A bit of a throwback to an earlier time, as I’m posting the whole column here instead of at the GuildMag site — technical issues with the hosting service have made GuildMag temporarily inaccessible. Fortunately, I’d saved a local copy of the weekly round-up just before the site went down, so I’m not starting from a completely blank slate (but I probably missed some links in the change-over). I’ll repost the whole thing at GuildMag once the technical issues have been addressed.
January 10, 2014
Grognards Anonymous
Dan Hodges makes his wargaming confession:
I remember the morning I became a Grognard like it was yesterday. In reality it must have been back in 1978 or 1979. I’d always liked games with a war theme, my favourite being Escape From Colditz. Oh, the cold terror of drawing the Shoot To Kill card. But that was with little wooden counters that looked like bowling pins. It was fun, but you couldn’t really empathise with a bowling pin, even if he was supposed to be a downed Polish Spitfire pilot.
And then one birthday I opened a package that looked like a large book. But it was actually a game box, and it had the words “Squad Leader” on the side. So I opened it gingerly, and that’s when I first set eyes on Sergeant Hamblen.
Sergeant Hamblen came in the shape of a blue grey counter, about the size of your thumbnail. He was a German soldier. You could tell it straight away. He was in silhouette, but you could clearly make out his helmet and his boots and his backpack, and his machine gun. Sergeant Hamblen was no bowling pin, he was a warrior.
And next to him was all sorts of cool stuff. His squad. His long-range machine gun. His demolition charge. A tank! Sergeant Hamblen came with a tank! And then there were the boards. Six or seven hard mounted boards of buildings and forests and hedges and rivers and walls and trees, all in beautiful detail. This was where Sergeant Hamblen lived and fought. And now I was going to live and fight there as well.
So that was it, I was hooked. Me and Sergeant Hamblen spent the summer roaming all over the Eastern Front. He survived the Guards Counterattack. Stymied the Russian assault on Hill 621. OK, he was fighting for the wrong side. But he was a good German. I knew this, because the game was so detailed that the nasty Germans — the Nazis — came on special evil-looking black counters.
Although I played and enjoyed the original Squad Leader game (along with its expansion sets), eventually I fell behind and when Advanced Squad Leader came along, I didn’t buy it. I’d reached my limit on remembering and applying all the rules: Avalon Hill, the publisher, had chosen to write the rule books in “programmed learning” style, where you got the basic rules, then each scenario after that built on the rules you’d learned to add more complexity … and to supersede earlier simple rules with more complex ones. My interest was tailing off after the second expansion set (Crescendo of Doom) came along and the last expansion (GI: Anvil of Victory) finished me off. The Squad Leader system wasn’t a game — it was a lifestyle, and I didn’t have enough time to devote to it to keep all the modified rules in my head.
But although I didn’t know it at the time, my cardboard forces were fighting a losing battle. Time was against them. I was growing older. Computer games, music, football, videos, girls. In roughly that order they came to hold more of an attraction than Sergeant Hamblen and his comrades. So the battle-weary Sergeant sat on a shelf, slowly gathering dust. Not dying, just fading away, as old soldiers do.
I sold off a lot of my wargames after I got married … including some that might be worth a lot of money nowadays. I still have far too many sitting on the shelf in my office, gathering dust. I don’t want to get rid of them, but I also don’t have the time and patience to set them up any more.
Weekend weather forecast
Scott Feschuk on the weather situation we should expect to encounter this weekend:
On Saturday, the snow and record cold will continue as a trilogy of all-seeing, all-knowing fronts moves in from Mordor and tracks across the region, covering all the lands in darkness, conferring the power of speech on trees and generally lasting about twice as long as it needs to. Although daytime temperatures are expected to hover around -37°, it is forecast that your teenager will nevertheless insist on going out in sneakers and a windbreaker. As if the cold were not depressing enough, Environment Canada also forecasts the imminent end of the limited-time return of the McRib.
Looking ahead to Sunday, the long-term forecast calls for the moon to become as blood, and the sun as black as sackcloth of hair, and lo shall the earth quake and skies part and every mountain and island move out of their places. In addition, Environment Canada forecasts an 80 per cent chance of every star of heaven falling unto the Earth, for the time of Mother Nature’s wrath will be upon us, and who shall be able to stand? Especially with all this freezing rain.
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US analysis of captured German U-boats after WW2
Tony Zbaraschuk posted an interesting link to the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing list (http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold):
Design Studies of German Submarines by the US Navy
The Design Study of Type IXC U-boats was made available by Scott Sorenson. The Design Study of Type XXI U-boats was made available by the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Public Affairs Office and the Navy Yard Museum — in particular Debora White, Gary Hildreth, Jim Dolf and Bill Tebo (a member of the US Navy crew of U-2513).
Photographs and documents of surrendered German submarines and their crews were made available by John Cunningham (a member of the US Navy crew of U-2513).
U-2513 off Key West, Florida — 30 October 1946
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QotD: Teddy Roosevelt
In the face of such acute military imbecility it is not surprising to discover that all of the existing biographies of the late Colonel Roosevelt — and they have been rolling off the presses at a dizzy rate since his death — are feeble, inaccurate, ignorant and preposterous. I have read, I suppose, at least ten of these tomes during the past year or so, and in all of them I have found vastly more gush than sense. Lawrence Abbott’s Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt and William Roscoe Thayer’s Theodore Roosevelt may well serve as specimens. Abbott’s book is the composition, not of an unbiased student of the man, but of a sort of groom of the hero. He is so extremely eager to prove that Roosevelt was the perfect right-thinker, according to the transient definitions of right-thinking, that he manages to get a flavor of dubiousness into his whole chronicle. I find myself doubting him even when I know that he is honest and suspect that he is right. As for Thayer, all he offers is a hasty and hollow pot-boiler — such a work as might have been well within the talents of, say, the late Murat Halstead or the editor of the New York Times. This Thayer has been heavily praised of late as the Leading American Biographer, and one constantly hears that some new university has made him Legum Doctor, or that he has been awarded a medal by this or that learned society, or that the post has brought him a new ribbon from some literary potentate in foreign parts. If, in fact, he is actually the cock of the walk in biography, then all I have said against American biographers is too mild and mellow. What one finds in his book is simply the third-rate correctness of a Boston colonial. Consider, for example, his frequent discussions of the war — a necessity in any work on Roosevelt. […]
Obviously, Roosevelt’s reaction to the war must occupy a large part of any adequate biography of him, for that reaction was probably more comprehensively typical of the man than any other business of his life. It displayed not only his whole stock of political principles, but also his whole stock of political tricks. It plumbed, on the one hand, the depths of his sagacity, and on the other hand the depths of his insincerity.
Fundamentally, I am convinced, he was quite out of sympathy with, and even quite unable to comprehend the body of doctrine upon which the Allies, and later the United States, based their case. To him it must have seemed insane when it was not hypocritical, and hypocritical when it was not insane. His instincts were profoundly against a new loosing of democratic fustian upon the world; he believed in strongly centralized states, founded upon power and devoted to enterprises far transcending mere internal government; he was an imperialist of the type of Cecil Rhodes, Treitschke and Delcasse. But the fortunes of domestic politics jockeyed him into the position of standing as the spokesman of an almost exactly contrary philosophy. The visible enemy before him was Wilson. What he wanted as a politician was something that he could get only by wresting it from Wilson, and Wilson was too cunning to yield it without making a tremendous fight, chiefly by chicane — whooping for peace while preparing for war, playing mob fear against mob fear, concealing all his genuine motives and desires beneath clouds of chautauqual rhetoric, leading a mad dance whose tune changed at every swing. Here was an opponent that more than once puzzled Roosevelt, and in the end flatly dismayed him. Here was a mob-master with a technique infinitely more subtle and effective than his own. So lured into an unequal combat, the Rough Rider got bogged in absurdities so immense that only the democratic anaesthesia to absurdity saved him. To make any progress at all he was forced into fighting against his own side. He passed from the scene bawling piteously for a cause that, at bottom, it is impossible to imagine him believing in, and in terms of a philosophy that was as foreign to his true faith as it was to the faith of Wilson. In the whole affair there was a colossal irony. Both contestants were intrinsically frauds.
H.L. Mencken, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy”, Prejudices, Second Series, 1920.
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