Klementi Voroshilov

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...

Japanese Hero Cards. These are printable on 5x7 index cards and can be use to remind you how many THH you've used and some rules that you might need.

This was the winning scenario in the 2015 KV scenario contest.

It's an open question as to whether railroads have and should have a greater role in Advanced Squad Leader. Probably the most frequently discussed question is armored trains, but this is far less important than the background information which comes into play—most of which is unimportant and perhaps uninteresting in an ASL context. I'll cover three areas of ASL railroading: 1) background knowledge about the role railroads played in WWII; 2) Railroad issues of interest to scenario designers and 3) a quick foray into railroad rules and some ASL related railroad stuff. Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics. While railroads are a rare occurrence in ASL, they were incredibly important considerations for the soldiers and leaders of armies during WWII. Railroads provided logistics that couldn't be matched by any other means. Armies require huge amounts of stuff: food, replacement parts, ammunition, medical supplies. While it is, to a degree, po...