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For my convenience (and maybe yours, I don’t know), I’ve created a second master post for my Six Day War entries. This picks up where the first one left off. It didn’t seem kosher to keep editing an almost-three-year-old post with new information.

The occasion for my look-back on a conflict that I’d all but left behind is that I bought some new games. Back in 2020, I wondered whether I should buy Campaign Series: Middle East 1948-1985, an update/reimplementation of Divided Ground, and (at the beginning of 2022) I finally did. At the end of 2022, I added the game Middle East ’67 to my PC library. Previously this title was only available for my now-useless tablet. In the chaos surrounding that purchase, I also bought War Over Mideast. Since I was already on a spending spree, I tossed in the CMO DLC Shifting Sands for good measure.

With three new games under my belt, and all three specific to the Arab-Israeli conflicts, I figured I better get them some use. It was easiest to go back to my most recently-completed theme (the Six Day War) rather than try to embark on something new and unknown.

As I sat contemplating these thoughts about scope, familiarity, and integration, I wondered if it would help to get a sense of the big picture. As you must know, I have a fascination with building and examining timelines. Would it help me, in this case, to see the scenarios that I’ve already played laid out along with what is newly available (plus, simply unexplored) in my newly-enhanced library?

– Six of one, half a dozen of another

It did, actually, quite a bit. One thing that wasn’t obvious to me, until I saw it graphed out, is how compressed the fighting was in the first day to two of the war. Narratives of the fighting break things down into the different fronts, often focusing geographically, taking that front from start to finish. That is, we start with Gaza/Sinai/Egypt and work through all of the fighting there. Then, only when that is concluded, return to Jerusalem and the West Bank. That gives the impression of a sequential war. Which it was, but the sequence was more a matter of hours, not days.

To put it another way, when I first had the idea to take on a handful of new scenarios, I imagined myself picking up where I had left off chronologically – somewhere about three days in. Instead, I find that my new scenarios are best delayed by 3 or 4 hours from my Egypt-centric first round.

The exception, of course, is the Israeli offensive into the Golan Heights; fighting that almost seems an afterthought in the war’s bigger picture. I had originally intended to do a little more with it back in 2020 but, in the end, didn’t find interesting scenarios to support my ambition. For what it is worth, I did play the Divided Ground Golan Heights scenario A Special Vengeance back then. I just never wrote about it.

Now, for those who have followed my timeline mania over the years, you’ll right away notice that I didn’t use the Knight Lab software to render this one. I thought I’d be better served with something quick, easy, and manageable (i.e. one page rather than a navigable multi-media display). I also anticipated that the current state-of-the-art of spreadsheet software would do Gantt charts. In fact, I kind of remembered that it always had been there.

In the latter, I was wrong. Back when I was doing some project management for a living, I (now) remember that I had some specialized software to do it. It looked much like Excel, but it wasn’t.

Current exploration showed me that spreadsheets have not made up the difference since then and their current capabilities don’t really approach what I wanted to do. If anything, market pressures make it more likely that such specialized tools are sold separately or as paid additions to the basics of the spreadsheet software. An online search turned up a spreadsheet template for a timeline chart of sorts, but rendered with the cells of a spreadsheet rather than graphics. Yuck. That search for templates also revealed what I finally used in the above – a Gantt chart based upon Powerpoint, simply using hand-rendered graphical elements. That is to say, there are no* “dates” or “computations” in the above. The chart is just drawn.

In any case, I created the timeline and I found it useful if only to demonstrate that it isn’t all that useful. All the scenarios I’ve played or am playing are bunched up into about a six hour stretch. It is nice to know that and it is nice, for me, to have an at-a-glance overview to flip back to.

Plus, I just like playing with timeline charts. Have I told you that? Hopefully this post is as entertaining to you as it is to me.

  1. I finally broke down and bought Campaign Series: Middle East 1948-1985. To get a sense of how it compares with Divided Ground, I return that fighting in Jerusalem (see #4) and play with the new engine.
  2. In a bit of a mental breakdown, I bought War Over Mideast, a Tiller game (originally) under his Modern Air Power series of games.
  3. This post right here, a second to organize my multitude of posts.
  4. After playing through an airstrike scenario in War Over Mideast I load up both Command: Modern Operations and IL-2: BAT (The Jet Age) to help me form some conclusions.
  5. I return to the battle outside Qabitiya, this time with Campaign Series: Middle East, revisiting a situation that I had much analyzed in my previous go-around.
  6. Finally moving ahead and breaking new (timeline) ground, I engage with a pair of scenarios involving the Golan Heights.

A last word. I thought I remembered that The Operational Art of War had a Golan Heights scenario similar to the Gaining the Golan from ME 67. It does not. I guess Golan is a little too small for that package. What TOAW4 does ship with are two “whole war” scenarios; Middle East 67 (not to be confused with) and Six Days of War 1967 (based loosely on the Jim Dunnigan game of the same name). Back in 2020, I felt I had had enough of the Sinai fighting via Sinai 67 and didn’t want to do it all again just to add in more. That hasn’t changed.

*I did not use PowerPoint myself, but rather OpenOffice. From the information in my file, it looks like PowerPoint has some tools to integrate data with the graphics if you purchase a (third party?) add-on. In other words, this sample timeline is part of a marketing push to get me to buy a tool for my PowerPoint, software which I don’t actually have.