Orders of Battle for Miniature Armies: August 2015

Sunday, August 30, 2015

The Bzura Counter-Offensive - Poland, September 1939. Attack on All Fronts, High Command, Kiss Blitzkrieg, Megablitz, Not Quite Mechanised Wargame Rules

My first purpose is to create wargames scenarios, paying special attention to the orders of battle, as you can see from the title of the blog.

Although I didn't finish yet with the Polish Army, I couldn't resist to try build a scenario involving it.

Allow me to describe, step by step, the way I'm doing it.

STEP 1

We need to choose an historical battle and get a (brief) description of it.

I've chosen the Battle of Bzura and as source I picked up the book from Steve J. Zaloga Poland 1939 – The birth of Blitzkrieg, nº 107 from Osprey Campaign series. The description of the battle will be a transcription from the book, with my compliments to the author.

STEP 2

We need to identify the units participating in the battle. In this case I jumped directly to the units participating in the scenario, using an already made that I found here (thank you):

http://www.adlerkorps.com/scenarios/scenarios.html

I also used the usual (wonderful) sources to complete it:

The Nafziger Collection of Orders of Battle, and

http://niehorster.org/index.htm

Step 3

I fulfill the identified units with 'Panzerblitz' tables of organisation. In this case it was faster and easier to use the work already done by Greg Moore (my compliments):

http://gregpanzerblitz.com/1939_poland.htm

STEP 4

When I think about wargames always come to my mind those I suppose are called Corps-Level or Army-Level Wargames. Some of them are ( with my great appreciation to the authors and without any particular order:

KISS Rommel & variants, by Norman MacKenzie

High Command series, by Ricardo Affinati

Megablitz, by Tim Gow

Not Quite Mechanised, by Chris Kemp

Attack on All Fronts, by 'Stickfish Productions' (I couldn't get the name of the author)

It's not possible to represent a full battle at this level with TOE from 'Panzerblitz'. Nobody can afford the money and the space. So I do what I think is called 'bathtube'.

With this, we can also use the final order of battle for games at Squad, Platoon, Company or Battalion level. It just depend what we consider its each unit.

I add all figures in each major unit and I divide by 10. the cost of each unit is 2.

Final Product

One final note before I show the final product. I don't know if this make any kind of sense for real wargamers. But, believe me, I'm having a lot of fun.