in the works: Tannenberg 1914

Ludendorff explains the 22.5 Königsberg Corps rules to von Hindenburg.

To kick off my experimental study of the first year of the war, I'll be looking at the battle (camapign, really) of Tannenberg, the first large encounter of Russian and German forces on the war's eastern front. My first effort will be a solo play of GMT Game's Clash of Giants: Tannenberg. I'm looking forward to this, as I've played one of the games in this series before and enjoyed it

As a quick introduction, I can recommend this four minute overview of the events from The Complete Landmark Television Series' World War 1 in Colour. Though the documentary images are indeed colourized in a rather flat, washed out way, the footage is itself still interesting, and the map animations simple but clear.

For a longer description of the battle, I can recommend Wikipedia's article, which covers the operations in quite comprehensive detail (though it curiously fails to mention Russian Northwest Front commander Yakov Zhilinski), while the FirstWorldWar.com website's piece on Tannenberg contains links to biographies of many of the senior commanders, as well as accounts of the engagement by German 8th Army commander Paul von Hindenburg and Russian First Army cavalry corps commander Vasily Iosiforich Gurko.

Russian Bielozerski Regiment relaxing while awaiting the next blog post.

Given that a principal feature of the battle was the failure of the two Russian armies to coordinate effectively (due both to poor technical communications provisions and to major antipathy between the First and Second Army commanders), the Tannenberg campaign seems ripe for a triple-blind kriegsspeil. I've recruited three players who are willing to give it a try, so I hope to be reporting to you, faithful readers, on that project in coming weeks.

two interesting pieces in the news

Two articles that floated past my corner of the Internet seemed worth sharing with my Great War readers.

BBC Magazine ran a short article on the German internment of British civilians at Ruhleben during the war. The rather short and facile piece touched on a few aspects of life in the camp in a reductionist, almost insulting manner. The Beeb seems to have gotten enough annoyed feedback from readers who had relatives in the camp that they ran a second article, featuring biographies of several of the internees. These bios, wholly or in part supplied by information for readers, give a fuller and more detailed look at life in the camp and the different paths that led its inmates there.

The other article, curiously, comes from the science-fiction/futurist blog io9. This piece concerns the (Allied) cats of World War One. There's minimal text to it, but it features about a dozen and a half photos of cats in various Allied military settings in the Great War, including naval cats, air cats, and trench cats. I rather imagine the Central Powers forces had their cats as well, but no photos of them were included.

a quick summary of recent links on the Great War from Society for Military History members

Thanks to a follower of the Society for Military History's Facebook page, here's a link to an article on war art commissioned by the US military during the Great War.

The article, on the Smithsonian website, contains a selection of images from the collection, a link to the digitised artworks, a link to a republication of the collection in book form by Texas A&M University Press, and a link to the New Britain Museum of Art, which houses work by one of the artists who took part in the project.

Other recent SMH posts concerning the Great War have included:

• an article from the US Library of Congress on First World War sheet music 
• an article from BBC History magazine on First World War slang that's stuck in the English language
• a piece on researching WWI POWs
• an interview with the director of the Canadian War Museum 
• an article in the Telegraph of war posters, 
• a review of a recent biography of Kaiser Wilhelm and
• a promo for a joint UNC/King's College London conference on the First World War taking place later this month

I've sadly neglected this blog, posting nothing at all so far in calendar year 2014. Seeing as this month begins the centenary of the Great War, I think it's a fitting time to try and breathe a bit of life into this small journal.

Since this is "a blog on reading and gaming the history of the Great War", I'm going to commit to doing both, as intensively as I can while the rest of life revolves around me, for the next four years. I'd like to say that I'll report on a game and a book every month over that time, but that would be setting an overly ambitious bar. I can promise to deliver a post a month, and I hope I'll manage closer to a post a week on average.

I think that both my game library and my printed library will be more than able to stand up to those requirements, even if my schedule can't. Besides the miniature games I've mentioned here already (TFL's Through the Mud and the Blood, If the Lord Spares Us, Corps Blimey, Algernon Pulls It Off, and the postwar Triumph of the Will), I have Great War Spearhead (now finally available in its comprehensive second edition), Soldat and The Last Crusade, and Wings of War/Wings of Glory.

The boardgame contingent, though, is even larger.

1914: Glory's End (XTR/Command magazine)
1914: Offensive à outrance (GMT Games)
1914: Twilight in the East (GMT Games)
1918: Storm in the West (XTR/Command magazine)
The Big Push: The Battle of the Somme (ATO)
Bloody April, 1917: The Air War Over Arras, France (GMT Games)
Blue Max (GDW Games)
Clash of Empires: August 1914 (3W/The Wargamer magazine)
Clash of Giants and Clash of Giants II (GMT Games)
The Cossacks Are Coming! 2nd Edition (Oregon ConSim Games)
A Fatal Attraction: The Gallipoli Campaign (ATO)
Grand Illusion: The 1914 Campaign in the West (GMT Games)
The Great War in Europe (both the XTR/Command magazine and GMT Games editions)
Jassin 1915 (Khyber Pass Games)
The Kaiser's Battle (SPI/S&T magazine)
Landships (Clash of Arms Games)
Lawrence of Arabia (3W/The Wargamer magazine)
Marne 1918: Friedensturm (Hexasim)
No Prisoners (Decision Games/S&T Magazine)
Paths of Glory (GMT Games)
Pursuit of Glory (GMT Games)
Rock of the Marne (MMP)
Serbia the Defiant/Romania: Transylvanian Gambit (SPW)
Sideshow: The German Campaign for East Africa (SPI/S&T magazine)
To The Green Fields Beyond (SPI)
Togoland 1914 (Khyber Pass Games)
When Eagles Fight (XTR/Command magazine)
World War I (SPI)

Plus, on related post-war topics:

Ataturk! (Khyber Pass Games)
Reds! The Russian Civil War 1918-1921 (GMT Games)
Rise of the House of Sa'ud (3W/The Wargamer magazine)
Rossyia 1917 (Azure Wish Enterprise)
Russian Civil War 1918-1922 (SPI)

I think I have a couple more of Khyber Pass's products, and I have my eye on several GMT P500 games (a new edition of Glory's End and When Eagles Fight coming as a double title; Serbien Muss Sterbien, by the designer of Offensive a outrance; Eagle of Lille, an expansion for Bloody April; Gallipoli, 1915; and Illusions of Glory, an East-Front game using the Paths of Glory model).

Even were I able to review one a month, that would nearly fill up the four years I've alotted myself. We'll see how I get on.

Next up: a review of my bookshelves.