Klementi Voroshilov

I have recently been doing some reading and I wanted to point out some revisions that need to be made to the ASL version of the SU-76 Sotka.

 1945 2019

 1945 2019

Reporting on the US Army's insensitive use of Joachim Peiper's picture and description on a historical article about the Battle of the Bulge, Vice News found that the colorized photo had been snatched from a SS fanboy gamer's web page. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/m7qjap/the-us-army-is-sorry-for-posting-a-glamour-shot-of-a-nazi-war-criminal-on-their-facebook-page “The fate of his beloved nation rested on his ability to lead his men through the American lines,” XVIII Airborne Corps wrote of Peiper, who is responsible for slaughtering scores of Americans. While regular cardboard gaming may be poised for a comeback, can it survive brushes with SS fanboys who rewrite and ignore history because SS counters "look cool?"

The Brits issued this bit of propaganda, but there's more to the story than this.  It's one of those stories, like the Christmas Truce or the No Man's Land Soccer Game during WWI, that transcends sides.

I found this extraordinary video about one of the Great Patriotic War stories I had never heard: Fighting Girlfriend Maybe the best part is the Germans calling the T34M43 the "Mickey Mouse" because of the front-hinged turret hatches.

I'm not entirely sure why the Wall Street Journal let Frank Lavin, a pro-free trade insider, write a historical essay about the Battle of the Bulge , but you only need to read the headline and the first paragraph to see that they shouldn't have.

If you are looking for one of those "I played this and then I played that" tournament reviews, turn the page.  In this post I'm going to look at what you need to look for when selecting an ASL tournament you want to attend.

Everybody hates Nazis, except other Nazis.

Tomorrow in the US is Veterans' Day, but in Europe it is known as Armistice Day.  Unlike the US, it isn't just a day off for early Christmas shopping, but a day to remember the end of the most terrible, wasted war of all time, WWI.  Le Geurre Mondiale.  Millions of lives thrown away for absolutely no purpose. Tomorrow, we'll gather around flagpoles and monuments to the dead (we have them everywhere here in France--every single village) and say a prayer for the end of war.

Sorry to hear about the loss of Patrick Ireland, a great teacher of ASL who was always available on the VASL server for a chat or to help out newbies.  He will be missed.

While the Sixth SS Panzer Army was lavished with the best equipment that the Reich could scratch together in 1945, the Second Panzer Army was apportioned with only a handful of tanks.  The Second actually had farther to go and faced the 3rd Ukrainian Front straight on.  The Sixth would attack the nexus of the Third and Second in a more fair fight.

I received the ASL Action Pack #14 yesterday--great, fast shipping from MMP.  But man, shipping costs are freaking killing me.  $24 for the Pack.  $24 for shipping.

Don't want to belabor this, but the British Army's documentary corps is the shit.  Really good graphics, sound analysis, first person perspectives and a pretty balanced approach.

Following the Ardennes Offensive the 6th Panzer Army was in a bad state.  Personnel losses could be replaced--not with the same quality of soldier, but with warm bodies--but materiel losses were far more difficult to fix, given the losses suffered and the lavish equipment compliment that the 6th was used to. Four SS Divisions made up the 6th Panzer Army:  The Leibstandarte Adolph Hitler, the 3rd SS Totenkopf, the 12th SS Hitlerjungend and 9th SS Hohenstauffen Division.  These were the core of the Army.  Various units were attached, the most important of which was the Fuhrer Grenadier Brigade (once part of the Grossdeutschland Division.)

Just got a message from Double One organizer Derek Cox saying that Double One 2020 has been cancelled.  Was it just me? Really too bad.  I'm going to miss some of the friends I made and the nice Writtle College venue.

Given current events, I thought I would point people to my scenario Kurdish Way. In 1946, one of the early proxy battles of the Cold War took place in Northwestern Iran between the Kurdish People's Republic and the US backed Pahlavi Imperial Regime of Iran (nee Persia.)

In my research of the 1945 war in Hungary, basically the Konrad Operations, Operation Fruhlungswachen and the Vienna Defensive Operation, I have come to an important conclusion:  many AFV crews of the 6th SS Panzer Army were inexperienced.

Tiger Meet just got more sexy. Klementi Voroshilov trophy for most wins of KV scenarios  at Tiger Meet in two weeks.

To the Germans, it was Operation Fruhlungswachen.  For the Soviets, it was the Battle for Lake Balaton.  For the western allies, it was, evidently, a minor skirmish.  US history books say that the Battle of the Bulge was the last German offensive of WWII, but this is tunnel vision.  Fruhlungswachen was just as ambitious and perhaps even more desperate, but was erased from Western history because it doesn't fit their narrative. The purpose of Fruhlungswachen (Awakening of Spring in German) was extremely ambitious.  The idea was first to relieve pressure on Vienna and Prague.  Second, it was hoped that they could get back into Budapest and re-establish what was their last ally--Hungary.  The German High Command also hoped to encircle a huge Soviet Army south of Budapest as well.  Finally, the last oil reserves of the Axis (which really only included Germany at this point) were South of Lake Balaton.

Here is the printable version of my scenario Red Sisters . Here is the page for the scenario contest, which will feature a TROPHY and a 10 euro gift certificate to LFT. Looking forward to some submissions!

What are tank movement points based on?  In all the times I've checked numbers of the founding fathers of ASL I've found that there is a pretty solid mathematical backstory. However, I'm pretty dubious about movement points as I am generally certain that the game is biased against the heroic Red Army.

As suggested by my upcoming tournaments table in the upper left hand corner of the blog, I'm going to be in Normandy in a couple of weeks.  Is there anything anyone wants me to look more closely at? Some pictures from Gold Beach, 2010:

Blogger stopped accepting comments without a third party cookie a couple of months ago and didn't say anything about it.  They aren't going to fix it, but I did learn a way around it.  Sorry for any inconvenience.

After all the research I've done, it comes time to put the scenario together. I've decided on a rather abstracted version of the events which goes according to the Red Army's plan.  It focuses around Hill 57.3 (which I still cannot find on any map) and includes all elements of the Soviet plan--airborne, marine, infantry and naval gunfire support.

My ongoing analysis of the Soviet attack on Grigor'evka in 1941 on the coast of the Black Sea continues with an attempt to find the right situation for a scenario. Krasny Krym...badass boat or donut franchise? For one thing, I've decided on a name for the scenario... "Red Sisters."  Krasny is Russian for Red, and the Krym and Kavkaz were sister ships. 

Jonathan Kay, an ASL player in New York, talks about his general board game experience in yesterday's Toronto Globe and Mail . He's plugging his new book, Your Move , which discusses what life lessons we learn about from board games. I really like the way that ASL let's me travel around Europe and meet people with a similar interest in history.  (Even my lovely wife likes to tag along and meet my geeky gaming friends.  But I'm not leaving her alone with some of those Italian guys!) The first guy who greeted me in Europe was Xavier Vitry!  Using your ASL connections can be risky, but I will say that meeting face to face allows you to reach across divides that you would never get an opportunity to online.  My buddy Bjorn would never have met a dirty commie like me online.  :)

This one is too good not to post.  A member of the 506th Parachute Regiment, Joseph Beyrle was captured within a few days of landing during of D-Day.  In the meantime, he managed to cause a great deal of mayhem.  After capture, he was sent east to Stalag IIIC, where he made several attempts to escape.  In January of 1945, he finally escaped from the German prisoner camp and linked up with a Red Army tank unit.

This story from the National Interest (a right wing pro-military spending blog) has a pretty good rundown on the Hetzer. Quite interesting is the very narrow range of fire (only 5 degrees to the right) which necessitated turning the tank to fire at moving targets.

Continuing my analysis of the scenario possibility of the Red Army's landings near Odessa at Grigor'evka, I'm going to look at the units involved and how a scenario designer can, with a little work, make his/her scenario most historically accurate. One problem with finding units for a particular action is that accounts are usually based on one side or another.  Certainly first person accounts have information on one side's units but generally lack any kind of detailed information on the other side.  Even operational studies frequently lack details, though it is usually possible to get general information about armies and corps.

A new View from the Trenches is out and it contains a vast amount of ASL esoterica .  This is very good stuff. There are helpful articles on halftracks, delux ASL and reports from tournaments.  Some pretty big names on these as well, as Ole Boe checks in.  As does grognard  Jeff Shields with a nifty analysis of the classic Cold Crocodiles. VFTT is free and I love it when people give stuff away that they could well be selling.  I think it is unfortunate that a lot of ASL players will buy crap that they will never play (sometimes selling it after it goes out of print on EBAY) and look down their noses at great stuff that is available for free.  Great work by my good buddy Pete Phillips (who I OWN.) True story:  on my first journey to Double One, my train was about an hour and a half late.  Tournament director and anti-private rail activist Derek Cox told me to file for a refund, as there was some sort of rule that they had to refund a propo...

I just spent a week and a half in Italy, Austria and Hungary.  To be honest, I spent the week in Italy watching baseball as it was the Europe/Africa qualifier for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. My BLACK-SS counter fans will be glad to know I was rooting against Israel, but it wasn't for any reason you approve.  First, they are in Asia, not Africa or Europe--playing in the E/A bracket they get out of playing the great teams like Taiwan, Japan and Korea.  Second, they are mostly American minor leaguers and really, Israel doesn't have a league to speak of, as opposed to Italy, Czech Republic and the Netherlands--who build their teams on home grown talent.  And finally, the underdog, South Africa, was such a compelling story.  In college I protested South Africa and today they field an integrated team. But enough about that, what about the ASL?

Holy Crap!  It's me at Wild West Fest 1995! Is that Matt Shostak I was playing?  Didn't matter.  I LOST!

The Krasny Krym is back!  I love it when I'm surfing around looking for history to read and something I kind of know about stands up on its hind legs and says:  "Dobray Dyne, Tovaritsch!"

While generally people think of the Soviet Union as backward in the running up to WWII, in fact, in many ways the Soviet Union was already a growing technical superpower.  The Red Army was working with clubs across the country prior to the war to teach skills in parachute jumping, creating a cadre for future parachute brigades.

I've been all over Europe over the last few years and been to a lot of ASL tournaments.  They've all got character and no tournaments are the same.  Some, like Lyon, Paris and Copenhagen have their distracting cities surrounding them.  Conscripts has its bucolic German countryside and incomparable beer.  Italy has a great laid back atmosphere and lots of great food.  (I will also add that Copenhagen has the world's sexiest airport security simply because my wife doesn't read this.)

The footnotes for Valor of the Guards says that the NKVD were Stalin's equivalent of the SS.  This is not particularly accurate.  If anything, the NKVD were the equivalent of the Gestapo.

Let's take a look at wire.  Barbed wire was patented in 1867 by Lucien Smith.  But the idea was proposed in France almost ten years earlier.  Primarily, it was seen as an agricultural resource as a way of keeping cattle from straying.  However, it wasn't long before the military application became clear.

It's hurricane season in the US and at Klementi Voroshilov we want to recognize the great work done by the US Coast Guard in keeping us safe from the hazards of heavy weather.  So let's take a look at the Coast Guard in an ASL context.

Here is a story I love! Operation Squabble

I make no secret of my distaste for air support in ASL.  It is far too available at the whim of a company commander and far too destructive against an enemy.  This report backs me up:

The HMS Sparrowhawk enjoyed the distinction of being the first aircraft carrier to launch an air attack that sank an enemy ship.  But she wasn't an aircraft carrier.  She wasn't even a ship.

I read Stephen King's The Stand  probably forty years ago.  I just remember it involved some kind of plague and ended with a bomb going off.  The Belgians probably would consider this a mercy from the way the Final Stand came out. If you remember, in RM3, the Germans were taking Bodange by cheating and bringing in their armored cars early.  We pick up where we left off, with the Germans holding Bodange and moving west along the paved road out of town.  What remains of the Belgians must hold them.

One of the more interesting actions near Narvik was the amphibious invasion of Bjerkvik, a small town north of Narvik.  With complete naval supremacy, the Allies could attack virtually anywhere at any time.  The fjords offered a much easier way to get around.  At times, this created real problems as the bridgeheads were not mutually supporting and required naval support to remain viable.  On May 12th, 1940, the Allies struck at Bjerkvik, with an eye to link up with Poles already landed at Navik to the south. Ne Next morning at Bjerkvik, the attack was constituted by a ferocious naval bombardment, which was very destructive to the town and caused many civilian casualties.  This was followed by an attack of a company from one of my all time favorite units, the 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion along with some H39 tanks.

The DKM Z2 Georg Thiele isn't a household name, unless your household is in Northern Norway and your hobby is freaking freezing ass SCUBA diving. What I love about this ship is what it says about German naval capabilities and the willingness of a madman to throw away such a wonderful ship and crew for such little gain.

I continue with my solo play of Race for the Meuse.  Today, we move a bit north into Bodange--I thought we were supposed to ESCAPE from Bodange!  :)) As the Belgians think of it, " A Town Called Panic !"  This is the first scenario in the pack with AFV's--a couple of German armored cars.  The Germans have a pretty mighty balance of forces, 7 squads to 4.  The Germans get a leichtinfantreegeschutz (which is worth a lot of points--in Scrabble.)  The scenario figures around the DD8 bridge, which is kind of cool.

Komarichev and Dhzoparidze (the loader) kept scanning ahead, from where the noise of engines was heard. Within a few minutes, armored vehicles appeared from behind the hill, moving from the valley, bypassing the hill, and exposing their sides to the front of our tanks. Apparently, the Germans did not expect an ambush here. - Five, six, seven..., twelve, - counted Komarichev. - Tengiz! Twenty! Do you understand, twenty!!! And behind them there is infantry! - Don't worry Zhora, we're guardsmen! - Pass the anti-tank rounds!

OK, so, this scenario looks like "Prelude to Bondage" which is what the wife and I call my birthday week.  HA! As I continue to work through the Race for the Meuse pack from Lone Canuck , I start RM2, Prelude to Bodange.  Here, the Belgians conduct a fighting withdrawal from Wisembach, (RM1) with the rather obstinate help of the first of the machine gun pillbox (covered in special rule 27.) Again, I look at this scenario and say, "How can the Germans possibly win?"  The victory conditions are fairly straightforward--the Belgian must simply cover the road from Wisembach to Bodange with at least 4FP.  It appears to be a very easy task, as you simply need to cover the road with the MG pillbox and you are done.  The Germans have to crawl through wire and mines to get at the pillbox and then take it out without the benefit of any engineering equipment?  Keep in mind that this is a concrete pillbox.

One of the big mistakes in assessing tanks is judging the defensive capability based on inches (or milometers) of armor.  Armor is not armor and I'm going to go through some of the chemistry and physics of different types of armor in an attempt to enlighten people on what difference different types of armor mean.

It's everyone's favorite British tank.  It's fast and has power to knock out almost any German tank, even from the front.  It has a fast turret and even a rate of fire! But was it really all that and a bag of chips?  Or is this more of the old soft soap for the King's Very Own?

If you are a publisher interested in using any of these articles, feel free to let me know.  They are available for free use.  Contact me first.

As you may have gathered, I recently received my long awaited copy of Race to the Meuse .  Overall, I am pretty pleased with the quality and whatever else you have to say about RttM, you will have to admit that it is a pretty unique situation in ASL for reconnaissance to meet with roadblocks and hasty defense. Until I get my hands on a VASL map, it looks like I'm going to be playing these solo.  So I start at the beginning with RM1 Wisembach Roadblock. RM-1 Wisembach, Belgium : Driving along the main road, south of the river, and the railroad tracks on the north bank, elements of the 1.Kradschützen-Kompanie, pushed towards of Bodange. Southeast of Bodange, German motorcyclist turned at Wisembach to attempt an approach from the south. At Wisembach, Sergeant Renauld of the 1er Régiment de Chasseurs Ardennais, having watched the destruction of the bridge across the Sûre River earlier that morning, now waited for the approaching Germans A small 6-turn scenario with...

A submarine designed to circumvent the Washington Naval Treaty, a couple of barely inhabitable rocks in the St. Lawrence Seaway and the resignation of Secretary of State Cordell Hull.  What do they have in common?  The story of how World War II came to North America. The MN Surcouf was a French submarine designed to get around naval treaty restrictions on cruisers.  While the Washington Treaty of 1922 placed limits on the number and size of cruisers, it did not touch on submarines.  As a result, the Marine National developed a behemoth of a submarine which carried as its main armament two eight inch guns in a turret.  Named the Surcouf after a famous French pirate, the eight inch guns were the main armament of the submarine and, while having limited range and taking a number of minutes to be made ready, were obviously far beyond the normal armament of a submarine.

To hear the Allies tell the story, Paris fell to marching British, American and, oh yeah, some Free French troops. But the true story is much, much different.

At some point most, if not all, players are going to make the jump from ASLSK to full blown ASL.  The question becomes how best to make that transition.  I've been working with a player known as DrDryg (on the Discord server) as he learns his way through the ASLSK and moves toward ASL.

I just got my copy of Race for the Meuse .  Here's my envelope opening: Some notes:

One of the things lost in the Cold War mayhem of ASL game design was tank ramming.  I have heard it argued that ramming didn't really occur very often, but this argument is undermined by a 1996 article from Marshal of the Soviet Union Oleg Losik in Military Knowledge, for most Western observers a rather secondary journal for military writers. But Losik is not a slouch.  He worked his way up from draftee to Marshal of the Soviet Union, winning a Hero of the Soviet Union along the way.  He attended officer's training at the Saratov Armored School in 1938 and acted as a platoon commander in the Winter War.  To be sure, these were times of rapid advancement for new officers in the Red Army devastated by the purges.  But most of the chaff was dismissed by 1943 and Losik kept going, being among the first to liberate Minsk.  He wan an Order of Lenin and Gold Star along the way, leading an independent armor brigade. So this is a guy who knows what he is ...

I make no excuses for my love of the PTRD.  This Soviet anti-tank rifle was probably the best of the war...though you wouldn't know that from its ASL counter. It's penetration (while a point better than most ATR's) is not adequate compared to its live performance.  Unlike the Finnish Lahti, it has no rate of fire.  In reality, its effective rate of fire compared favorably with the Lahti and was considerably less bulky and didn't require a crew to lug it around.  Further the PTRD was supplemented by a semi-automatic version (the PTRS), which made it every bit as quick to fire as the Lahti--with greater penetration. A YouTube video has all the facts. It is well worth the watch.

Few warships in WWII had the colorful story of the Red Crimea (Krasny Krym.)  Laid down during WWI, towed to the safety of Petrograd during the Revolution, laid up for five years before completion and finally a harrowing journey around Europe to the Black Sea, the Krasny Krym was a quintessential Red Navy warship. The Krasny Krym was classified as a light cruiser and bristled with 5 in (130mm) guns.  The Krym carried 15 in all and while such a weapon was considered primarily an anti-aircraft gun in more modern navies, for the Soviets it was a surface action gun as well as shore bombardment weapon.  In an attempt to keep the ship up to date a variety of anti-aircraft guns were installed--and worked because the Krym survived the war.  In fact, the Krasny Krym was the only Soviet Light Cruiser to shoot down a German aircraft during the war. This is an important time to make a point about strategic surprise and Barbarossa.  It didn't work with regard to the B...

I live in France now, but I will always have a place in my heart for the Centennial State.  All that remains of BB-45 is the wheel and the bell, which reside in the Student Memorial Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder (also home to Admiral Arleigh Burke.) Tangentially to ASL, I want to lay out some of the battles where the Colorado fought, applying the help of its 16 inch earth movers for the benefit of the USMC.  I'll link to the ASL Scenario Archive if you are interested in playing scenarios in the aftermath or with the help of the Colorado's powerful guns. The first of her class, the Colorado was laid down in New York in 1919.  She saw a lot of the world before settling down at Pearl Harbor in 1941.  As luck would have it, she was due for a refit and was sent to Puget Sound in June and missed the action in December of that year.  The refit completed in May of 1942, she spent her first year of action uneventfully patrolling in San Francis...

Out today!  Race for the Meuse from Lone Canuck. This TM revolves around the efforts of the Belgian 5th Company,  1er Regiment de Chasseurs Ardennais'   valiant attempt to slow the Germans' Race for the Meuse River. So, rather than a French-German kerfuffle, we are really looking at a Belgian battle.  Four small scenarios, a large scenario and a campaign game. The map looks good.  There are a few counters (German trucks) that come with this, which is a bit disappointing as the Chasseurs Ardennais are featured in a number of scenarios outside this pack which could benefit from a 458 with assault fire.  The Chasseurs Ardennais used the MP-28, a SMG.  That would have been pretty handy. Lone Canuck products are generally very good.  I particularly like Ozerekya Breakout , so I am looking forward to this product.  I like the whole Fall Gelb setting.  So I've put in my order.  I'll write more after I get it. I am not a coll...

Most ASL players are pretty knowledgeable about the Second World War, but one of the forgotten theatres is the Middle East. Not Africa, but Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. In 1940, after France surrendered and Great Britain was hard pressed in North Africa, events occurred in this region that could well have raised serious problems for the Allies, but never coalesced into the threat that some in the Foreign Office might well have feared. After the first World War, the League of Nations broke up the Ottoman Empire and divided its holdings among the English and the French.  Outside of this arrangement was Persia.  The rump of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, remained independent but lacked a great deal of control in Kurdish areas in its Northeast.  In fact, much of the Middle East was an artificial collection of tribes and sub-national interests. Palestine and Lebanon were pretty firmly under British control.  Iraq, while nominally independent, could best be identifie...

Discretion is the better part of valor... When ugly danger reared its head, he bravely turned his tail and fled... Close combat is arguably ASL's most macho and testosterone laden phase. Defenders will try to gun their way out of trouble, making attackers claw through a hail of residual firepower and even final protective firing to keep out of close combat. Once enjoined, no good order squad ever ventures to withdraw. Partially, it seems unmanly. But it is also dangerous, allowing an opponent to apply what is usually a deadly -2 to his attack roll. However, scenario designers frequently reward attackers by requiring defenders to be “good order,” excluding defenders held in melee from meeting victory conditions. It has become a gamey tactic to move troops into close combat in order to prevent good order defenders from meeting victory conditions. Not really sleaze, but definitely gamey. This is particularly true if you are eligible for some form of human wave...