I can remember as a child being fascinated that you could measure the age of a tree by counting the number of rings you saw through its trunk when it was cut down. It didn't take long to occur to me that to do so one had to ensure the demise of the tree. Not a bad realisation for a five year old. I was particularly fascinated by the very idea that in looking at those rings you were looking back in time, and later learning taught me that it is possible to read much about the tree's life and growth, and climatic events, from those rings. Similarly the geology of landforms and the strata that are evident when uplift or erosion occurs all tell a story about aeons long past. It was no wonder I was a Dr Who fan from that very first broadcast in Aotearoa NZ.
So yesterday I had just finished painting another batch of figures, and sat staring at my paint palette. It is (or was) a piece of glass maybe 10-15cm square that my father gave me when I started painting figures and models. I was probably around twelve years old. That piece of glass began at around 5mm thick. It was the thickness that held my gaze. I measured it .. it's now 25mm thick at its thickest.
The current state of my paint palette
A paint pot next to the palette, for scale
It struck me that if I looked at the underside of the palette I was looking at paint that had been laid down over 55 years ago. I was looking back in time. There is blue, and yellow, and green, and white, and grey and.... I can't recall what I might have been painting. Maybe the blue was some Airfix French Napoleonic infantry? Maybe the green was an Airfix M3 Lee/Grant tank?
The underside of the palette
Again, for scale...
Interesting how the mind works, isn't it. Hopefully I have a few more years of painting left in me, although I doubt enough to add another 20mm to the thickness of the palette.
We all love a good clichē, don't we, and if your interest lies in the First World War, then you have rich pickings. While there has been a lot of revisionist history published since the 1960s that attempts to debunk many of these they still persist, and Rowan Atkinson's representation of the classic WW1 British clichē is one of the best.
I have just finished reading the first volume of what is perhaps the most thorough debunking of some of the myth surrounding world war 1 that I have seen: 'Zero Hour Z Day 1st July 1916', by Jonathan Porter. I was gifted the first two volumes which, upon arrival, came with a courier sticker that declared their net weight at 2.6kg, so these are weighty tomes in both the intellectual and the physical senses.
This first volume analyses the operations of XIII Corps operating between Maricourt and Mametz, on the British right adjoining the French army. XIII Corps has the distinction of being the only Corps to have achieved all of its objectives for 1st July in a battle that has been analysed to the nth degree in the nearly 110 years since. Porter begins with an overview of the situation with Fourth Army and the formulation of its offensive plan. He includes in this preliminary stage an analysis of the geology of the area of operations, an issue that had a significant impact on the Corps' success. He gives a detailed breakdown of the opposing forces, the preparations, the preliminary bombardment (if you want to know how many shrapnel vs HE shells a battery fired, this is your place to go), and a detailed description of that first day of the battle for each battalion, brigade, and division in the corps.
He makes extensive reference to unit war diaries in a way I have not seen done before, even though this primary source material has been available for most of the time that has passed since. These references provide an unprecedented level of detail, and it is here that Porter debunks much of the myth. The narrative is also provided with plenty of colour with Porter's use of fragments from personal diaries and letters, and of course the obligatory official histories.
Porter's almost hour by hour narrative provides an extraordinary level of detail. Such is the detail that even before I had reached his final chapter offering his analysis and interpretation, I had arrived at several conclusions of my own about how the Corps achieved this level of success. Included in my thinking were issues of thorough preparation and rehearsal, innovative use of what in modern parlance we call minor tactics (tactics at section, platoon, and company level),enabled by a high level of trust in the initiative of junior leaders especially, and the emphasis on innovative use of lewis gun and stokes mortar teams. I had not realised how flexibly the 3" stokes mortar batteries had been employed once the battle began.
In discussing these minor tactics for example, in his chapter on 53rd Brigade Porter says:
It would be suicide to advance in extended line so a change of tactic was established. Sections and half sections would advance in short rushes using whatever cover was available - shell craters or hollows. While one section moved, another would provide covering fire. (P 407)
In modern parlance we'd call this 'bounding'.
The issue of the subsurface geology of the battlefield I found fascinating. In the XIIIth Corps area south of Mametz , the soil was "a deep layer of top soil and/or clay and then chalk" whereas north of their area there was a shallow layer of topsoil with underlying hard chalk. The chalk had the effect of protecting deep bunkers, whereas the topsoil and clay does not. Hence many of the deep bunkers dug to protect troops of the German garrison were collapsed or rendered unusable by the preliminary bombardment. An additional effect of this was that the defenders withdrew most of their troops to the third and fourth trench lines, leaving sentries, and some MMGs, to give early warning and hold up any attack until it reached their main defensive line. Combined with the effective wire cutting bombardments, this meant that many units gained quick access to the German first lines. From there, where further attack across the open was halted by small arms and MG fire from the main bodies of troops, bombing parties (specialists armed primarily with mills grenades) proceeded to fight down communication trenches, clearing as they went, in order to then attack the main defences.
In his final analysis Porter ascribes XIII Corps' success to five key factors:
Command and leadership, from the Corp and divisional commanders, right down to platoon and section leaders. Each divisional commander had created a leadership culture that emphasised individual initiative, and repeated and thorough rehearsal meant that every man knew what was expected of him, what he had to do and where he needed to be, so that when successive layers of leadership became casualties, those below were capable of stepping in to fill the void.
Training and rehearsals. Porter shows that XIII Corps units spent on average several more days in rehearsals than units elsewhere in Fourth Army
Special weapons and mining, from the use of mines of up to 5000lbs of explosive to livens flame projectors, gas, and 4" stokes mortars laying planned smoke screens (something I'd not previous been aware of)
Innovative tactics which included specialist teams as described previously, but also in deployment in the attack which mean that reserves were right where they needed to be when needed
Artillery support, which included several batteries of French 220 mm mortars. An essential part of the artillery fire plan had included what proved to be a very effective programme of wire cutting from the many batteries of 18pdrs, and the 2" stokes mortars, and effective counter battery work which reduced the opposing German artillery to near (but not quite) impotence
Porter uses a combination of text, contemporary maps and aerial photographs, and perhaps most helpfully modern day oblique colour photographs to describe and explain the actions of the day down to individual platoons and sections. This combination makes it very easy to understand how action across the battlefield unfolded during the day.
An example of a modern oblique photographic guide to each attack
Despite XIII Corps' success, there was still an awful toll, 6100 officers and ORs were killed or wounded on the day. John Steinbeck said "All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal", and whether 1 man or 100 men, the cost is too much. However when compared with other action in the war, XIII Corps came out of the day comparatively lightly. Porter gives many of the men are given faces, and where known he acknowledges the places of their eventual burial, although the final resting places of too many men remain unknown, to be commemorated only on the enormous Thiepval memorial.
The books are printed on high quality stock which in itself also contributes to their physical weight. My only criticism is that the text would have benefited from a good editor. There are typographical errors and at times awkward sentence construction that a good editor would have picked up (although from my own publication experiences authoring six books I am only too well aware that even professional editors miss things). That should not however put you off purchasing a copy. If you have any interest in the 'real oil' of what went down on that first day of the Somme, this is a damned fine investment. Thank you Mr Porter for an invaluable contribution to the scholarship of the first world war. Now to read the second volume, and apparently there are more to come.
Had a few of the lads around this week for a bit of a bash using the 25mm napoleonic armies. The armies are a good 40 years old, as I've posted before. They are brittle (lead rot), and were painted in the style we used in the 70s and 80s. However none of us is a rivet counter, and it's all about the chance to push figures around a table while enjoying good company. We had both. We fought the game using our standard Volley and Bayonet rules.
This battle is not an historical refight, but rather a 'situation' modelled on the Battle of Tamames on the Peninsular in 1809. As is usually my habit these days, this isn't a full blown AAR, but rather just a few selected photos.
The Spanish forces, a mic of M5, M4, and militia, troops occupy a steep ridge, ands the village of Tamames at its foot. The French are attacking. As I've already said, our game was not a refight.
The buildings are my own, scratch built after the style of Kevin Dallimore who featured similar buildings in Wargames Illustrated in the 1990s.
I've lost count of the number of times in my lifetime I've heard the refrain "New Zealand has no real military history worth writing about". This is often reprised with 'just those bloody maaari wars which are not worth worrying about". Yes, the right wing racist tone is intentional.
Admittedly we never had a Napoleon or a Caesar or a Manstein (or did we?). But we had Pene Taka Tuaia and Hone Heke, and Russell and Freyberg. And to suggest that New Zealanders never wrote any pages in the military history books is to do a gross disservice to the thousands of New Zealanders who fought, and the thousands who died, in two world wars and numerous other conflicts.
Jeff Plowman has found plenty of New Zealand military history to write about. Various Google searches tell me that he has credits for between 14 and 19 titles (the total chnages each time I search). I have four of them, including his latest "German breakthrough in Greece: the 1941 Battle of the Pineios Gorge".
In this narrative Jeff traces the deployment of the New Zealand Division to Greece, initial plans to deploy it along the Metaxis Line supporting the Greek army's proposed defence, the shift to the Aliakmon Line, and the subsequent withdrawals to and battles around Mount Olympus. He chronicles the defence around the Platamon Ridge, and the subsequent withdrawal through the Pineios Gorge, the main focus for this book.
This is a story of fighting in difficult terrain, about difficult withdrawals and dogged defence. It is not a story of sweeping armoured thrusts with hundreds of tanks. It is a story of small packets of tanks, a story of dreaded German panzers stopped with mines, artillery, and sheer guts. It is also a story of tactical flexibility amongst some German commanders, and a corresponding lack of flexibility amongst some allied commanders
Jeff spends some time considering the situation and the decision making of Lt Col Macky, commander of the NZ 21st Battalion. In doing so, he debunks some of the post war official history myth of poor performance in the field, while still identifying key errors made in the command decision making.
For example, in his final chapter 'Anatomy of a pyrrhic victory", he states:
"Macky's primary mistake has been put down to his failure to adequately prepare for and deal with an attack by tanks from the gorge. This is curious because it would appear that Anzac Corps Headquarters was not prepared for such an eventuality either."
Perhaps the underlying narrative here though is that the campaign demonstrates that the German war machine of 1941 is not deserving of the invincible superhero status that it might have been given in other narratives. The logistical failures alone, the inability of the 'system' to keep the front line troops supplied with petrol, food, and ammunition, and the subsequent grounding of the German advance at critical junctures, speak of a system inherently human in nature.
Then there are the accounts of those small scale actions that halt the attack. New Zealand field artillery causing substantial losses on advancing German tanks, German reconnaissance units being cut down almost to the man by accurate disciplined New Zealand infantry fire. These are stories that often counter the myth of German invincibility in these early stages of the war.
This extensive quote from the review on Bookshop.org gives the flavour:
Ten days have passed since the German invasion of Greece and the Anzacs are in trouble, even if they don't yet know it. The small German motorcycle battalion that has just reached the 21st NZ Battalion positions at Platamon is a harbinger of the panzer battle group yet to come. To the south is the strategic town of Larissa. North of it almost the entire Anzac Corps is spread out along the line of the Olympus mountains, with its western end anchored on Kalabaka, where a small brigade group waits for the appearance of the 1st Armoured Brigade further north. Larissa is their only escape route and the German thrust is aimed straight at it. Worse still, as the fighting intensified at Platamon, the Anzac Corps high command seemed slow to react and almost turned a blind eye to it as they continued to reinforce the west against what was only a perceived threat. That this lone battalion, with four 25-pounders in support, managed to hold off the attackers for as long as they did until Anzac Corps Headquarters finally reacted was certainly not due to the latter's commander, Lieutenant General Thomas Blamey. There is a view in some quarter that this successful delaying action only became possible for the intervention of Blamey's Chief-of-Staff, Brigadier Sydney Rowell. However, the complete evacuation of all Anzac troops north of Larissa may owe much more to the propensity of the New Zealand soldier for misappropriation of other people's assets, in this case British anti-tank mines.
Jeff has adopted what I am reliably informed is the trend in scientific writing to develop text and explanation using diagrams, graphs and other illustrations. The book is copiously illustrated. Not only has Jeff sourced many photos that I have certainly personally never seen before (not that that in itself is any sort of meaningful benchmark), but each illustration comes with extensive captioning. The captions add significantly to the narrative.
Pages 150 & 151
As you might expect in a book from a series titled 'After the battle', the text is interspersed with plenty of modern day photos, many of which Jeff took himself during his own battlefield tours. There is a fascination in seeing a modern day photo taken of the same geographical location, from the same angle, as an historical photo.
His analysis is succinct. He makes extensive use of primary source documents, as good history does. Jeff's repeated references to top secret German High Command signals intercepted by Ultra, decoded, and forward to the top level command during the campaign in Greece, were a revelation. I had no idea that the senior commanders were so well informed on German high command intentions.
His career as a biochemist is apparent in the meticulous way in which he writes, yet his style is eminently readable. Jeff is a good communicator. I can't help thinking that he is too often overlooked as a writer of New Zealand's military history. The book is highly recomnmended.
In the meantime, reading this latest book has sparked enough interest that I've gone back to my bookshelves and picked out his 2019 book 'Greece 1941'.
It's time I revisited this narrative too. You can buy Jeff's latest from Pen and Sword, here.
Asag's generals strode across the landscape, littered as it was with broken rocks, but more particularly with the mortal remains of thousands and thousands of spiders. Hordes of the things, seemingly unlimited in number, seemingly irresistible .. until that is they had collided head first with the armies of the mountains. Had they had a sense of smell, their senses would have been assailed by the smell of death, the cloying, lingering smell of .. victory. The rocks and stones knew no fatigue, only animation, or nothing, at the hands of the generals and their magicians, God-like in their work. Somehow they knew this would not be the end.
A week or so ago Andy began work on an army of animated rocks, based around the Sumerian myth of Asag. This was to be a 'horde' based army, in Hordes of the Things (HotT) terms, to match my Spider army (also a horde based army), now expanded to Big Battle HotT (72 point) proportions. The rock army is incomplete, so Andy supplemented it with Aliens for this Big Battle outing. I won't give a blow by blow account, merely a few comments along the way, with some concluding comments at the end.
The set up, spiders on the right, rocks on the left, with the flank anchored on a water feature.
Hordes of stones
The Rock CinC, a stone behemoth
The Spiders' God (Spiderman) did show up.. briefly
Long enough to attack the Stones' magician...
... and eliminate him
Spiderman also eliminated an Aliens' blade element
.. and with that single roll,
... the God disappeared again
The Spiders left tried to roll up the rocks' right, the behemoth general doing damage along the way
In the centre, the Spiders CinC, a Hero general, pushed hard, and was confounded by Hordes... surprise surprise
The Spider Horde casualties on their right flank, brought back on (seen at the bottom of the photo)
The spiders left flank command loses its general, and is demoralised
The left flank makes a subsequent low PIP die roll, can't hold enough stands, and the whole army is pushed over 50% casualties
This was a very good game. As always, the Big Battle version of the game plays differently to the standard 24 point game. My lessons with the Spider army.
I was defender, and so chose a water feature for my water borne spider element. We used this per Gunboats in the Hordes of The Empire variant of the game. However a water feature down the flank seriously limits the use of the element. Had I placed a 'river' down the centre of the able I would have significantly enlarged the sphere of influence of the water element, and therefore its potential impact on the battle..
The army includes two airboats and two flyers. I split these between two commands. I was starved of PIPs often. I reckon that as a player your plan should work on the assumption that it can still work to some degree even when starved of PIPs. I didn't do that. Therefore aerials saw relatively little use. Had they operated together in one command I MIGHT ell have been able to leverage greater impact form the combat effectiveness against foot.
Gods are fickle eh
Overall a really good game, with a well deserved victory to Andy.
