Monday 17 December 2012

SturmAbteilung Vor!


You wait all year for a project to be finished….and two get done at (almost) the same time! You’ll remember that I was really struggling a few weeks ago to get any closure on a couple of projects.  It felt a little like I was project plate-spinning in a fashion much beloved from British family game shows of the 1970s. In the end, the darkest hour came just before the dawn.  


I managed to finish the ruined Rattenloch last week, and finally got to the end of writing my article “SturmAbteilung Vor!: A set of rule adaptations for using Stumtruppen, Stosstruppen and Ersatzstosstruppen in “Through the Mud and the Blood” for the TooFatLardies “Christmas Special” on Saturday morning.  OK, so it’s not the shortest title ever.  But it hopefully “does what it says on the tin”.  

It took me a while, but I got there in the end.  The "Special" should be available on the TFL website HERE by the time you read this.




In the end, I ended up with three or four times the material I finally put into the article.  I was rushing to leave stuff out, rather than force everything in.  Some sections are a lot briefer than I have wanted, and quite a bit of material about the creation, or fabrication, of the “stormtrooper myth” in the 1920s and 1930s didn’t make the cut.  I felt in a wargaming magazine I should concentrate on the hard facts mostly: organisation, tactics, deployment, military theory and battlefield practice.  Like all great projects, it’s unfinished – but it’s as finished as I could get it in the space Rich and Nick allowed me.

For those interested, here’s the introduction, reproduced by kind permission or Richard and Nick:

If a group of wargamers were each to pick one formation to recreate in miniature out of all of those fighting on the Western Front in the Great War, it would be a safe guess that a sizeable number would choose a formation of German stormtroopers.  And that choice would be hardly surprising.

We think we know about these troops:  the image of their stallhelm and their bread-bags of hand grenades seem as distinctive as their innovative methods of fighting.  We have probably all seen the same photographs, of groups of aggressive, athletic, young men posing for the camera in a rear area, awaiting battle, perhaps a MG08/15 light machine gun at their feet or a MP18 Bergmann sub-machine gun carried proudly at the front of the formation. 

We think we know these troops, and how they should be used in our wargames.  Infiltration.  Aggression.  Storm.  Attack.  Speed.  Surprise.  We see them in our mind’s eye looming, masked, out of a cloud of phosgene gas.  A visceral, near-feral, uniquely Teutonic whirlwind tearing through their opponents.  “This is the New Man.  The storm soldier, the elite of Middle Europe.  A completely new race, cunning, strong and packed with purpose….the axis of the future” wrote Ernst Jünger in 1925.  We think we know all about these men, and their way of warfare.

And then we look closer.  We read further and look at some of the revisionism about the stormtroopers…or is that sturmtruppen … or stosstruppen … or ersatzstosstruppen?  What exactly were these formations?  Were they all the same?  Were they that different from British or French troops? How did they fight, and was it always in the same way? And what happened to them after the Kaiserschlacht, the Götterdämmerung on the Somme?  And perhaps, slowly, we start to see a far darker sub-text, one which unrolls through the early literature regarding stormtroopers in the 1920s and into the nationalistic writings of the 1930s.  We begin to wonder if there is a “Stormtrooper Myth”, or worse, mis-information.”

So, if you’re curious, and you’d like to read more, you now know where to go!

So the desk is just about clear for the next project.....  




27 comments:

  1. Well done Sidney! Always good to finish a project.
    Love the title too.

    Enjoy the Hobbit.

    Matt

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  2. Stunning work ! Just love the flamer !!!

    Best regards Michael

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    1. Thanks Michael! I was looking for a photo-manipulation effect to add the heat waves around the flames, but it defeated me!!

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  3. Great work Sidney! And good luck in the Painting Challenge!

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    1. Thanks Ray - and the very best to you also, mate!

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  4. Wow. Just wow. Have to say the same as Dalauppror and say how much I love the flamer. I love the bases too where the colours quite clearly echo the stahlhelm camo. Beautiful.

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    1. Thanks Kieran - very much appreciated, and thanks so much for dropping by. You'll see I've added the excellent "Do You Have A Flag" to my list of great Blogs. I tried to echo the groundwork colours in the helmets - so thanks so much for noticing!!!

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  5. I am really looking forward to seeing what you wrote. I have not made it past Charles Eckhart's piece yet. I did some research on Austro-Hungarian Stosstruppen so I am anxious to see what you have.

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    1. Thanks Chris. I really hope you like it. Sadly I completely ran out of space. I had material on the Stosstruppen on the Eastern Front and in Italy but I was running out of time and completely ran out of space. (I did want to try to cover Caporetto, but plumped for the 'Messertaktik' at Skrobowa instead). I also didn't get near covering the Stosstrupps at Riga in 1917, or the Friekorps Stoss formations in the Baltic in 1919-20. In the end there was material for at least a couple of articles - and all that after panicking that there was not enough!

      It is not as much fun as your (wonderful and brilliantly original) whale scenario, but I hope you like what I did all the same.

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  6. Wonderful stuff Sidney! I'm dashing over to download a copy. It will help speed past the slow hours at the office this week.

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    1. I really hope you enjoy it Curt. There's some fun stuff in there, regardless of the game systems people use. There is an absolutely terrific Viking scenario involving a whale (yes, no typo) which is genuinely worth the cost of the whole "Special" - and written by Chris Stoesen (kindly commenting above). I really hope you it - I'm officially nervous now in case you don't!

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  7. Beautiful job on the flame from the flamethrower. Did you build it to match a flame template? I take it that its just placed in the game when launched...would make a rather unwieldy miniature otherwise 8D.

    Did you build it with a solid dowel core?

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    1. Thanks Terry. The flames are simply a long copper fire with clump foliage pierced on it and then drenched in PVA glue. I used autumn foliage as there was lots of yellow, red, orange and brown. I think I covered how to make them in a post in July earlier this year if you're interested:)

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    2. Terry, there's a tutorial from one of the posts in July 2012 here: http://sidneyroundwood.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/flaming-holidays.html

      Hope that helps, but if you have any questions, please let me know through a comment here.

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  8. Simply fantastic as usual Sidney! Good luck in the challenge!

    Christopher

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    1. Thanks Christopher. Much appreciated. And good luck to you also!

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  9. Got my Christmas Special copy copy tonight, and your articles will be a very good bed-reading. Excellent work once again, señor Roundwood

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    1. Thanks Benito! There has been a bit of a problem in the Special....Richard forgot to include the MAP for "Stosstrupptaktik", the pre-game. DOH!!! I'll post it here tomorrow in a post and on the resources on the right hand sidebar on this Blog...and I think he'll put a copy on the main Yahoo group. Sorry!!!! Publishers.....sigh.....what can you do?? :)

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    1. Thanks Phil!! Much appreciated! Really pleased you like it.

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  11. Amazing, museum-quality figures and terrain. The flames in the trenches really bring home the horrors of this war. Best, Dean

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    1. Thanks Dean. The flames were a pretty easy thing to make, but they do make a huge contrast to the grey and dull, brown dead grass on the terrain. I'm really pleased you like it. Thanks for commenting and for stopping by.

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  12. Great work, congratulations. I've fond this scale thanks to you.

    A hug.

    José María Álvarez

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    1. Gracias, Jose Maria! That's very kind. I hope you have fun with 28mm - its a great scale for smaller games. Any questions, please just ask.

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  13. Well done in finishing both projects! Now, onwards and upwards!

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    1. Thanks David. Phew, at last they're done!! Yes, onwards and upwards - no time for a "brief period of rejoicing" yet!! Hope you enjoy what's coming soon.

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