor roads. Nearly anywhere there was a bridge, there was also a town which could be fortified. There were really only three points that made the Ardennes suitable at all. The first was that the American forces in the vicinity had just taken part in a knock-down drag-out brawl in the Hürtgenwald on the way to capturing Aachen. The defending forces were overstretched all through the Ardennes, and generally either inexperienced or receiving replacements. The second was the weather. (The plan for the predawn assault on the 16th included searchlights bounced off the clouds to simulate moonlight. "How do you know you will have clouds?" asked Hitler. Responded von Manteuffel: "You have already decided there will be bad weather.") In December in the Ardennes, clouds, fog, and snow are the rule, and their presence certainly kept the offensive free from aerial attack for the first week. Third, but probably most responsible for the initial successes, was the utter failure of Allied intelligence services to realize what was coming.

It's simply amazing that no American officer had any inkling of an offensive of the scale that eventually came. Reconnaissance flights had noticed major activity in marshaling yards in Germany near the Ardennes. Decrypts from the Japanese diplomatic service revealed, in letters from the Japanese ambassador, that the Germans were planning a major attack. Ultra, the British codename for Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park, told the same story. Two Belgian civilians, in the last few days before the 16th, witnessed German preparations. Between the 14th and the morning of the 16th, American patrols across the Our River took prisoners who uniformly declared that a large attack was coming. One, an ethnic Pole understandably eager to share, said that the Germans would attack "between December 16 and Christmas, in a large-scale offensive, employing searchlights against the clouds to simulate moonlight." Even American soldiers had some evidence:

For several nights, outposts of the 106th Infantry Division had been reporting the noise of tracked vehicles, and on the 15th, Colonel [Robert P.] Stout [the division's chief intelligence officer] noted that the night before there had been the "sound of vehicles all along the front after dark—vehicles, barking dogs, motors."

Even so, it took until the evening of December 16th, more than twelve hours after the attack began, before the Allied high command decided they were facing a major attack. Ultra intercepts referred to the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies by name, and American troops recovered exhortations from the bodies of dead officers:

Forward, march, march! In remembrance of our dead comrades, and therefore on their order, and in remembrance of the tradition of our proud Wehrmacht!

We will not disappoint the Führer and the Fatherland, who created the sword of retribution. Forward in the spirit of Leuthen!

Soldiers of the West Front! Your great hour has arrived. Large attacking armies have been started against the Anglo-Americans. I do not have to tell you anything more than that. You feel it yourself. WE GAMBLE EVERYTHING! You carry with you the holy obligation to give everything to achieve things beyond human possibilities for our Fatherland and our Führer!

Noted the intelligence officer of the VIII Corps, "These documents indicate the scope of the German offensive, and its importance becomes apparent from the impressive list of high-ranking German generals whose signatures appear thereon." I should say so.

Those messages went out to the whole of the German force lined up opposite the Americans in the Ardennes: in the northern sector of the front, opposite Monschau, Elsenborn, and Malmédy, the Sixth Panzer Army, four SS Panzer divisions under Sepp Dietrich. Dietrich had long been associated with Hitler himself, having become his chauffeur and bodyguard in the late 1920s. In 1933, he commanded Hitler's household guard, the SS-Leibstandärte Adolf Hitler, and kept that post as it grew from regiment in France to brigade in Greece to division in Russia. He was not popular with the other German commanders. von Rundstedt called him "decent, but stupid." He wasn't much of a commander, but he had been loyal to Hitler since 1923, the troops adored him, and Hitler was convinced that he, more than any of the Reich's other commanders, could be trusted absolutely.

The Fifth Panzer Army, which stood ready to attack the center of the American lines, was under the command of Hasso Eccard von Manteuffel, a veteran of Barbarossa, the campaign in North Africa, and the long retreat on the Eastern Front, and his conduct over the course of his distinguished career had vaulted him past corps command entirely; on returning from the Eastern Front in 1944, he was placed in command of the Fifth Panzer Army, with three panzer divisions (including the Panzer Lehr Division) and two divisions of Volksgrenadiers. von Manteuffel's stature lent him the capacity to convince Hitler to make changes to the plan: at his urging, the artillery preparation turned from a three-hour barrage into a short, sharp bombardment, designed to throw the Americans into disarray and then exploit their confusion. He also had the time of the attack moved forward to the aforementioned 5:30, a move which lengthened the naturally-lit day for the Germans by several hours.

The Seventh Army, at the south end, was commanded by Erich Brandenberger, who may as well be named General Not-Featuring-In-This-Special. Walter Model commanded all three armies, while Generalfeldmarschall Karl Rudolph Gerd von Rundstedt held overall command (von Rundstedt remarked that, with Model in tactical command of the operation, Hitler had left him "the authority to change guards at my headquarters").



We concern ourselves primarily with the Fifth Panzer Army here; I want to save the exploits of the Sixth Panzer Army for next Christmas (I have the best title for it, let me tell you). Across from von Manteuffel was the 28th Infantry Division, positioned along the Skyline Drive: the highway that ran from Diekirch all the way north to St. Vith (hey, a familiar place name!). The 28th Division's sector was some twenty-five miles long, and tactical considerations dictated that two of its infantry regiments were to occupy only about five miles each (the 112th Regiment in the north, and the 109th in the south). That left the 110th Infantry Regiment with a fifteen-mile front to defend, and on top of that, the 110th was providing the divisional reserve, a battalion behind the Clerve river, five miles in the direction of Bastogne, leaving the regiment about sixteen hundred men in total. They could expect to defend neither the Our nor the Skyline Drive in anything approaching strength; during the day, they situated themselves in squad-sized outposts along the Our, and at night, they withdrew to positions astride major roads leading up to the Skyline Drive.

That about finishes setting up the board. Let's get those pieces moving. The artillery preparation against the 110th Infantry Regiment came to a close, and units of the 26th Volksgrenadier Division and 2nd Panzer Division crossed the Our River and moved on the Skyline Drive.

The 110th Infantry held positions at Heinerscheid, Marnach, Hosingen, and three smaller crossroads further south. Unfortunately, Fishbach, a village whose name I appreciate, will not feature in this AAR beyond this mention. The German objectives for the 16th were Marnach and Hosingen. Roads led from Marnach to Clervaux and its bridges over the Clerve River, while both Marnach and Hosingen led via Munshausen and Bockholz, respectively, to Drauffelt and its bridge. After crossing the Clerve, they could run along good roads for the ten miles between the Clerve and Bastogne.

The 26th Volksgrenadiers and the 2nd Panzer Division had orders to bypass American strongpoints wherever possible in order to focus the whole of their effort on Marnach and Hosingen. The 26th Volksgrenadiers were largely successful, reaching Hosingen while the morning fog still lingered and overrunning one of Company K's platoons south of the town. Despite overwhelming superiority, the local commander failed to press the attack on Hosingen proper. Some of his units infiltrated past Hosingen, however, and came upon C Battery, 109th Field Artillery Battalion. They put in a desperate call to the commander of the 110th Infantry, Colonel Hurley Edward Fuller, who had just re-established communications with his division's command post in Wiltz, halfway between Bastogne and the front line along the Wiltz River. Fuller, a curmudgeonly Texan with a temper, wasn't the sort to let that sort of thing happen, so he called up divisional headquarters and demanded the release of his third battalion (the divisional reserve, remember). The divisional commander, Major General Norman Daniel 'Dutch' Cota, refused. The situation, in his opinion, was still developing, and he didn't want to commit his reserve before he had a better picture of it. Cota did release the remainder of 707th Tank Battalion, two companies of Shermans; the battalion's other two companies were already committed with the 112th Regiment to the north and the 109th Regiment to the south. Those two companies, still in the 707th's assembly area along the Clerve, were only two miles away from Hosingen, and so a platoon quickly got under way to bail out the artillery. They arrived shortly, and with their help the artillerymen resolved the day's first crisis.

While the Volksgrenadiers fought around Hosingen, elements of the 2nd Panzer Division crossed the Our opposite Marnach. They happened to run into an American minefield, which delayed them until the morning fog had lifted, and by the time they reached the town, Company B and a platoon of towed anti-tank guns had gone on full alert; the German attack failed, gaining only a foothold in the south end of the village. As was to become a pattern, though, the Germans simply bypassed the little island of American territory and continued down the road toward Clervaux and Battery B of the 109th Field Artillery. The commander of 1st Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel David Paul, attempted to send a platoon from Company A in Heinerscheid south to Marnach, but they were repulsed by Germans bypassing Marnach and only made it back to Heinerscheid just in time to aid in the defense against the German attack there.

Fuller, who had far too many crises on his hands to employ his two tank companies as a single unit, sent two platoons to Marnach to retake the south end of the village, while at the same time Paul dispatched his reserve, C Company, from Munshausen to carry out the same task. The two groups were supposed to meet, but C Company came under fire along the road and had to abandon it. The tanks made it to Marnach, though, and were able to clear the Germans from the town. Lt. Col. Paul sent one platoon to retrace its tracks, locate C Company, and defend Munshausen, while dispatching the other to drive south on Hosingen, which Paul thought had fallen. The first platoon did come across C Company and reach Munshausen, and the second swept the Skyline Drive between Marnach and Hosingen clear of Germans, and, to Paul's relief, found Hosingen still in American hands. Of course, his orders left the critical road junction at Marnach in the hands of an infantry company without tank support.

The Germans were also without tank support, because the Our was not an easy river to bridge:

Because the bridges had to be stout enough to support big Panther tanks, the girders were heavy, and the terrain around the bridge sites was so confined by the deep river gorge that no heavy equipment could get forward to help. All had to be done by hand; furthermore, the Our, normally a placid stream, was swollen from rains and melting snow. [...]

Shortly after 1 p.m., Major Loos's engineers finally completed the bridge for the 2nd Panzer Division at Dasburg, whence ran the road to Marnach and Clervaux. The Mark IV and Panther tanks were nevertheless slow to cross, for a narrow, precipitous approach road on the east bank had a succession of hairpin turns that was hard for the ponderous tanks to negotiate. Only ten had crossed the span when the next tank in column took the last turn too short, crashed into one side of the bridge, and plunged into the water. Except for the driver, the crew escaped; but repairing the bridge consumed another two hours, so that it was [4 p.m.] before tanks could begin crossing again. At about the same time [...] engineers of the Panzer Lehr Division completed a bridge downstream at Gemünd.

At around the same time, in Clervaux, Colonel Fuller was rounding up a platoon and a half or so of men on leave in the town's hotels and sending them east to Reuler, north from the Marnach road, where B Battery of the 109th Field Artillery and a detachment from the quad-machine gun halftracks of the divisional antiaircraft battalion were desperately fighting off a determined German assault. B Battery pulled back to Clervaux, out of immediate threat, while Colonel Fuller once again implored General Cota to release the divisional reserve. Cota refused, so Fuller devised a cunning stratagem: he asked for the two hundred-odd men from the division's other regiments and attached battalions who had also been on leave in Clervaux. This Cota agreed to, and Fuller dispatched his new provisional company to dig in on the road down into Clervaux, while organizing cooks, clerks, military policemen, and anybody else who could be spared from headquarters duties and hold a rifle to defend the old chateau in Clervaux. Orders all the way from the corps commander, General Middleton, required that Fuller hold the town.

Darkness was falling as the German tanks made it across the the Our, and although the Americans were hard-pressed at every point along the Skyline Drive, none of their outposts had fallen. That was soon to change; as the tanks arrived at Marnach and Hosingen, the Americans found themselves increasingly hard-pressed, and some outposts south of Hosingen were forced to retreat. As night fell, the defenders at Marnach radioed Fuller:

[They] reported by radio that the Germans were attacking again supported by half-tracks firing machine guns. That was the last word to come from the men who had so stoutly defended Marnach, but a continuing noise of firing from the village gave Colonel Fuller hope that some of them were still holding out.

Finally, at nine o'clock that night, General Cota released Fuller's 2nd Battalion back to him, and Fuller immediately planned to use the new battalion to relieve Marnach. The attack would come at dawn, supported by the 707th Tank Battalion's company of light tanks from the north.

General von Lüttwitz, in command of the 47th Panzer Corps that had been tasked with capturing Marnach and Hosingen, along with a crossing over the Clerve, found himself well short of his objectives: the Americans held in Hosingen and Clervaux, and the Germans had only succeeded in taking three defended positions over the whole day: Marnach and two of the villages south of Hosingen. MacDonald writes that the success of the American defense against such overwhelming odds (two battalions against four regiments; that is, no more than two thousand men against at least ten thousand) was the most remarkable achievement by the American soldier on the first day of the offensive.

Of course, the Pzkfw IVs of the 2nd Panzer Division were assembling just before midnight at Marnach, and with no serious opposition between them and Clervaux, Fuller was rapidly running out of time...

---

Well, we're about 3400 words in, and only now do I get to the administrative stuff:

I hope to update once a day from now until the end of December, giving a day-by-day account of the fight around Bastogne and, from the 22nd to the 26th, my defense and relief of Bastogne as fought in Command Ops.

Far and away the most helpful source for this opening post (note the map; that's a photograph from the book) and the daily updates to come was Charles B. MacDonald's A Time for Trumpets, which I give my highest recommendation. Pretty much every quotation and every fact comes from that history; it covers the crucial first few days of the battle in exhaustive detail, and it's still probably the among the most readable military histories I've ever read, owing in large part to the individual stories MacDonald weaves into the larger narrative. If you want a better feel for the Battle of the Bulge, this is your book. Trust me.

I'm posting this first at a different forum, which happens to do automatic scaling of images. They're all going to be 1920x1080 or 1600x900 here.

----

Return to St. Vith: A Command Ops Mini-AAR

I've always had a fondness for the Airborne Assault/Command Ops games, ever since I saw a review of Red Devils Over Arnhem when I was a but wee lad and thought to myself, "That looks fantastic." To date, that fondness had been the creepy-stalker sort no doubt familiar to our contingent of visual novel and dating sim fans, but I've recently crossed the boundary between less money/more sense and more money/less sense on the $100-wargames scale.

Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge is a real-time, not-hex-based operational-level wargame. Scenarios usually span from 48 hours to 10 days, maps run ten to a few dozen kilometers across, and the units under your command range from divisions to brigades, each potentially modeled all the way down to a platoon level. Three mechanics conspire to force you to play your hand like a battlefield commander might have done. The first is orders delay, which simulates the time it takes for an order to percolate from you, the highest-ranking commander on-map, down to the tip of the spear. Orders can take up to two hours to reach their destinations if you're not careful with your attachments, detachments, and the like. The second is the overloaded headquarters mechanic, which increases orders delay when a headquarters has too many units beyond its normal count attached. The third is the excellent AI, which makes it possible to order a battalion to make an attack and trust that the battalion commander will employ his companies without screwing it up too badly. Long story short, it's a complicated game, and one I haven't gotten into beyond playing the tutorial in a previous installment I borrowed from an old college pal. That changes this week! As a potential prelude to future AARs, I'm going to be posting my experiences working through the Battles from the Bulge tutorial.

It's set during the closing stages of the larger battle. This scenario is somewhat speculative, in that it posits an attack on St. Vith from the south as part of an encircling maneuver. Here's the map:



The grid is 1km squares. I'm the American side, by the blue label: Combat Command A of the Seventh Armored Divison. It's a brigade-sized formation, including the 35th Tank Battalion, the 51st Armored Infantry Battalion, and the 1st Battalion of the 318th Infantry Regiment, plus a supply depot, two self-propelled artillery battalions, and an anti-air battalion. My opposition for the moment comprises elements of the 17th Volksgrenadier Division, which the briefing calls one of the best German infantry divisions on the Western Front. More of the 17th Volksgrenadiers will be arriving from the north about a day into the scenario, and panzer elements are en route from the west, expected around day 2. Combat Command B of the 7th Armored Division is headed my way on day 2, along with the divisional headquarters, and Combat Command R will be along early on Day 3.

I have four objectives for this battle, which I labeled (the red numbers) backwards. Objective 1 is St. Vith, which intelligence claims is currently undefended, and which I start losing victory points for if I'm not there in 24 hours. Objective 2 is the Breitfeld crossroads, and I should have that at 0200 Day 2. Objective 3 is the village of Lommersweiler, which I'm expected to capture by noon. Objective 4 is the bridge at Steinebruck, which is an immediate goal.

Here's a detailed view of the southeastern corner of the map and my forces:



1. The 51st Armored Infantry Battalion, which is probably my heftiest unit: two armored infantry companies, an assault gun platoon, a mortar platoon, a tank company, and an engineer company.

2. 1st Battalion, 318th Infantry Regiment. Pretty bog-standard: a headquarters element, three rifle companies, an AT gun platoon, and a mortar platoon.

3. 35th Tank Battalion. Three tank companies, one of the 51st's armored infantry companies, and A Troop of the 25th Cavalry Reconaissance Squadron.

4. Headquarters elements, including the AA battalion and the two field artillery battalions (one of which is in the 35th's circle).

Around Stenebruck, intelligence (of course, the enemy contacts on the map are generally only accurate by purest chance) suggests there's a reinforced battalion, and roughly the same in Lommersweiler. My plan is to form up all three battalions for an attack on Steinebruck. The 1st Battalion of the 318th Regiment will move along the north road after that, and hopefully should reach Breitfeld early, while the 51st and 35th Battalions will make use of brigade artillery support and the good tank terrain to empty out Lommersweiler.

Hi, I'm Fishbreath. You may remember me from threads such as the Bay 12 Writers['] Guild or the Arsenal of Democracy LP at the top of the second page of this very sub-forum¹. Today I'm not here about either of those things: I'm here about Dangerous Waters.

These are dangerous waters.


This is Dangerous Waters, a modern-day naval simulation released in 2005 by the makers of the fabled 688(i) and Fleet Command:




A friend of mine (Frankie D. from the cooperative USA/England Arsenal of Democracy game I believe I mentioned in my other thread) is a bigger naval warfare buff than even me, so a while ago I convinced him to get Dangerous Waters. We've set up some times for a co-op mission, featuring the two platforms in the foreground of that final screenshot: the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate and its embarked MH-60R Seahawk helicopter. Our mission is set in an alternate history: the People's Republic of China, emboldened by geopolitical factors I did not feel compelled to describe in any detail when I was coming up with the mission, has launched a war to secure the raw materials and territory of Southeast Asia. Land-based missiles and secret construction projects made it possible for the People's Liberation Army Navy to inflict massive losses on the United States' carrier force, and as shipyards the world around spun up, the PLAN was able to force its advantage and advance all the way to the Solomon Islands, landing on Bougainville and attacking the American garrison there.

Desperately low on supplies and in need of reinforcement, the Bougainville garrison called for help. Military leaders quickly put together a convoy of four ships, two US Navy amphibious warfare ships carrying two battalions of Marines, an oiler, and an ammunition ship. Only one escort was available, the USS Vandegrift (FFG-48), and the only aircraft suitable for maritime patrol at Henderson Field was a single P-3C Orion. There was nothing to be done, though; the convoy had to go through or Bougainville would be lost. At 6am during a summer thunderstorm, Vandegrift and her charges leave Guadalcanal. The run up the Slot will take twelve hours, and no doubt the PLAN will deploy everything it can to stop it.

1. Which is presently looking like we're going to get curb-stomped, hence my reluctance to update. >.>

Let me provide a bit of exposition first. I've been writing as a hobby for eight or ten years now, starting a large number of stories and finishing very few of them (one notable exception being a NaNoWriMo project a few years ago, which, while moderately entertaining in terms of plot, was rather poorly carried out), and I always end up enjoying it when I get around to it. Lately, thanks to another project, I've discovered that having an obligation to write something entertaining is a great way to get myself to actually do so on a regular basis.

Towards the end of spring I resolved to create such an obligation for myself, taking the world I'd developed as a tabletop RPG setting and coming up with with some stories to tell from it. I spent some time writing between then and the middle of June, and by the latter I ended up with enough cushion to start putting them on the Internet. I dusted off an old Wordpress account, found out that a URL is actually pretty cheap. I ended up with Many Words, which manages to sound deep and thoughtful while actually being almost entirely devoid of meaning.

Two weeks ago I told the friends who had seen the world via the tabletop campaign about the project and put the first entry up on the Internet. The problem I find myself with now is that my friends know me for the absentminded, degenerate slacker I am, and since they'd just exchange knowing looks if I slowed down to the point where I missed updating, they're not the world's best motivators. Therefore (and also because I'm a bit of an attention monger) I'm spreading the word about myself among other circles in which I run, and here we are.

The story that's currently being posted is set in a world of magic, desperation, and faux Vikings (there are dwarves, too, but they're not important yet). There are two big points that have given it more staying power in my mind than most of my writing projects (I don't know if they'll make it fun to read or not, but whatever): it's a relatively serious story in a world that's a little bit ridiculous; the backdrop's grimness descends all the way to milli- or even centiWarhammer levels, but the story is about metaphorical lights in the dark. I'll grant that most of the elements I smash together are cliches, but I like to think that the end result is something that is more than the sum of the parts.

Of course, I'll let you decide for yourself whether that's true. I hope at least a couple of you enjoy reading it as much as I'm enjoying writing it.