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Home › Forums › Historical Tabletop Game Discussions › Bolt Action Update › Reply To: Bolt Action Update
It might be a moot point, but it is one of the criticisms of BA as a games system, as it encourages unbelievable ‘army’ compositions. When you see a game, and one side has Tiger II and 6 infantrymen with STG44 fighting against some equally unlikely home brew organisation, it just doesn’t look like folk are playing a historical game.
It’s not a universal criticism, there are plenty of BA army compositions that are perfectly credible historically. It’s just the flexibility allowed is open to what I see as abuse. Very much depends on who you play with I guess.
I’d be interested to know if you have read some of the accounts of the Pacific by Leckie, David & McManus. They do talk quite a bit about the reinforcement process. It was unusual to not have on hand replacements, and they discuss the impact of that on squads. The FNG syndrome, to use the later Vietnam War term. There’s also a general lack of rigour in some of the numbers bandied about. So 50% casualties can mean anything from 50% killed over the course of a campaign, to 50% receiving some sort of injury, with half of those returned to duty within a very short period.
You’ll also see in most cases, that troops engaged in combat would be replaced by supporting units when they had seen a decrease in efficiency through loss of combat effectives. If you look for example at NWE, battalions would be used in an attack with a supporting battalion ready to come up to the line to replace them if they had been deemed to have become degraded to a certain point. It really is all about the reserves.
Another thing to remember is that typically losses would be heavy among NCO and junior officers, so if you lost squad leaders it was often easier to reduce the number of squads in the platoon, and allocate additional squads from another platoon or at company level. Different armies had different approaches of course.
Interesting discussion. I haven’t seen any articles or research comparing replacement systems. I do know the US and UK systems were quite different. Would be interesting to know if anyone has the info to hand?
