Reply To: Poland 1939 – Preparing for 80th Anniversary of World War II

[jamesevans140Participant 2055xp 4]

Good to see you have placed the spotlight on Poland @oriskany. I feel it is an all too often overlooked campaign of WW2 by wargamers in general.  I have never played it with miniatures but have done so on hex and counter and PC hex games.  I know the German players in our group are not interested as it does not involve big cats.  The German tanks are at their lowest armour thickness and fire power but in is period a 37mm AT gun rules the battlefield like an 88mm. So for me everything is still in proportion.

What I have taken away from my gaming is that it is very much a war off movement and if the German player takes his eye off the ball he will lose. You can too easily do this as you get carried away destroying Polish formations.  It is not straight forward either as gamers prefer to use and deal with armoured units yet Polish infantry are a match for German infantry and any such encounter can go either way.  The much put down Polish tankettes get their last but outnumbered Harrah here.  It can take out PZ-1s, which was one of the more common tanks in this campaign.  It can also take down a careless PZ-2, but from a T-26 or above it is just totally out classed.  I think that the MG version is more dangerous as these tankettes are fast and can pounce upon infantry and gun unit before you can blink and by the time you have dealt with them the damage has already been done.  Their larger tanks are copies of the Vickers 6 ton tank and again for this briefest of moments they are still a good tank. It is the large deployment of AT rifles and a profusion of 37mm AT guns that is their undoing. One battle I would like to do is one were you get to take on the forward elements of a panzer division with an armoured train and infantry units.  It was a very narrow win for the Germans that cost them time so I call it a draw.  I don’t remember the name of the battle at the moment and I am too lazy to go and look it up.

I have not seen a documentary on the Polish Campaign that I like as they also have to show the German propaganda mock battle between tanks and cavalry and they bang on about how futile and one sided it was,  which is just not so.  It was more about the different strategies employed by both sides.  The Germans go for a near standard Prussian war of development with some blitzkrieg brass knobs and the Polish go for a thin line trying to protect every km of their boarders.  I would actually still put Polish cavalry up against the panzer division.  Their are elite infantry but have the largest amount of modern light towed AT guns.

The start date for WW2 has been raised.  As the main topic of thing s series is about Poland I feel September 1st is appropriate.  For the US and Russia it is 1941, the most Europeans it is 1939 and to others it is the mid 30s and if you consider the Italian campaigns in Africa it started much earlier.  So it must be a sliding scale otherwise it is like trying to pick when a bush fire became a fire storm.  For me I see it as a continuation of WW1 as no real issue was solved and a lot more was created. Just like a bush fire it starts with tiny spot fires that combine to make bush fires that in turn combine into a fire storm. A world war its the fire storm and there has been more than two of them just that the last two were numbered when they named them.

I have not been on line much as I have been very busy of late.  I am building some new armies,  working on our Izyum project and working on the hex system table.  If that was not enough I bought a copy of the Rommel rules and are going through them at the moment.  These rules was the one used by the Little Wars guys to do their all of D- Day on a 12′ foot table.  It sits high in the operational warfare sphere as a stand of men or a tank is generally represents a company.  6 inches is 1 km on the table,  but we will rebuild it so that 4 inches is 1 km ship that it works better with our hex system table.  So far it looks like a prime candidate for our higher level gaming.  FoW remains our primary rule set with BG being the primary set when we zoom in at individual level prospective.  The Rommel rules look at the issues at the higher level such as units being in combat formation or have become dispersed and or supplied and allows the battle to be fought over a number of days. We will be using 15mm models to represent the armies while the terrain features will be made tiny.  This will allow us to test and use this system very cheaply. 🙂