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A couple of weeks ago, I sat admiring a nice, fat pile of gaming goodness related to a conflict that I barely knew existed. As happy as I am about a varied choice in games, I am a little embarrassed about not knowing my history. Perhaps I can forgive myself for my ignorance.

If I am to believe the propaganda, neither side lost more than a few dozen men in the more than six months of conflict over a border dispute in the remote reaches of Asia. For a timely comparison, the casualties were similar in scale to those suffered during the week of fighting over Hamburger Hill. Remarkably, Asian conflict took place between belligerents that we both considered rivals, if not enemies. Might we Americans be forgiven for downplaying the incident?

Of course, it could have turned out otherwise. An open conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries could easily have spun out of control. Perhaps had I been old enough to have been aware of world events in 1969, but not completely distracted by Vietnam, I might have feared impending doom. Some did. For one example, the 1971 film Omega Man (although not its source material or other derivatives) posited that the apocalyptic world of the film’s story was caused by the use of biological weapons in a distant border conflict – almost certainly referring (at least in part) to the events of 1969.

So… forgiven.

That leaves me with the question of which game to start with? I am looking at three different tactical treatments (I’ll call them old, older, and oldest) which ground themselves in the reality of August 13th’s fighting. There is also a hypothetical scenario from TOAW that imagines things really do come undone. As that setup proposes an August 2nd attack date, a date that precedes the mid-August fighting which actually took place, let us start there.

– The Red Army rolls across the border

For someone entirely unfamiliar with what really happened between Russia and China, the first task might be to separate truth from fiction. An August 2nd attack from the Soviet Union into China is, obviously, a fiction. The material accompanying the scenario, called simply Sino – Soviet War 1969, doesn’t address the details. The scenarios introduction simply assumes the fictional reality that underlies it; it doesn’t analyze where the fiction departs reality and what might have happened to cause such a departure.

This fight-between-our-enemies didn’t materialize out of thin air. As the U.S. worked to extract itself from Vietnam, the Soviet Union seemed more amenable to a satisfying solution – one that might leave South Vietnam intact (for the time being). That difference in strategy over the Vietnam War (among other things, to be sure) increased animosity amongst the members of the global communist movement.

Throughout the 60s, the U.S. was concerned about China as a nascent nuclear power – and the Soviet Union shared those fears. Kennedy even entertained the idea that the Soviet’s could be co-opted into bombing Chinese nuclear facilities as a way to set back their program substantially. Nonetheless, the intelligence community was shocked when Russian contacts suggested that the 1969 border conflict might be an opening for the Soviets to disarm and denuke our shared rival.

Much speculation surrounds how serious the Soviets really were and how close they might have been to a large-scale invasion of China. Both the Soviets and the Chinese were pursuing domestic agendas that might have been served by a genuine display of force. As the rivalry between them grew, both sides sought to align the interests of the United States and the West with their own ambitions. The U.S., of course, was eager to play one communist power against each other to further the goals of the West. But behind that, everyone (outside of China, naturally) feared the rapid rise of a new nuclear power with global ambitions.

Whether it was all a bluff or not, we gamers have been wanting to watch the Red Army’s mechanized forces in action since 1946. Overrunning the Chinese masses is as good of an excuse as any.

– Russia has better equipment, but air superiority counts for more

Authorship credit for this scenario is assigned to John Schettler. A little bit of google-fu suggests that he is a prolific indie author, focusing his imagination on a hypothetical World War III. I can’t determine a specific connection between his writing and this particular scenario. Nor is there a reference to a source for the game’s setup.

I can’t help, however, but notice the similarity to a Jim Dunnigan design that was published in Strategy & Tactics in 1974 called The East is Red. I have to imagine a scenario such as Sino – Soviet War 1969 was inspired by what came before, even if it wasn’t outright cribbed1.

Despite being a fictional war in a distant part of the world, the scope and the scale of the map quickly bring even the uninitiated into the right context. The proximity to North Korea means that we can connect battle locations to their place in the world, even if city names are unfamiliar. The remote geography of the border region allows a “whole war” scenario to take place entirely on the map provided.

– At this scale, Lake Zhalanashkol doesn’t even appear on the map.

As Sino – Soviet War‘s hypothetical calendar closes in on the real calendar, I’m going to pause in my playing. Quite clearly, there is but a tenuous connection between this kind of massive invasion and the border skirmish that did flare up in the summer of ’69. Other games will take us closer to that reality.

  1. In some sense, it couldn’t be. Dunnigan’s design was of a “near future” war – in the mid-to-late 1970s, not a rehash of what might have been in the 60s. ↩︎