"Battle of the Somme "Zero hour"" Topic

This year I volunteered myself to help the secondary pupils at my school where I work, in understanding certain aspects of warfare. This month it was World War one and trench warfare. I have played World War One before but concentrated on the last 100 days when the battles flowed more, using a variation of the crossfire rules. I always felt the actual trench warfare was bit boring to play. However I have found it really interesting and will continue playing different scenarios adding rule for tanks, gas, sniper etc as well as more scenary. It seemed that the two classes of 23 pupils found it interesting as well.

Please see the link below for an account of the game we played

link

Regards Phil

Excellent! I wish I'd had you as a teacher when I was at school!!

Looks like 15mm to me. I've thought that war games would be good in history class. We tryed it in the 70s with board games in my high school. Miniatures should be much better.

Wonderfully done Phil!
How much of the rules did the students have to learn before they played, or did they get told of the rules, like crossing the wire, as they came to it.
Thanks for sharing;
Joe

Hi, thanks for the comments, yes they are 15mm figures a mixture of Essex and Peter Pig. The pupils were given a quick reference sheet when they entered the room and then given a quick intro so they could get stuck into the game. The rules were explained as the game was played and how the mechanisms and results reflected the tactics of the actual battle.
Next year I am thinking of making small bases with white crosses to replace the killed sections to make a poignant statment at the end of the game ( a bit like the ending in the film "Oh what a lovely war").

Oh don't ruin it by bringing Oh! What a Lovely War into it…

A more poignant statement would be to teach the kids that the Battle of the Somme was an important part of a necessary strategy in beating the Germans in 1918. It wasn't called the 'muddy grave of the German army' for nothing…

I know what you mean, the original idea was to game the first day and then afterwards do the same attack with the tactics the British had developed towards the end of the battle (creeping barrage, tanks etc) , to show that the Generals did actually learn by their original mistakes. The problem unfortunately was the time constraints and so I only managed to give them a quick talk about developments of the tactics at the end of the game.

Hopefully next year I might be able to do 2 games in two seperate lessons.

That would be good, you could recreate the early morning attack on 14 July, or even the partial success with the tanks on 15 September.

I think it really is a brilliant idea for teaching kids history. My history teacher at school allowed us to use his room for a wargaming club on a Monday lunch time while he did his marking, until one of the meat head PE teachers got wind of it and closed it down. He said it was a health and safety breach, apparently.