Nice books!

 

I have had these books on my desk for some time, I find them fascinating and they are both well thumbed and worth a quick review.

1. Battlegroup!

This is published by Helion. It is entitled Battlegroup because the focus in on battalion sized combat teams. It is sub-titled, "The lessons of the unfought battles of the cold war" because it looks at how war would have been fought had it broken out. 

Jim Storr was an army officer during the cold war and took part in many exercises in Europe and knows what he is talking about. His brother, John, was also a serving officer. Unusually, Jim and his brother played 200 or so wargames using WRG rules (Wargames Rules for Armoured Warfare at Company and Battalion Battlegroup Level 1950-85). These were published in 1979. These games were played over many years and, importantly, were recorded in detail. The results of those games and Jim's real world experience of tactics, feed into the analysis of these unfought battles.

Jim covers a lot of ground in 300 pages, from an overview of the NATO/Soviet front, analysis of the tools of the trade to discussion of both the various arms and tactics.

It is not possible to do justice to this book in a few words. Perhaps an example would help. Jim and his brother found that the use of APCs and IFVs was problematic. APCs could deliver a full infantry section to an objective whilst suffering enormous losses. IFVs faced the same problem with casualties, despite having the ability to provide their own suppression fire, and could only deliver the equivalent of a half section. This is a familiar conundrum to wargamers and now, of course, is being demonstrated during the fighting in Ukraine.

In Ukraine we see a common sight. Russian BMPs and MTLBs (as well as various BTRs) enroute to an objective whilst being obliterated by drone and ATGW fire. I have also seen the Ukrainians undertake similar operations but much more successfully. They refer to  the delivery of troops to target as landing operations. They use IFVs, they move extremely fast over open ground, they provide suppression fire with on board weapons but we also see that the target, a tree line perhaps, has already been stonked and the open flanks, as well as the target zone, are covered by smoke. After landing troops, the IFVs retreat at high speed. Worthwhile testing this out in a game.

I find this fascinating and highly recommend this book.

2. The Stress of Battle

This is a volume in John Curry's History of Wargaming series. David Rowland was an MoD OR specialist and this book is heavy on data and graphs (nice!). It covers a lot of ground. This book is very important because much of the evidence used in the studies was derived from real life trials including use of gunfire simulators. These were known as Exercise KINGS RIDE. They are really informative and I was interested to learn that defensive fire tended to be opened at long range, giving away positions, directed at the nearest visible target and often concetrated on a small number of targets instead of being distributed. 

There is also a really good annex documenting a KINGS RIDE exercise in the Ruhleben Fighting City in Berlin. It would make a good urban warfare scenario. Time for another game!

Again, highly recommended.

Both books are on my shelf next to Leo Murray's Brains and Bullets and Frank Ledwidge's Losing Small Wars.