Studying classic battles

I realised that in the space of a couple of weeks I have looked at four different classic historical battles in four different ways:
- visited Normandy
- wargamed Gettysburg
- watched the movie Waterloo
- read Clausewitz.

It made me reflect on how these four different ways of approaching history give us different insights and understanding of the events.

Bruce's gorgeous Israeli Centurions for 1973. Can you believe they are 3mm scale?

Not much to do with this blogpost but prettier than my usual illos.

Visiting a battlefield is surely the best way to truly appreciate the nature of the terrain: the close country created by the Normandy bocage, or conversely the open enfiladed killing ground that was Omaha beach. You can see why Panzer Lehr's counterattack north of St Lo came to grief in ambushes on narrow lanes, or why the rolling country southeast of Caen dictated that Operation Goodwood be a massed tank attack. (Visit Normandy in January and you have a good chance of finding the River Aure flooded, giving you a good picture of how the inundations looked in June 1944.) I've been to many battlefields and they are always educational. The battle for Normandy in 1944 crammed so much important action into such a small area, however many times I visit there will always be more to see and more to learn.

Then we wargamed Gettysburg (again). That's one of those classic battles that everyone has to fight at least once in their wargaming career. Of course, a battle fought over three days on a 5- or 6-mile front and involving over 150,000 men is too big for a lot of wargamers to ever get to fight more than a small part of it, because of their choice of rules and scale. With five players, we were able to do the whole of it on 6'x4' in under 3.5 hours using BBB. (Our Union side lost ... I think the scenario is skewed and neeeds tweaking! But the Rebs played better than we did anyway and deserved their victory, and it was still a good fun ebb-and-flow game where we felt in with a chance to the end.) An analogy that I freely acknowledge may be wasted on readers from non-cricketing nations is that to play a small segment of the battlefield is like just watching one day of a Test match, whereas to fight all the action of all three days is to enjoy the whole Test series, with its contests within contests, changing situations, shifting fortunes, and players having to think of consequences beyond the next ball or the next throw of the dice. (Perhaps to translate into baseball terms: one innings as against a whole World Series best-of-seven playoff?) So what lessons does such a game give? As I've said before, it is learning by doing, and gives a better sense of the shape of the battle and the reasons it took that shape than simply reading a book ever can. A historical scenario is usually more complex and subtle and interesting and challenging than anything I could invent; but as if that weren't sufficient reason for playing historical refights, the understanding gained by doing so surely is.

What of the movie, then? I was slightly disappointed by its perfunctory treatment of Quatre Bras, Ligny and Wavre, and would have liked a better exposition of the relationship among the four actions. But of course that's something that's better done by a book, whereas this was a movie and ultimately all about spectacle. And boy does it deliver on that front! We could quibble about some of the tactical detail: lines of infantry right in front of their guns, for instance, and I'm not sure I'd have wanted to be in the front rank of the multiple ranks of guardsmen rising out of the corn and firing over each other's heads. But the sheer number of extras (courtesy of the Soviet army, I think?) enabled De Laurentiis to give us a really good view of what mass formations look like, and of how quickly some of them could move, or indeed - when floundering through mud - how slowly. The charge of the Scots Greys was tremendous. Did watching the movie give me some special additional understanding of the battle of Waterloo? Hard to say, but I'm sure that next time I'm pushing some 2mm lumps of lead across a Napoleonic wargame table, I'll have some of De Laurentiis's images in mind. (And an aside, while on the subject of movies: earlier this year I watched all six hours of Abel Gance's 1927 classic, "Napoleon". This covers some of the same ground as my Clausewitz book, so it was great to see those scenes on screen, especially Napoleon's famous address to his army at the start of the campaign.)

And so finally to Clausewitz. The work of his that I've been reading most recently is about the 1799-1800 campaigns in Switzerland and Italy, including the battles of Zurich and the Trebbia. Maybe these don't quite qualify as must-game classics, though they are ever so interesting. However, Rivoli surely does, and he covered that in his history of the 1796 campaign which (as I hope regular readers of this blog will forgive me for mentioning again) will appear for the first time ever in English next month. I just love his incisive analysis of every misstep by the French and Austrian generals. The way he leads us through to strategic insights is exquisite, and the final chapter of the book is a kind of punchline that elevates our understanding of the whole business. Please buy it - I need to fund my lead addiction!

To summarise the point of this post, there are different ways of learning about the great battles of history, and each way can teach us different things. The obvious conclusion is that if we want the fullest possible understanding of these battles, we should use the full range of approaches.

But for the combination of insight, entertainment and camaraderie, of course, wargaming them on the tabletop is hard to beat. Roll on the next club night!