Rommel, my part in his triumph

A welcome return to wargaming after a hiatus caused by various intrusions of reality saw me at James' last night for some WWII action. I don't really like modern wargaming (and if you had grown up playing on bomb-sites as I did then you would also regard 'the war' as modern) not just because it's recent, but because the ground scales are even sillier than other periods and because the combined arms aspects don't really work and because one either has to make everything so complicated that one can never finish a game or so simple that the differences between the sides disappear. And, of course, because the Germans and Japanese were unthinkably evil and many of the rest weren't much better.

Anyway, yesterday we were in the Western Desert. One of my uncles, who died only last year, was a tank commander in the theatre and I have worked with more than one ex-8th Army veteran, including one chap that one had to be very careful from which side one approached him because he had lost an eye at El Alamein. Norman Potter is an exaggeration, but not an invention.

The first president of the Society of Ancients complains to John Alderton about the dreadful behaviour of 5C

All of which brings us to the wargaming. It had been decided that Piquet (the full-on version, none of this lightweight FOB nonsense) would provide insufficient fog of war and we therefore used a playing card driven system to govern unit arrival that was so complicated that even its devisor - the legendary James Roach - was clearly making it up as he went along. It confused Peter 'Rommel' Jackson even more than it did me, which resulted in my brave Brits rushing onto the board to be confronted by basically no-one at all. Eventually, and sheepishly, the desert fox himself turned up with just one battalion of tanks to confront what were essentially an armoured brigade an infantry brigade and plenty of off and on board artillery, complete with air superiority. It had walkover written all over it.

"Wo sind sie?"

And so it proved. The German tanks took advantage of their gun superiority, sat out of range of the British tanks and shot them up. The British advantage in artillery counted for nothing against only armoured targets and by the time the rest of the Bosche arrived it was all over; the panzers were through onto the soft skinned vehicles of the infantry and artillery and it was sauve qui peut.

Other than rather feebly deciding to form a hull down line with one regiment of armour while their sister regiment worked round the German armour's flank I don't think I did much wrong. The flanking movement didn't work because even throwing my snazzy red, white and blue dice I couldn't win any initiative. Standard Piquet can be very cruel sometimes in the way it dishes out the chance to actually do anything; and so it proved last night. Obviously splitting my tanks up so that the third regiment was way over on the right waiting fruitlessly to perform an even grander flanking sweep didn't help. Nor did concentrating my 25pdrs in a grand battery for indirect fire instead of using them to counter the panzers. But it still wasn't my fault. You must see that.