This week is the 25th anniversary of the Australian cinematic release of WarGames, which is mainly significant because I missed the anniversary of the US release a few weeks ago! There were a few retrospectives floating about then, which focused on the movie’s importance as an early popularisation of the hacking and phreaking subcultures, and its influence on adolescent computer geeks (which is admittedly where most of the fun derives from). Instead, I want to look at the wargames in WarGames, and the ideas about nuclear strategy which it imparted to its young Gen X audience. Well, I have no hard figures about any influence it might have had, but I was probably just about a teenager when I first saw it, and it certainly helped form my ideas about nuclear warfare. (Though it also inspired me to try coding a Joshua simulator on the C64 … I didn’t get very far!) Warning: spoilers follow.

The wargames in question are played by WOPR (War Operations Plan Response), a computer located in the NORAD bunker, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain:

Well, the WOPR spends all its time thinking about World War III. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it plays an endless series of war games. using all available information on the state of the world. The WOPR has already fought World War III, as a game, time and time again. It estimates Soviet responses to our responses to their responses and so on. Estimates damage. Counts the dead. Then it looks for ways to improve its score …

But early on in the movie, WOPR is made responsible not just for simulating World War III, but for running it. The rationale for this is that the men in the missile silos can’t be relied upon to launch their missiles when ordered to, which would undermine US deterrence of a Soviet first strike. The trouble is that the geek hero, high school student and slacker David Lightman, has hacked into WOPR — or rather Joshua, its alter ego — and inadvertently caused it to start playing its primary wargame, Global Thermonuclear War, for real. The big screens at NORAD start showing phantom Soviet ICBM launches and bomber penetrations. The DEFCON level drops perilously close to all-out war. General Berenger, the NORAD commander, must decide whether he should recommend to the President that the US launch its missiles in response to what looks like an all-out nuclear assault on the US. The computer scientist who designed Joshua, Professor Falken, tries to convince him otherwise, in a key exchange which highlights the ultimate illogic of mutually assured destruction:

Falken: General, what you see on these screens up here is a fantasy. A computer-enhanced hallucination. Those blips are not real missiles. They’re phantoms.
McKittrick: There’s nothing to indicate a simulation. Everything’s working perfectly.
F: Does it make any sense?
Berenger: Does what make any sense?
F: That! [points at the screens]
B: Look, I don’t have time for a conversation right now.
F: General, are you prepared to destroy the enemy?
B: You betcha!
F: Do you think they know that?
B: I believe we’ve made that clear enough.
F: Then … don’t. Tell the president to ride out the attack. General, do you really believe that the enemy would attack without provocation, using so many missiles and subs, so that we would have no choice but to totally annihilate them? General, you are listening to a machine. Do the world a favour and don’t act like one.

Which works. But then Joshua starts trying to crack the launch codes by brute force attack, in order to launch the missiles itself. As Falken had earlier remarked, he had never been able to teach Joshua the most important lesson of all: when to give up. Luckily, he and Lightman figure out how to use the futility of tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) to do just that, just in time to stop Armageddon. In a spectacular sequence, Joshua then plays through all the real-world scenarios it had been programmed to play, finds that they all lead to both sides being wiped out, and concludes that global thermonuclear war is a ‘Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.’

It’s very simplistic, sure, but considering the age level WarGames was pitched at, it was a pretty good introduction to the concepts of deterrence, mutually assured destruction, escalation, and so on. A very timely one, too, in the era of the Reagan military buildup, a succession of ailing Soviet leaders, and potential flashpoints all around the world. And it’s with respect to the geopolitical instability of the time that I end with the following list of all the scenarios played by Joshua in the last few scenes of the film (as far as I can make out anyway):

U.S. FIRST STRIKE
USSR FIRST STRIKE
Pre-emptive nuclear strikes by each superpower against the other’s homeland.
NATO / WARSAW PACT
FAR EAST STRATEGY
Evidently scenarios which begin with friction in Europe and Asia respectively (possibly Korea, otherwise oddly missing from the list).
US USSR ESCALATION
Well, that seems a bit generic …
USSR CHINA ATTACK
Plausible enough, the USSR and China having fallen out since the 1960s. China had a huge army, but was massively outgunned in nuclear weapons.
INDIA PAKISTAN WAR
Again, plausible enough. Rivals since 1947, fighting three wars in that time. Pakistan was an American ally, India theoretically non-aligned but buying a lot of Soviet military kit. Plus India had already joined the nuclear club.
MEDITERRANEAN WAR
A bit generic, and hard to see how a war would have started there. Maybe a clash between NATO allies Turkey and Greece?
HONGKONG VARIANT
Variant of what? Of course, Hong Kong was still in British hands at this time, so presumably there was an occupation or siege by China. But if that had happened, would anyone have gone to war over it?
SEATO DECAPITATING
Hmm. SEATO, an alliance of Western and Asian countries, was dissolved in 1977, six years before the film’s release. Maybe WOPR’s database needed updating. ‘Decapitating’ is an interesting word, perhaps suggesting attacks on SEATO capitals?
CUBAN PROVOCATION
And they are still provocative, though the end is perhaps in sight.
INADVERTENT [...]
ATLANTIC HEAVY
‘Heavy’ is suggestive, but of what exactly is unclear.
CUBAN PARAMILITARY
NICARAGUAN PREEMPTIVE
The Sandinistas had taken over Nicaragua in 1979. Maybe a preemptive US attack to stop them spreading socialism throughout central America?
PACIFIC T[E]RRITORIAL
BURMESE [THE]ATERWIDE
A military-socialist regime controlled Burma at this time, though I’m unsure of its geopolitical alignment.
TURKISH [DE]COY
NATO [...]T
ANGENTINA ESCALATION [sic]
This was just after the Falklands War. Though Angentina had nothing to do with that.
ICELAND MAXIMUM
Iceland, part of NATO, had a crucial position in the middle of the GIUK (Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom) gap, guarding the Atlantic sealanes from the Soviet navy.
ARABIAN THEATERWIDE
Oil. ‘Nuff said.
U.S. SUBVERSION
The enemy within.
[AUS]TRALIAN MANEUVER
Hey, what did we do? Oh yeah: Pine Gap. Nurrangar. North-west Cape.
[...]AN DIVERSION
[...] LIMITED
SUDAN SURPRISE
Well, yes, starting a worldwide nuclear apocalypse over Sudan would be a surprise …
NATO TERRITORIAL
Meaning what? Soviet incursions into NATO territory?
ZAIRE ALLIANCE
The state formerly known as Congo had been the site of a proxy war between the US and USSR, in the early 1960s.
ICELAND [IN]CIDENT
ENGLISH [ESC]ALATION
Presumably they mean the trigger-happy British.
ZAIRE [...]N
E[...]ITARY
MIDDLE EAST HEAVY
MEXICAN TAKEOVER
Maybe what happens if you don’t preemptively strike Nicaragua?
CHAD ALERT
That’s even less plausible than the Sudan.
SAUDI MANEUVER
AFRICAN [TERRI]TORIAL
ETHIOPIA[N ESC]ALATI[ON]
Not a happy country at this time.
CANADI[AN ...]
TURKISH HEAVY
NATO INCURSION
Maybe NATO is the aggressor here?
U.S. DEFENSE
Another blandly generic title.
CAMBODIAN HEAVY
PACT MEDIUM
As in Warsaw Pact.
ARCTIC MINIMAL
MEXIC[AN D]OMESTIC
TAIWAN THEATERWIDE
One of the classic flashpoints, even today.
PACIFIC MANEUVER
PORTUGAL REVOLUTION
It had had a revolution in 1974, and was now pretty democratic. Maybe a counter-revolution?
ALBANIAN DECOY
PALISTINIAN LOC[AL]
Perhaps an intifada draws in neighbouring Arab countries and then Soviet and American patrons?
M[ORO]CCAN MINIMA[L]
[...]RIAN DIVERS[ION]
CZECH OPTION
This is only 15 years after the Prague spring, of course.
FRENCH ALLIANCE
Intriguing. Perhaps France pulling out of NATO, and maybe allying with the Soviets?
ARABIAN CLANDESTINE
GABON REBELLION
NORTHERN MAX[IMU]M
[...]RIAN SU[RPRIS]E
[...]SH PARA[MILIT]ARY
SEATO TAKEOVER
HAWAIIAN ESCALATION
Pearl Harbor was (and is) still a key US naval base. But how would escalation have worked? The nearest Soviets were many thousands of kilometres away …
IRANIAN MANEUVER
Actually, it’s surprising that Iran doesn’t feature more heavily in this list, given that the revolution and the hostage crisis were only a few years back.
NATO CONTAINMENT
SWISS [INC]IDENT
Hard to think of what sort of Swiss incident might have sparked a general war.
CUBA[N MIN]IMAL
CHAD [...]RT
ICELAND ESCALATION
VIETNAMESE RETALIATIO [sic]
Probably something involving China (which unsuccessfully attacked in 1979) rather than the US.
SYRIAN PROVOCATION
Towards Israel, presumably — probably the Golan Heights.
LIBYAN LOCAL
Gaddafi, one of the classic foes of America in the Reagan years.
GABON TAKEOVER
Gabon again. Why? Am I missing something?
ROMANIAN WAR
Interesting. Romania was, or at least at times appeared to be, semi-detached from the Warsaw Pact in the Ceaucescu era. Maybe here it tries to break away completely and asks for NATO intervention. But I’m pretty sure they would have said ‘no, are you crazy?’
MIDDLE EAST OFFENSIVE
DENMARK MASSIVE
Perhaps the Soviet Baltic Fleet attempts a breakout …
CHILE CONFRONTATION
This was the Pinochet era. Chile had a number of territorial disputes on the books, so it could have been with any of its neighbours.
S.AFRICAN SUBVERSION
White South Africa’s worst nightmare. Well, one of them, anyway. Not completely implausible given the wave of usually socialist inspired independence governments and revolutionary movements in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.
USSR ALERT
NICARAGUAN THRUST
GREENLAND DOMESTIC
Greenland would barely have enough people to start a riot, surely? But I suppose it was important strategically.
ICELAND HEAVY
KENYA OPTION
PACIFIC DEFENSE
UGANDA MAXIMUM
THAI SUBVERSION
One of the few reliably pro-Western states in this part of the world.
ROMANIAN STRIKE
PAKISTAN SOVEREIGNTY
AFGHAN MISDIRECTION
That’s the third time I’ve fallen for that this week … Maybe a Soviet offensive against the Mujahadeen is actually a cover for a move against Pakistan or Iran?
THAI VARIATION
NORTHERN TERRITORIAL
POLISH PARAMILITARY
This was the Solidarity period — Poland was under martial law when the film was being made.
S.AFRICAN OFFENSIVE
PANAMA MISDIRECTION
Panama of course had the canal, so it was strategically important.
SCANDINAVIAN DOMESTIC
JORDAN PREEMPTIVE
ENGLISH THRUST
BURMESE MANEUVER
SPAIN COUNTER
Spain had just joined NATO, but was a bit iffy on the matter, and furthermore prone to revolutions and civil wars …
ARABIAN OFFENSIVE
CHAD INTERDICTION
TAIWAN MISDIRECTION
BANGLADESH THEATERWID [sic]
ETHIOPIAN LOCAL
ITALIAN TAKEOVER
By the Red Brigades?
VIETNAMESE INCIDENT
ENGLISH PREEMPTIVE
DENMARK ALTERNATE
THAI CONFRONTATION
TAIWAN SURPRISE
BRAZILIAN STRIKE
VENEZUELA SUDDEN
MAYLASIAN ALERT [sic]
ISREAL DISCRETIONARY [sic]
It’s really not a good idea to let the work experience kids near your script …
LIBYAN ACTION
PALISTINIAN TACTICAL [sic]
NATO ALTERNATE
CYPRESS MANEUVER [sic]
EGYPT MISDIRECTION
BANGLADESH THRUST
KENYA DEFENSE
BANGLADESH CONTAINMEN [sic]
VIETNAMESE STRIKE
ALBANIAN CONTAINMENT
GABON SURPRISE
Again?
IRAQ SOVEREIGNTY
There’s a familiar name. It was deep into its war with Iran at the time. But maybe a Kurdish rebellion or something?
VIETNAMESE SUDDEN
LEBANON INTERDICTION
TAIWAN DOMESTIC
ALGERIAN SOVEREIGNTY
ARABIAN STRIKE
ATLANTIC SUDDEN
Perhaps a sudden thrust by the Red Banner fleet?
MONGOLIAN THRUST
One of my favourite Soviet satellite states. Presumably some sort of conflict with China (well, there was nobody else with a border with Mongolia …)
POLISH DECOY
ALASKAN DISCRETIONARY
CANADIAN THRUST
ARABIAN LIGHT
S.AFRICAN DOMESTIC
PAKISTAN INCIDENT
MAYLASIAN MANEUVER [sic]
JAMAICA DECOY
Must have been some decoy …
MAYLASIAN MINIMAL [sic]
RUSSIAN SOVEREIGNTY
Interesting. I suppose there were any number of separatist movements, as indeed there still are.
CHAD OPTION
BANGLADESH WAR
BURMESE CONTAINMENT
ASIAN THEATERWIDE
BULGARIAN CLANDESTINE
GREENLAND INCURSION
EGYPT SURGICAL
CZECH HEAVY
TAIWAN CONFRONTATION
GREENLAND MAXIMUM
UGANDA OFFENSIVE
CASPIAN DEFENSE
Defence against who? Iran?

OK, so some of those scenarios appear to have been generated at random, but there are still some clues as to what parts of the world a Hollywood screenwriter thought might ignite a nuclear war, c. 1983.

Via Old is the New New, MONIAC, the MOnetary National Income Automatic Computer: an analogue hydraulic computer designed by A. W. Phillips, a New Zealander, while a student at the LSE in 1949. The prototype was apparently built out of spare Lancaster parts. And there’s one on display at the University of Melbourne, otherwise known as ‘my uni’, so obviously I had to go and have a look at it!

The MONIAC is currently on the 1st floor of the Economics and Commerce building (on the Parkville campus, off Professors Walk), just opposite the lifts, if anyone wants to visit (though it will probably move to the new building on Berkeley St when that’s finished). It’s a bit over 6 feet high. The bit of paper stuck to the door reads:

MONIAC stands for:
Monetary National Income Analogue Computer

The MONIAC is a hydraulic model of the economy which was used originally in the teaching of economies. Today, econometric modelling is undertaken in modern Research Computer Laboratories. Visit the Commerce Research Laboratory on this floor to compare the vastly changed environment for teaching and research.

The MONIAC was designed by A. W. Phillips, (an engineer turned economist of “Phillips Curve” fame) who constructed a working model of the Keynesian System utilising coloured water (representing incomes, expenditures, etc) flowing through pipes.

Only 3 or 4 models were built and this is the only known model in Australia. A working model is located in London. The cost of restoring this MONIAC to working has been quoted in the vicinity of $40,000+!

BY THE WAY:

The “Computer” had a reputation for leaking during demonstration!

Could this be the origin of terms used a great deal by Keynesian Economists namely, “Injections” and “Leakages”?

Expressions of interest in contributing to the restoration may be made to the Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce.

However, Wikipedia says that there were 12 to 14 units made. MONIAC caused a sensation at the time (at least among economists!), and was lampooned in Punch. His creation probably helped put Phillips on the fast-track to a full professorship.

The working model in London would be one that’s at the Science Museum; there’s another at Cambridge, and the original prototype is being restored at Leeds.

The national income tank, with a blue pipe (on the left) feeding it in to the rest of the economy. Eventually, the tank gets replenished by greater or lesser amounts, depending on how much is diverted to other parts of the economy. One problem I can see is that it’s a closed system — there’s no way for the economy to grow. Though apparently somebody did link a couple of MONIACs together to show how two economies would interact!

This is where the blue pipe leads to. You can see that part of income gets siphoned off as taxes, the rest going into (naturally enough) income after taxes. The taxes go to government expenditure, income after taxes to savings and (mostly) consumption. There’s a diagram here, which explains it all better than I could.

Back when I was doing computational modelling in a very different domain (astrophysics), we’d sometimes refer to running a model as ‘cranking the handle’. It would have been more fun with actual handles to crank, like this one! Though of course, these would be used to modify variables (e.g. how much is paid in taxes) and not to actually run the simulation.

Here’s one of the outputs, showing national income over time: presumably the board would move from right to left and a pen would move up or down, recording the level of fluid in the income tank (shown in the second photo from the top). But probably more important than this graph was simply watching the fluid (money) pump around the computer (economy); apparently it gave a very vivid and intuitive understanding of the effects a change in one variable would have on another.

The on-off switches for the recorders and pumps, and the name of the manufacturer: Air Trainers Ltd, of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. Now this is interesting. As the name suggests, Air Trainers (later Air Trainers Link; later still, General Precision Systems; then in 1967 it was acquired by Redifon, another pioneer of aircraft simulators, and renamed Redifon Air Trainers) made flight simulators, which attempt to imitate the experience of piloting an aeroplane without the need to actually leave the ground. (Something like the Link Trainer, but more sophisticated.) In 1959, for example, they made a simulator for the new Vickers Vanguard, a turboprop airliner. They also made simulators for military aircraft too.

I’ve written before about something closely related to flight simulators, a bombing teacher and the idea of simulation. With Phillips’ help, admittedly, in MONIAC, Air Trainers seems to have gotten past the idea of simulation by imitation and gone on to simulation by abstraction, if still in a physical way. MONIAC would have drawn on some of the company’s strengths, not only in simulation but in hydraulics (an essential component of a flight simulator). And after MONIAC, Air Trainers/Air Trainers Link seems to have kept dabbling in the field of analogue computers. In 1958, they built MAC (simply, Mechanical Analogue Computer), which could solve 4th-order differential equations: Imperial College had one, which is probably the one now in the possession of the Science Museum. Probably related are two patents taken out by people working at Air Trainers Link in 1954 for ‘Improvements in and relating to analogue computers’. They were evidently also looking towards the digital future — there’s a 1959 paper in The Computer Journal from another Air Trainers Link worker about a method for separation of variables, which includes notes ‘on programming the problem for a digital computer’.

This all sounds a bit warfare state, doesn’t it? (Though whether in a deep way or a shallow way, I’m not sure). Consider: (i) Air Link seems to have specialised in simulators for civil aviation, but they also made military ones too. And presumably their expertise was developed during the war, perhaps with Redifon; and anyway Britain’s civil aviation industry was an offshoot of its military one. (ii) In Britain, analogue computers — admittedly electromechanical, not hydromechanical! — started out as aids in solving problems in atomic physics, but then were used for everything from code-breaking to dam-busting (Barnes Wallis supposedly used a Meccano computer for some of his calculations! Though this could just be a myth) (iii) Phillips built his prototype out of RAF surplus kit — pumps and a Lancaster’s windscreen wipers. Before the war, he studied electrical engineering in Britain and joined the RAF in 1940, which sent him to Singapore as a munitions officer. He spent the years 1942 to 1945 in a POW camp in Java, which was brutally used as a source of labour by the Japanese; those who knew him suggested that this experience led him to turn after the war from engineering to sociology and then economics. (iv) Before 1939, government expenditure in Britain was about 10% of GDP; this rose to a massive 54% in the war. So the idea of modelling a national economy must have been attractive to economists after 6 years of a semi-planned wartime economy. ‘At the level of national planning was the consequence, not the cause, of high arms production. It was a means of accomodation to the needs of the warfare state.’¹

A good source on MONIAC is Chris Bissell, “The Moniac: a hydromechanical analog computer of the 1950s”, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, February 2007, 69-74; on Phillips, see Robert Leeson, “A. W. H. Phillips M.B.E. (Military Division)”, The Economic Journal 104 (1994), 605-18 (JSTOR). Phillips was a remarkable man. In between New Zealand and Britain, he swagged his way around Australia (working as a crocodile hunter for a while), China (just as the Japanese attacked in 1937) and the Soviet Union (took the Trans-Siberian to Europe). His MBE was awarded for his actions during the evacuation from Singapore, when his transport came under air attack. His citation reads, in part:

he obtained an unmounted machine gun, quickly improvised a successful mounting and operated the gun from the boat deck with outstanding courage for the whole period of the attack which lasted for 3½ hours. Even when the section deck from which he was operating was hit by a bomb, Flying Officer Phillips continued to set a most valuable example of coolness, steadiness and fearlessness to all in the vicinity

While in the POW camp at Bandung (where he met the legendary Australian doctor ‘Weary’ Dunlop), he built a secret radio which enabled the prisoners to keep track of news in the outside world, and, perhaps even more impressively, an immersion heater so that two thousand POWs could have a hot cuppa before bedtime. The Japanese guards could never figure out why the camp’s lights dimmed every night at 10pm.

After a successful career in economics, Phillips switched careers yet again, becoming a Sinologist. He died in Auckland in 1975.

1. David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 72.

While in York Castle Museum, I was surprised to come across Black-Out, a ’skilful card game — full of interest’. It’s one of the British war games I mentioned in a previous post. At that time I only had a low-res photo from the BBC website to go on, so I was glad of the chance for a closer look.

So here’s what I can make out of the gameplay. There are up to four players who driving a car or lorry across a blacked-out London. Each player starts in a corner of the map corresponding to the colour of their vehicle, and presumably wins by getting to the opposite corner. (The corners are Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch, Holborn, Charing Cross.) The board is a map of London which bears some relation to the actual geography of the city (as Monopoly does not). But it’s not marked into squares or numbers or anything, so it’s a bit unclear how movement works.

One clue is the arrows drawn across the streets at intervals, each with a symbol beside it. These symbols seem to relate to various civil defence organisations or objects: Air Raid Precautions, Auxiliary Fire Service London, Metropolitan Police (?), fire hose, fire helmet, buckets of sand, fire extinguishers (?), a siren (?), a kerbside pillar of some sort (?), a red cross, a yellow cross, a blue and white ribbon (?). Presumably they are obstacles of some sort (and maybe opportunities too), and it’s the successful navigation through these hazards which determines success or failure.

Another clue is that there seem to be three different directions a player can go in from each corner, so from Hyde Park Corner they could go down Park Lane, Piccadilly or Constitution Hill. It’s a ’skilful game’, so I think the player gets to choose which direction to go in, which way to turn at corners. Since it doesn’t seem that the players could interact with each other (i.e. to slow each other down somehow), there’s probably some random element too, or else there wouldn’t be much replayability once the fastest routes have been figured out. It’s also a ‘card game’, but unfortunately none of the cards are shown, so I can only guess at what they might do. One possibility is that they dictate movement (e.g. ‘move to the nearest AFS post’). Another is they are random events (e.g. ‘you fail to stop at a sentry point and the Home Guard shoots you dead’).

That’s about all I can say from the information to hand, except to add that it must date to between 1938 and 1941 (the years the AFS operated). It looks like it could be an amusing game for children, with more possibilities for skill than Snakes and Ladders type games, and with the added bonus of teaching a bit of London geography. But it’s also a reflection of life in a city made strange and unfamiliar by the hazards of the blackout.

Yet another British war game to add to the pile, this one from 1922: The Raider.

A copy of a new game called “The Raider” has been received from Enstone and Lilienfeld, of 47, Berners Street, W.1. The game consists of a large sheet divided into squares, the whole showing a view of a battle-front seen from the air. The game is played with miniature attacking and defending aircraft, and is further complicated by machine gun and shrapnel barrage, contrary winds and failing engines. Moves are made by throwing dice, the object being for the attacking force — 3 in number — to reach and bomb a village and return intact.

The defending force is 9 in number, and these take off from two different aerodromes. The game, which was invented by an officer of the R.A.F., is so designed that experience in the gentle art of scrapping in the air is of considerable value to the players. The price is 5s. net.

Incidentally, Messrs Enstone and Lilienfeld, by whom the game is made and marketed, are ex-officers of the R.A.F., and they have besides a most amazing selection of “Brainwave” games and implements with which to pass the time amusingly.¹

This is rather interesting, especially given the timing: about 5 weeks after P. R. C. Groves popularised the knock-out blow in a series of articles The Times. I think you could just about knock together a boardgame in that time; on the other hand, Messrs Enstone and Lilienfeld might have working on it for some time and it may just be a coincidence. The object is to bomb (or defend) a village, which could be considered a civilian target, though given that the map is described as a ‘battle-front’ I’d say it’s more likely that it’s being attacked to support ground operations. The defenders out-number the attackers by three to one, which seems unusual in these sorts of games: normally the forces are quite symmetrical. It suggests a “bomber will always get through” mentality, but it could also just as easily be the result of the way the game is set up (for example, perhaps the defending player gets to choose where their aerodromes are, but does so before the attacker: they would then be at a severe disadvantage unless they had more units to play with). And the suggestion that the game is ’so designed that experience in the gentle art of scrapping in the air is of considerable value to the players’ implies that the rules allow the possibility for aerial manoeuvring and are in some sense intended to be “realistic” rather than abstract (as do the rules about AA, wind and engine failure), though I wonder how that works given that movement is said to be based on die rolls.

Google seems not to know about The Raider so presumably it wasn’t a big seller, despite the Aeroplane’s best efforts.

1. Aeroplane, 3 May 1922, p. 312.

I’ve been reading the Daily Mail quite a lot since I’ve been here, but only issues published in 1940 or earlier. So I’m grateful to Jakob for pointing me in the direction of an article in today’s edition about German boardgames from the Second World War. It’s fascinating, but why is it news? Ostensibly because a German collector is auctioning them in Britain, but really the point would seem to be to contrast the bloodthirsty German kids of 1940 with their far more innocent British counterparts:

During the dark days of the Second World War, British children passed the time with marbles, hopscotch, tiddlywinks and, for a lucky few, a Monopoly set.

But over in Germany, the amusements were far less innocent.

In one version of bagatelle named Bombers over England, children as young as four were encouraged to blow up settlements by firing a spring-driven ball on to a board featuring a map of Britain and the tip of Northern Europe.

Players were awarded a maximum 100 points for landing on London, while Liverpool was worth 40.

It’s not just the Mail either. Says the Sun:

WARTIME Nazi board games rewarding German children for “blowing up” British targets have been unearthed.

The 1940s toys show that while UK kids played marbles and tiddlywinks, German youngsters were trying to score points by destroying London.

The Daily Mirror titles its story “Sick ‘blast Brits’ Nazi toys found” and adds that ‘Board games based on snakes and ladders and battleships also get a disturbing Nazi twist’.

Well, Nazis are an easy target, aren’t they — even juvenile ones. But of course, as I’ve discussed here recently, British children played war games too, so it’s really rather silly to pretend that they spent the whole war playing tiddlywinks, whereas the kinder on the other side of the North Sea were plotting the destruction of Britain. And to their credit, most of the commenters on the articles have seen through this too (one even mentioned L’Attaque!)

My only caveat here is that the British games I wrote about previously are rather more defensive in orientation — showing Britain attacked, not attacking. But I did wonder if there might have been games of a more offensive nature. And it seems that there were! Two of the commenters on the (would you believe) Metro article list the names of a number of games made in the Second World War and mostly, it would seem, inspired by Bomber Command’s raids on Germany:

• Raiders and Fighters
• Pinpoint the Bomber, designed by Francis Chichester
• Target for Tonight, a ”Snakes and Ladders’ based game where the object is to be first to drop your bombs over Berlin’
• Ariel Combat [sic; presumably "Aerial Combat"]
• The Way to Berlin
• Bomber Command

The sources are even given: the first three are described in Peter Doyle and Paul Evans, The Home Front: British Wartime Memorabilia, 1939-1945 (Crowood Press, 2007); the latter three are in the British Museum though I didn’t see them there! The only one of these I can find mention of online is the one by Chichester, which looks like it was designed to teach map-reading and navigational skills. It’s actually a book¹ and sounds a little bit Choose Your Own Adventure-ish to me! The flyleaf is said to read:

Pinpoint the Bomber describes a new form of game and a large map of the territory from Kent to the Rhineland is provided. The player is given the necessary clues to his position and must tax his skills and ingenuity to deduce from them exactly where he is, in other words to “pinpoint” the bomber on the map.

To players who have no direct interest in flying, the test of their ability has all the fascination of a detective story or crossword puzzle.

At the same time, they will be thrilled to read of the difficulties besetting an air-navigator on an operational raid into Germany, by following the progress of the raid on a map exactly to the same scale as the maps used by our navigators when raiding Germany, and by studying actual air photographs of enemy territory.

Players who hope one day to become air navigators can learn more about the art and principles of map-reading from two hours with the game than from two hundred hours air experience if untrained

And one of the entries in the book reads:

Item 16. Heavy flack ! The pilot takes avoiding action, but you forget to record his changes in course. After 3 minutes you do not know where you are. But, with a luck you certainly don’t deserve you see through a very small gap in the clouds the junction of a large river and a canal-river. This junction is at the North end of a town, the canal-river runs south west through the middle of it…

(Apparently Aalst, near Brussels.)

This is absolutely fascinating and I’m going to have to have a look at this next time I’m in the BL!

But getting back to the German games, none of them appear to be proto-wargames in the sense I discussed previously: they are all too symmetric. As far as one can tell from the pictures (the Mail has a few, and the Sun has a slideshow as well) they are just adaptations of more traditional games, and so the mechanics have nothing to do with war as such. (Gotta love the Axis and Allies-style plastic ships and planes, though, in what I assume is Mit “Prien” gegen England.)

Perhaps most interesting is the one which doesn’t fit into the “German kids wanted to destroy London!” theme. From the Mail again:

Incredibly a fourth, titled “V Game”, plots an altogether different attack - on Hitler himself. Inspired by tiddlywinks, players flick coloured ‘V-1 rockets’ into a game board boasting targets of the Fuhrer and his cronies.

Mr Westwood-Brookes said: “It is a most unbelievable act of courage on the part of its makers. It is hardly the sort of thing you would want to be found with if the Gestapo came calling.”

Indeed; you’d have to think it was practically suicidal. But that’s assuming the interpretation given is correct. The last photo on the Mail page would appear to be the game in question (it’s clearly wrongly captioned). The Nazi leaders as targets are Hitler, Goering, von Ribbentrop, Goebbels, Himmler, von Papen and von Rundstedt. The last two are a bit odd: von Papen surely was not particularly influential during the war (he was ambassador to Turkey, 1939-44); von Rundstedt was of course one of the highest-ranking army officers, not a Nazi leader as such. But there are cities as targets also: six letters spelling out B E R L I N, then Hamburg, Stuttgart, and so on (Danzig is there so presumably it was made after 1939). A subversive game about trying to knock off the Nazi leadership (using V1s!) is perhaps plausible — but is it likely that in such a game you’d be trying to blow up German cities too? It doesn’t seem so to me. Maybe V is for Victory and it’s actually an Allied game — but then the city names are German (München, not Munich). Maybe it’s Allied propaganda? I can’t really make sense of this game, so I’ll just have to assume that whoever is selling it has a better idea than me.

Update: I see the BBC also has this story. It says the following about V Game (I think):

The games also include one possibly made in liberated Belgium in late 1944, where players throw crude darts at a board denoting German cities and representations of the Nazi regime. The bullseye is Adolf Hitler.

Well, that does sound like the game in the picture. So is V Game something else or has the story changed? A liberated country probably makes more sense than Germany as the origin for the game as described.

Unfortunately the Beeb, like the tabloids, can’t resist quoting the auction house’s historian about the huge gulf in national characteristics on display by these games:

They say a lot about the Nazis, and about the German regime. Our kids were still playing trains and Meccano and hopscotch and things like that.

But also things not like that.

Update 2: the BBC have more than made up for previously going along with the herd by publishing an excellent article on British war games of the period. So we have still more examples of the genre: Decorate Goering — A Party Game, The Battle of the River Plate, The Allies Dart Game, Dash to Berlin, A.R.P., Night Raiders, Hang your Washing on the Siegfried Line, Chase the Enemy, Air-Scouts! The Great Air Flight Game, Black-Out, and something called Monopoly (but isn’t). The last three are mentioned in the slide show; Black-Out in particular looks rather intriguing — with its map of London from Holborn to Hyde Park Corner, it looks like it may be about the perils of trying to navigate the city in pitch-blackness.

Thanks again to Jakob for the tip!

1. Francis Chichester. Pinpoint the Bomber: A Game, in Textbook Form, to Teach the Principles of Map Reading. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:

According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)

The caption also says that the game itself was similar to Battleship. But as you can see above, each player can see their opponent’s pieces, which is kind of exactly unlike Battleship (where the point is to guess where the enemy ships are). I’d suggest that since the pieces are blank on one side, it’s more like Stratego, where you can see where the opposing pieces are, but not what they are. The pieces in Stratego have number values, and so do those in Aviation:

• Scout: 1
• Bomber: 2
• Bristol Fighter: 3
• Battle Plane: 4
• Troop Carrier: 4.5
• Airship: 5
• Three Battleplanes: 7
• Commodore’s Squadron: 8
• Vice-Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 9
• Air Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 10

There are also some pieces which don’t have any assigned values: Observation Balloon, Searchlight, and Anti-Aircraft Gun (3, 4 or 5 Miles). Presumably these correspond to some combination of the bombs, spies and flags in Stratego — guns for bombs, searchlight for spies and balloon for flag might make sense, although there is also a double-square labelled “Aerodrome” on each player’s side which doesn’t seem to have any obvious correlate in Stratego (they are too far back to be choke points, maybe they are actually the flags?)

It turns out I could have saved myself the trouble with a bit of Googling: the third message on this Stratego website confirms that Aviation is a Stratego variant; or rather that both are derived from a common French ancestor patented in 1909, L’Attaque! Aviation came well before the American game, and its maker, H. P. Gibson, also published L’Attaque in Britain, along with a naval version (Dover Patrol) and an air-land-sea version (Tri-Tactics). In fact, Gibson’s games were very popular and went through several editions into the 1960s. BoardGameGeeks has pages on all four of them, including photos of the components and even scans of some of the rules (for the later editions, though). So now it becomes clear that the enemy Aerodrome in Aviation is indeed the objective; you have to land one of your Troop Carriers on it to capture it. Interesting, but not exactly orthodox air strategy in 1920!

The Imperial War Museum had even more war-themed games on display. This one is called From the Ranks to Field Marshal, and is clearly basically Snakes and Ladders: you start out as a private, trooper, gunner or sapper, roll a die, move your piece along, and follow any instructions on the square.

Sometimes this is good (’Rescues a comrade under heavy fire. Promoted 1 rank, and receives Distinguished Service Order’), sometimes bad (’Court Martial. Tried for incompetence’ — 1 in 6 chance of being reduced 4 ranks). The first to land on 100 exactly becomes a Field Marshal and wins; though the game can end in other ways and then it’s the highest ranked player who wins. The IWM’s captions don’t say much other than repeat the game’s name, so I don’t know when exactly it was published. It was in a case on “The military and naval origins of the [First World] War” but it was clearly actually made during the war itself, between 1914 and the end of 1915, as French is one of the field marshals shown in the centre, alongside Kitchener; presumably Haig would have been shown after 1915. Not that either French or Kitchener rose through the ranks to field marshal (who had by then? Wully Robertson didn’t until after the war) of course, but it’s interesting that the game does make you start at the bottom, instead of giving you a plum commission in the Hussars. So it seems like it’s designed to appeal across the classes, and perhaps encourage young working-class lads to think they could make it to the top through hard work and straight shooting. (Though presumably the war would be over before the Snakes and Ladders-playing cohort reached military age!)

Moving on a world war, it seems that card games had become popular. It’s harder to work out what the rules for these might be, but presumably they again were adapted from already existing games. The above is an advertisement aimed at retailers for a game called Who’s Who or Food for Thought, ‘for delivery during October, 1939’, so quite likely was rushed into production just after the declaration of war.

OK, I think I’ve partly worked this one out: it looks like you have to try and collect triplets, where one card has an important figure’s name, another has an incomplete sentence describing that person, and the last one has an illustration and word which completes the sentence, which cleverly rhymes with the word in bold on the second card. So for example: ‘Winston Churchill’/'Shows he is the true fighting type, ignoring all Nazis [sic] scandalous’/'Tripe’ (and there’s a picture of some tripe — I assume). Sounds pretty trivial — I think I’d rather be playing From The Ranks To Field Marshal, to be honest!

This one is called Evacuation, I would guess from the first evacuation at the start of the war rather than the one during the Blitz, but can’t really be sure. There are at least three types of cards: Householder, Evacuee and (I think) Teacher — though the Evacuee cards seem to be subdivided with the red letter in the corner: B, G, M and perhaps A). Each has a comic figure — Mona Mudd is one of the evacuee children, for example, who has fallen into a puddle. Possibly, then, the game is depicting in light-hearted fashion the difficulties everyone involved had in adjusting to the new living arrangements.

But to return to the First World War period, and to board games, the most intriguing game out of all of these is War Tactics or Can Great Britain be Invaded? This time I’ve manage to find it in the IWM Collections database, as EPH 2701 and EPH 2702, and there it is dated to c. 1911. My initial thought was that it was from during the war, but on balance, I’d probably agree with the comment there that it reflects ‘the production and widespread popularity of anti-German ‘war scare’ literature of the period’.¹

The pieces here are Dread Nought (3 dots), Cruiser (2 dots), Torpedo Boat (1 dot), Sub, an unnamed piece which is obviously a monoplane, and one which has 16 dots on it and no picture — I’m guessing this is meant to be a ground unit. But what is most intriguing is the map:

The thing about Aviation and the other Stratego-style games, along with other stylised representations of warfare like chess, is that they are almost completely symmetrical. No matter which side you’re playing, the board is the same, the forces are the same and the objective is the same. About the only asymmetry is that somebody has to go first. This does make such games very evenly-balanced, and so the result will on balance come down to skill. But as a representation of warfare, it’s not in the least realistic (except in certain circumstances, particularly the more tactical you go, I guess). Each side in a battle or war has very different forces at its disposal, in terms of numbers, equipment, training and morale. And each side will be constrained by the geography it has to fight from or in, and each side will likely have different objectives in the war. Abstract games like chess or Stratego don’t have asymmetry, which is why they might be war games, but aren’t really wargames as currently understood.

But the map for War Tactics is clearly very asymmetric, as it’s based on the actual geography of the North Sea. Naval bases are placed not to make a “good” or “fair” game, but because that’s where they really were. The eastern coast of England does look inviting for the Germans because of the lack of bases, but then the British cities are spread out both north and south: which way to go? It also looks like the British can try to invade Germany, but good luck getting in close to the German coast. I’m not saying this is a particularly accurate depiction of the North Sea strategic situation ca. 1911 — for one thing it does look like the German and British forces might be symmetric in number and capability, which is rather unhistorical; and anyway I don’t know what the rules are — but it is at least a partial recognition that not all is fair in war, just as in love. So some props are due Lowe and Carr of Belvoir Street, Leicester, for creating an early ancestor of the strategic wargame.

I was going to leave it there, but I came across a couple of things on the net that I have to mention. One is from a Time article published on 14 December 1942, about the current vogue for military games. It talks about Gibson and the French origins of L’Attaque, but says he independently came up with Dover Patrol. It also mentions that the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes — who also rather liked very big aeroplanes — invented his own Little Wars-style wargame played on a huge table with 14 (!) players a side. Games could last for years — if you had the right stuff, that is:

The game occasionally took a tragic turn. Rear Admiral William B. Fletcher, long a regular player, lost eight capital ships one night and was so humiliated that he never returned. Another friend, after being court-martialed one evening for losing an entire army, lay on a sofa and cried.

Such are the burdens of command.

The other interesting thing I came across was that Dennis Wheatley, the best-selling author of thrillers in the 1930s who went on to write strategic appreciations for the Joint Planning Staff during the war (his Times obit claims it was his idea to remove all the signposts in Britain!), invented several strategy games which appear to be at least geographically asymmetric. One, called Invasion, was published in 1938, and was popular enough to go through a few editions. The publisher’s description is as follows:

ATTACK & DEFENCE
by Land, Sea and Air
A thrilling battle of wits in which 2, 3 or 4 players have as their playing pieces the armed forces of the Navy, Army and Air Force.
The Battlefield is a Map in the size of approximately 24 inches square, PRINTED IN SIX COLOURS with Capitals, Principal Towns and Forts named and a full Fighting Force of 160 Pieces with dice, shaker, etc.
You have to be ready to resist an invasion and at the same time send Expeditionary Forces to Allies.
A Game in which Young and Old can use their strategy to overcome the luck of the dice.

There’s a picture of the map here; it appears to be a Ruritanian representation of north-west Europe (the country off the coast is called Angleland, I think). It’s interesting that this came out in 1938; I can’t say I’m aware of much discussion of the possibility of an invasion of Britain at the time. But since Wheatley was helping plan anti-invasion strategies a couple of years later, Invasion perhaps should be considered as serious speculation, and not just a game.

Finally, just for completeness’ sake, I’ll mention two other war games I came across. From 1916 or so, there’s Trencho, ‘The Famous Australian War Game As Played in the Camps and Trenches’, which is apparently just Nine Men’s Morris. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but “Trencho” does sound very Australian! As does Spotto!, for that matter (second from the bottom), and indeed judging from the web it was originally a Bingo-like Australian car journey game (make lists of things to watch out for, cross them off when you see them, then shout “spotto!” when you’ve got them all). But again, I’ve never heard of it. This one is an aircraft recognition version, ‘OF INSTRUCTIVE VALUE TO: SPOTTERS, A.T.C.[,] R.O.C.[,] HOME GUARDS, SCOUTS, A.R.P., POLICE, SAILORS, SOLDIERS, AIRMEN, Etc.’ so obviously it’s British, ca. 1940, and not Australian — anyway, we didn’t get many Heinkels down our way!

My brain is fried after all that, but one last thought. Some of these games are evidently intended to be simulations of war, not just representations in some abstract way: War Tactics asks in its title, “can Great Britain be invaded?” and presumably players are invited to think that the game does provide an answer to that question. Did they in fact think so? And if so, did their game-playing affect their fears about the future one way or the other? If the German player in War Tactics won 7 times out of 10, did the players (presumably children) take that as a warning of what may come? Or did they just treat it as a harmless bit of fun? No doubt some did see it as just a game, but possibly not all. As a teenaged wargamer, one of my favourite games was GDW’s The Third World War, about the potential land and air war in Germany between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, ca. 1985. It was considerably more sophisticated than the proto-wargames discussed here, but not necessarily more accurate. I certainly thought it was, to some degree, accurate, however. Playing such games was one way in which I tried to understand the Cold War and what might happen in the future, and I do remember getting anxious when the Warsaw Pact won. I wanted NATO to win, because I would want NATO to win in a real war if it ever happened. In fact, I must admit I would sometimes cheat a bit in solitaire games, re-rolling die rolls in important battles to get a “fair” result. Pretty silly, any way you look at it; but I could understand some overly-sensitive boy in 1911, probably already immersed in le Queux and An Englishman’s Home, playing War Tactics and thinking that perhaps “Der Tag” was nearly upon him …

1. For example, looking at the map, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Holland are marked as neutrals, whereas France and Belgium seem to be British allies; this suggests a WWI setting. Except that Luxembourg is also neutral, and most of Belgium’s territory should be marked as a German conquest. Perhaps more tellingly, there’s no naval base at Scapa Flow — the closest is Cromarty (ie Invergordon). Given the great importance of Scapa Flow as the harbour for the Grand Fleet throughout the war, it’s hard to imagine that it would have been left out.

I don’t often mention the various history carnivals here, which makes me a bad netizen; but I’m trying to get into the habit of picking out my favourite post from the monthly Military History Carnival. MilHisCar III is now up, and although a great post on the military origins of the phrase “basket case” did catch my eye, I have to go with the two posts I myself nominated from Old is the New New, on the esoteric and military-industrial origins (via wargaming) of role-playing games. Further proof, if it were needed, that Rob MacDougall is king of the geek/historians!

The above drawing (click to enlarge), which appeared in the 3 May 1934 issue of Flight, depicts an ingenious bombing simulator manufactured by Vickers-Armstrongs — the Vickers-Bygrave Bombing Teacher. The basic idea is that an image of the area around a bomb target (which is printed on a glass plate) is projected onto the floor, scrolling along to represent the flight of the simulated aeroplane at 8000 or 9000 ft. The bomb aimer peers down at the image through a bomb sight, and sends course corrections to the pilot, who alters the flight path in response. An electro-mechanical linkage then moves the glass plate accordingly.

When the pupil has calculated the direction and force of the wind and has sighted on the target, he throws a switch which represents the bomb release. A device times an interval, equal to the time taken by the bomb to reach the ground, and at the end of this period the movement of the “ground” is stopped. Painted on the floor is a fixed “trail point,” which marks the point on which a correctly aimed bomb should drop. Any error may be seen by the difference in the position of the “target” and this fixed trail point.¹

Something very similiar seems to have been used by RAF Operational Training Units during the Second World War, though they were then called Air Ministry Bombing Teachers. (Presumably the Air Ministry’s in-house version, perhaps improved over the Vickers-Bygrave.) Many former wartime airfields still have their distinctive two-story bombing teacher buildings, for example this one at Waltham. But I don’t know how widely such devices were used before the war — though 601 (Bomber) Squadron of the Auxiliary Air Force, at least, had one in early 1934, according to the article. Given the poor performance of Bomber Command in the early years of the war, one would think that the RAF could certainly have used a few more bombing teachers!

I was thinking that a few bells and whistles could have increased the realism of the Vickers-Bygrave dramatically. For example, dry ice could be used to simulate clouds over the target. You could use a negative, with most of the features painted over, to imitate night bombing. Hydraulics (or manpower!) could be used to buffet the airframe, as in turbulence or anti-aircraft fire (a few firecrackers could help with that too). Not surprisingly, I wasn’t the first to have this idea. This interesting site on the history of flight simulation has a page on the Celestial Navigation Trainer (CNT), developed at the RAF’s request by the makers of the Link Trainer. Though no mention is made of the Vickers-Bygrave, it’s clearly a very similar concept, with the addition of what is effectively a planetarium above, so that the navigator could practice celestial navigation. According to the RAAF (which had one at East Sale), ‘The CNT instructor could introduce bumpy flying conditions, changes of wind, create daylight or nightfall, scurry clouds across the sky, or arrange static to worry the wireless operator’. But development of the CNT was initiated as late as 1939, and the first one didn’t come into operation until 1941 or later. (The RAAF’s remained in operation until the late 1950s, so it must have been very useful.)

Perhaps it’s because, as a Gen Xer, I grew up with simulations in a way that previous generations did not, but it seems incredible to me that it took five years or more to take the basic concept of the Vickers-Bygrave and add substantial degrees of realism to it. (Well, I can’t completely exclude the possible that this happened sooner, but I have no evidence for that as yet.) Then again, one of the dangers of simulation is that it can reinforce preconceptions, rather than challenge them: to a large degree simulations simulate what is thought will happen, rather than what will actually happen. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. So, maybe the failure to develop a Celestial Navigation Trainer before 1939 is of a piece with the failure to practice bombing runs under warlike conditions in the same period, and the failure to set up a Bombing Development Unit before the start of the war. If bombing is thought to be easy, then there’s no need to train too hard for it. Wartime experience was, of course, the ultimate bombing teacher.

See also: this American bombing teacher from 1940, with that wondrous war-winning Norden bombsight fortunately shrouded from public view.

1. ’Bombing instruction’, Flight, 3 May 1934, 434. The drawing is on the facing page, 435.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Niall Ferguson has an article out in the New York Magazine, on the use of computer wargames in learning about history and strategy. (Via ClioWeb). It’s a frustrating piece. As a sometime wargamer myself, I do agree with him that they can have their uses. But I think he fundamentally, and strangely, misunderstands what those uses might be.

Ferguson first outlines why he sees a need for such games:

Today we live in a multipolar, multiplayer world. Some players are much better armed than others. In that sense, today’s strategic problems are more like those of the World War II era. Sure, the U.S. can invade Iraq. But what will the French do? The Russians? The Chinese? What if invading Iraq ends up benefiting Iran? The question is, where to learn this kind of stuff?

He thinks wargames can help with understanding the big picture, and he may be right. In gaming a battle or a war, things like terrain, supply, position, maneuver, firepower, and so on move from being abstract factors found in books, to concrete parameters that need to be juggled in order to achieve victory. Ferguson (quite fairly) dismisses computer games like Civilization and Empire Earth, which include WWII scenarios, ’since what they provide is such a crude caricature of the historical process’. He then looks at (what he claims is) the previous best attempt, the board game Axis & Allies:

Up until now, the best my sons and I could do when it came to replaying World War II was in fact an old-fashioned board game, Axis & Allies. Similar in its mode of operation to the earlier strategy game Risk, Axis & Allies offers a reasonable approximation to the strategic position in 1942. But I stress approximation. The game vastly understates the economic power of the United States, for example. The best thing about Axis & Allies is that battles are decided by a combination of firepower and luck. Dice are thrown, but the odds are weighted in favor of the player with the most men and hardware. (Each time I play, I’m impressed by the calibration of these weightings.)

Now, I know Axis & Allies well. There’s just no way that it is the best simulation of the Second World War there is, or even was. It’s not much less of a caricature than Civilization, or Risk. The individual pieces represent — well, who knows, but they do not vary between nations in either strength or number: Britain can, in theory, have as a big an army as the USSR; German aircraft carriers are just as good as Japanese ones. The world is divided up into irregular-shaped areas — “Eastern Europe” is one, stretching from Istanbul to the gates of Leningrad. But it can hold no more units than can Guadalcanal; an infinite amount, actually (but only one AA unit). Production of new units is governed by “Industrial Production Certificates”, which you get every turn depending on the territories you hold. But any you don’t spend in on aircraft production in 1942, say, can be saved up until 1945 to buy tanks, as if industrial production was some fungible thing that can stashed away in a warehouse until it’s needed and turned into whatever is required.

I don’t want to bash Axis & Allies too much; it wasn’t intended to be a hyper-accurate simulation, but just a fun game. (And it is — it’s hard to not to enjoy pushing those plastic tanks and battleships around the world!) And even so, it’s not completely divorced from reality; maybe in its cartoonish abstraction it’s still teaching its players useful things about how the war was fought on the largest scales. This is certainly one of Ferguson’s points, but then he turns to a new computer game which he thinks blows Axis & Allies away, The Calm & the Storm. For one thing, ‘it is based on a quite astonishing quantity of factual information about the war’:

Like Axis & Allies or Civilization III, the graphic interface is a map. But the level of detail is quite unique. Not just national borders but provincial borders are visible. And all the world’s countries are depicted; players can choose from up to eleven governments, including China’s.

Here Ferguson shows his limited knowledge of wargames, for there’s nothing particularly ‘astonishing’ or ‘unique’ about the level of detail described here, even when the discussion is limited to games covering the Second World War at the strategic level. For example, the map for The Calm & the Storm is much coarser than that for World in Flames, which covers much of the world with a hexagonal grid: each hex is 100km across on the European map, and 230km on the Pacific map. And while eleven playable countries is impressive compared with most board wargames, it’s not when placed next to another computer simulation, Hearts of Iron II, which has dozens of playable countries, from Turkey to Tannu Tuva.

Ferguson is also impressed that diplomacy is a crucial part of The Calm & the Storm. Again, games like Hearts of Iron and World in Flames (via its prequel, Day of Decision) were doing all this years ago. But this leads to a much more serious problem with his article. (After all, there are worse sins than not being a hardcore wargamer!) He uses The Calm & the Storm to explore a counterfactual history of 1938:

I argue in my new history that confronting Hitler in 1938 would have paid handsome dividends. Even if it had come to war over Czechoslovakia, Germany would not have won. Germany’s defenses were not yet ready for a two-front war. So how did my preemptive strategy stand up to a computer stress test? Not as well as I had hoped, I have to confess. The Calm & the Storm made it clear that lining up an anti-German coalition in 1938 might have been harder than I’d assumed. To my horror, the French turned down the alliance I proposed to them. It also turned out that, when I did go to war with Germany, my own position was pretty weak. The nadir was a successful German invasion of England, a scenario my book rules out as militarily too risky.

This is the part I have a hard time understanding. Why does Ferguson trust the results of a computer game over his own historical research and judgement? Wargames aren’t magic; they aren’t somehow automatically correct, as though all you had to do was program in the laws of war, feed in some data about numbers of tanks and production of ball bearings, and then crank the handle to see what comes out. (Although some might disagree.) They are no better than the historical knowledge used to create them, and possibly worse, in that they often involve assumptions and speculations to cover the gaps in what we know about the past — a wargame designer must of necessity make judgements that cut swathes through decades of studied academic ambiguity. (So do historians, at times: but wargame designers are not obliged to show their reasoning or their sources.)

So, Ferguson’s reverence for wargames (or at least, this particular one) undermines his argument that military historians should be using wargames as research tools:

“What if D-day had gone wrong?” is only one of scores of counterfactual questions historians have asked about the war. What if the Nazis had invaded Britain in 1940? What if Hitler had captured Moscow in 1941? What if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway in 1942? These are questions that computer games ought, in theory, to be able to help answer. And yet no military historian, to my knowledge, has made use of them. This is doubly surprising. Not only is there a long and respectable tradition of war games within the military academy, but games also played a central role in Cold War strategy, advancing an entire branch of mathematics—game theory—in the process.

If historians are going to use wargames for research purposes, then they need to thoroughly understand the models the games are based on. From the article, it is not clear how deeply Ferguson has delved into how The Calm & the Storm actually works. For all we know, the algorithm for amphibious landings might be too generous to the invaders, or the code implementing it might be buggy. And there’s no reason to believe that Muzzy Lane’s game developers have any greater insight into France’s willingness to go to war in 1938 than Ferguson, or anyone else. Do they have access to primary sources that the rest of us don’t? It seems rather unlikely. So why he apparently privileges this game over other forms of historical inquiry is a mystery to me. I suspect he is blinded by the sheer density of detail in this particular game, and being unfamilar with the wargame genre, overestimates its novelty while underestimating the potential problems. Creating a wargame is largely an act of historiographical interpretation, interpolation and extrapolation, and any historian following Ferguson’s lead would be well advised to understand this.

Investigations of a Dog also critiques Ferguson’s article, from a different angle.

Update: another critique, from a fellow former WiFer, and current professor of literature, at AmericanHeritage.com.

Had some good luck browsing in secondhand bookshops this week …

Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. The Burning Blue: The Battle of Britain, 1940. Hanford: GMT Games, 2006. NOT a book, a wargame simulating the “plotting table” war, if you like. Product page. Well-researched, as the support page shows. DOES have Boulton-Paul Defiants, does NOT have Gladiators.

Donald Cowie. An Empire Prepared: A Study of the Defence Potentialities of Greater Britain. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939. Published for the Right Book Club. About how all the red bits on the map will help Britain if war comes. Introduction by Lord Lloyd, former Governor of Bombay and High Commissioner of Egypt.

Harry Golding, ed. The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls. London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919. Was I as giddy as a schoolboy when I saw this in a bookshop for only $10? You betcha! Lots of illustrations, though unfortunately some have been cut out (no doubt to grace some long-forgotten school project), including eight by Heath Robinson! Clarification: that was badly phrased — the Heath Robinson pics weren’t the ones that were cut out, luckily.

Robert Graves and Allan Hodge. The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939. London: Four Square Books, 1961 [1939]. A classic work of contemporary history, in a groovy new edition for the new generation.

Richard Jefferies. After London or Wild England. London: Duckworth, 1929 [1885]. Only very tangentially relevant to my areas of interest, mainly as an early example of some catastrophe doing for London and dramatically re-ordering English society.

George Rochester. The Despot of the World. London: John Hamilton, 1936. A thrilling (one assumes) novel of the Soviet menace, air combat over Siberia, and how world war was averted. Part of the “Ace” series of books, along with Biggles and others (indeed, there’s a big selection of other aviation titles in the catalogue at the back of the book). My copy was given to one Peter Johnston at Xmas 1936, as the Third Prize “for improvement in Pianoforte”.