The George Gush Napoleonic Northern Italy Campaign - Campaign Report

 I (as umpire) and my two heroic players have just completed a refight of George Gush's Napoleonic campaign, set in Northern Italy and as detailed in Miniature Wargames 31: an earlier post gives an outline.

And first up, I really do want to thank my two players - as someone doing this kind of thing for the first-time, they were absolutely amazing: enthusiastic, and patient. Couldn't have asked for, or even imagined, better! I hope they had fun.

I have three elements I want to cover. The 'technical' side of the rules and so on, I will add as a separate page of the blog, so I will cover the story of the campaign, and then some thoughts about the whole affair, what worked, what sort-of-worked and what really didn't.

 

The story of the campaign.

The full orders of battle will be in the campaign page, but in brief:

The French Army is commanded by General Sauret, who has 4 divisions: those of Renault, Panis, Arnoux and Villeneuve. Arnoux's division is somewhat weaker than the other those of Renault and Panis, Villeneuve's Division is a cavalry division.

 

The Austrian Army is commanded by Marshal Altenburg, who has 2 'wings' (those of Liechtenstein  and Sachsen-Coburg, with 7 infantry brigade and 3 cavalry brigade equivalents). A couple of those brigades are broken up into garrison forces.

Starting Deployment:

The French commander has decided on a 'Southern'-focused deployment just in front of Genoa, with the Ligurian apls to protect his left; the Austrians are in a more central positionin the Piacenza-Cremona-Parma triangle, with some forward detachments a little further forward to give warning of French intentions. These detachments were mainly the Austrian militia battalions. There is a little risk-reward element here: isolated militia battalions are fairly likely to be overrun if attacked - but that might happen to any isolated detachment, and you don't care as much about losing a lowly militia battalion (compared to say, a precious cavalry regiment).

We are a couple of days in now. The advancing French overwhelmed the isolated militia battalion in Spezia and are advancing up the E-W road to the South. Apart from some tiny affaires des postes in the Ligurians as Austrian cavalry patrols and French light infantry skirmish, that is it really. The Austrians do not yet have any indication of what the French are up to.

 

By Day 5, the French attack is developing. The Austrians are aware of the Spezia incident and Liechtenstein's wing is marching towards the crossroads in A10 to intercept the French, unaware that the French main body has passed. The French have in fact nearly reached Modena and Bologna, two game-winning objectives. On the other hand, the French cavalry patrols which have just spotted Liechtenstein's advance are not going to stop Liechtenstein's force cutting off the French lines-of-communication...

 

And the predictable situation the following day: the French have captured the two objectives, which if they can hold until day 29, then they win the game. On the other hand, their supply lines have been cut. This can cause quite a lot of damage quite quickly to an army.

We are now at Day 8. General Sauret knows there is no way his forces can hold out for weeks with no supplies, so he sets his forces in motion back to the crossroads. Keeping in mind his orders to keep is forces as concentrated as he can, he doesn't try to leave strong forces guarding his objectives. The 'scattering' effect behind the French columns moving back West is from units dropping out to look for food etc and then re-organize. Because the battalion/regiment/battery is the lowest unit in the game, then straggling and losses etc. are effectively modelled by whole units becoming disrupted - or destroyed - rather than each unit losing a percentage of their strength. Once you get to thinking of a unit as an 'Army strength point', it works really well. But more to say on this in the notes. The Austrian commander, has moved forward to reinforce Liechtenstein - things not looking great for the French!

The first major battle of the campaign is now fought - it is an Austrian victory! The French suffer heavy losses and are pushed back. The Austrian casualties are somewhat lighter but not negligible.

This is the position after the battle. Sauret is in a slightly desperate position! However, some reinforcements (a new brigade, currently in Spezia) is coming forward to reinforce him.

There is a lot of fog-of-war happening at this point. The Austrian commander is aware of Modena and Bologna falling, but is not aware of what is happening around the southern crossroads. He therefore orders his Army to retire and concentrate on Modena, unaware that the French are really in a hugely difficult situation.

Day 10. Another battle is fought around the crossroads, and this time the French, being stronger (they have brought in new units to replace their losses in the previous battle, at the cost of great disorganization, but the Austrians have no supports in range) gain the victory. Their losses were somewhat greater, but very unfortunately for the Austrians, their army commander, Marshal Altenburg, is captured during the action!! Not only have the French managed to escape the trap, their opponent is disorganized and outnumbered at the key point of action. The French player commander is a truly Napoleonic high-priest of concentration, and despite the heavier losses he has suffered to this point, reaps the rewards here.

Day 12. Prince Liechtenstein, temporarily in command of the Army Reserve along with his own remaining troops of the Left Wing, retreats towards Modena and occupies it. Sachsen-Coburg's lead elements are in Parma, but the French troops are advancing fast towards the junction of the two armies (slight shades of the 100 days here?!)

Prince Liechtenstein was faced with a very difficult tactical choice here. He could defend Modena itself in strength - but then the Austrian main army would be surrounded and besieged, and would be unlikely to last out until the end of the game. He could leave a smaller force in Modena and try to concentrate with Sachsen-Coburg - but Modena would likely fall quite quickly, with the main French army between the Austrians and Modena and Bologna - probably losing conditions. Or he could fight outside Modena - stopping the French for two days would allow reinforcements to come, and he would then be in a position to strongly garrison Modena and maintain a potent field force. But losing the battle would mean that Modena would fall without fighting...

For better or worse, he chose the latter option. It did not go well, the outnumbered Austrians were defeated and the French occupied Modena.

The positions by Day 14. The French have captured Modena and are concentrated in front of it. Not an easy situation for the Austrians!

Day 17: The French have also taken Bologna, and re-established a line of communication that goes through Pistoiese rather than near Parma; Sachsen-Coburg's troops manage to ambush and defeat the rear of the French column as it moved past, causing some losses to the French but not fundamentally changing the situation.

Day 20: The Austrians under their new commander, Prince Hohenzollern, make another attack and take Modena - but with very severe losses. It is now very doubtful that they can really stand up to the French if the French should re-concentrate. The Austrian commander is no longer very confident that his army can stop the French.

Day 22: Sauret has re-grouped his forces. Liechtenstein withdraws slightly, leaving some troops to garrison Modena, which the French commander places under siege. He takes it by storm the following day, with only modest losses.

Day 24: The main Austrian army has withdrawn North, to defend its other cities and supply lines and depot. A small raiding force (an Austrian Grenzer battalion) causes quite a rumpus in the French rear around Rapallo, cutting off supplies to the main French army for a couple of days. Arnoux's Division is converging on it however, and destroys it the following day. Indirectly however, that Grenzer battalion caused really quite serious damage through the straggling, desertion and illness which resulted!

Day 26, and the last day of campaign action (the game rolled on for a couple of days, but nothing happened - neither side's troops had any orders which could affect anything). The French have succeeded in taking their objectives, despite the rather heavier casualties they suffered.

Game Notes: 

That was really interesting, and a lot of fun - at least for me! I think the players seemed to enjoy it mostly, and found it interesting. It was a hard game for both of them: the set-up is that the twop players (Napoleon and the Archduke Charles) are just 'off-table', issuing orders but can't get involved directly in the action. So as the action moved further from the SW corner (for the French) and from the NE corner (for the Austrians), news took 2-3 days to arrive, and subsequent orders took 2-3 days to reach the respondents, so the fog of war and confusion was particularly heavy. I made tactical decisions for the local French commanders and Austrian commanders as best I could, given their previous orders. Where there were two or more options, I let the dice decide. For example, the French cavalry regiment guarding the crossroads on Day 6 could have plausibly retreated East (on his main force) or West (onto his LoC). The commander decided to do the latter. I also used a similar mechanism for dealing with intelligence information from prisoners. The fog of war and delays prevented the Austrian commander from ever knowing quite how close he was to victory during the second week of the campaign.

 

The reason for doing it this way was to prevent commanders being unable to influence events at tactical battles they were actually present at. Of course, this is a very gnarly problem for every campaign. Let me summarize:

 

1 - Each player fights all the battles, commanding their own troops in F2F battles. Issue: when commanding battles, there is implied telepathy between the tactical commander and the overall commander. In this case, 'Grouchy' at Wavre would 'know' what 'Napoleon' wanted him to do at all times.

 

2 - Each player only fights the battles the overall commander is present at. Okay, but this means that a 3rd party, or the umpire has to control the opposition. This may be sub-optimal for all kinds of reasons, even if it could be practically done.

3 - Neither player fights any of the battles. But then, the tactical commander may totally 'get wrong' what the player-general would be able to literally shout in his ear, because they are co-located.

 

4 - Neither player fights any of the battles, because their persona can never be present. But this means that they are always days away from the scene of the action, which is almost anathema to actual Napoleonic generalship.

I went for #4. but probably in retrospect I should have gone for #3. So the players were in effect in a situation in real-life represented the situation on the wings: for example, Napoleon in relation to the Northern and Southern armies in 1812, or King Joseph and Jourdan in the Peninsular (possibly the closest comparison), or Napoleon and his detached corps in 1813 and 1814. So it certainly was done this way, but without the option to be at the vital point.

 

The hardest tactical decisions for me concerned cities and how many troops to garrison with. This is because the solution is mathematically computatable if you know what the enemy might do. This made it hard for me, since I did in fact know! So I am still unsure whether Prince Liechtenstein (i.e. me!) made the correct decision outside Modena, since my internal deliberations would have to be 'known' to General Sauret, in some sense.

I think the campaign rules worked generally pretty well. The stacking limits were pretty harsh and unrealistic, but I think if we think of a battalion representing a brigade, it sort of makes more sense. Northern Italy is quite a big place for the size of forces stipulated in the scenario. On the other hand, they did make it easy to administer the action and made sure that I could always set up the tactical actions quite easily. Rolling for terrain is sometimes a bit unintuitive (Liechtenstein's terrain rolls for the Modena battlefield were awful!) but seems to be more achievable than the alternatives.

The out-of-supply rules were a bit harsher than I perhaps intuited when I was modifying the rules. I used a simple mechanism of an out-of-supply unit receives the equivalent of a normal musket shot. This gives units perhaps a 1-in-10 chance of being eliminated. It is impossible to eliminate units in towns this way, but the odds are worse for units in rough terrain. There is somewhat more chance of them being 'shaken'; this only means they have to rally the next day, which is normally fine, except then there is a 1-in-10 chance of being eliminated at this point too. So perhaps this was overall a little harsh, although it did also seem to work quite well at the army level. I need to number-crunch the odds a bit more though.

 

I deliberately just wanted the players to concentrate on the commanders' roles. I didn't want them to do any staff work, I took that on. It felt both more fun for the players and more realistic really. I will be interested to know if players wanted to do more of the organizational work or if they were happy that they didn't need to do it, or if they wanted more visibility of it (e.g. more morning states) without necessarily doing it more.

 

We took the campaign at a reasonably leisurely pace, which worked well for 1 umpire and 2 players. I think it would be difficult to increase the number of players too much though without much more formal and demanding systems.  However, I think I could maybe run a couple of these campaigns simultaneously, without too much trouble. I learnt a lot about the mechanics of running the campaign, so I think I now have a decent system for running these things, after a few moments of awkwardness early on. I also have some ideas about how to run it faster, but with more colour and atrmosphere too, if I do any more.

 

I will put out the camapign notes as a separate page soon, perhaps with a sample of the reports and orders sent, to give a feel for that. I will do the battle reports themselves at some point and link to them, but I wanted to get the campaign summary out first. 

I am really pleased that, at least once, I have run a wargames campaign in the 'classic' style of Barker, Grant, Featherstone et. al. It wasn't as hard as I imagined it might be - the blogging of Paul Leniston has really helped over the years work out where the difficult bits actually lie and how you overcome them - and I would recommend giving it a try - it really is quite thrilling to be part of it all unfolding in ways you wouldn't have imagined yourself.