Wargames, politics and ethics #2: Politics? You can run, but you can't hide

Broad-brush polemic ruffles feathers

A book I picked up on sight from a recommendation on the WW2 SS Counter Colours thread, Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies II's 2008 scholarly study, The Myth of the Eastern Front: the Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture was going to become an article even as I first read it – avidly – over xmas last year. Researching for this series- in which The Myth of the Eastern Front was going to feature centrally, I found the military hobbyists' inevitable internet hot flushes in its wake. Inevitable? In response to an academic tome?

The biggest invasion of the
biggest war in history:
a lot there to forget

Yes, because The Myth of the Eastern Front is part analytical historical deconstruction, and part broad-brush polemic against the 'romancers'- promulgators of an idealised vision of the Wehrmacht and the SS as honourable soldiers fighting a 'Lost Cause' against the Red horde. Smelser and Davies root this mythology in the Wehrmacht's 'last campaign': the ex-generals' postwar years of networking and spin aimed at rehabilitating the image of the German armed forces on the Eastern front.

Enemies after a mutually
embarrasing past affair?

As Cold War tensions rose, the wartime memories of the Soviet people's heroic resistance against Nazi Germany became a propaganda casualty. A remarkable act of historical forgetting was engineered, apparently rapid and profound enough to turn around the war generation's own perceptions of the Eastern front's importance in the Second World War largely before they reached middle-age.

Cold War myths deconstructed

Uncle Joe

Smelser and Davies start with the mainstream suspicion of, and hostility to the USSR in America in the 1920s and 30s. They demonstrate how- through massive media coverage of the Red Army's resistance to the onslaught unleashed by Germany with Operation Barbarossa on June 22nd 1941, the American people were won over to widespread sympathy and active support for the Soviet people during the Second World War. Pride of place among the breadth of media sources Smelser and Davies cite should undoubtedly go to TIME, March 29, 1943, the 'USSR Special' featuring Stalin on the cover.

Evil genius,
or just genius?

In over 100 pages of what was then cutting-edge reportage, the magazine celebrates Russia's history, its economic achievements, the diverse peoples and their love for art, culture and sports, and spotlights some key personalities from the Soviet war effort. There's even an article styling Lenin 'The Father of Modern Russia', which credits him as "Perhaps the greatest man of modern times" and telling us elsewhere that "Lenin's genius brought order out of chaos and saved the USSR." You don't have to hold a torch for the former Soviet Union to see that these pages glowing with enthusiasm for the Soviet cause are tantamount to an endorsement of the Soviet regime. 

Criminals no more: the German generals in the Cold War

Defeated & dishonoured
in front of the world

In the years immediately following Germany's surrender on 8th May 1945, the Nuremberg Trials and the Nuremberg Military Tribunals make plain the full nature of the war crimes of the German war machine in its genocidal war of conquest and enslavement on the Eastern front. German generals are in the dock, on the scaffold; the General Staff tout court might be next. As the authors explain, these trials weren't even finished before the new realities of the postwar world began to make their impact felt. The emerging crisis in relations with the Soviets meant that political pressure to exculpate the accused and the convicted began to come to bear.

Halder (left) with
'the boss' meeting
Finland's Mannerheim

A significant turning point came when the American army rescued General Franz Halder from a possible war crimes trial on the grounds that he played an indispensable role in the Operational History (German) Section of the United States Army Historical Division. Halder in fact went on to direct the History Section for several years, gathering around him a group of politically reliable former officers to provide the US Army with an appropriate account of German operations on the Eastern front. Then, after the Korean War, the realisation grew that a new German army was needed as part of an anti-Soviet alliance in Western Europe. The surviving German generals became a major asset to the American military.

'The boss' visits
Von Manstein in the
Ukraine in 1943

Figures like Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein enjoyed great authority in US army circles because of their experience fighting the Soviet army on the Russian front. The authority these men and their wartime fellows enjoyed ensured an uncritical, even adulatory, reception for their self-serving memoirs when these were published. The ex-generals' mythologised account of the Wehrmacht's 'clean war' on the Eastern front established as the authoritative version, the way was open for a flood of popular histories, personal memoirs and even pulp novels, all straightforwardly pro-German; all of which in sum contributed to the reimagining of the German attack on the USSR as a war in which German soldiers were cast the main victims, whether of the Russian hordes, the climate and terrain, or the megalomaniacal folly of Hitler himself.

Learning (from) history?

When wargamers confront the political and ethical implications of our hobby, a common argument heard is that wargaming is educational, that it teaches the horror and folly of war by giving hobbyists insight into the human costs of battle. There's more than a grain of truth in this, even if actually anti-war wargamers still appear thin on the ground. For example, I think that the rehumanisation of the enemy is valuable in and of itself because dehumanisation of the enemy is an essential element of war propaganda on all fronts- home and fighting.

But of course, wargames themselves are so abstract and wilfully decontextualised that they themselves can't really contribute much to rehumanising the enemy, or to generating any other insights into warfare as a grotesque human folly. That side of things typically stems from reading around the subjects which most interest you on the tabletop. And insights of this ilk can arise in peculiar ways. For me as a teenage tankie, pictures were particularly influential.

Context is everything

Just regular guys?

Take the picture here on the right (from Brian L. Davis' authoritative German Army Uniforms and Insignia, 1933-1945). This is a less gruesome sample of several pictures which used to fascinate me as a youngster. What drew me to this picture was its sheer mundanity. The contrast between the flanking NCOs' cheesy grins and central officer's forced grin is a very human touch, and the photo looks for all the world like a tourist snapshot. I used to find myself wondering if these guys had any notion of what their futures would bring them.

The German Question: old
& very important

Smelser and Davies' convincing deconstruction of how the German view of the Eastern Front became the official American view after the war casts my youthful musings in a new light. Why? Because I was then simply unaware of how my otherwise perfectly reasonable interest in humanising the enemy was conditioned by the pro-German bias Smelser and Davies explain. That is to say: I always assumed that picture was taken on the Eastern Front. I don't know why, but I did. And when I wondered what might've happened to those three men, I never seriously imagined that they might've been active agents of genocide. For me they were always hapless victims. If that's not an example of the myth of the 'clean Wehrmacht' in action, I don't know what could be.

Conclusion
The fundamental point that Smelser and Davies make which is of importance to wargamers is this: an entire branch of our hobby was founded on the bill of goods sold by the German ex-generals during the Cold War. Their agenda- to sanitise the role of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, was both personal and political. The legacy of those efforts still infuses our hobby today. I say this not to point the finger at wargaming as a den of romancers. Instead, I think that this poses challenges to wargamers: to be more critical of those politicised myths; and to find a role for that critique in inspiring new approaches to designing games. It is challenges of this ilk which make me believe that The Myth of the Eastern Front is uniquely useful to wargamers who are interested in new insight into the hardy perennial of our hobby- the 'German question'. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
Wargames, politics and ethics
- #1: Ah, that old bugbear

My first (and last?) game of España 1936

A long time coming

Regular readers will be well aware that I'm not a negative reviewer as a rule. It's too easy to find negativity on the web, and the first editorial decision I made way back in 2005 was that I wasn't going to contribute to it here at RD/KA!. Also, when I review anything, I've paid for it and therefore have a good reason to want to like it. Every so often though, something comes along which disappoints me sufficiently to prompt a distinct lack of enthusiasm to which I cannot but give vent. Antonio Catalán's game of the Spanish Civil War- España 1936, is a case in point. 

Dust off and dust-up

Waiting in the wings

España 1936 is a game I bought on sight when I saw it in Static Games, an FLGS: the subject of the Spanish Civil War interested me and the box ad-copy showed nice-looking components. It then joined my collection of dust-gatherers, where it stayed for a good three years. Only recently, with Liam's newfound enthusiasm for strategic boardgames, did I begin to think that I might finally get a chance to bring España 1936 to the table. My thinking was this game would serve as a useful bridge between Labyrinth and Twilight Struggle on the one hand, and games like Unhappy King Charles! on the other.

And so, on Wednesday night Liam and I sat down to have a go. Five hours later, I'd won the game, but España 1936 had lost the vote of confidence.

Components: a source of satisfaction

The mapboard

Colourful & functional,
but hardly inspired

Let me be clear right from the start: España 1936 isn't a broken game, nor even a particularly bad game, it's just a disappointing game. None of this disappointment came from the components as such, which lived up to expectations. The mapboard is nice. Sure, comparing España 1936's board to those from Labyrinth and Twilight Struggle doesn't flatter the former, but it's still an example of clean and functional graphic design offering nothing to complain about, visually at least. It's also fully mounted, which is always appreciated.

The cards

History, events &
combat modifiers

The four decks of cards: two each for the Republicans and the Nationalists- 1936-37 and 1938-39, are very nice too. The artwork is slightly cartoony in style, but this is a consistent design aesthetic throughout España 1936 and it contributes to the game's strong visual appeal, which is better than average compared to your typical wargame. Each card has three elements- the historical background, the event, and the combat modifiers; and these are all clearly depicted. The graphics for the combat modifiers are particularly good because they distinguish neatly between the two kinds of modifier: bonus/penalty dice; and bonus/penalty DRMs.

The counters

Well laid out with
some neat touches

The counters too are nice. They're one of the game's best features in fact. Their vivid colours and images are more than just attractive, they're also useful in play, making it easy to recognise each side, and each side's different units. And there is quite a variety of troop units on each side. The Republicans have the Regular and Basque armies, the Anarchist and Communist militias, and the famous International Brigades; the Nationalists, their own Regulars, Carlist and Falangist Militias, Legionnaires, the Army of Africa and Italian troops. Each side also has its generals, tanks, aircraft and ships (for the optional naval game, which Liam and I didn't play, so there will be no comments on it here).

Sizes & shapes: smart
graphic design makes
checking stacks easier

What I like most though is the use of different sizes and shapes for different units. There are three shapes: hexagonal- the generals; square- ships; and round- troops, tanks and aircraft, which come in three sizes:

• The smallest are the strength 1 and 2 troops.
• In the middle are the strength 3 and 5 troops.
• The largest are the tanks and aircraft.

This isn't the first time I've seen this: my original Gibsons Games edition of History of the World does something similar, but it's a definite plus for España 1936 that it uses the same approach, whose effect is to make it easy to scan the board for your opponent's concentrations of strength.

Gameplay: familiar features competently executed
The system in general

A handy player aid

In a mere 8 pages of rules featuring large print and several well-illustrated examples, España 1936 features all the mechanics you'd expect of a point-to-point movement wargame:

FAI (Iberian Anarchist
Federation) poster

• Controlling/contesting boxes: only one side's troops/both sides' troops in a box. Winning the game is based on controlling objective cities (the yellow boxes): there are several instant victory conditions, the most important of which is probably controlling 7 objective cities. If there is no instant win, the Republican wins if they have combat units in three objective cities at the end of turn 10.
• Movement, with the limitations imposed by moving into or out of controlled or contested boxes. Only troops and tanks actually move (aircraft and generals are freely placed); movement is essentially unlimited although units must stop moving if they enter/leave an enemy controlled/contested box.
• Stacking limits: 4 troops units/box (generals, tanks and aircraft don't count towards stacking limits).
• Supply, with the attendant effects on movement and combat: a box is in supply if there is an adjacent friendly controlled/contested box; troops out of supply can neither move nor attack.
• Combat, naturally enough.

There is also an events phase, and a replacements phase on every odd-numbered turn. These mechanics are all straightforward and the rules explain their workings clearly enough. The player aids also help players to keep track of the phases each turn: another plus.

Combat in particular

George Orwell in Spain
(the tallest man in shot)

The rules for battles are the longest single section of the rules of España 1936. They use the tactical battleboard approach, in which each individual battle is broken down into one or more rounds. You can only attack if you've got a general with your troops, so you have to plan your battles carefully when it's time to place your generals- which is done after both players' movement is completed. Sometimes you'll want your generals to lead an attack; other times you'll want to commit a good general to help defend a vital objective city. This element of strategic planning meshes nicely with the additional tactical planning to make for battles which can be both interesting and tense.

Setting up a battle

This picture shows how a battle is set up. The attacker must always use their general in the first round; this is optional for the defender. In any event, no unit may attack or support more than once, although the same defending unit may be attacked more than once. Here, the Republican player has decided to throw everything he's got at the Nationalist's weaker unit- the Army of Africa, hoping that 4 dice with three good positive DRMs will be enough to eliminate it in one round- you resolve attacks by rolling 1d6/combat strength, scoring hits on '5's or '6's. The Nationalist decides to use their general and their Me-109, which'll have a good chance of winning a dogfight against the obsolescent B-XIX; the resulting 4d6 with a +1 DRM should ensure that the Republican's International Brigade won't come out of the battle unscathed.

Resolving the first
round of battle

With the Army of Africa unit eliminated and the International Brigade unit reduced to a 1 strength Regular army unit, the Republican player now faces an interesting dilemma: the Legionnaire's +1 combat DRM and the tanks make it a tough target to take on but if it can be eliminated, the Nationalist will also lose his two tank units. In this situation, both players would probably be looking at their cards to see if they had any combat bonuses/penalties which might tilt the balance one way or another.

(NB. There is a small mistake in the above picture: the Me-109 has a combat strength of 2, and would roll 2d6 in the air combat. Ah well.)

FAI/CNT (National
Confederation of
Labour) poster

The battle system has some crucial implications:

• If you want to win a battle in one round you need both an equal or greater number of units and significantly more combat strength and/or support bonuses.
• Even then, battles between relatively equal forces- large or small, will commonly end up as indecisive.

This makes sense to me and it means that the combat system, as a whole, is a strong feature of España 1936.

Caveats: the disappointments
Minor: the rulebook

"¡A las Barricadas!"?

The rulebook for España 1936 is written in the so-called 'conversational style'. As such it suffers from the typical problems of rulebooks of that ilk: illogical organisation, no cross-referencing, and frustrating page-flicking as you search for rules you're sure you've read, somewhere. This last problem is compounded by the lack of either a list of contents or an index. OK, the rulebook is short and the rules are simple, but what is there to lose by making life easier on players? Some examples of poor organisation:

• The rules for friendly and contested boxes (which are crucial to movement, supply, and winning) appear under 'Components'; ie. before the rules of play as such.
• The supply rules appear directly under the 'Sequence of Play'; just like the rules for friendly and contested boxes, these would benefit from appearing in a list of definitions of key terms at the top of the rules of play.

I'll admit that these are minor criticisms, but they highlight the inherent limits of the style of rulebook chosen by Antonio Catalán, a style I simply don't like because problems of this ilk inevitably crop up in my experience.

Middling: the mapboard and the battles

Picasso's Guernica

The mapboard aptly serves its purposes in the game. It's a bit bland though. By this I mean that there is absolutely no terrain differentation at all. It can reasonbly be argued that terrain effects on movement has no place in a game with 4-month turns. But it is hard to deny that Spain itself sort of fades into the background in a game in which ports are the only distinguishing feature of otherwise geographically identical locations.

And the battles? As interesting as they are, the larger battles can also be relatively time-consuming. It's open to question whether the added fun factor the battles bring can really compensate for the game's other shortcomings.

Major: the 'meh' factor? It's all in the cards

Anarchist women soldiers

The cards in España 1936 do exactly what they're supposed to: deliver reinforcements, generate a few other events, and offer opportunties to manipulate your chances in battles. And that's the problem. The Spanish Civil War was above all a war about the fate of a revolution. That is to say: it was all about politics. Unfortunately politics feature nowhere in the game. Sure, there are events which do more than just bring on new units; some of them even interfere with your opponent's plans. Nonetheless, the function of the cards in España 1936 in no way corresponds to their use in CDGs like Labyrinth or Twilight Struggle. The result is that the events are essentially colourless, and hand management and cardplay generates none of the tension which makes the CDGs so gripping.

They shall not pass!

Another issue arising from España 1936's use of the cards is that they're not used to create a quick, alternating-phase turn structure. There are some phases which alternate; eg. placing generals or activating them to attack (or not). The movement phase though is a classic IGO-UGO. This adds a degree of downtime which isn't seen in CDGs. I guess this would decrease with more play experience, but it strikes me as another example of where Catalán's design vision turns round and bites him on the ass.

Overview

Antonio Catalán succeeded in making España 1936 what he wanted it to be: a simple wargame of the Spanish Civil War which isn't shallow, neither in strategy nor tactics. Unfortunately he chose to leave out the politics and so failed to make use of one of the biggest design innovations of the last 20 years, the CDG. The result is a game set in Spain in the years 1936-39 in which Spain, its revolution, and the important international dimensions to the Civil War all feel strangely absent. In short, Catalán kind of missed the boat. As I said above, España 1936 is neither bad nor broken, it's just missing that special something, which it might've enjoyed had it been released ten or twenty years ago. If you're looking for short wargame on the subject, this game could easily fit your bill. If you're looking for a Spanish Civil War CDG, I guess you'll have to wait for Crusade and Revolution: The Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 to make its way through MMP's preorder system. ;)

Wargames, politics and ethics #1: Ah, that old bugbear

Reality bites

They're just games, yes?

At some time or another, many wargamers will have found themselves pondering the political and/or ethical implications of their passion for revisiting the past, present and future battlefields of the world with their maps and little counters. This reflection leads some to create boundaries and/or preferences: periods they won't game, sides they always prefer to play, and so on. For me this began in my teenage-tankie youth, when I drew a boundary at 1945. My reasons for this were twofold:

• In the late 70s and early 80s- with Thatcher and Reagan's 'second' Cold War at its height, modern warfare was too closely linked to the spectre of global thermonuclear holocaust for it to have any appeal to me.
• I felt uncomfortable with the idea of playing games about wars the casualties of which would be actual people living in my own time.

I abandoned this boundary as I grew older. That's not to say that I 'grew out of it', because that would be to imply that there's something immature about the choice to draw and to exercise such boundaries. I've no wish to be so insulting to others who've made these choices.

Who's to say this
isn't a bridge?

No, for me the decision to abandon such boundaries was driven by much more personal imperatives of simple mental survival. That might sound grandiose but it's true. Y'see, in my early days as a student, I got into a conversation about philosophy – as you do – with a guy I met in a student flat. The end result was that I became a convinced strong sceptic; ie. I took seriously the notion that we can't take the evidence of our senses for granted, to the extent that I confronted the proposition that reality was essentially unknowable. This might sound like just another cockeyed bit of undergraduate Philosophy 101. It was. And so it would've remained but for the later emergence of the delusional phase of my bipolar disorder.

Dreams into nightmares

"Pass the dutchie..."

The dangerous confluence of this cod philosophy and my declining mental health began with another typical undergraduate mind game, this time about roleplaying. Following the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and his famous quote "I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man", we used to ask whether we were ourselves roleplaying our PCs, or our PCs roleplaying ourselves.

Apparently somewheres,
I have a readership
of millions!

I took this further, applying the question's method to my games of Squad Leader to ask whether I was just pushing around cardboard counters or actually giving orders to real men who were living and dying at my command. Once I'd thrown the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory into the mix, I was caught on the horns of a real dilemma: radical scepticism meant that I couldn't be sure that I was just pushing cardboard counters around on a map (or playing at being "a renegade ninja who has set out to destroy the evil that spawned him"™); and the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory meant that the very act of asking if I was actually giving orders to real men on real battlefields meant that somewhere, I actually was.

Patent bollocks

At this point my survival instinct kicked in and common sense took over: strong scepticism was patent bollocks; Zhuangzi was just an poetic old dreamer; and the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory? Well that just has to be pseudoscience, doesn't it? With my maps and counters restored to their real status as cardboard tokens, I decided too to abandon completely my old boundary, which had become a bit porous in the intervening years in any case. This may seem an, erm, eccentric (yes, let's call it 'eccentric', eh?) way to introduce the topic of 'Wargames, politics and ethics'. I guess it is. I believe though that it serves one useful purpose in particular: it shows that no matter where I take this analysis, it's founded on a firm grasp of reality. Quite literally.

Back in black?

Sometimes you can't
help but wonder...

This frankly bizarre route to the formation of my personal outlook on the ethics of wargaming aside, readers will readily imagine the one subject above all which brought political and ethical questions about wargaming to the forefront of the minds of a group of pals in whose company I- as a long-time teenage-tankie and WW2 wargamer, felt right at home. That subject was all-too-familiar popularity of the Germans among WW2 gamers. And, naturally enough, that special fetish held by an uncomfortable number for the 'Übermensch' of the Waffen SS, with their inevitable legions of Tiger tanks. Our discussions in those Edinburgh days led us to the obvious conclusion: that some of these types were more than just a bit dodgy. Beyond that? We just mocked them for their historical inaccuracies

"They had the
better looking
uniforms"

All of which brings us almost right up to date. Early last December, someone started a thread on BGG's Wargames forum entitled 'WW2 SS Counter Colours' (observant readers who follow the link will notice that said thread now resides in the Religion, Sex, and Politics forum, whence it was consigned when the topic unsurprisingly strayed from the 'straight and narrow' of a discussion about wargame counters to the wider political issues of fascism). The OP was asking if-  in his 20-year hiatus from the hobby, wargaming had gone PC to avoid offending "Euro Wargamers", because SS counters in wargames are now grey instead of the "correct" black.

No, not that 'counter-culture'

PC gone mad?

It's not my purpose here to revisit that thread's discussion in any degree of detail, because I'm only referring to it to show that certain fundamental issues about the wargaming hobby are evidently every bit as live now as they were 30 years ago. For the sake of a taster though, its 344 posts across 2 months can be roughly summarised thus:

• It's PC gone mad (I put my oar in on this issue).
• Actually the Waffen SS didn't wear black uniforms, so black counters are ahistorical anyway (sounds familar).
• They're just games, so you're dumb if black SS counters bother you.
• War is brutal; all sides commit atrocities to a greater or lesser extent; so:

1. Why make a special fuss about the SS and our cool black counters?
2. Precisely because the SS were the cutting edge of German war crimes on the Eastern Front, it is dubious to make them look specially cool for no good reason (I commented on this issue- function versus decoration, too).

Those were the main issues around which circled the debate about counter colours before the thread polarised into mud-slinging between liberal anti-Fascism and rampant anti-Communism. So you can see that this familar old issue is not just alive and kicking, but is positively explosive.

And that's it for now. When I return to this topic I'll be looking more closely at the whys and wherefores of wargames, politics and ethics; and the benefits our hobby might enjoy if we were more attentive to these issues, whether we like it or not. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
Wargames, politics and ethics
- #2: Politics? You can run but you can't hide