DYWTW Excerpt 1: The Beginning

It’s two o’clock in the morning, and we’re in Dad’s “Second Study”. Dad’s main office is upstairs, but when he’s working on multiple projects at once, the only way he can stay organized is to keep everything on separate floors. He hasn’t had a second project for a while, though, so the room is pretty much mine now. It has a large, west-facing picture window across which I keep the thick velvet curtains permanently closed – otherwise, when the weather turns cold or breezy the room can get very drafty, and on late summer evenings like the one which yielded to night a few hours ago, the sun drains into your eyes across the tall maple and hickory trees in the adjacent woods. Bookcases inset within the adjoining walls heave with yellowing journals and faded tomes with cracked spines stacked two-deep; I’ve annexed two shelves for my own stuff, but the other contents have been left to decompose in peace. Above a pair of grey filing cabinets next to the door is a framed print of Pissarro’s The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, bristling with blues and purples and an Impressionist energy the other walls conspicuously lack.

 

Centered on the picture window is a large, hand-carved oaken table of magnificent thickness and ballast. I’d thought antiques were by definition fragile until I first pressed my hand against its polished surface. It pins the Persian rug beneath it to the hardwood floor and is not easily jostled, which matters because although Dennis and I can choose to sit in upholstered leather chairs, I’m often pacing around it or bracing myself against it to get an aerial view. Dad used to keep a stapler, a pencil holder and pads of paper on it, but I’ve cleared them away to a dim corner of the floor.

 

On the table, illuminated by a row of harsh ceiling lights, is a large paper map of Europe stretching just beyond the Urals in Russia, just above the northernmost fjord in Scandinavia, across the Mediterranean to a coastal corridor of North Africa, and through the Middle East as far as Tehran and Basra. Superimposed upon the map is a grid of grey one-inch-wide hexagons at a scale where each “hex” spans 60 miles, as well as charts and boxes covering irrelevant sections of ocean or desert. A thin pane of plexiglass holds the map in place, canceling its creases and folds and presenting a smooth surface.

 

Upon the plexiglass, within the borders of individual hexes or boxes, lay the stacks of cardboard. Each piece of cardboard, half an inch square and one-eighth of an inch thick, is color-coded by country: grey for Germany, brown for the Soviet Union, tan for Britain, mustard yellow for Italy, green for the United States, and so on.

 

The pieces of cardboard are called “counters”, a term coined by the first modern wargame designer because each piece represents a military unit’s characteristics and abilities with numerical values. To give an example, there’s currently a grey German counter on the East Map in hex e4012, which is three hexes south-southwest of Moscow and contains the Russian town of Orel. Printed on a white strip at the bottom are the numbers “5-4-4”, which are the unit’s respective ratings for attack, defense and movement. In the middle of the counter is an oval within a rectangle, signifying an armored unit; the designations “2P” and “XXXX” identify it as Second Panzer Army. Two dots in the upper-right corner mean the army has two “steps”, each of which represents roughly 30,000 men and their materiel.

 

Second Panzer is at reduced strength. At full strength it’s an 8-6-4 with three steps, but it suffered a step loss when I attacked Smolensk three turns ago, in July-August 1941, and I haven’t yet gotten around to building it back up. Normally I don’t remember that level of detail in my face-to-face games of Totaler Krieg with Dennis, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Second Panzer – Guderian’s Second Panzer – especially during the 1941 Barbarossa campaign.

 

Colonel General Heinz Guderian has long been a hero of mine, at least to the extent that a lynchpin of Nazi Germany can or should be. I admire his tactical and operational skill, his leadership and motivational qualities, his innovativeness in the realm of armored theory, his flexibility (serving ably as battlefield leader, munitions coordinator and chief of the German General Staff), and above all his willingness to stand up to authority. Read the 1944 transcripts of Guderian in the Führerbunker, and you can’t help but wonder what might have happened had more senior Nazis spoken to Hitler like him. If I’m playing the Axis and I manage to capture Moscow, Second Panzer often seems to get there first. If Hitler had listened to him in August 1941, Guderian may well have led the Wehrmacht into Moscow anyway, so if I can give the man his posthumous due, I will.

 

But nobody is getting to Moscow in my current game of Totaler Krieg with Dennis, at least not in 1941. Second Panzer led my attack on Tula – two hexes south of Moscow – in my half of the November-December 1941 turn, and the dice weren’t with me. So now Guderian is stuck in the open steppe, waiting to get creamed by Zhukov’s counteroffensive. For his Western Option Card, Dennis already unleashed his Operation Crusader offensive in the Med, attempting an amphibious invasion near Benghazi which I think primarily aimed to draw my Air units away from the Russian front. And now, having revealed his Soviet Siberian Reserves Released Option Card, he’s poring over the map and making notes on a pad of paper between tugs at his beard.

 

As he studies the map, I realize something. “This game has almost perfectly replicated history, hasn’t it?”

 

Dennis doesn’t look up. “Yeah,” he says absently, drumming with his tip of his pen on the paper. “A bit.”

 

“More than a bit. Seriously, look at the front lines.”

 

Dennis stops drumming and leans back in his chair. “You’re right, Sean. It’s pretty close.”

 

 “It’s more than pretty close. The Germans and Finns are besieging Leningrad, but it’s not cut off yet. I’ve got Kharkov, and I’ve sealed off the Crimea, but I haven’t gotten into Rostov or Sevastopol yet. And Guderian just attacked Tula, in November-December 1941, but he couldn’t capture it!”

 

“The Med is different.”

 

“But it’s within the margins of error. You’ve still got Crete, which should have happened if the British were competent. I’ve got Tobruk and have advanced to El Alamein, which would have happened if the Italians were competent. The coup in Yugoslavia didn’t happen, and you didn’t intervene in Norway, but everything else is just about right. We even got Italian aggression in Greece! How often does that happen?”

 

“You know what I think about Axis Aggression.”

 

“Even when it happens to your opponent?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“You should be playing A World at War, you know.”

 

“Probably,” sighs Dennis. “But I’m here playing with you.” He leans forward and starts drumming his pen again.

 

Axis Aggression is one of the things I love about Totaler Krieg. When a “Minor Country Politics” Political Event occurs before Germany is at war with both Britain and the Soviet Union, the Allied player chooses one of five regional “Area Tables” and rolls a die: if the result is an Axis country, an adjacent neutral country joins the Allies. In our game, Axis Aggression occurred in August-September 1940 when Dennis rolled on the Western Area Table and luckily got Italy, which forced me to declare war on either Greece or Vichy France. When I chose the former, Dennis wisely deployed British forces to Crete but not the mainland; Athens eventually capitulated, but the invasion cost an Italian step and slowed preparations for my invasion of Russia.

 

A game about World War II in Europe with pretensions of historical accuracy needs to cast its players in plausible roles. Games like A World at War, World in Flames, Europe Engulfed, even Axis & Allies give the Axis player complete control over German and Italian decision-making – their armed forces, factories and diplomats do exactly what he tells them to, subject only to his opponent’s interference and the luck of the dice. Totaler Krieg is different: in its designer’s words, the Axis player “represents the tension between Hitler, the Army staff and the Axis allies.” Mussolini’s decision to invade Greece was idiotic. Some games let the Axis player use 20-20 hindsight to avoid such mistakes. Others give Italy special economic or political benefits for conquering a country on its own without German assistance, thereby encouraging the Axis player to make Mussolini’s historical decision. But Totaler Krieg assumes that Hitler’s allies occasionally get frisky and do stupid things, leaving the Axis player to clean up their messes as best he can. Control freaks may disagree, but I think the latter approach most accurately models history and creates the most interesting gameplay, which is one of many reasons I play Totaler Krieg.

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I often wonder what it felt like to be Heinz Guderian on Friday, 5 December 1941. I often wonder many things about history, but this intersection of date, place, person and context fascinates me more than most. The weekend to come would outline the course of human history for the next 50 years: on Saturday the 6th, the Soviet Union’s first major counter-offensive of the war proved to the world that it was a global superpower; on Sunday the 7th, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor motivated the United States to become one. Those two days foreshadowed the downfall of Hitler and Nazism, and the division of Europe into two armed camps. They predestined the decline of Imperial Japan, which led to the death of Asian colonialism in all its forms – the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Vietnam – and the dawn of the nuclear age at Hiroshima. Standing at the precipice on 5 December, with such vast, impersonal forces swirling around and preparing to throw the world over the edge, I wonder if any one person had even an inkling of what was about to happen on both fronts. Stalin? Maybe, maybe Stalin, if only thanks to his master spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge. But Sorge was arrested by the Japanese in October, so no, probably not even Stalin.

Guderian certainly didn’t, not that it was his job to know. On 5 December, his job was to decide when his orders couldn’t be obeyed. Previously, he’d decided several times in 1940 and 1941 that his orders weren’t to be obeyed, and his instincts were usually right. Hitherto, his insubordination aimed to secure victories he knew were within his reach – most famously in May 1940, where his daring armored thrust from the Ardennes to the Channel effectively won the war against France in two weeks. Now, it might be necessary to avoid a catastrophe. The brave and innumerable Russians, led by General Zhukov and abetted by the winter weather, could not be pierced. Attack was now impossible. Defense soon might be, if appropriate steps weren’t taken immediately.

What was going through Guderian’s mind? From Panzer Leader, Guderian’s postwar memoir, we know the temperature near Tula on 4 December dropped to minus-31 degrees Fahrenheit. That day, Guderian interviewed several company commanders from his old Goslar Jaeger unit; they were anxious but believed further attacks could yet be successful. While returning in the dark to his headquarters, on Tolstoy’s former estate at Yasnaya Polyana, his armored command tank drove into a crevice hidden by the snow – he was lucky to escape and quickly flag down a German signals truck, but this cannot have improved his mood. Attacks by several key units under his command were prepared on the 4th but not executed until the 5th, at which point they were repulsed after brief initial successes. Worse still for Guderian, it became clear on the 5th that Fourth Army, whose coordinated assistance was required for his Second Panzer Army to make significant headway, had gone over to the defensive.

So we know all of this, at least insofar as Guderian’s memoirs are accurate. But what was he really thinking? He must have consulted his most trusted subordinates for advice: von Liebenstein, his chief of staff, and von Geyr, his senior corps commander. As the best battlefield general in the world’s most skilled and professional army, he would have clinically weighed all the available evidence: bad weather and Soviet operational security reduced the intelligence at his disposal, but the threats to his flanks and the paralyzing effects of the cold were obvious. How heavily did recent history weigh upon him? He’d never conducted an unsuccessful offensive, never voluntarily surrendered ground he and his men had won, never faced the prospect of losing the strategic initiative his country had held for more than two full years of war and at least four years of peace before that. In addition, his immediate superior – von Bock – was out of touch with conditions at the front, and der Führer opposed retreat under any circumstances, not that Guderian was likely to consult either of these men for advice. Finally, he could hardly anticipate the full fury of a well-planned Soviet counteroffensive. Subconsciously or otherwise, the Soviets were still the Untermenschen; were they really capable of seriously hurting the mighty and as-yet undefeated German army?

Such are the decisions faced by the men of war. Many books and memoirs describe the experience and the horrors of the poor foot soldier; far fewer try to get inside of the commander’s head and describe his day-to-day existence in the same way. I don’t just mean examining the logic behind the decisions they make; I mean, what was it like to live the life of senior commander in World War II? They weren’t all donkeys leading lions, living in lavish comfort miles behind the front and deserving full measures of derision. Many were conscientious leaders, highly skilled and more than a little brave, and if they got the best food and most comfortable billets, they probably benefitted from them when called upon to make the crucial, gut-wrenching decisions that commanders have to make. In this case, there’s nothing to envy about Guderian – he chose retreat, shortly before the Soviets would have made his decision obvious, and three weeks later the Wehrmacht was in tatters and he was out of a job – except insofar as he was at least positioned to shape the course of events. Leaders get to lead. Someone has to. And look: I know I’m just a teenager at the end of my summer vacation, hyperactively pondering the past while a nerdy, middle-aged wargamer across the table from me plots my downfall. But if the full force of history ever threatens to engulf me, I want to be able to deflect its course and not merely flounder in its wake.

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November-December 1941 (Soviet turn). When Dennis is done thinking, he silently starts moving his counters. First, he places the 20 reinforcements steps granted to him by his Siberian Reserves Released Option Card on the map in Soviet cities. This Option Card also gives Dennis a “Blitz” marker: any Soviet units within its two-hex radius may attack twice this turn. After placing the marker and combining several one-step units into two-step armies, Dennis moves each Soviet unit up to its individual movement allowance, subject to the debilitating effects of snowy weather. Dennis has short, stubby fingers, so where necessary he uses a suction tweezer with a silicon tip to levitate his counters into position.

Dennis takes several minutes to move all of his units, but I immediately deduce that he is not attacking Second Panzer – he’s pounding into my lines further north. When he’s done, he declares the start of his Blitz Combat Segment and says, “First, the paras do their bit for the Motherland.” He flips the Soviet airborne corps and places it on its “Airdrop” side in an empty hex behind my front line. “First Blitz attack is against Vyasma, with 21 factors and shifts for armor and the HQ. I assume you’ll use your HQ?”

“Correct.”

Dennis has 21 attacking factors to my nine defending factors – raw odds of 2:1 after rounding in the defender’s favor – but his extra combat “shift” means he rolls on the 3:1 column of the Combat Results Table. Dennis chooses a translucent red die with white pips and drops it into a felt-lined wooden contraption called a dice tower. It bounces across several diagonal slats within the tower and emerges in the small, square basin at the bottom with four pips showing.

“The Defender Retreat is reduced to an Exchange by the snow,” says Dennis, interpreting the “Dr1, 1/1” result he just rolled. “So we both lose two steps – a very bloody start.”

Dennis eliminates a two-step armored cavalry army, while I kill my Yugoslavian cavalry step and replace the two-step German Twelfth Army with a generic, single-step German infantry unit. Twelfth Army goes to the “Delay Box” in the southwest corner of the map: at the end of the turn, the dice will determine when each unit in the Delay Box will again become available for use.

Next comes a more penetrating attack on Rzhev, two hexes due west of Moscow. Dennis rolls well and announces, “D-R two, oh-two after the snow.” The “Dr2, 0/2” result means I lose two steps to Dennis’s none and must also retreat two hexes. With Dennis’s Airdrop blocking one retreat path, I must now choose whether to withdraw to the west or the southeast: the former exposes my forces between Vyasma and Orel to strong follow-up attacks during the Regular Combat Segment, but my gut tells me the latter might allow a devastating Soviet thrust through Smolensk. Is Dennis strong enough to encircle Army Group Center? If he is, this could be my Stalingrad, and I might lose the war right here.

Why did I have to attack Tula this turn? I should have anchored my winter defenses on Smolensk and Bryansk, instead of risking everything on Tula and getting dragged out of position like this. I keep falling into the same trap as Hitler, trying to keep my lines as far forward as possible even when it doesn’t make sense to do so. Now I’ve only got one step in Smolensk, and if he can push Seventh Army back or exploit two hexes from Smolensk in Reserve Movement, and then the weather is bad again next turn…

“You still thinking?” asks Dennis.

Too many of my important decisions in Totaler Krieg seem to be made after midnight. West or southeast, west or southeast…screw it. I’m always, always too aggressive. If I go west, I can only lose a few steps; if I go southeast, I could spend the rest of the game digging myself out of the hole I’ve created. And then I’d have to blame Guderian for losing the war.

“I’ll go west-southwest,” I say. Third Panzer Army and Seventh Army withdraw to the northwest of Smolensk. Dennis exploits through Rzhev with six armies, three of which form the tip of his spearhead adjacent to Smolensk.

That concludes the Blitz Combat Segment. Dennis has planned his attack well and continues without pause: “To start Regular Combat, I’ll soak off Army Group Center HQ at 1-to-3.” This weak attack causes a Soviet army to flip and retreat to the northeast at no cost to me. However, by engaging my HQ unit and preventing it from supporting my other defenders, the attack accomplishes its goal.

“Next attack is against Smolensk at 3-to-1. What?”

“Nothing.” I’m shaking my head because I now know I chose poorly. Dennis has nothing like enough force to threaten an encirclement – my attack of nerves will cost me several steps for no good reason. I’m such an idiot sometimes.

After Dennis clears Smolensk and occupies it with three Soviet steps, the rest of the turn passes quickly. Two final Soviet attacks near Vyasma cause additional casualties. During the Reserve Movement Phase, units adjacent to enemy forces cannot move, so there’s not much for Dennis to do. In the Conditional Events Segment, Dennis gets two reinforcement steps via the Lend-Lease Table. Finally, in the Delay Segment, one of my Air units and all of my good armies return immediately, whereas the Soviet rolls are indifferent and the Western ones are horrendous. In particular, one British Fleet suffers severe damage and won’t be back until 1943, which gives me breathing space in North Africa and perhaps even a chance to push beyond El Alamein to Cairo and the Nile.

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It is now two-thirty in the morning. “I hope you’re ready to go to bed?” asks Dennis.

“Yeah. Can I make my Political roll first?”

“Sure.”

The dice tower does its thing and spits out a ‘1’. I smirk at Dennis and slowly extend an arm to punch the air. My current Option Card, Mobilization Limits, models the effects of the Wehrmacht’s first winter in Russia: normally, the weather is bad and the Axis suffers a “Command Failure”, but this time my roll yields a “Mandated Offensive” result. Mandated Offensives can be bad later in the war, when Hitler orders attacks that have no chance of succeeding, but at present it’s exactly what I need.

Dennis smiles, then yawns. “Where do you want me to sleep?”

“There’s a room upstairs for you. Do you want to go now?”

“Yes, please.”

“Go up the stairs at the front of the house, left at the top of the stairs, then follow the corridor all the way around to a door next to more stairs on your left. Go through that door – your bed is in there.” Dennis arches his eyebrows, so I continue, “Really, you can’t miss it. I’m gonna study the board for a few minutes.”

“And in the morning?”

“There’s a bathroom in there, but if you promise to behave you can use Dad’s if you want – it’s nicer. He won’t be back until Sunday night. I’ll wake you up if you’re not up when I get up, but otherwise help yourself to breakfast.”

“OK...”

“See ya.”

Dennis shuffles out of the room. He’s never stayed over before – we normally play on Thursday nights, but with Dad away for the weekend and the new school year not starting until Monday, this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I don’t think Dad would want Dennis to use his bathroom, but I doubt he’ll notice.

Meanwhile, what a break I caught in Russia! That changes everything – snow effects will still hamper movement, but at worst I can now organize my defenses properly, and I might even create an opening with my extra attack. I could ignore Russia and attack in Egypt, where the weather is lovely this time of year. I can try to reduce Smolensk ahead of a proper assault. I could engineer a voluntary retreat to disengage some of my forces, allowing them to reach deeper defensive positions or redeploy for a surprise attack. Or I can go after Tula again: I know I shouldn’t, but it’s only held by two steps and two factors, and if it might open the back door to Moscow, I should at least consider it.

The possibilities etched in my mind, I turn off the lights and march upstairs. What a game this is – so many twists each turn, so many interesting decisions, so many blunders to inevitably make and hopefully fix in the nick of time. Sometimes I really feel like I could rewind history and have Hitler let his panzers finish off the Brits at Dunkirk, or give Patton all the supplies and leeway he wanted in August 1944 and watch him reach Berlin before Christmas. And as I lie in bed, I can’t stop counting the factors in my head – against Tula I could attack with 22 factors against four and one shift against two, so that’s 3:1, and if I can soak off the HQ and hit the Moscow fort with 12 factors plus Air, that’d give me a shot…or was there another HQ within range of Moscow? I can’t remember. Perhaps I can force a massive overstack in Vyasma – I’m sure I could do that from Tula, plus that would free up my own HQ. What if I freed everyone to turn southeast and attack toward Voronezh?

I’m exhausted, but it will be a while before I can get to sleep.