Tankettes and the limits of theory

One of the problems facing military force planners and doctrine writers is that they have to do most of their planning in peacetime when they can't test their musings against reality.


This drawback is inescapable, although there's reason to think modern simulation techniques and realistic training can mitigate it. Still, military planners in the interwar period were faced with an especially challenging environment. Military technology was developing at an exceptionally rapid pace for peacetime in the 1930s (less so in the 20s because there was a surplus of Great War equipment lying around and other factors slowing things down such as naval treaties and Versailles.)


So it's not surprising that there were a lot of things that sounded good on paper in the writings of military experts in the 20s and 30s that turned out to be wrong in the light of actual combat experience in World War II.


For example, what's the best way to field tanks. After World War II the major powers have settled on the Main Battle Tank idea, which is that the only tank worth the trouble is one that is powerful enough to fight other tanks, mobile enough to exploit its own breakthroughs and cheap enough to field in adequate numbers. Modern armies have a number of specialized lighter vehicles for recon, infantry transport and mobile artillery support, but they generally have just one kind of tank (although they may still field a previous generation of MBT as well).


The British, no slouches in tank thought between the wars, thought there should be a functional divide between heavily armored, but slow "Infantry" tanks and fast, but lightly armored "cruiser" tanks. Unfortunately they compromised the experiment a bit by having inadequate firepower for either, but even improved firepower in later models didn't save the concept. The French followed a similar idea.


Most of the other powers went more with a light-medium-heavy division for their tank arms. This worked better than the infantry-cruiser division of labor, but also eventually fell out of favor too as it was found that light and heavy tanks were just as much trouble as medium tanks but nowhere near as flexible.


One further notion that was already falling out of favor even before the war got going in earnest as the "tankette." All the major armored powers has already decided the concept was unworkable, but tankettes saw combat with some of the second-line armored powers such as Italy and Japan and with minor armies such as Poland. The idea was that swarms of highly mobile, 2-man tankettes with machine guns would overwhelm the enemy. It turned out that the logistic cost of the tankettes did not justify their limited combat power. And they were vulnerable to a wide variety of weapons. Anything that could kill a tank could kill them, as well as many weapons that were not powerful enough to kill a tank.


It was a cute idea, but simply didn't work. The attractiveness of the concept is illustrated by the appearance of the AT-ST "chicken walker" in the Star Wars universe, which is again a small, fast, 2-man fighting vehicle not unlike a tankette in concept. Of course, in a fictional universe anything can happen, and whatever tactical drawbacks the AT-ST might have (and they do seem to take heavy losses) are not necessarily reflected in the scripted outcomes.

But in the real-life crucible of World War II the idea was discarded.

Tankettes do not appear in large numbers in wargames, but in those games where they do appear, such as Advanced Squad Leader and Axis & Allies Miniatures they are not especially useful.

I'm a Stuart tank fan

I've been a fan of the Stuart tank ever since I was little.

I'll admit it's an odd choice. It's not a sexy tank like a Panther or King Tiger. It's not a real effective tank like a T-34 or Sherman. It's not a historically significant tank like an FT-17 or T-55. It's not even a really awful but colorful tank like an M13 or Type 93.

But it was the first tank I remember seeing myself, in the steel, as a child. There was one poised in the middle of a square near a shopping center my mother liked to frequent. It was a war memorial. There were a lot of those scattered about the New Bedford area in the years after the Second World War. Later I became aware of a couple Sherman tanks, a few 57mm anti-tank guns, a German PaK 40 ATG and some .30 cal machine guns, but the Stuart was first.

I asked my mom what it was and she told me it was a "World War I" tank. Later, when I was a little older and started reading I quickly discovered she was mistaken and it was a World War II tank. As a matter of fact, it was an M3A1 tank.

Folks interested in a detailed recounting of the Stuart's stats and service history can check it out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_tank

My reading revealed it was a tank that wasn't altogether successful, so I developed a little bit of an underdog's fondness for the little tank.

And darn if it didn't keep showing up. One of my favorite comics was The Haunted Tank, which featured the ghost of Jeb Stuart watching over the crew of an M3 Stuart tank as it battled through North Africa and Europe against the Nazis. The little haunted Stuart even took on an beat some Tiger I Tanks (with some ghostly help).

The tank also showed up in a memorable Twilight Zone episode about some National Guardsmen who end up going back in time to fight at The Little Big Horn (although without tank, unfortunately).

It's even Tank Girl's tank!

When I became a wargamer I started playing with Stuarts whenever I got the chance. They were usually pretty easy to have back in those days. Everybody wanted Panthers and Tigers anyway. Actually, if you wanted to play with any other kind of tank (T-34s, Shermans, Matildas, etc.) you'd probably get your chance. I remember seeing some pretty improbable arrays of King Tigers and Panthers on some miniatures battlefields.

Stuarts showed up occasionally in board wargames, too. They were actually pretty decent in Avalon Hill's Tobruk game. It was a good early 1942 tank, about equal to a Pz III or Crusader.
Still, by the time the U.S. troops got to use it against the Germans in late 1942 it was obsolete and therefore Stuarts in most wargames don't leave a very good impression. Their primary use and usefulness -- recon -- doesn't usually play a big role in board wargames so Stuarts tend to be under-represented.

The little tank gotten a more respect lately, I think. It's showed up three separate times in the Axis & Allies miniatures game (twice British and once U.S.), each time sporting the "All Guns Blazing" special ability allowing it an extra shot against soldiers. It's got high speed and decent stats for a 15-point piece making it a reasonable build selection.

Anytime it appears in a Pacific War setting it tends to be useful. It's at least as good as any of the Japanese tanks it's likely to face and its anti-infantry ability is actually better than a Sherman in some ways. In games as diverse as Echelons of Fury- Pacific, Up Front!, Matanikau and Advanced Squad Leader it can be a big help against Japanese troops. In ASL, especially, that 37mm canister round can be deadly.

It might not be powerful or sexy, but the Stuart still played an important role in America's fight against the Axis. It succored the British in the desert when they needed large numbers of a decent, reliable tank to hold back Rommel and aided the Soviets, too, when they needed quantity and reliability. Stuarts freed up Shermans from scouting and screening roles and provided the chassis for a lot of supporting vehicles such as howitzer carriers, recovery vehicles and recon scouts.

After the war it soldiered on in a lot of smaller, third-world armies where its simplicity, ruggedness and reliability were appreciated.

And it helped spark at least one little boy in Massachusetts to study history, serve in the military and discover a life-long hobby.

ASL and the urge for epics

One urge common to wargamers but rare among other board gaming flavors (although shared with RPGs) is to seek out and play the "epic," "campaign" or "monster" game. All three are just different manifestations of the same desire, I think, to capture the sweep and drama of a bigger-than-life gaming experience.
Warfare, by its very nature, lends itself to the grand sweep of things and its interrelated parts are well-suited to being linked. Even the otherwise-rather basic Commands and Colors system includes "Epic" and "Overlord" versions. Monster games requiring a half-dozen players achieve the links laterally.
But perhaps the most common way to create a campaign narrative is by linking a series of individual scenarios together into a longer metagame. The whole idea of "scenarios" is itself peculiar to wargames. I don't think there's anything like it in other boardgames.
The original Squad Leader included a way to build a campaign narrative including the opportunity for promoting a "personal leader" but there were many ways to link games even in ASL. The historical modules like Red Barricades and Kampfgruppe Peiper have obvious linkages, for example, but others are possible.
Myself and my regular ASL partners engaged in a giant metacampaign for the 50th anniversary of World War II playing the "official" Avalon Hill ASL scenarios in chronological order more or less on the 50th anniversaries of the actual fights. Like perhaps most such overly ambitious wargame projects it didn't reach completion (at least not yet) but it did reach fruition. We made it well in the summer of 1944 before life changes knocked the effort off schedule. Finishing the last year of the war is an ongoing, if very occasional, project to this day, even as the 60th anniversaries have now passed.
Still, we got some 200+ games played in some kind of order and had a good time doing so. There's a unique satisfaction to playing on the epic scale.