Europa Games and Military History

Author: Wolf Broszies (Page 1 of 3)

Stonebooks

Reading on anything to do with the Second World War is an intimidating task, since the literature is so vast that it seems impossible for any laymen to identify relevant books or simply those well enough written to deserve notice. Military history remains a topic of high interest, and serious studies often drown in the flood of available popular editions, autobiographies or “collections” of pictures, technical data or battle descriptions.

For those of us without access to a well-stacked library, stonebooks.com is an invaluable source, providing a structured catalogue of publications. Fleshed out with book reviews, a message board and and more catalogues of publishers and authors, stonebooks provides a great service for readers and historians alike.

Our hobby seems for most cases to be stuck in the early 00’s when it comes to design and usability, and stonebooks.com is no exception. However,  we would ask our reader again for leniency: The website proves without a doubt one does not require Bootstrap to provide viewing pleasure. Additionally the author of the page, Bill Stone, is one of the oldest Europa veterans and former editor of E.T.O.  Say Hi and grab a good book!

Date: August 22rd, 2018

URL: http://stonebooks.com

 

 

Classic Europa

John Astell’s contribution to the Europa-Series is such that I would be hard pressed to find any Europa game that does not show his handwrit, be it that he designed it directly, be it that it heavily borrows from the rules canon John established over the years. Taking over from the founders of GD/W, Paul R. Banner and Frank Chadwick, John, always working in team with the relentless Europa-publisher and promoter Winston Hamilton, made Europa what it is today. In short, without John Astell, there would be no Europa-series today.

John’s “classic Europa” website is back up now after falling victim to the lamented end of “Geocities”. Of particular interest are the “Legion of Honor”, a list of people who contributed to Europa in the past, and of course the extensive designer notes, covering nearly every Europa-game ever published, and some of the game concepts and rules implemented such as abandoning equipment and “extended rage” for air units.

For more than a decade now there haven’t been any new “Europa”-games. Until and if Total War ships, John’s website is the premier source for background information on most published Europa-games.

Date: February 26th, 2013

URL: http://classiceuropa.org/

Grognard.com

The oldest gamer site on the web

For a long time Grognard.com was the place to look if you wanted to know anything about strategy games. Anything, from MS-DOS based programms to generate hex-maps to long lists of scanned counter sheets for nearly any strategy game available, Grognard.com delivered. During the Nineties and beyond Grognard was the central hub for gamers online.

It was the rise of online communities and the infabous user generated content that broke Grognard’s monopoly. The site failed to update functionality and embrace the hordes of interested geeks that wanted to contribute, and other platforms that included messaging and, most of all, forums and wiki-style contribution possibilities overtook the veteran site in terms of attractivenes and content offered. Of course it did not help that Grognard basically is still online in the design they devised in the mid-Nineties.

However, the wealth of special-interest-links and downloadable material still makes a visit worthwhile. Grognard.com may be more of an archive of developments of the past these days, but still it presents a vast amount of information on even the most obscure games of the past twenty or thirty years. So we wish the old guard the best and hope they will be around for a long time to teach youngsters about the way of cardboard wars.

Date: January 16th, 2013

URL: http://www.grognard.com

Tags: echo $keywords;

The CARL digital library

A recurring theme of pages listed under these bookmarks seems to be that their design somehow harks back to the late nineties, but their content is much richer than a first look would surmise. CARL contines this trend: benhind an awkard and slow interface lingers a host of historical documents. CARL is short for “Combined Arms Research Library” and describes the library on Fort Leavenworth, which is in turn not only one of the oldest forts in the US still operational, but also counts the United States Army Combined Arms Center amongst its tenants. Fort Leavenworth prides itself to be the “intellectual center” of the US Army, and the sheer volume of documents available online certainly dwarf the Army’s Historical Center (history.army.mil).

Amongst the documents hosted are essays and thesises prepared by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC), but also a lot of operational reports, old field manuals and all kinds of other documents related to the military history of the US. In these the second world war features prominently, as is to be expected. Especially the After Action Reports from the divisional and corps level make an interesting reading for EUROPA afficinados.

The cumbersome interface of the website has been mentioned already, although the collections are searchible, the structure is unintuitive and purly organisatorical, the website responds slow and makes it close to impossible to get an overview about the hosted documents. An overhaul has been announced for some time now, but even now the uniqueness and historical wealth of the documents found place CARL amongst the first websites relevant for modern military history.

Date: October 19th, 2012

URL: http://usacac.army.mil/organizations/cace/carl

War over Holland

How to organize armies for war is still one of the topics that fascinate me the most – probably one of the reasons why I am still loyal to the precisely researched OBs of the “Europa series”. Some time ago during reasearch I stumbled upon a now defunct blog that listed in detail all units involved in the German invasion of the Netherlands, partially down to company level. I was very exited about that find, even if, as so often, the page lacked detailed source information on individual entries. A quick email exchange with the author of the blog revealed that the site was only a preparation for a historical project on the invasion of Holland in 1940. This page is now online, and I can only recommend reading to everyone interested in the german occupation of the Netherlands in 1940. P>

“War over Holland” focuses heavily on the military events in the operational sense and disregards the misery the invasion and subsequent years brought over the Dutch. One may lament this, but it should be noted that the consequences for civilian population, and especially for the dutch Jews, have been well documented and described in other publications. Putting the focus on operational military history thus does not automatically constitute an omission. The authors intention is not to give a complete picture, but to describe the military events without which none of the subsequent times of terror and miseary can be understood. The website narrates the five days of desperate struggle Holland put up against an overwhelming superior foe, and even the most inconsequential firefights are recorded with a well founded knowledge of the source material. On the forth day, most organized resistance collapsed, leaven only capitulation and flight to exile for a few. P>

So for those the article by Alan Tibetts on landing operation in the Netherlands is not enough, you will find “War over Holland” provides an excellent analysis of the military action in unparalelled detail and depth. The only nitpicks are regular error messages the server produces currently, and which require several loading attempts for pages, plus the lack of footnotes, complicating any fact-checking from the sources. P>

Date: August 13th, 2012

URL: http://www.waroverholland.nl/

Planes, Spaceflight, and Things That Go Boom: Vectorsite

This article should be linking to two articles, too. But unlike our previous reccomendation, in which one site hosted the other, in this case the contents of “Vectorsite” have grown to a point at which the author and owner of the site decided some weeks ago to split his website into two. So http://www.airvectors.net/ contains all articles about planes now, while the vectorsite has everything else.

Before you head over to look at planes, however, I’d like to say a few words to Vectorsite itself and why I reccommend it here. The choice of topics is a big reason, of course. Greg Goebel picks interesting topics of modern military technology and presents them in an concise, entertaining and informative style. Most of the articles are more of an extended reference than a full coverage of the topic, but especially for me as an european the articles (for example about the “Caribou”) provided new insights about US military history during the cold war and its interservice relationships.

Another reason is that I actually like the websites layout, which refrains from any design elements and focuses on delivering content. The vast amount of material produced in such a short time, and the willingness of Mr. Goebel to put all of that under the GPL also deserve special praise. But most of all its the unpretentious and friendly style of writing that drew me to read even about topics I alread knew well enough – or so I thought. The joy and curiousity with which Mr Goebel approaches his topics is one I would like to pass on.

Date: June 20th, 2012

URL: http://vectorsite.net

Soviet Orders of Battle – Soldat.ru

In order to explain why I am linking with google translate to an Entry on archive.org, a little explanation is probably warranted. For a long time our knowledge about the organisation of the Red Army and its structure during World War II was fragmental at best. While the western Allies published extensive official histories, and the defeated countries of the Axis saw whole archives transferred to Washington and dissected there, the Soviet Union shrouded everything military in a veil of secrecy. Until the late Eighties, the best and most reliable information on the history of the Red Army came from captured german intelligence records.

The Collapse of the Eastern Block changed all this. For a brief period in the Nineties, archives and libraries opened their doors, and a wealth of information was suddenly available for researchers and historians. In 1995 Charles S. Sharp started publishing a series of orders of battle of the Red Army detailing the unit histories of the ground formations of the Soviet Army and NKVD. Sharp partly leaned on the research by Poirer and Conner and used some on the original German records, but the most important new source was the official order of battle of the Soviet Army as published by the Soviet Ministry of Defense from 1956 to 1990. It was relatively unknown until the early 1990s because the Ministry of Defense had classified all of them as secret. The problem with these OOBs is they only detail the combat forces and not the support forces.

A couple of years ago then information seeped out of the former USSR about a much larger series of books detailing not only the combat units, but also the combat support and combat service support units of the Army, Navy, Air Force and PVO forces. Finally, on 24th August of 2007, through his source, Igor Ivlev posted on his soldat.ru website scans of most (one is missing) of these books. It seems that they are appendices to General Staff Directives (which still remain restricted) showing every formation, unit, sub-unit, establishments and institutions in the Soviet Armed Forces and NKVD in the Operational Army during the war. The first one was published in 1956 and the last in 1973. Intermittent updates followed until 1998.

This was and is the most complete and authoritative source about the Red Armys Order of battle in Word War II.

Sometime in 2011 soldat.ru went offline, whether do to personal reasons or because the copyright paranoia has by now successfully replaced the cold war paranoia we don’t know. However, archive org thankfully saved a set of the files, so the originals are available. Additionally, the team from RKKA started the herculean task of translating this monumental work into English, and should you not be proficient in Russian, you can always start reading there. However, since the appendices are not available in any library or any other source, I thought that information to be more important at the current moment.

Date: May 15th, 2012

URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20100214135652/http://www.soldat.ru/files/4/6/216/

Before the advent of the Web, the name of George F. Nafziger was already a staple in wargaming circles. His work on the wars of the French Revolution and his collection of well-researched Orders so Battle, especially for the Napoleonic area, made him the first adress for anyone wargaming that time. Nafziger started to make single OOBs available via the Internet in the Mid-Nineties, and his now rather dated looking website enabled visitors to order print-outs of selected battles and campaigns.

In 2010 Nafziger retired from publishing those OOBs and donated his whole collection to the public domain. It is currently hosted at the US Army’s CARL website. Additionally Alternatewars.com culled the complete archive and made it available as a collection of zipped archives for quicker access.

The Nafziger Collection itself contains orders of battle from 1600 to 1945 with over 7000 individual pdf files. What makes those files special is that the majority of them is based on archival sources, which are not easily accessible for mortal souls like us. Its depth and scope are unparalleled anywhere, and it still remains one of the most reliable, best sourced and detailed adress for order of battle research.

Date: April, 23th 2012

URL: https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/

Updated: March 18th, 2020: CARL has a new URL.

Battalion Organisation during the Second World War

“Bayonetstrength 150” is the most knowledgeable website on bataillon sized units in second world war that we know of. Its name aptly describes focus and content: its all about organisation, training, equipment, and action of bataillion-sized units on the various battlefields of World War II. Its author, Gary Kennedy, not only manages to describe the theoretical structures of these fundamental buidling blocks of armies, but also captures the reality of their emplyoment and the subsequent changes that attrition and battle wear forced on them.

Based on a prolific bibliography on the subject Kennedy manages to describe the close interaction between organisation, equipment, and training in a way that makes it accessible even for laymen.

The page is spartan and in simple HTML, the only compromise to usability is the color coding of various sections. A host of index-pages and introductions lead to some redundancy, but ensure the reader never feels lost. A must-read for anyone interested in the topic of tactical combat in World War II.

Date: April 18th, 2012

URL: http://www.bayonetstrength.150m.com/index.htm

Update, Sep 11th, 2017: Bayonettstrength has been offline since this summer. While the Owner of the website has publicly stated that he wants to re-up the site in the future, currently it remains offline. If you need any information previously available at bayonettstrength150, you can find an offline copy in the ubiquous web archive at

https://web.archive.org/web/20160425143250/http://www.bayonetstrength.150m.com/General/site_map.htm,

or you can contact me, since I do have an offline copy.

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