Deeply Unhistorical – but maybe in a good way

A Very Personal View of Bernie Ganley’s The World Will Hold its Breath, Barbarossa Megagame on 3rd August 2024

by Andy Grainger

Back in February Bernie Ganley asked me if I might help out as a Control Umpire at his The World Will Hold its Breath (WWHIB) Megagame slated for 3rd August at Anerley. Although I put it in the diary straightaway I realised how rusty I was with all aspects of megagames when I found myself unable to navigate the relevant parts of the Megagame Makers website. Feeling like one of the Waterloo veterans whose doddering role in defending the residency is so vividly described in J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur I asked Bernie to steer me clear of anything involving numbers. The combat system in A Wolf by the Ears, his very successful game on Kursk, had appeared terrifying to me but clearly wasn’t to the players and umpires who administered it!

Bernie asked me to act as Control for the Germans. As a result I went to the library and borrowed Walter Warlimont’s Inside Hitler’s Headquarters (1964), a book that I should have read decades ago. Even making allowances for the self-justifications of the Good German General Staff officers he describes the chaos which Hitler deliberately instituted well before the war throughout his regime. Whereas the Allies tried to wage war by institution, setting out clear lines of responsibility within their respective Governments and indeed between them, Hitler preferred the opposite. Vague spheres of interest and conflicting arcs of responsibility were his preference because it encouraged and indeed required participants to refer to him for guidance. He could provide this in a variety of ways – by appointing a yes-man, by providing it personally, by leaving the decision to whoever was stronger or by doing nothing at all. In designing a game about the upper echelons of the Third Reich (or indeed the Kaiser’s regime in WW1) there is an argument for not allowing the various teams – OKW, OKH, Luftwaffe, Navy, Foreign Office etc to talk to each other directly but to have to find a way of dealing via a third party sanctioned by the Führer. At the same time, German military culture since Frederick’s day had leaned towards the extreme end of aggression and risk-taking. Prussia / Germany had come to favour pre-emptive strikes against its allegedly stronger opponents and used the long periods of peace to prepare them, enjoying their budgets to research, deploy and train with new weapons and techniques. But this approach tended to come at the expense of intelligence, diplomacy and the cultivation of relationships with both potential friends and foes. How long could the advantage of pre-war military preparation last? It looked to be a fascinating game!

Then Bernie asked me to be Control to the Soviets instead! A tricky one. There wasn’t much time and I was unaware of a Soviet equivalent of the Warlimont book. I dipped into works by established historians like Glantz and House as well as one who was new to me – Evan Mawdsley’s Thunder in the East 2005 but seriously updated in 2015. I came to the conclusion that war waged by dictators was governed by caprice and whim. There might be institutions like OKW or STAVKA but essentially these were just creatures of the Great Man.

This of course presents a challenge for a Designer. Most wargamers are mild-mannered Clark Kents rather than people with egos and personalities that one would go a million miles to avoid, even for a drink in a pub. This is borne out by the fact that for most of my historian / wargaming lifetime Prussian / German armies have been fetishised in respect of their uniforms, weaponry and supposed military capabilities and yet their players, particularly in megagames have rarely – ever, I think, commanded them with the spectacular results of their real-life counterparts.

The OKW Map in Feb 1942.

The OKW Map in Feb 1942. The Germans (Yellow) are miles from Leningrad and Moscow. Army Group South has barely crossed the border. And are the Rumanians and Hungarians in action at all?

And so it was with WWHIB – whether by accident or design the Germans appeared to adopt an attritional strategy compared to their real-life political and military counterparts who gambled on destroying the Soviet Army in two months. By February 1942 when the game ended one could argue that the Germans were much better placed both militarily and logistically than they were in reality. Their problem was that the Russians were even more so.

Part of the reason for this was that the Germans – and indeed maybe the game itself – became distracted by an unexpected political issue. Rumania, one of Germany’s allies had undertaken to take part in the invasion on Turn 1 but did not do so. Instead, its ruler General Antonescu spent the entire game, until his demise late on, making demands on the Germans and then, having obtained a concession, sought more. There was a suggestion that Antonescu was exceeding his brief but was he? The crucial question is what the Germans might have done if Rumania or one of its other Allies had reneged on pre-Barbarossa commitments. Only those involved in the game will know the whole story – and, as in real life, maybe not even then.

Umpiring STAVKA we were trying to find out what had happened. The Germans had crossed the border but it seemed that the Rumanians had not, apart from indulging in some cross border ‘incidents’. There was a suggestion that Antonescu had been irritated by receiving an Order from Army Group South rather than being involved as an Ally or Partner – very Germanic behaviour if true. Only in the pub later did I hear that Hitler and Halder had spent every turn in personal meetings with Antonescu to try and resolve the situation. If that was true it sounded like a very un-Germanic reaction!

But then, as a player, what do you do if you have committed your entire armed force to a massive military operation and your ally reneges on his promise to join in? His armed forces are substantial and he is your major supplier of oil. One can hardly just invade, surely. My thoughts on this conundrum remained inconclusive due to lack of information during the day and my own umpiring tasks.

It was only afterwards that a precedent entered my memory banks – the German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. As ever, one starts with Wiki “In 1940 and early 1941, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria all agreed to adhere to the Tripartite Pact and thus join the Axis. Hitler then pressured Yugoslavia to join as well.[16] The Regent, Prince Paul, yielded to this pressure, and declared Yugoslavia’s accession to the Pact on 25 March 1941.” Prince Paul’s action turned out to be extremely unpopular however, at least with the Serbian dominated officer corps and he was replaced in a coup two days later.

The German reaction to the coup was remarkable:

27 March: Per Wiki “Upon hearing news of the coup in Yugoslavia, Hitler called his military advisers to Berlin on 27 March. On the same day as the coup he issued Führer Directive 25, which called for Yugoslavia to be treated as a hostile state.”
6 April: Luftwaffe bombs Belgrade and German ground invasion starts. Their troops are based in Austria but also in Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria. Italian and Hungarian troops join in slightly later.
17 April: Armistice signed.

Further examples of speedy German military occupation abound from Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Vichy France in November 1942, Italy in September 1943 and Hungary in March 1944. From August to October 1944 despite the pressure on all battlefronts the Germans put down the Slovak Rising with sizeable forces and, as usual, considerable brutality.

In game terms therefore the Germans could have prepared an assault on Rumania within one turn and might have expected to conclude it in one or two more depending on the level of resistance. Given that Rumania stood to gain a lot more from keeping Germany onside than by fighting her one imagines that Antonescu might have been persuaded to see the error of his ways by at least some of his colleagues.

So, if the Germans were indeed un-Germanic at the top, what of the Soviets? STAVKA comprised some seriously experienced gamers who settled down very quickly.

STAVKA at work

The junior but energetic Zhukov (Rob Cooper) played a major role at STAVKA. Beria (Neil Parker) clearly approves. Shaposhnikov (Andy Reeve) has failed to conceal a beverage received from the Lend Lease supplies. As the game went on he ran out of LP counters and his desk was covered with paper calculations.

Bernie had included some friction in the briefs but the individuals had enough to do running the war. And it seemed to me that they understood the systems very well. Like his real-life counterpart Shaposhnikov rarely rose from his desk but busied himself with production and logistics. Newcomer John Concagh playing Zhigarev (Head of the Air Force) partnered him and grasped his role very quickly and effectively.

Phil Middleton (red sash) played an odious Voroshilov, always first to start and last to stop clapping when Stalin (Dave Boundy) made a speech. Dave delivered these in Russian, having them translated into English by Beria. Molotov (pale blue shirt) was played by another newcomer, Cameron Mason, energetic and engaging although his stated ethos of ‘meeting his clients’ wishes’ would perhaps have been unfamiliar to some of his colleagues in the Politburo.

The Politburo.

At the map Timoshenko kept track of operations in the form of a mostly calm Stephen Brown. Meanwhile, the images show that the most junior member. Zhukov possessed an influence greater than his rank might have suggested. Nevertheless, STAVKA also possessed un-Soviet characteristics (at least for 1941) in identifying one if not two Front Commanders and delegating them with the authority to co-ordinate operations at the combat map. Maybe in 1944/45….

So the Germans were distinctly very not National Socialist and the Soviets tended towards allowing players individual initiative.

Unhistorical but maybe not in a bad way. After all, it was a great game and I think most people enjoyed themselves. As for me, it was great to reconnect with grognards, some of whom I had not seen for far too long – and to meet some new people too!