The Invasion of the North: Opening Moves

Tags

AgeOD's American Civil War, American Civil War, Avalon Hill, civil war, Gettysburg, John Tiller, The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command, wargames

I’ve written several posts on the Gettysburg Campaign. The first is a combined book/movie/game review around The Killer Angels. I followed that up with some more thoughts on the Scourge of War command/AI system. This is the third I’ve written on the subject, discussing to tangentially-related topics. First the larger campaign in the context of a book and gaming. Second, a discussion of the level of necessary modeling for a proper Civil War battle game.

I expect a series of thoughts as I work my way through the rest of the book…

Having begun contemplating the Battle of Gettysburg, I got my dander up (as Harry Heth may or may not have said). I started in on the book The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command. This is a sizeable book that addresses not only the battle itself, but the bigger picture leading up to the battle.

The book starts out, while not explicitly, with a debunking of some of the foundation of the Killer Angels. With the printing of this particular version being 20 years ago, I looked at it as a sort of counter-revisionist history. At some point, however, I actually looked at the front matter and the original date of this work is 1968, meaning it preceded that novel by almost a decade. Clearly the influence of Longstreet’s writing had a hold on the popular conscientious before the Killer Angels.

In particular, Professor Edwin Coddington (the author) questions the idea that Longstreet had agreed with Lee on an invasion of the North on the condition that the campaign be structured around the defensive and that the Battle of Gettysburg was entered into against Longstreet’s long-standing advice. The evidence, in Coddington’s view, suggests that this view of the campaign was conceived by Longstreet after the battle was lost and, perhaps, after the war. Correspondence from before Gettysburg shows Longstreet as an enthusiastic supporter of Lee’s plans for taking the army north. There is no evidence that such support came with conditions, such as the agreement to seek a defensive strategy once in enemy territory.

Another stark contrast between the book/film and Coddington’s research is the scene where Lee realizes that they need to turn to fight the approaching Union army. In the movie, unable to read the map, he asks “What town in this?” The answer is Gettysburg. By contrast, Lee in fact expected the battle in the North to take place near Chambersburg, York, or Gettysburg. Gettysburg may have been his preference. While moving North, he deliberately telegraphed his positions with the intent of drawing the Union army towards him. When he realized he had succeeded, he deliberately and leisurely positioned his forces around Gettysburg with the intent of fighting a battle much like the first day at Gettysburg turned out.

Furthermore, the days and weeks leading to Gettysburg were far from a peaceful march from Virginia to Pennsylvania. Various actions occurred all along the route, ranging from the cavalry battles at Brandy Station and near the passes to the overwhelming victory of Ewell and Early’s assault and capture of Winchester. The book also highlights the importance (and impotence) of Darius Couch’s Pennsylvania militia, as the defending force in Pennsylvania up until the arrival of the Army of the Potomac.

Looking at what I’ve previously thought of as simply a march north in in new light, I decided to break out my old copy of AgeOD’s American Civil War. This was a follow-on to the extremely well-regarded Birth of America, a game which covered the operational level of the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolutionary War. AACW, as it is often abbreviated, expanded on the engine and further added the management of the wartime economy, making it a game of vastly greater scope and scale. Many thought this resulted in making the game too complicated, losing the charm that made its predecessor so successful.

“We did not want the fight but the fight is here!” Longstreet moves his Corp into Gettysburg in the opening turn.

The game has, as part of the original package, a Gettysburg scenario. Given the operational scale of the game, I hoped that this would be a useful depiction of the campaign as described in the book. Disappointingly, given my goals, I found that the AACW scenario starts at the end of June with both armies situated just outside of the vicinity of Gettysburg. For the battle itself it seems that, while there might be a few choices for the player, the outcome is going to be largely depended on the roll of the virtual dice.

Devil’s Details and the Brigade

I also continued to work my way through the Ultimate General campaign, and have warmed to it the more I play. My original impressions were that it was a little on the simple side.  Perhaps it is better thought of as more of a complex RTS than a simplified wargame. Specifically, I did comment on the unit size; the basic maneuver unit being brigades rather than the more commonplace regiments. My other first impression was that the game was very difficult. In several plays, I lost every time.

Since that first writing, I’ve played all the way through the campaign from both sides. My result was that, as Confederates, I suffered the historical loss. As the Union, my first two days were victories (again historical), but on July 3rd I was taken by surprise by a Confederate envelopment. Pickett’s command actually hit me from the rear and the enemy used my resulting distraction to push me off Cemetery Ridge.

The play got me thinking about the level of abstraction and what is appropriate. Appropriateness, of course, is relative. Does that mean ever more realism and accuracy of the simulation? Does it mean more fun to play? How important is accessibility? For the target of this particular game, the ability to pick up the mechanics quickly and to be able to complete a game within a 20-30 minutes is probably at a premium. When going in this direction, how much and what kind of abstraction will retain a good simulation of command, even if the details don’t appear to be simulated?

The original Avalon Hill Gettysburg game came out in 1958, and was one of the first of the modern wargames. To the eyes of today’s game player, it was fairly primitive and the package does not come together well, but its fair to say that all games that followed owe a debt to the design. The game was played on a square grid, over a fairly attractive map using counters representing Divisions. The rules were rewritten and the components re-released several times by Avalon Hill, culminating in much more modern-looking 1977 version using hexes and traditional counters. Still, the maneuver unit is at the Division level. Avalon Hill had a 1993 release, Roads to Gettysburg, again with primarily Division level unit markers, however this was meant to capture (as I started off with at the beginning of the article) the larger campaign.

The most modern, and probably most well-regarded board game treatment of this battle is The Guns of Gettysburg. It is a hex-less (and square-less), card-less, and dice-less treatment of the Gettysburg battle. It is part of a series of games taking place in this era (Napoleonic and American Civil War) that uses wooden blocks and nodal maps to represent the combat style of the time. I don’t mean to get into a discussion of the game itself except to note that, again, the maneuver unit is somewhere between the division and the brigade (multiple units per division but not necessarily one per brigade).

The point of all this is that, when it comes to boardgame representations a huge battle like Gettysburg, breaking the units down into brigades would be considered a “serious” treatment. Within that context, the Ultimate General design make not seem quite so simple. I’m further influenced by looking ahead at the next in the series, Ultimate General: Civil War. I don’t have this game; it’s a Steam Early Access game, which seems like paying for the privilege of being a beta tester. However, I can see from discussion, screenshots, and design notes some of the direction that game is headed. It also has me considering Ultimate General: Gettysburg to be more of a testing-the-waters for the fuller vision of the new game.

From what I can tell, Ultimate General: Civil War will, in fact, take the simulation down to the regiment level. The comparison I would make, rather that to the Sid Meier game, is to Sierra’s Civil War Generals 2. That game, which I still might be playing today if it worked easily on current operating systems, provided the battles of the Civil War linked together in campaigns. At the campaign level, management decisions were made about supplies, weapons, and manpower as well as high level strategic options. Those decisions then influenced the order and details of the tactical battles.  It was a very engaging game that consumed a lot of my time back when it was new. This may be the direction that this series is trying to go.

Reading Steam comments about the early access for Ultimate General: Civil War highlight some existing problems, that hopefully will be ironed out in due time. Most of the comments seem to be about the campaign system, and how well previous results are factored into the next battle. Based on my playing of Ultimate General: Gettysburg, if I had one request it would be better modelling of supply. It isn’t so obvious with infantry; when infantry units engage, they gradually become depleted through a combination of morale, physical losses, and (perhaps) ammunition. However, a battery of cannon can, if within range of enemy units, fire on the enemy positions indefinitely.

While the standard for computer wargames tends to be at the Regiment, rather than Brigade level, I took a peek at Battleground 2: Gettysburg to remind myself of that design. Although the second of the John Tiller/Talonsoft series, it was the first of the “Age of Rifles” games. It also used the Brigade as the unit for the “stands” (it mimicked the look of the table top wargame, although played on hexes).

In the HPS iteration of the the Tiller Civil War engine, he reimplemented Gettysburg battle at a much finer level of detail as well as capping it with an operational level “decision” interface that guides the tactical level battles. While there are a dozen Civil War titles for the PC, only eleven are available on the tablet (and that includes one demo game, not related to one of the battles). Perhaps because Gettysburg was one of the first, if not the first, conversion to the new engine, it is not on the tablet.

This is most certainly not Gettysburg. It is a tutorial scenario, but one that vaguely corresponds to Buford’s July 1st Gettysburg defense.

For some further compare and contrast, I did take a look at the demo app on the tablet. For continuity sake, one of the tutorial scenarios involves a cavalry unit (under Buford) defending a ridge against attacking Confederate infantry. It certainly sounds pretty Gettysburg-like.

The Tiller offerings are thought of as at the serious end of the military simulation spectrum, which is why I think it makes an interesting compare and contrast. As I said, the unit size (regiment) matches where the Ultimate General: Civil War appears to be headed. But just look at that row of buttons across the top. Surely, with all those options and all that you do every turn, it must be a much deeper game? What “serious” options are left out of the more accessible version of the Battle?

The turn-based versus continuous time is one obvious difference. It certainly changes the way one tends to manage their game. In a turn based game, a player often feels the need to consider each move carefully, whereas in a real time game you’re forced to move your focus away from some parts of the battle as you focus on others. In theory though, when a RTS is pausable, there is opportunity for equal amounts of deliberation. Further, continuous time (or at least a simultaneous execution of turns) eliminates some gaminess surrounding the order in which you make your moves. Point being, I don’t automatically consider one style or the other as superior.

Several of those interface buttons along the top have to do with facing, which is also modeled in Ultimate General, and with their cooler interface. What isn’t in the Ultimate General interface is the change from column to line, or the limbering/unlimbering of artillery. Ultimate General does this “automatically” when you make a move. For short moves, cannons are pushed forward into their new position. For long moves, cannons are hitched to their horse teams and infantry forms into a column. When playing the various Tiller games, I often find that the formation is more something to belatedly realize you’ve forgotten to manage (especially in more modern settings where there is column/deployed and mounted/foot) rather than a fun addition to gameplay. The question with letting the computer do it is, is everything modeled correctly?

Similarly, the choices for targeting units in the turn based game do not necessarily add to the experience. In Ultimate General, the player can direct fire, but the default is that units choose their own targets. This actually makes more sense in terms of realism. From the battlefield commanders standpoint, units are apt to fire on the units that they feel are most threatening to them, not the most important targets from command point of view. Granted, the automatic resolution of “opportunity fire” makes the two systems, again in theory, pretty similar, the real time version (to me) feels more natural. Finally, they both have options to enter melee combat, and are thus pretty equivalent on that level.

There are other details that the Tiller version probably models better, and certainly models more explicitly. I do think that the Ultimate General system is not targeting the same level of fidelity, and so a one-to-one comparison isn’t necessarily fair. My point, however, is that something like Ultimate General could easily challenge the something like the Tiller games, if taken in that direction.

Return the master post of Gettysburg articles or go on to the next article.

We Heard Something that Would Set Us Free

Tags

American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, England, the alarm

I picked up the book Revolutionary Summer. Its thesis is that the events, in America, over the summer of 1776 should be looked at differently than is typical. That summer saw the Continental Congress, first, resolve to separate itself from Great Britain and then write and ratify the Declaration of Independence. It also saw the British land on Staten Island and Washington’s army try, and fail, to defend New York against occupation. The author describes how most historical analyses treat the military and political events of that summer as distinct chapters in the story of the revolution. He believes that the events are so critically intertwined that it is better to analyze them together. This is his book.

A major reason for this is, at the start of 1776, the military and political actions were somewhat distinct. Despite the fact that colonists and English soldiers were actively shooting at each other, the political situation was still short of all-out war. It may seem counter-intuitive but, politically speaking, the colonies were still receptive to a diplomatic solution that would restore good relations between the colonies and the central government. Within Parliament as well, there were voices in support of a compromise with the colonial demands. The possibility of granting the colonies more autonomy (pretty much along the lines of what the British Commonwealth would eventually become) would likely have been welcomed all around. Meanwhile, George Washington, having taken Boston and in command of a field army, was saw revolution as inevitable. While he had like-minded political allies (John Adams and the Virginia delegation, most notably), there remained a gap to be closed with the colonial governments themselves. Similarly, the leaders of the forthcoming British military operation, the Howe brothers, were also strong believers in peace and a reestablishment of good relations.

On August 23rd, 1775, King George III had declared the colonies to be in “open and avowed rebellion” and withdrew his protection of those citizens. Years later, when John Adams was asked who did the most to achieve the revolution in America his answer was “King George.” The King’s decision to send an army from England and to crush the rebellion militarily, before any diplomatic resolution could take place, was the major factor into shifting the opinion of the Continental Congress and ratifying the Declaration of Independence. The book does not claim to know whether Washington’s decision to defend Manhattan and Long Island was a massive military blunder that, but for the grace of God*, would have destroyed the revolution. It does make the case that the decisions made, both by Washington and by General Howe, were inexorably tied to the political environment in which they took place.

One of the major themes of this book is one I’ve encountered before. That is, the ineffectiveness of a militia army. In the context of the Civil War, it was obvious upon reflection. We know that, particularly by the date of the Battle of Gettysburg and beyond, the engaged armies were regular, professional armies and not the militia of the early war. Logic would dictate that was for a reason. For the Revolutionary War, expectations are different.

It is one of the founding pillars of our Republic how an army of “well-regulated” militiamen defeated the greatest empire on earth. These “minutemen” were intimately connected to the ideals that drove the move to independence in the first place. If an army of free and freedom-loving men, voluntarily assembled to defend a common cause, is in fact superior to a traditional, professional army, can there be any other realm of government where freedom and voluntary cooperation cannot prevail? The nation even went on to enshrine in the Constitution the notion that a trained population, organizable into a militia, is “necessary to the security of a free State.”

When I stop to think, this is a strange case to be made in this particular book. Yes, the militia showed itself to be particularly ineffective during the campaign in New York in 1776, but so did the Continental Army as a whole. Key to the story told by Revolutionary Summer are George Washington’s thoughts about the necessity of a national army and the shortcomings of the militia are a part of that. It seems to me that author Joseph J. Ellis goes above and beyond to justify that case – perhaps because the glorification of the minuteman militia continues through to the present day. It may also be that Ellis is trying to counter how this attitude gave short shrift to the Continental Army itself. Toward the end of the book, he writes of the efforts of the last living Continental Army veterans to redeem the reputation of America’s revolutionary “standing army,” against the odds, at the expense of the widely-accepted mythos of the minuteman.

As to the book overall, it is an enjoyable and quick read and it provided (to me, at least) a different perspective on the summer of ’76. I occasionally picked up some weaknesses in the editing. Sometimes it seemed like information, or even the same paragraph just slightly reworded, was repeated throughout a chapter. It had the feel to me of something that was written over an extended length of time, but then nobody had gone back to rewrite with an eye for readability. But this is a minor complaint in an experience that was rather positive. Is this the best book out there on this topic? That I couldn’t tell you, but you could certainly do a lot worse.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Pexels.com

*The combination of the Howes’ miscalculations, wildly-favorable weather, and just dumb luck is astounding. For those who saw the hand of the almighty in the founding of the American republic, it’s not hard to understand why. At the time, the belief that the justice of the American Cause was more important to the outcome than the military and economic might of the British enemy certainly seemed to have been borne out by the events of this summer.

Lead the Way

Tags

American Revolutionary War, Birth of America, England, France, french and indian war, New England, ranger, robert rogers

Whenever I’m required to submit a corporate expense report, it always fills me with dread. Have I made math errors? Have I submitted something that the accountants won’t like? Will I be accused of cheating? It all seems quite irrational, and I’ve never really had a problem, but the fear never goes away. I have just found out how much worse it could get.

Somebody got me War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier as a gift, shortly after it came out in 2011. It has sat on my shelf for, lo, these many years but I have now begun reading it. High time, too.

First, in these times that try men’s souls, we could do worse than be inspired by the heroic deeds of those that came before us. In addition, since leaving off in my reading of Moment of Battle with the chapter on England’s victories in 1759, I’ve been itching to get back into the groove. My recent fascination with the Age of Sail fighting would mesh well with some serious history of the wilderness land war in America. It also informs me just how bad expense report issues can possibly get. Accounting red tape not only can ruin a great man but it is capable of reshaping the destiny of nations.

Robert Rogers was both one of the key personalities driving England’s victory in the French and Indian War and, in many ways, an influence on the American Revolution. I stumbled across an interesting article from some years back talking about how Rogers gets no love from his native* New Hampshire. It is a combination of his having taken the wrong side in the American Revolution and the far-from-PC fame as a tamer of the frontier Indian menace. War on the Run counter-balances this historical short shrift with a very sympathetic telling of his life and deeds, including his problems with debt and reimbursement. In a nutshell, he fronted expenses and salaries for his now-renowned Rogers’ Rangers as well as made promises of future payments. When he later went to the keeper of England’s treasure for compensation, most of his claims were denied – frequently due to insufficient receipts. In battle, his optimistic refusal to concede defeat brought him glory. In his personal finances, the assurance that all would inevitably turn out all right eventually was his undoing.

One source that has never sold Rogers short is the U.S. Army. Last time I was poking around about the Rangers, I came across the Army’s historical connection to Rogers. Roger’s didn’t invent the concept of “Rangers” or “Special Operations” but he brought the concept to the English army of his day (and particularly that portion thereof that became the American army) in its modern form. With his “28 Rules of Ranging,” he formalized and codified the methods he employed to be effective at fighting in the wilderness. These very rules were printed and distributed during the Vietnam War and continue to be used in Ranger training to this day.

War on the Run is written as a scholarly work, citing original source material and extensively footnoted. At the same time, it is an attempt to echo the inspiring storytelling of the 1937 novel Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts, which War on the Run author John F. Ross cites as a major inspiration. To do so, he occasionally mixes historically based speculation in with documented events (e.g. “Rogers might have…”). It makes for an enjoyable read while at the same time grounding one solidly in the written records of the time.

A few characterizations stand out for me which I will briefly share. First, my sense of that time is based upon being gradually fed the modern conception of England’s (and then America’s) dealings with the Native Americans. I know in my heart that the indigenous people were the good guys, General Amherst was a monster, and we all are due a reckoning. From this standpoint, the book is a bit unexpected. Rogers, per Ross’ telling, was surprisingly sympathetic to the Indians, at least for a famous Indian killer. His methodologies were adopted from the Indians, of course, but he also gladly recruited and deployed native tribes as part of his force. In one chapter, it is emphasized how much he respected Ottowa chief Pontiac, even has he was called upon to defeat him in battle. Implied is the thought that a greater sensitivity on the part of the English to differences in culture and values might have helped engender a more peaceful co-existence on the North American continent. Tellingly, Rogers arrives to make war against Pontiac but first sends him a gift of brandy through a French go-between. It was a show of respect for a worthy opponent but also a show of power; a warrior confident enough to be magnanimous to his foes.

The other interesting point I’ll dwell on is Ross’ description of Rogers as the first American celebrity. Robert Rogers was known throughout the colonies (even those far from New England and Upstate New York) and was also well known in England proper. When he was winning victories for King and Country, the press was very positive. When rumors began to fly, stemming largely from those expense report troubles, the press turned against him. Yet, he still commanded recognition in his travels and could, to the end, typically muster sympathy, if not the financial support that he actually required.

A (speculative) scene from the book elaborates on Rogers’ meeting with George Washington. The two were remarkably similar. Approximately the same age, they were both physically imposing and both seasoned veterans of the French and Indian War. Rogers had been stuck in London for years trying to resolve his financial problems and so missed the run-up to revolution in the American sentiment. Returning to America and seeing the signs of brewing conflict, he preferred not to get involved so as to focus on re-establishing his fortunes, which necessarily involved interaction with the British authorities. This all seemed suspicious to those who were dedicated to revolution. Ross writes that Washington saw in Rogers a potential rival – someone whose force of personality, not to mention demonstrated military skill, matched his own. Washington’s suspicion resulted in Rogers being shunned by the Continental Congress, driving him back to the British army, where he fought the Revolution as the enemy to his birthplace. Yet his loyalty to the crown was much as a means to earn some coin as anything political.

Ross contrasts the two men. Washington, also, struggled with financial issues. He had to borrow extensively and even had to take loans to travel to New York to be inaugurated (and we made fun of AOC). The difference is that Washington, like the majority of the Founding Fathers, were Old World -style aristocrats. Washington had a social depth, inherent in his background, to fall back upon when his personal fortunes floundered. Whatever his financial difficulties, he was not going to wind up in debtors’ prison. Rogers, on the other hand, clashed with that very aristocracy, who seemed unable to accept that such as he could be successful.

Despite not becoming a part of the American Revolution, in many ways he was an archetype for America’s new man. He was low-born, a Scots-Irish, and his successes were entirely on his own merit. While he did not grow up exactly poor, neither was he rich. In this, he contrasts with the likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison and the other wealthy founders. He is the America as it was to become rather than the America that had been.

He is ready to make all the difference.

The other reason that my reading of this book was timely is that I’ve been itching to install Birth of America II and this gives me the motivation to actually do it.

I bought Birth of America, the original, shortly after it was released. It took me a little longer to get to playing it but I was already mesmerized by the descriptions I saw on-line. Remember, this was the first of the AGE engine titles, so everything about it was new and exciting. Graphics-wise, the hand-drawn look provided both a clean user interface as well as lending to the historical flavor. The game is entirely** operational, with strategic decisions being largely made for you and tactical battles resolved automatically. It seemed to hit the sweet spot – entirely manageable and yet rich in detail. In fact, as I commented earlier, the decision to make the series bigger and include more strategic decisions turned off many of the BoA fans.

As I said, after getting very excited about the game and securing myself a copy, I was a little slow to play it. When I finally did start playing, the anticipation seemed to outstrip the experience, at least to an extent. After some time spent trying to figure it all out, I finally felt like a I had a grip on the game and recall having a fairly enjoyable experience with one of the larger Revolutionary War scenarios. I haven’t played it since. I bought the sequel/upgrade Birth of America II well after it came out. How far after it came out – I am almost (but not quite) curious enough to dig out a receipt to get the details. I’m sure I picked it up at a very nice discount but I nevertheless did spring for the CD version. In any case, when I got it I wasn’t really in the mood to take this period on again and so there the game has sat, a physical copy on an actual bookshelf, as the years ticked by.

Clearly, when remaking Birth of America, the team took into account lessons from the intervening releases. I see a game that is larger (bigger map), longer (more scenarios), and includes some updates to the rules. I haven’t gone through feature by feature so I can’t speak for how much the upgrade is worth over the original. Based on ancient memories, I don’t see a huge difference between the two versions. I was a little apprehensive that Birth of America II might come loaded down with the features that fans of the original didn’t like but that does not appear to be the case.

If you’ll recall my own back and forth regarding the suitability of this engine for gaming involving Rome, you know my feelings have been mixed. Much of that commentary would also apply to this title. In some ways, however, the French and Indian War and this engine may be particularly aligned. The battles in colonial North America were small and, shall I say, irregular, making them unsuited to tactical gaming. Strategically, it is easy to wildly diverge from the historical, as I found during my recent stab at this period in Europa Universalis IV. Reading War on the Run gave me an appreciation for just how wild the frontier wilderness of North America really was. The operational scale of this game might just capture the feel I got by reading about the period.

At first glace, the Annus Mirabilis Colonial Faction scenario would seem a little too simplistic to earn too much praise. The scenario is a mere 6 turns long and, as the English, you have only three armies, one of them already besieging Quebec and another named for the very task to which it must be assigned. My first run-through went pretty quickly and I ended up losing on points and not quite understanding why***. In some ways, this is a similar problem to the Gettysburg scenario in AgeOD’s American Civil War – the small scale leaves you little in the way of strategy and puts your prospects for victory at the mercy of the virtual dice. Yet, this time, I take a different view.

Coupling the play with my book learnin’, I see a little more to it. In order to appreciate Annus Mirabilis (and BoA more generally), you likely need to go in with an understanding of the period and about the battles. Perhaps more so than for other iterations in this family, these wars are characterized by vast emptiness populated with only a scattering of small armies. The combination of unit and leader special abilities contrive to flesh out the unique attributes of those armies. To successfully play the game and, perhaps more importantly, to enjoy what the game offers, you need to understand two things. First, know who all these people are and what they did or failed to do. Second, you should understand the details of the game’s systems and how abilities match or clash with your intentions.

So, yes, the 6 turn scenario is a little light. I think, though, it is the only way to get the decisive couple of months into the game historically intact. Without the exact set up of circumstances (mostly miserable British losses) to set things up, the likelyhood of ever having such a decisive victory at exactly the right time seems remote. Perhaps I’ll be back to you with some thoughts on the game performance on a larger scenario.

*Rogers was born in Methuen, MA to immigrant parents (the first American-born sibling in his family). He moved to present-day Dunbarton, NH at the age of 8.

**Different scenarios can have different interactions. For the simpler scenarios, including the Annus Mirabilis scenario pictured in the screenshot, there are no strategic level decisions. It is all about movement, supply, and command.

***I took me quite a while to find a victory screen overview, which was prominent in the Alea Jacta Est series.

Even the Jordan River

Tags

Arab Israeli Wars, Barry McGuire, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, six-day war

The human mind is designed to create patterns, even when those perceived patterns don’t really exists. When the world seems to descend into chaos, we will inevitably try to correlate signs that what we are seeing is part of a greater picture – perhaps the end of all things. Just as the coronavirus being coincident with earthquakes awakens us to the likelihood of some form of divine intervention, so it would have seemed, when the chaos of the Vietnam War was spreading to the streets of American and Europe, that a new war in Israel signaled the coming of the Apocalypse. In truth, we were simply seeing flare-ups in the Cold War that were possibility inevitable and mostly unrelated. Small consolation for a public mood already stretching towards a breaking point.

To get my mind thinking about the other side of the world, I decided it was time to do some reading on the subject. When I was creating my Israeli Independence timeline, and while I was trying to find descriptive information on the battles during the Suez Crisis, I encountered frequent references to The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East by former Israeli President Chaim Herzog. At the end of that endevor, I decided to order Herzog’s book. Instead of reading it when it came, I began reading instead The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command and left my thoughts about the Arab-Israeli wars behind me. It’s time I pick that book up.

Herzog starts shortly before the British withdrawal. As such, I was treated to a written refresher of my earlier exercise. In some ways it was just a rerun, although I get a chance to look at things a little differently. Most notably, it surprises me how a loosely-organized citizen militia was able to take on multiple, established nation states and win. In many cases, a couple of dozen armed settlers held their own against regular forces. Herzog also highlights how the earliest attempts at operations by the Israelis were hampered by a lack of professional army discipline. Several times an attack failed because of an inability to coordinate the different pieces of the attack, an operational-planning capability that only came with experience.

As Herzog moves on to the Suez Crisis, he illustrates something that I struggled with when looking at the wargame depiction of this conflict. As I said at the time, it is nearly impossible to reproduce the historical results in a wargame. Israel’s defeat of fortified Egyptian positions was often the result of brilliant tactical maneuvering and “doing the impossible” on top of the factors that can modeled in games. Reading Herzog, I’m also impressed (again) with the difference in motivation between the two sides. For Israel, their struggle was for their very existence – both as a nation and (in the minds of many) personally. For the Arab nations, although many hated Israel and the Jews, they were still conscripted armies under the direction of authoritarian governments. One can imagine that the difference in will was a major factor in the lopsided Israeli victories.

As before, I plan to cycle through a handful of games and scenarios and link it all together with a master post. Herzog begins his 1967 war with the Sinai Campaign, and that also seems like a good starting point for me.

Conjunction Junction, How’s That Function?

Tags

Bau Bang, Cold War, Radio Commander, schoolhouse rock, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Squad Battles: Vietnam, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations

This is the fifty-ninth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

In February of 1967, preparations began for what was to be one of the the largest operations of the Vietnam War, code-named Operation Junction City. The offensive targeted the communist stronghold referred to as “War Zone C” with a massive invasion intended to trap and destroy what was referred to as the “mini-Pentagon,” an informal term for the Central Executive Committee of the People’s Revolutionary Party. This was the administrative headquarters directing the anti-government forces in the South.

The operation has an unprecedented scale for this scenario series. In the weeks before Junction City is to take place, preparations such as this diversion, are among the player’s tasks.

In gaming terms, I had some high hopes for this operation. It is covered by scenarios in three (or four, depending on your counting method) games; Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume V in The Operational Art of War, a scenario in each version of Squad Battles, and a campaign scenario in Radio Commander. In some ways, it provides an unprecedented opportunity to compare different games and different scales while looking at a single battle. The key is the scale of the operation. Junction City itself lasted for 82 days and that can be pushed to over 100 if you include preparatory operations such as Operation Gadsden. The U.S. forces committed included much of the 1st Infantry and 25th Infantry Divisions, the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. This is potentially 30 turns in Vietnam Combat Operations with a maneuver area this actually meshes well with the TOAW mechanics.

Horseshoe? It is hard to separate hammer from anvil in this screenshot. In what is considered by some to be bad luck, the “horseshoe” faces downward.

As I’ve explained, the scenario manual instructs you which units were historically involved in the operation in question and directs you how to place them historically. Satisfactorily doing so will earn you victory points as well as help match your play with the built-in triggers. You are, of course, free to deviate from the historical path in whatever ways you see fit.

Operation Junction City consisted of a horseshoe-shaped static perimeter intended to isolate the area containing the mini-Pentagon and to prevent enemy from escaping the operational area. With the perimeter established, a massive mechanized force entered the open end of the horseshoe from the south, sweeping north. They would either engage the enemy forces and annihilate them or force them against the waiting forces of the prepared perimeter.

In the end, my massive operation netted little more than a captured supply base.

The problem was, the communists, perhaps alerted to their vulnerability by sources inside the South Vietnam government, were able to move their logistics center to Cambodia and avoid being trapped by the operation. What engagements there were resulted in lopsided American victories, but the large scale battle where the U.S. expected to have a clear advantage did not materialize. While casualty ratios (per U.S. estimates) were on the order of 9:1, that did mean a non-trivial loss approaching 300 American servicemen in addition to equipment losses. In this, the scenario accurately recreates the operation. Besides a few inconclusive (and obscured by the game’s fog of war) battles, my only result was the location and destruction of an enemy supply center.

A very nice array of assets. both armor an artillery.

Absent a major, defining battle, one probably can’t expect the tactical-level games to integrate in any way with the operational treatment. For the Squad Battles scenarios, there is really nothing about them that gives a uniquely “Junction City” feel to them. In fact, the first of the two fits in just as well with one of my previous articles as as it contributes to this topic.

March 20th, around about midnight, saw a VC assault on a Fire Support Base 20 near the village of Bàu Bàng. Such an assault was anticipated by the American command, due to its proximity to a known communist stronghold, and so forces (3rd Squadron) from the Fifth Cavalry Regiment were deployed to defend the artillery. This fight is sometimes designated as the Second Battle of Bàu Bàng, the first having been fought in November of 1965. When I played a (First) Battle of Bàu Bàng in Steel Panthers, I suspected that a research error had caused some M48 Pattons to incorrectly make it into the order of battle. It is this, the 1967 scenario where the defenders have a mix of M113s and M48s and the Squad Battles setup accurately provides them.

Now, for all my complaints about deviation from historical lethality, my results in this scenario were very much matched to the historical results. I wound up losing only one AFV (it happened to be the one highlighted in the above screenshot) whereas the U.S. lost two vehicles to enemy fire in the portion of the actual fight modeled* by the scenario. Although the ability to rapidly react and to establish and expand a perimeter was a key element in the U.S. victory, I mostly fought from fixed positions. In any case, the scenario gives the (American) player a nice mix of armor and artillery. It’s a slaughter, but that’s the reality. The real-world casualty ratio was pushing 100:1.

Another fire base defense scenario.

Move ahead a day, and we get to the next of the Squad Battles scenarios. This one was part of the Squad Battles: Vietnam package, as opposed to Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, but like the first it is a fire base defense scenario. In this case, the defenses are manned by dug-in infantry of the 4th Infantry Division. What’s special about this scenario is that it (as seen in the above screenshot) models the direct fire capability of the artillery batteries using flechette ammunition, also called “beehive” rounds due to the buzzing noise they produce on their way to their target. Direct fire from defending artillery was often a factor when defending a fire base and this scenario allows the player to experience this capability hands-on.

Cavalry riding to the rescue.

As with the previous day’s action, armor was a factor. The player is granted four tanks to rush toward the sound of the guns. Moving them at maximum speed, they can engage the enemy for the last few turns of the scenario. In my case, they may have contributed to the salvaging of one of the victory locations, although it is hard to tell. I also lost a tank to RPG fire during the advance, which is consistent with the historical results. It was a hard-fought battle, but it is an easy win in game terms.

Another Radio Commander intro sequence, in the voice of an embedded reporter, answers my question about Coleman’s rank. Is he a grunt?

On to my third tactical scenario, this one from Radio Commander. First off, the campaign sees fit to address some of my open issues from previous steps. The cinematic intros continue, this time via commentary from a civilian reporter. We’re now clear on Coleman’s educational background and rank. What I don’t understand is whether or not an officer, provided they lead troops in the field, would have qualified as a “grunt.” Was this how the term was applied 50+ years ago? Besides that, I finally have my company up to full strength. I’m in command of three platoons instead of the usual two.

Dropped behind enemy lines, my guys need to find and trap the guerrillas.

I can’t knowledgeably comment on the historicity of this scenario. The action is too small and, frankly, too uneventful to be notable. It is certainly possible that something very similar happened at this time and place, but to verify or disprove that would take more effort than I’m willing to put in. I strongly suspect, instead, that this is yet another example of making a scenario that encapsulates key points from the larger battle, but at a scale more appropriate for the game.

Operation Junction was the largest airborne operation in the Vietnam War. By Vietnam, the U.S was seeing the need for parachute drops being, well, dropped in favor of helicopter insertions. The drop of 845 paratroopers was only a small part of the overall operation, but a noteworthy part. In my (above) operational game, I missed my chance to use the 173rd in their paradrop role. As I was reading the instructions, I actually inserted the second battalion of the 503rd via helicopter before I realized they were supposed to use an air drop. I probably lost some mission points for this, but given that I had more than enough helicopter transport to go around, my way was likely more effective otherwise.

The Radio Commander scenario, Hammer and Anvil, has an early AM drop of your subordinate company. Once in position, they are to push the enemy toward waiting mechanized elements of the 196th Brigade. This small-scale drop takes place about a month after the historical airborne operation. My gut tells me there was nothing that actually corresponds to this configuration of forces.

Herding cats. Armed, communist cats.

That aside, the scenario is an interesting in terms of its different approach. In this go-around, the objective is not to engage and defeat the enemy, the trick is to force them to move in the direction that you want them to. In doing this, there are plenty of things that can go wrong. You can miss them entirely, as you pass by them in the jungle. They can slip around your flanks or through the holes in your forces, escaping out of the operational area. They can achieve sudden, local superiority and teach you a nasty lesson. In short, it reflects the experiences of America’s large-formation operations against the insurgency.

There also seems to be, tucked away, a scripted event meant to advance a story line about war crimes. I’ll avoid commenting too much… for now. I will say that fictional battlefield atrocities seems like a cheap way to make a point, particularly if it is untethered to reality either through actual events or at least statistical occurrence.

That bit aside, I’d say all four of these scenarios provide some useful insight into various aspects of this operation, even if none of them are quite the gaming challenge that one might be hoping for.

Return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles. The next article looks at a hypothetical as implemented in a user made scenario – with a twist.

*As is often the case, it is hard to pin down what segment of the battle, exactly, is represented by the scenario. The battle went on for something like 4-5 hours before massive air power drove off the VC. Despite the effectiveness of mechanized units against the assault, it is estimated that the bulk of the enemy losses were due to airstrikes.

Definitely not Ashdown

Tags

Alfred the Great, Bernard Cornwell, Crusader Kings 2, England, Field of Glory II, Medieval: Total War, The Battle of Ashdown

When I started a campaign around the Great Heathen Army, I knew I was bound to depart from history. Even still, Wessex and the invading Vikings were certain to clash in one way or another. Let us imagine one of those ways.

In this timeline, Ivar did not fare as well as his historical counterpart.

As the campaign played on, Ivar the Boneless was unable to keep his army together and conquer England. Instead of dying at the hands of the heathens, King Ælla not only survived but managed to fend off Ivar’s Great Heathen Army. Of course, one defeat is not going to send the Vikings back to their homelands. We are bound to see continued attempts to pluck the ripe fruit that is England, but perhaps in a less organized form.

With the King’s army away, Wessex fell victim to plundering.

A major turning point in the real history, Spring of 871, finds Wessex in trouble. With King Æthelred having sent troops northward to help defeat a Viking incursion there, another raiding army has besieged Wessex. In the above screenshot, we see the Lesser Heathen Army (but still huge by historical standards) moving northward to defeat a smaller force under Æthelred in the field near modern Gloucester.

Alfred, Earl of Dorset (and that’s me, remember) has been designated as his brother’s Marshal. Unfortunately, he is also a bit sickly, so the present crisis finds him, not leading the troops in the field, but back at the barracks administering the training of replacement troops. Sensing a great battle in the making, he orders his own vassals’ forces assembled to march to the aid of Wessex. Unlike at Ashdown, no members of the royal family will be leading the armies to victory (or perhaps to defeat.)

After a bit of maneuvering, the forces meet at the Battle of Cirencester.

Fortunately for the future of Wessex, my armies were assembling and on their way to Gloucester even as the Viking armies were. The arrival of the reinforcements was only a few days behind the Vikings. Upon joining together, it was Dorset’s commanders, presumably in a rare triumph of meritocracy over politics, who were put in command of the combined armies. That is there is no indication that the King’s soldiers are in one wing and Alfred’s in another. The armies look to be intermixed.

To delve further into the outcome of this imaginary battle, I will return to what might be simulated by the battle tactics in Crusader Kings. As the game’s calendar advances, the tactical battles also are displayed in real time with various battlefield maneuvers calculated for both the AI and the player. Obviously, though, the strategic clock and the battle clock can’t quite align and, just as obviously, the use of a single clock in both cases has to be some kind of abstraction – one can’t believe that a Medieval infantry battle is lasting a week or more. Instead, I think the interpretation is two-fold. First of all, the display should be seen as a window on a battle that might take the better part of a day, but it is displayed for the player over (let’s say) a week of real time. Secondly, the maneuvering of two armies in close proximity to each other might take days or even weeks. The forces have to concentrate and jockey for favorable ground. During that time, small engagements, attrition, and other losses are surely taking place.

In other words, I would interpret the real time battle screen as some combination of real time and artificially-expanded time. In the above screenshot, as an example, the battle view shows the armies engaged in skirmishing, as they have been for a number of days. We could interpret this as the skirmishing taking place over perhaps an hour, during a battle that happens at some point around this date. However, another way to look at it is that the armies haven’t really met yet. Portions of the army might meet and engage as the two main forces attempt to locate each other. Or maybe they are facing each other from fortified camps and periodically there are minor losses due to raiding.

A vanguard spots a portion of the Viking army across a stream.

Although one can simply imagine and project what numbers on the screen might mean in terms of a more detailed encounter, we also dream of being able to actually play those details. To indulge myself, I got out Field of Glory II‘s recently released Wolves at the Gate DLC. I decided, to make it easier on myself, that (roughly) matching the total numbers was sufficient to reproduce the Crusader Kings battle. While CK gives a detailed breakdown of the armies’ troop mix, reproducing that while also maintaining a historical balance in the unit makeup of the armies was beyond what I wanted to do. As it turned out (after some trial and much error), the Quick Battles function created the best result I could come up with, numbers-wise. The Anglo-Saxon side may be a little high (by perhaps a unit or two) but I can justify that as a “home field” advantage. From the standpoint of Field of Glory points, the Vikings have the advantage, as is the norm for any Quick Battles.

I assemble my forces to meet the enemy. Unfortunately, to face his shield wall, I’ve got some Poorly Armed Rabble.

I used the “Potluck” choice for the type of battle which resulted in a scenario I’ve not seen before (see below for in-game description). The map has designated areas for each side, basically you must own the center of your side of the map. Points are awarded for getting your forces in the enemy’s territory and keeping them out of yours. As it says below, it is supposed to simulate the meeting of small portions of the two armies as the remainder of each side slowly drifts while night approaches. The goal is to hold territory as those reinforcements come up. I found this interesting in light of the fact I was just musing whether the skirmish results shown on the Crusader Kings screen, just before I exited, should be interpreted as a pre-battle meeting engagement.

The battle type was randomly selected. In the end, I don’t think either I or the computer AI fully understood the rules of the game.

At the scenario start I found myself with an inexplicably small number of units facing what appeared to be a slightly larger force across the stream. You see, I hadn’t really been paying attention when the scenario description popped up. Obviously my army was split and I’d be getting reinforcements, but I didn’t know when and how and I really didn’t know what those extra flags were on the battlefield.

Once I figured out what I was supposed to be doing, I took on an “I meant to do that” attitude. My original plan was to hold back with my inferior forces until I had brought up enough reinforcements to present a decent line of battle. The problem with that is that while I held back the Vikings were racking up points for holding my side of the battlefield. The way I figured it, though, was that charging impetuously forward when I didn’t have the force to do it was just going to get me wiped out piecemeal. On the other hand, if I formed a solid line and then advanced, I could probably make up the points in the end part of the scenario when the large number of units at my disposal would let me accumulate points faster than the Vikings were at the beginning.

Reinforcements are arriving in waves. With them, I hope to turn the battle to my advantage.

When the reinforcements came, they came in successive waves. Three or perhaps even four of them. Once they appear on the back edge of the board, they then take a number of turns to advance towards the front lines. The early disadvantage may prove to be an advantage at this point – with the battle lines closer to my side of the “board,” my reinforcements should come on line before the enemy’s.

Relating this back to the narrative I hold in my head, how well does this fit? If my army was being summoned from around the country side, would they likely all come into play from a single direction? Also, Field of Glory does not model column march versus line of battle movement. So while it seems strange that forces summoned to rush forward into battle would enter already deployed in battle line, there may not be a better way to model it.

My plan has come together, but has it come together too late?

The battle played out pretty much as I intended it, but considerably slower. As the Vikings came forward, I was able to reinforce my lines in time to meet them. Eventually, the fact that my lines were holding and turning back the attacking Norsemen more than made up for the fact that he, too, had reinforcements streaming into his rear. In the screenshot above, you can see I’ve got him just where I wanted him. My line is strong and intact while his units are crumbling and falling away. I am now able to push forward in a single front and use my entire army to pick up points. Problem is – well, look at the turns remaining. It took me far longer to stabilize the situation than I had intended and even against a wavering army its going to take a few more turns to advance my line into point-earning territory. Yet, I don’t have a few more turns.

Oh well, I might as well finish out the scenario and see how I do.

For all those points the Vikings are sitting on the game still declared them the loser. On top of that, their forces were massacred.

Turns out, the game gave me a win. The Vikings held the line and scored a lot of points, particularly in the first two-thirds of the game. However, doing so meant a massive loss in units – nearly four times my own casualties. When that got tallied up, that counted as a victory for me. The problem is, if you thought that it was going to be those “VP”s shown in the upper left of some of my screenshots, the sacrifice of your forces should have proven to be well worth it when you “held the good ground,” or however you might choose to interpret it. I’m sure the AI would have fought differently had it “known” that, in the end, the victory would go to the the player with his army left intact.

Back in Crusader Kings, similar results.

Maybe I’m missing something. Perhaps there is a victory condition that requires that you meet the victory requirements as stated but also control your losses. I should read the manual but, whether it is or isn’t there, it isn’t a bad idea. It would prevent deliberately gamey sacrifices to score points – maybe. There is also the obvious point that I’m playing the AI on a mid-level difficulty, meaning any victory that I achieve means that I may only have won because I didn’t let the machine try harder. Whatever the takeaway, the results were similar enough to those that Crusader Kings produced to assume equivalent results. Not that it means much, but it was the point of this whole exercise – to fight the similar battle in both games.

This leads me back to an earlier point I made, that the Last Kingdom mod for Total War: Medieval II might well portray these tactical battles. In the Battle of Cirencester, I had combined my armies of Dorset with Æthelred’s main force making the size of the battle at least double (maybe triple) of what Total War would handle. To find a more suitable battle, I continued on waiting for another encounter, but of a smaller size.

Crushed.

That turned out to be easier said than done. After defeating the Vikings, Alfred’s army took off after the fleeing enemy but without the support from his brother. When the Viking force finally turned and fought me, their advantage in numbers plus their advantage from fighting on the ground of their choosing led to a crushing defeat on my part. It would then take a year for my army to recover enough to again find itself at an advantage over the Viking attackers.

Putting an end to the invasion.

I ultimately managed to corner the Vikings with a restored army approximately equal to their own. In addition, however, I was joined by an Irish lord leading a group of his troops. Apparently it was a lord who outranks Prince Alfred, meaning that the battle is actually displayed as an Irish army against the Vikings, despite Saxon generals being in command.

Wrong time, wrong place, and wrong generals in command.

I did not use the Medieval II Battle Generator to recreate this battle. What I’ve done instead is to use the armies created for the Last Kingdom campaign game and shuffle those units around to get the right force size. Interestingly, based on the commanders of this battle, it appears I’m actually fighting the Battle of Cynwit, the action where Ubba Lothbrokson died. I’m using the campaign wrapper to create the battle for a couple of reasons. First, it saves me the mental exertion of trying to create a historically-balanced army from all of the possibilities available to each nation; the campaign has already created the armies and I just need to adjust for size. The savings is particularly noticeable when you consider that each of these units has different experience levels which is nearly impossible to “figure out” in any meaningful way. Second, it removes the issue of “saving” the results. After the battle, the surviving units will still be there, allowing rebuilding or reuse or even just additional analysis.

Armies are now fully engaged.

Initially, my experience went very well. As the battle started, the numerically inferior Vikings retreated to high ground to their rear to await my assault. I approached and then attempted to outflank their lines, but was unable to do so. The armies engaged just below the hilltop’s crest and began the long process of shield wall combat. Employing one the Medieval UI buttons, the screenshot shows a sense of the two armies’ positions (I’m green). In addition to seizing the high ground, the AI in these scenarios also has a habit of holding units in reserve. This is a strategy I do not recall seeing in stock Medieval II battles, although I don’t know how a mod would introduce entirely new AI strategies. It is more likely that the computer has always been programmed to do such things, but it isn’t until the pace of the battle is slowed down that one can actually see it in action.

Vikings have horses

Although I have numerical superiority, that is offset by the fact that the Viking forces have mounted troops where I do not*. This is an artifact of using the campaign game armies as the basis for individual battles. Counter-intuitively, the Vikings are the only ones with horses at the beginning of the campaign and can easily transport them from Denmark to England. The West Saxons do not have any initially and would have to rely on building up their cities to obtain the equivalent. While it looks a little weird, the result is that it made the battle very even when taking on the computer’s AI.

Reserves in reserve

This screenshot illustrates that enemy strategy of holding units in reserve. Initially it gave them an advantage but later it seemed like their reluctance to commit them might have cost them the fight. I perceived moments where a wing of the battle was about to tip either way and yet the enemy still held back their strategic reserves. Of course, I had long since thrown everything I had into the battle, and probably too early at that. Once again, what may be at play is the stock AI dealing with modified unit capabilities. The tenacity of the soldiers in Last Kingdom, both in terms of resistance to losses and morale (particularly for the veteran troops), may wind up “surprising” the AI every time with unexpected results.

Butchery.

On the subject of unexpected results, see the above screenshots for the battle’s end. The slaughter was on an extraordinary scale. Critically, in terms of my experiment, it does not reproduce what I would expect to see; low casualties while morale remains intact and high casualties to the army who breaks. Instead, the loser (Ubba is the Viking) managed to kill even more men of Wessex than the victors took from his own force. Comparing to the first two results, this one isn’t even close.

So whereas Field of Glory II is capable, and indeed designed for, producing historically-plausible results, Last Kingdom does not seem to be. This is particularly disheartening considering the things that Last Kingdom actually does get right, such as the resilience of the shield wall formation.

*This counter-intuitive setup may be a nod to the Battle of Edington, particularly as portrayed by Bernard Cornwell (The Pale Horseman). In the decisive battle between Guthrum’s viking army and Alex the Great, the vikings have seized all of the Saxon horses through their occupation and pillaging across much of Wessex. Cornwell describes the viking army as mounted while the Saxon’s have very few horses which they mostly employ as pack animals.

The Sons of Ragnar Lothbrok

Tags

Alfred the Great, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bernard Cornwell, Crusader Kings, Crusader Kings 2, Medieval: Total War, The Last Kingdom, The Vaselines, Total War, Vikings

This exercise with historical games began when I first started watching Vikings. I think I was originally watching on the History Channel; each new episode as it came out. When I first heard Vikings was going to be broadcast, I was a little nervous about a) how the History Channel might fumble the development of a historical-based drama and b) the obviously over-stylized interpretation of the period in question. As I watched a handful of the episodes, I wasn’t thrilled, but neither was I entirely put off. Eventually I lost track of the shows, as one often does when trying to catch things on the TV’s schedule.

Around that same time, I happened to be reading one of the books in The Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. It was a the combination of Cornwell’s writing and the depiction of a shield wall on Vikings that made me decide I wanted to find a game that would go with the experience. My first attempt was a using Medieval 2: Total War and a mod-package called The Last Kingdom, apparently made by someone inspired in a similar fashion as I. From there, I got interested in the Wolves from the Sea expansion for Field of Glory, which generated its own long and sordid tale. Worse yet, now that I finally have that expansion in hand, there were no battles created for the period of the Great Heathen Army or Alfred the Great. In any case, before I got very far, I ended up focusing on the Cold War period, rather than the Age of Vikings, and never got back to it.

Now, it seems, Vikings has come a full circle for me. I’ve watched up through the awkwardly-named Season 402, wherein the Sons of Ragnar Lothbrok (as defined by this series) threaten to intrude upon the story line of The Last Kingdom and the other books of The Saxon Chronicles, itself now a TV Series.

My initial misgivings aside, this is a period that’s ripe for a fictionalized treatment. Actually, with The Last Kingdom and Cornwall’s other works, I’ve always been impressed by his treatment of Dark Age history. Stories of Ragnar Lothbrok and his offspring survive today in the form of myth and legend. The primary source for this era, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is too thin on detail to create from it a modern novel-style narrative without a whole lot of elaboration and speculation. If the paucity of details weren’t bad enough, the accuracy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has been called into question, at least in terms of some of is assertions. Being written in the court of Alfred the Great, one would have to expect an interpretation history favorable to his reign, as opposed to just a strict record of facts. To some extent, the self-history of the Saxons can be cross-referenced with the oral histories of the Norse via the Tale of Ragnar’s Sons. The Norse story, however, is clearly mythological in nature. Historians question whether Ragnar Lothbrok was was even a single personage, as opposed to an iconic representation of Scandinavian virtue. One can freely mix a story about the “real” Ragnar with mystical elements without worrying to much about “accuracy” because nobody really knows what an accurate version would look like.

Even still, one wonders at the necessity of shoving every Norse legend into a single TV show. Ragnar’s character on Vikings not only sires his sons through his wife Aslaug, as is documented in the sources, but his wife previous to Aslaug (when he is but a farmer) becomes the also-legendary Lagertha. His life-long friend Floki, having created the first fleet of boats capable of sailing to England, turns out to be none other than the historical Flóki Vilgerðarson, the discoverer and founder of the Norse colony on Iceland. We also find out that King Alfred the Great was, in fact, the bastard son of Queen Judith*. Not content to have this Judith marry two successive kings (father and son!), as her namesake did, this Judith not only has a long-running affair with the her father-in-law**, she has also produced a son with one Athelstan, one of the few survivors of the massacre at Lindisfarne Abbey, the first Viking raid upon the island of Britannia. Here, naturally, we credit the raid to Ragnar Lothbrok. Granted, these historical events are not well pinned down and did, in fact, all occur in the generation or two in which the story takes place. Nevertheless, it remains quite a stretch to weave them into a single familial narrative.

A little more problematically, from a math standpoint, Ragnar’s brother, Rollo, takes part along with Ragnar in both the raid on Lindisfarne (793) and the Siege of Paris (845). For Rollo to have accomplished all that he does in the show, from raiding Lindisfarne to besieging Paris to being crowned Duke of Normandy and founding the dynasty that would go on to rule England (as well as Sicily), he would have had to have lived to be around 140 years old.

The departure from the historical would seem to be particularly ironic by the fact that this is a History Channel production. One would expect a fidelity to the historical as a top priority. Of course, when Vikings first premiered, the History Channel was also running programs like Ancient Aliens and Pawn Stars. While long ridiculed for its seeming mockery of the channel’s name, by the time Vikings came out (and certainly by the time it was popular), nobody expected much history from the History Channel. The creator of Vikings, for his part, defended his decisions to heavily dramatize his story. He claimed that an exciting, albeit ahistorical show, would draw far more interest in actual Viking history than a dry and historically-accurate series. In this, history (so to speak) has backed his claim.

Particularly given that the depiction of small-force combat was one of the things I liked about Vikings, I’m a little sad to say that it doesn’t scale up. The portrayal of the larger battles, at least the ones I’ve seen so far, does not particularly impress. The emphasis is on the stock-fantasy “epic” battles, where the heroes smite the nameless hoards before facing off with each other in a one-on-one duel. Part of the problem is that there aren’t records of the battles whereby Ragnar’s sons conquered England. It is possible, even, that no big, decisive battle did occur. The campaign could easily have consisted of weaker armies retreating before stronger ones and a series of sieges and plunder.

Unfortunately, this inability to realistically visualize the period extends to the gaming world.

No One Else Can Take My Place

One game that is explicit in modeling the Sons of Ragnar and the Great Heathen Army is Crusader Kings II. A little over a year after the initial release, Crusader Kings‘ fifth expansion extended the start date for the game backwards to 867 AD, shortly after the start of the Great Heathen Army’s campaign. Other mechanics were added to add unique capabilities to the Vikings and to pagans in general. The technology system was revamped to allow for the greater range of advancement that will occur when you extend the potential length of the game backwards towards the fall of the Roman Empire.

Ivar the Boneless, supported by Sigurd, leads the Viking army in a war against East Anglia. It isn’t really 865 AD.

I’ve begun a new campaign, for academic purposes of course, that has me playing as Alfred the Great at the beginning of the Viking scenario. That means my older brother, Æthelred, is still king and I might expect to inherit his title if he dies reasonably soon. Of course, Crusader Kings can rapidly diverge from the historical formula so I could just as easily find myself fighting it out for control of Wessex as saving and uniting England. Doing my part to spoil the historical flavor up front, I’m arranging a marriage between myself and a Frankish princess, hoping to catapult my fortunes forward via continental politics.

The Saxons raise their forces to confront Ivar’s horde. 24,000+ Heathens is pretty great indeed.

Whatever happens politically, the challenge of this scenario is the Viking threat. Sons of Ragnar Ivar the Boneless and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye are leading the Great Heathen Army in the vicinity of York, a force that exceeds 24,000 soldiers when all totaled. While the very name of this force brings to mind a vast, angry horde, modern scholars’ estimates are far lower. A figure under 1000 has been arrived at by calculating the documented carrying capacity times the recorded number of boats. The consensus produces figures in the low 1000s.

Why Crusader Kings starts the Vikings off with an army roughly ten times the size it should be is a matter for speculation. I don’t think its as simple as they had some bad data. More likely, a part of it is the necessary balance to give the Viking forces the military power to accomplish what they historically accomplished. Within the game mechanics, historical outcomes may well require a force that is perhaps ten times the size of the real one.

I don’t think it is just the Vikings, either. Across the board, the Dark Age armies seem overpowered in a number of ways. It seems easier to raise large forces of 10s of 1000s of soldiers than historical data suggest it should be. The seasonal limits on military campaigns are also very weakly enforced. In reality, soldiers would have been sent home for the winter to avoid battling the elements. Not only that, they probably would have also been sent home during planting and harvest, so that war time wouldn’t interfere with unduly with their kingdom’s food supply. Crusader Kings, instead, uses the basic 4X mechanics of upkeep costs to the player’s treasury combined with war weariness calculations. It creates practical limits to the raising of armies, but not limits based on the same factors as were (likely) most important in reality.

I think I’ve complained about the seasons and weather before. If not, I’ll complain again. Crusader Kings (and the EU family of games) get points for modeling weather and the seasons. But only a few. The arrival of winter in the northern climates should, more often than not, put a dead halt to military action until the spring thaw. Instead, the way the game handles it – increasing attrition during winter months – makes it just one more “cost” to manage when maintaining an army. It seems to me that you’re more successful keeping your army in the field and just feeding money and reinforcements to it through the supply system versus actually losing the 4-5 months out of the year required to cycle your armies home and back with the weather.

Although that’s one of my persistent complaints, lets just return to the army size and with it go back to something I said about Medieval II: Total War. Contrasting with Rome: Total War, medieval-period battles were much smaller than those of the classical age such that a “typical” fight could be played with the Medieval II units at a one-to-one ratio between rendered and modeled men. That goes doubly so for the Dark Ages, where the ability to support large armies was even less than in the tail-end of the High Medieval period. Remember, I was first drawn into Vikings by its depiction of shield wall combat in a battle consisting of hundreds of participants, not thousands – something at the low end of Medieval‘s range. The drawback, of course, is that Medieval II isn’t (nor is it really meant to be) much of a simulator of realistic combat.

The Last Kingdom is a comprehensive mod that includes a cinematic introduction.

Enter the Medieval II mod, The Last Kingdom. I first came across this overhaul of the Medieval‘s Kingdoms sequel many years ago. I recall reading introductory material from, I think, The Last Kingdom‘s developer’s website, which I can’t locate today. Whether I just can’t find it or whether the site has been taken down, I don’t know. This stuff is 10 years old by now. I’ll tell you what I remember, but half of how I remember it is probably wrong.

I believe the developer is, himself, in academics as a profession. His intent was to make a strictly historical mod, accurately portraying aspects of life the Viking Age. He found himself limited in that goal by the mechanics of Total War, and so the result is a mixed bag of historical fidelity and Total War mechanics. He also uses, as a major source, Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom. As a result, in addition to the historical elements he has some of Cornwell’s fictional or speculative characters participating in the campaigns.

The modified elements run the gamut of what conversions typically do. The artwork and skins are redone to provide a more authentic-looking Viking/Dark Age depiction of clothing, armor, and weaponry. New unit types are introduced to distinguish between the various Northern European cultures. The build-tree has also been redone to provide a set of buildings and technological advances more appropriate to the period. Lastly, the stats of the units have been altered to change the feeling of the real-time battles.

Non-campaign battles are built using army points, with random or automatic unit selection.

Originally, my interest in this was for historical battles, to the extent that we can find such. Like I said above, Medieval seems to be right at the spot where it is capable of representing the vast majority of organized fighting from it’s period as a one-to-one ratio.

Modifications include the graphics, unit types, and parameters that govern battle resolution. It looks nice.

My initial impressions of this mod were very good. Normally, Total War battles are frantic affairs. Units race around the field, often executing contorted commands frantically clicked in by the player. Almost any realism mod is going to start by slowing everything down. This mod does that, and more. I won’t speculate on exactly how it was done but the shield walls act like shield walls. When similar units meet, they’ll stand in line bashing away at each other for a long time. Eventually, one side or the other will begin to dominate. In reality, shield wall combat was exhausting but not particularly deadly as long as the line held. Once a line broke, the fleeing army might well get slaughtered unless they were protected by other, intact forces.

This is still Total War, so the downside of the more deliberate battles is there is a tendency to fight to the last man. I’m guessing the casualties are ahistorically high, but that is pretty much guesswork all around as we’re not going to be finding detailed battlefield reports circa 865 AD. A second major problem I have with this as a tool for fighting one-off historical battles is my inability to get those battles set up in the game engine.

I’ve long had trouble using the scenario editor in Medieval II: Kingdoms and this mod seems to exacerbate the problems that are already there. The random battles are fairly easy to use, especially (if you are trying to get a historical setup) since you can hand-pick the armies on both sides of the field. Two issues conspire to make this less than fully satisfactory, both obvious when comparing experience of playing Total War in the campaign mode. First, there is no way to “carry over” your army, from either a victory or a defeat, into a future battle. You can construct a new army, but all units will be at full strength. This is particularly noticeable in that the campaign engine manages casualties and experience, allowing your army to be reshaped by the battles in which it engages. Likewise, the terrain. In the campaign game, the battle maps are created based upon where the encounter takes place on the strategic map. In the single battle mode, you need to choose from a more limited set of maps, which can detract from the experience. For example, in that last screenshot, I didn’t actually want to fight the battle as a contested river crossing, it just seemed to turn out that way.

This heightened realism mod, whatever faults it has, does seem to be quite a find for Dark Ages tactical battles. The larger problem is the lack of historical information on battles to which to apply the engine. Information is scarce regarding the details of battles. Similarly, there are no strategic or operational engines that focus on realism. The Last Kingdom does add new life to its Viking-centric campaign, but at the end of the day it remains a Total War game. For Crusader Kings, it does a descent and immersive job of portraying the politics of the time but, as I’ve identified early in the article, it is probably pretty far from being an accurate operational engine for the Viking invasion of England.

*This character is a fictional daughter Ælla of Northumbria, who may or may not have had daughters. The name and some of the narrative is based on Judith of Flanders, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor.

**The mixing of fiction and fantasy can become confusing. Judith, the real Judith, was the second wife of Æthelwulf, son of Ecgberht, not his first as was shown in the series. As his second wife, the once-and-future kings of England were not her own children, but rather her stepsons. Indeed, it was cause for court intrigue as some wondered whether Judith’s children by Æthelwulf, being the grand-children of the Holy Roman Emperor, might claim the thrown of Wessex over their older half-brothers. As it turned out, she had no children in this, her first marriage, nor in her second to Æthelwulf’s son Æthelbald, who is left out of the Vikings series entirely (see the discussion on time compression in the main text).

Death or Glory

Tags

Alea Jacta Est, Alea Jacta Est: Hannibal Terror of Rome, ancients, Carthage, Dire Straits, Field of Glory II, Great Battles of Hannibal, Mare Nostrvm, Roman Republic

I had previous complained that Alea Jacta Est falls into an unhappy medium between a tactical and a strategic representation of the Roman Republic. My comments about the game’s treatment of the Pyrrhic War is that it left the player with too little of value to play with, focusing primarily on the operational level of that war. It occurs to me that one of the issues is that the Pyrrhic War scenario may be better played as Pyrrhus, not Rome. Rome won the war, in part, by fielding new legions* when the existing ones were defeated in battle. So the Roman strategy is one of replenishing their forces, throwing them into battle, and then see who wins. If it’s a loss, then repeat. For Pyrrhus, however, he has more operational decisions. He is more limited in his resources and so has choices to make. How can he fight his enemies in detail, particularly once Carthage is involved. Does he focus on Italy or take the fight to Sicily?

Similarly, in the early part of the Second Punic War a gamer may be better challenged by taking the part of Hannibal. He too has the single but large invading army which he can use against the Roman forces wisely to break the Roman will. Yet from the Roman side too, the operation strategies may be more interesting. While there are similarities between the invasion of Pyrrhus and the invasion of Hannibal, the Second Punic War is far more complicated. While Hannibal leads the main Carthaginian force, his brothers have forces in Spain. As the war progressed, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Africa, and even Greece all became potential fronts in this conflict. Given all that, it might be worth looking, again, at the war from a higher view.

Cooler heads prevail and I hold off engaging Hannibal until August.

As I briefly described before, the meat of Alea Jacta Est family is managing army operations. This consists of movement, the resulting combat, and the management of supply. In this case, the movement is implemented as a planning phase followed by a month’s worth of simultaneous execution. In addition to all of that, the make-up of armies must also be managed. In the AGEod family, this is more than just creating “stacks” of units subject to supply limit. First, the mix of the army’s units drives the tactical level and provides one of the player’s main methods of impacting the detailed battle results. In addition to balancing the combat unit types, the commanders must be chosen to be sufficiently capable of managing the army for which they are responsible. This can imply balancing the military with the political as poorly-performing generals inevitably make their way up into senior command positions. It’s a complex system, and one that (for the Second Punic War) I’m jumping into with inadequate preparation. Rather than think about the game as a simulation of the war as a whole, I’m going to look at it more as a framework playing Hannibal’s early victories, but seen from the Roman side.

I started the scenario that begins in the late fall of 218 BC. Hannibal is across the Alps and the stage is set for the showdown across the river Trebia. Modern politics is often (and annoyingly) compared with warfare. In the Republic of Rome, however, success at the ballot box was often tied to one’s success on the battlefield. Sempronius Longus’ eagerness to engage Hannibal, even when at obvious (particularly as seen in retrospect)  disadvantage, is in part because achieving personal glory on the battlefield would translate to political and financial success in Rome. It was therefore easy enough for Hannibal to draw Sempronius into a fight across a river in winter conditions, where he was defeated.

Taking on the vague persona of “Rome,” I’m under no such pressure. I was slow to relocate Sempronius’ forces from Sicily** and then, once they were in northern Italy, moved them into camp to properly prepare for battle. I was so slow, in fact, that Gaius Flaminius and Gnaeus Servilius Geminus replaced Sempronius and Publius Cornelius Scipio as consuls. Maybe Sempronius was on to something? I also waited a few more months for reinforcements to arrive (which, frankly, I was still trying to get figured out) and for the weather to be good. I wouldn’t make my move until August.

I moved my camp to the same side of the river before fighting, but you can’t argue with the numbers.

Having fully assembled both consular armies and beefed up my forces, I first crossed the Trebia River at an unopposed crossing so that I could attack Hannibal on even ground. As it turned out, it didn’t do me much good. Despite my organization, I came upon a Carthaginian army which significantly outnumbered and outclassed my own. All my preparation wasn’t for naught. The loss wasn’t a disaster; my losses were only about double that of Hannibal and more than half my forces remained in fighting order. I was able to retreat back across the river and keep my army intact, ready to fight against Hannibal (and, yes, lose) another day, as he moved south through the Italian peninsula. Publius Cornelius Scipio, meanwhile, although many months behind schedule, moved back to Rome in preparation for leading his historical command in Spain.

As Scipio returns to Rome, Hannibal catches my weakened army near its camp, again giving about twice as good as he gets. Problem is, I can handle the losses but he can’t.

I’ll not dwell on the campaign that followed except to note one thing. As I continue my chase of Hannibal through Italy, I’ve yet to experience the massive defeat and resulting loss of all legions that marked Hannibal’s greatest victories. Part of this may be due to my more pensive operations; the Romans have yet to be caught out with the consuls split and defeated in detail. Also, by the time I actually did lose a single legion to Hannibal, I already had a replacement waiting in Rome. I suspect that was triggered in the scenario by the historical defeats that never actually happened in my game. It is also, I imagine, due to a leveling effect that comes from the random resolution of battles. Statistically speaking, this should tend to avoid the outliers in terms of extreme victories or defeats, as a Cannae or Lake Trasimene would seem to be.

The end result of all this is that, because Rome never has a catastrophic loss and because I’m recruiting replacements in anticipation of heavy casualties, the pace of my campaign picks up rapidly. In the game, I can force a major battle every two or three months through the seasons with favorable weather. I lose, sure, but each time Hannibal also loses forces he can’t replace while Rome is able to patch up her legions in short order, ready to send them out again. What is it about the modeling that causes this departure from reality? Am I allowed to beat the cycle of military defeats followed by Senate reaction by anticipating my losses? Is this a reasonable result of my losses being lower than the historical ones? I have no idea, but it does have implications with respect to exploring “what ifs.”

*In the Pyrrhic War, it was less an issue of creating replacement legions as rebuilding the ones that had been depleted. I use the terminology because, isn’t a unit which has had the bulk of its soldiers replaced in many ways “new?” Plus, I want to make the comparison with the actual destruction of legions from which Rome suffered in later wars.

**In another historical note, I came across a telling detail regarding the relocation of the Sempronius’ consular army from Sicily to Italy. In game, I marched them by land, a procedure that took time and cost me through attrition. Sempronius himself dismissed his army after having them swear an oath to reassemble at Armenium (right edge of the top-most screenshot). Essentially “strategic movement,” as it is sometimes called in other games, was left as an exercise for the individual soldier. It must have worked, at least to some extent.

We Held the Coastline, They Held the Highland

Tags

Billy Joel, Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Road to Disaster, Robert McNamara, Vietnam

This is the forty-third in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

I am now reading Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent Into Vietnam by Brian VanDeMark. This is a newly released book, particularly compared to what I usually read. The book was published in the fall of 2018.

It is occasionally a difficult book to read, even when comparing it to some of the military-sponsored works I’ve referenced previously, but not because of the writing style. It is written well enough that it is a pretty comfortable reading experience. The difficulty comes from the thesis of the book itself and how that translates to a narrative.

The idea is to reexamine the escalation of the Vietnam War in the light of the most modern understanding of psychology. Basically, Kennedy’s, and then Johnson’s, people were supposed to be the best and the brightest and on the peaceful side of the political table to boot. So then how did they drive so deeply into a war effort that became such a spectacular failure? To explore this, historical records of the decision-making process are interspersed with psychological theories about how one might arrive at such a wrong set of decisions, given the pressures of human frailty. The breakup of the narrative can distract, especially when some of the psychology is stretched quite a bit to apply to meager evidence from 55 years ago. Still, as I said, the book reads well enough, especially once you get used to its pacing.

The book begins with the Bay of Pigs invasion and, essentially, the beginning of Jack Kennedy’s presidential term. The argument is that the combination of talent, ego, and inexperience caused a series of missteps resulting in failure at the Bay of Pigs. That failure, the book describes, lead directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis and, in some ways, the successful outcome of that confrontation. But that success built a foundation for failed decision-making processes that would send us down the wrong road in Vietnam. Eventually, not only would South Vietnam to fall to the North but it would do so only after tremendous expenditure of blood and treasure on the part of the United States. The blame for that loss, and the impact on American politics and military, continues to reverberate in American politics to this day.

The author also wrote In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam with Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense. That project started as a book about McNamara created through extensive interviews between the two co-authors as well as talks with other major players from the top ranks of late-60s diplomacy. In response to another biography, McNamara decided to release his own memoir and the VanDeMark/McNamara biography was turned into auto-biography. With this background research, in this book VanDeMark can analyze events of the time by comparing the thoughts of the contemporary McNamara with a retrospective McNamara as a way to understand the extent to which the thinking was distorted when decisions were being made.

One area in which this book stumbles is its flying high of its politically-biased flag. Perhaps it should only be expected that a book critical of the Vietnam War should be authored by a liberal. Writing from the vantage point provided by one’s own beliefs allows an exploration of that world as one sees it, which may, perhaps, be a necessity. I find parts of this book, however, where the partisan leanings bend so far as to make me wonder what the author might be blinding himself to in his analysis. I’ll discuss an example.

President Johnson’s decision to begin a bombing campaign was made as a result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and particularly the second of the two attacks*. Johnson had been pushed towards, and resisted, a bombing campaign throughout 1964. The military leadership advocated a military response to the growing involvement of North Vietnam internally in the South and bombing was proposed as a way to limit U.S. commitment. Even after Tonkin, Johnson put off the decision hoping that events would improve his range of options. When the Viet Cong attacked Camp Holloway in February of 1965, Johnson started the bombing campaign that he had essentially authorized the year before. In all of this, Johnson is described as making the wrong decision, but against his own better judgment. Among other factors, that judgment is impaired by political considerations. Johnson hoped showing strength against North Vietnam (a popular decision at the time) would buy him political points, both with conservative Republicans and his own Southern Democrats. The latter, he felt, were ready to turn against him on Vietnam in retaliation for his signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet Johnson’s realpolitik in foreign policy is contrasted with his Great Society initiatives, which he is seen as pursuing only for the most righteous and selfless of reasons. OK, perhaps the author admits that Johnson is interested in his “legacy,” but the intensely political animal we see escalating in Vietnam is suddenly nowhere to be found when it comes to domestic politics.

Of course, as I said already, its not as if we didn’t expect a bias when we picked up a book titled Road to Disaster. Further, it may be informative to have that bias fully on display at every turn rather than having to second-guess what might hide behind a more neutral and dispassionate prose. Moreover, in the case of the Gulf of Tonkin and the “second torpedo boat attack,” I’m pretty sure that the author has his analysis correct. The tenor of the analysis, though; the certainty in the face of conflicting accounts from fifty-five years past, makes me wary of analyses where I don’t already have some background.

Another aspect of this bias is that, when attempting to clarify what constituted the truth among conflicting estimates of the time, the author frequently cites recent statements from the government of Vietnam itself. Obviously, access to the communists’ records can shed some real light on an ambiguous situation. If nothing else, seeing something from “the other side” can be critical to getting a true perspective. However, 50 years on, it would seem to me that America’s own current perspective is going to be more reliable than the communist government of Vietnam, influenced both by the propaganda of the time and its own desire to self-promote in the here and now. Where Vietnamese official data confirms something we already thought we knew, it is probably worth accepting as positive evidence. To simply accept statements as arbitrating the truth is probably naive.

In the final analysis, this book is something of a mixed bag, but a mix that turns out to be a hearty stew (mixed, much like this metaphor). The historical narrative combines the familiar with new insights. The psychology ranges from the pop variety to actual insightful analysis, the latter truly helping to understand why decision-making went so wrong. The telling of the story from the perspective of the diplomats, in particular, represents a nice counter-balance to the stories that the generals have told in those other books that I’ve read.

Return to the master post or go on to another article dealing with the Australian forces in the Vietnam and, albeit indirectly, The Battle of Long Tan.

*VanDeMark has no doubt that the second attack did not take place. I don’t disagree with him, but I don’t find the historic record to be definitive. In my own analysis, I deliberately avoided discounting the testimony of any participant who claims to have evidence in the matter. In Road to Disaster, by way of contrast, the evidence that no attack took place is presented to overwhelmingly back that point. Ironically, this done in a chapter that discusses the role of confirmation bias in blinding people to evidence which contradicts their preconceived notions of fact.

For My Life, Still Ahead, Pity Me

Tags

artificial intelligence, Les Revenants, netflix, Queen, singularity, The Returned, zombie

I recall when the French T.V. series Les Revenants was released in the United States. It has something of a buzz about it and I made a point that I was going to watch it. However, by the time it was released in the U.S., there was already an English language version under development. In fact, I dare say part of the push to talk up the French series was to generate interest for the American version. By the time they made it to Netflix, I had both available to me at roughly the same time.

I wasn’t sure which one to watch first. Should I try to see the original, and then watch the U.S. version be able to judge it as an adaptation? Or should I start it off with the material that was meant for me specifically? Surely setting a show in the Pacific Northwest, rather than France, would make it easier for me to follow some of the more subtle references, assuming there are any? I recently watch The Killing, the U.S. version, without first taking in the Danish series, and it seemed to work out OK. There were certain moments where I became aware that, for example, all the names were Danish or that the landscape, while convincingly Seattle, was an awful lot like Denmark. Culturally, though, it matched my own.

In the end, Netflix has made the choice for me. The U.S. series is being removed from their streaming offerings by the end of the week so I have that long to try to make it through. The show is well done, and so I am certainly happy to give it a try, I’m just not sure I have enough time to fit it all in. It is a short series, only 10 episodes in all. Having not reached the end, I still don’t know yet if all will be revealed. I’ll leave that to you to find out on your own.

Instead, a little bit on the title. The French series was based on a French film from 2004, also with the same name. The film version was translated into English as “They Came Back.” It is also identified as a “zombie film.” It deviated from the “zombie” formula in that the risen weren’t monsters, mindless or otherwise, whose presence threatened the rest of us. They didn’t eat human flesh nor did they pass on their curse to those they came in contact with. Nevertheless, they are “the other,” something not entirely human (as we, the living, define ourselves) and so, perhaps, they are in some other way a threat to our existence. One that we don’t immediately appreciate.

When the series was recreated for the American audience, the translated title is “The Returned,” which is also how it is reference in Amazon for the original, French version. Now, revenent is derived from revenir, meaning “to return” or “to come back.” So the noun form, certainly, implies “They who have returned.” However, in French, le revenent, is also understood to mean “the ghost.” It probably wouldn’t refer to a zombie, where one might expect to see, much as in English, the actual term zombie or perhaps “living dead.”

They concept behind the show, the return of the dead, wouldn’t seem to have much grounding in reality. I wonder, though. It may be a bit of a fringe following, but there are a growing number among us who anticipate, and wholeheartedly believe in, some form of a Singularity. Such is defined as an advance in technology, most often attributed to advanced (possibly sentient) Artificial Intelligence (AI), that would overturn many of the rules by which society has thus far functioned. One of the more sought-after benefits is an end to aging. This could be brought about by advanced medical science that would allow the repair of the aging effects upon our bodies to grant us extended youth and immense life-spans. An alternative possibility is that the advancement of AI would allow humans to transfer their consciousness to a computer, allowing an immortality of mind, if not of body.

For me, this raises a certain philosophical question. Imagine you are offered the opportunity of transferring your mind to a computer. You are assured that, upon doing so, you will continue to live on, forever. Imagine also that this idea appeals to you (although, for many it may not). You are assured, including by those who have undergone the process before you, that indeed your sense of self remains intact through the transfer. However, you suspect differently. In an Invasion of the Body Snatchers type of scenario, you begin to suspect that those advising you are simply clever AIs who want to profit by assuming the identity of living persons, whom they can then eliminate without arousing suspicion. How could you know?

Imagine it this way. What if I told you that every night, when you go to sleep, your mind actually dies. In the morning, a new person, and new consciousness, is created. That person inherits all the memories and identifying features of the dead person and thus is indistinguishable from the deceased. In fact, the newly-born mind feels that they, themselves, have experienced the life lived by the person who passed on overnight, even though their “life” before this very morning is merely false-memories created by another. I tell you this. Can you prove to me it isn’t true? How could you go about doing that?

As a character in the show says, “There’s only one way to find out.”