"Strip Map Campaigns?" Topic

Following up on the KG Peiper readings. It struck me part-way through that from a miniature wargame campaign aspect, I was reading about XXX Corps in MARKET-GARDEN--a powerful attacking force with limited choice of poor roads needing to advance very rapidly as the defenders muster resources. As a campaign, there would be little choice of battlefields, but attacker losses would carry over, and any delay would mean a stronger defender. Maybe only a "mini-campaign" but easy to set up and run. Have we got anything else like that for WWII armies? I'm thinking maybe the approach to Primosole Bridge, if we had enough on 50th Division's approach. But given the size of WWII, there could be half a dozen I've forgotten or never heard of.

I like this format, and sometimes evaluate WWII campaigns to see if they'd fit this framework, and I've thought of a few likely candidates:

• Market-Garden you already mentioned. Totally agree.
  
• North Africa. Pick an operation, or maybe amalgamate several. The forces were basically fighting back and forth in a corridor constrained by the Mediterranean on one side and the open desert on the other. If you don't want to fight huge multi-division operations covering hundreds of km, you could also pick a small sub-campaign from this theater and just fight the out-and-back along a single road on one wing of the front.
  
• Kokoda Trail, a to-and-fro campaign over a narrow path through the Owen-Stanley ridge in New Guinea. Like Market-Garden, a preponderance of force is offset by the narrowness of the line of advance.
  
• Sicily. Not the whole thing – pick a drive along the coast where there are mountains on one side the sea on the other, or one of the drives up an inland route through the mountains to get to the coast. This might actually be more fun as two or more parallel tracks, with one Allied player advancing along each, an the Axis players wrestling over limited resources to try and slow or stop one of the columns.
  
• Greece 1941 was almost a linear campaign through Thessaly and Athens. You can dismiss the wings outside the main thrust as one-sided mopping-up operations. Who doesn't want to try holding the pass at Thermopylae?
  
• I'm guessing there were a lot of battles both major and minor in Italy where the advance was channeled by the coast, a mountain pass, or river crossings and could be recreated in a linear campaign track.

You could zoom in on the North Africa one above, and do Kasserine. There's a great mini ‘strip' campaign in the old Wargames World magazine, issue 5 IIRC, if you're interested I'll check.

We have done this sort of campaign as a matter of course. We have done it as a strip map and as a limited road chice (see below) the black lines represent "board edges".

Now clearly the scale is not your's but you get the idea. We have also done it as a long "virtual board" where you only set up the current bit you are going to fight on.

The main advantage are:-

1) That with a bit of carefull work you can make sure that you have the terrain to make the map as it's at your wargame scale. Again you can make sure signtlines are inside the wargames table so you can map the bit you want and have no extarranious edges.
2) you arn't drawing table maps you may well never use.
3) Personally I dislike "episodic" campagins that move from Table A to table B. They don't reflect say whan an enemy stalls and there is an opertunity to conter attack. They do not allow overun of supply points and also it forces commanders to compromise where supply points go, close to the front for rapid acces to suppies but quickly overun if things go wrong or suffer longer delays in re-supply. It also forces both sides to move there artillery up in "real time" as the enemy can respond sensibly, not possible in an episodic game of any scale.

The many pint-sized campaigns from Too Fat Lardies for Chain of Command provide 'ladder' campaigns around specific actions. Usually attacker/defender but usually with the option for counter-attack. Casualties carried over, usually, and options for support of the basic platoon. I'd imagine they could be used for other rules.

The fighting up from Southern France and the Dragoon landings.

I've done lots of these, both as campaigns and operational games. I even wrote a campaign system for Spearhead to do it, starting with The Race to Leningrad. Both players are the GW, competing against each other. Other in the SH community have since developed it.

As a general concept, the Skirmish Campaigns series does it, and the basic premise of KISS Rommel is to fight the North African campaign with formations cycling in and out. I wrote a version for Operation Bagration.

Tbh, any operation with either geographical or operational flank Boundaries is suitable.

A few suggestions

7th Panzer or Guderians Corps in France.
4th Panzer in Poland
The drive on Leningrad, the Dvina, Smolensk, Khakov, Rostov (take your pick) in 1941
Battle of Kharkog in either 42 or 43
Operation Winter Storm
Drive on Rostov in 43
The very obvious Kursk and Orel and Belgorod offensives
Bagration, Lvov Sandomierz in 44.

Drive on Catania in 43 (Paras and Commandos!)
Operation Totalise (GBWW2 covers this very well).

Honestly, the list endless, just limited by your imagination. An interesting alternative to Peiper is 2nd Panzer Divs drive to the Meuse, culminating in the decisive battle at Celles.

The old Battleground "Keys to the West" is a campaign and has game maps of the route that Peiper's drive to the Meuse took. We used this in a campaign for 15mm and a different set of rules. The smaller maps are used for the table setups for combat locations.