"Favourite Doomed Army" Topic

I have a psychological quirk where I feel too much sympathy for losers. This translates to my hobby, where armies that were historically doomed, seem inordinately interesting.

I don't think I'm alone and many of us enjoy commanding armies that are historically outclassed, under-equipped or simply facing impossible odds.

Which "hopeless" or disadvantaged historical army do you most enjoy putting on the tabletop—and why?

Possibilities might include:

Late Romans
Napoleonic-era Neapolitans
Early-war French (1940)
Late-war Confederates
Anyone fighting the Imperial Romans
ECW Royalists
Definitely the Jacobites of the '45 and so on.

Is it the challenge, the unusual troop mix, the historical sympathy or simply the pleasure of trying to achieve the impossible?

French in 1870
Late Eastern Roman Empire

I gather this is not just a matter of my not going for the current "killer army" for some tournament or the other.

Kingdom of Greece 1897--I wanted some Greeks for the Colonial Era and knew I'd find much more information on an army that actually fought a war during the period, hence 1897. It wasn't until later that I slowly began to realize that I might well have modeled the least effective European army of the 1890s.

Sub-Roman British--Very romantic, with Celtic themes and King Arthur.

French 1940. Well, I thought they were underrated and could have done better.

Something I would like to have done is 1450s Byzantine. Yes, I think they could have done better, but they also have unusual troops, and I do have some historical sympathy for them. I'm not so sure about them now because it is getting late in my life to do another army and because in some ways, their situation reflects too much of the current political situation.

Grelber

Natal Native Contingent.
German Volkstrum.
Peasant levy.

Napoleonic Spanish. Everything needs to go right to win and victory is rare, but memorable when it does happen.

I suppose the closest thing I've got are Ancient British. Historically they lost about every battle the Romans cared to tell us about – but on the table-top I've got a decent track record with them.

I'm supposed to get started on an ECW Royalist army, but I dunno if they were historically outclassed or facing impossible odds. Their military system was basically the same as that of their enemies, and their defeat doesn't seem like a foregone conclusion to me.

Defenders of the Alamo
Spartans at the Pass
Muskogee Creek Native Nation
Japanese after 1942
Chinese Boxer era and later

Reichsarmee SYW. Attractive uniforms and gorgeous flags.

Reading the replies, I wonder if this is about more than simply liking unusual armies. Don't get me wrong – I love an improbable uniform as much as the next person but is psychology at play?

Are some of us especially drawn to gallant defeat—to doomed causes, last stands and armies fighting against impossible odds?

Thermopylae. Rorke's Drift. Maiwand. The Alamo.

There seems to be something deeply appealing about courage without much hope of victory.

Is it sympathy for the underdog? A desire to rewrite history? Admiration for stubbornness in defeat? Or does a "doomed" army simply feel more human—and therefore more interesting—than an obvious winner?

Zulus! and most colonial opponents.

Xenophon's 10,000, surely doomed but they got out!

I realize this is about historical, but back in the day, my created Full Thrust faction was the remnants of a shattered H3 'big oil' loser of an interstellar corperate war.

Basic spoiler force for normal scenarios, but I loved creating the background.

Doug

I think the more interesting question is, what underdog armies are not liked. I don't see many fans of
- Late Persians
- French in the early 100 year war
- 1866 Austrians.

Maybe it is, because these armies were not seen as underdogs before the war started.

Ottoman Turks and their Crimean Tatar and North African allies, 1683 and later.

Pounded repeatedly by the Austrians, Poles, Russians, French, British, and Persians well into the 20th Century, but could take a lickin' and keep on tickin'.

For most of the Napoleonic Wars and much of the Seven Years War, Austrians – like dBerzerk's Turks, took a lickin', kept on tickin'

Plus I like the white coats

Also Mexican armies from the Texas Rebellion to the Mexican Revolution with the possible exception of the Mexican Adventure

And, of course, I have all three armies

Most of the early war WWII countries like Poland, France, Greece, etc. because I like the underdog and, at a tactical level, you can still give the Axis player a bloody nose.

Napoleonic Spanish. They took a beating and kept coming back.

Zulus because they are my favorite colonial army, and they won a few battles!
Paul

Napoleonic Spanish
Mexican-American War Mexicans
ECW Royalist
1866 Austrians
Spanish-American War Spanish

Italian Blackshirts in Africa 1940-- double bragging rights if they ever win a battle.

+1 for Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples (glory to the pink!).

For Ancients:
Early Libyans (glory to the foot skirmishers!)
Skythians (glory to the light horse!)

Early Medieval:
Bretons (bringing cav to a knight fight against the Franks, ouch, but somebody has to try to stand up to that Baddie Big Chuck.)

ECW-ish:
Irish Confederates (somebody has to stand up to that Baddie Old Nol.)

For me Alamo defenders

Anything I have fielded on a tabletop.

Wurtemberg in the SYW. Their leader (a mere Duke) wanted to become an Elector status in the Holy Roman Empire at any cost. Consequently, his fielded army was often forced to live off the land and the best/tallest men in the ranks were impressed into his personal guard and shipped home. Those men would have been grenadiers in his field armies. They also suffered from his personal involvement in their deployments which the Prussians were able to sweep them aside. Such a life in the Wurtemburg army of the time!

I had a good deal of fun with a Warlord Chinese army. Terrible quality, but fun to put together.

Decades ago I played Skaven in Warhammer, hordes of rats who were just there to die! Quantity has a quality all its own. One army I came up against had nothing in it I could actually kill. Talk about doomed army. It was shortly after that I quit playing Warhammer altogether.

I enjoy the underdog armies in history. My two favorite Colonial armies are the Mahdists and who ever is fighting the British.

There is an advantage for folks like me to play the historical underdogs, when we lose we can shrug and point to historical precedent, rather than our own shortcomings.

French 1870

Russian Army and Navy 1904-5

The Japanese just completely dominated them, but I have a soft spot for what they could have done.

France 1940.

It's a situation with so many opportunities for alternate outcomes, unlike the many hopeless last stands.

Confederates
ECW Royalists
All the guys holding the line while the rest get away.

Carolinean Swedes

Hmmm. I don't see WWII Italians on the lists.

I'd say two basic sets:
(1) Armies like 1940 French, 1941-42 Italians and 1808 Spanish which can give good service, but you have to understand how they were meant to fight and adjust your tactics to match.

(2) Last-ditch armies with emotional resonance--say Volksturm Germans and those last improvised panzer divisions, or 1814 French.

I've done both, but most of my effort has gone into that first category: armies you have to understand as different.

Can't say I fielded any of these.

Yes Italians of WW2 first came to my mind.
The Italians of First Italo-Ethiopian War (1895–1896)
The Aussies of the Gallipoli Campaign.
The U.S. in the Philippines at the beginning of WW1.
Russians in 1917

As far as fielding and wanting them to win, Royalists, and I have no idea why. Maybe be some small bit of an ancestor still in me.

Limited to armies I own myself --

Texians at the Alamo
Jacobite rebels (any of the conflicts but primarily 1745)
Zulus (but on the tabletop, they can win more often than happened in history)
Thermopylae Greeks
Medieval Scots (curse those English longbows!!!)

-- and if I branch out into literature, it would be the Romans of the Twentieth Legion in "The Eagle in the Snow" historical novel by Wallace Breem. The doomed attempt to hold the Rhine frontier in 405-407 against the might of the united German tribes.

Jacobite rebels (any of the conflicts but primarily 1745)

They could have won! Louis let them down.

I agree that they *might* have won, but given what historically went down, the odds grew increasingly stacked against them as the conflict went on. The Jacks always seem to be in a situation where they can't afford to lose a major battle. Gotta keep winning to sustain any momentum, and even then, they were bogging down by the last months. As soon as they suffered a big defeat (Culloden) the game was up.

Real French support could have made a difference.

And something else that intrigues me -- as alternate history -- What If Charles Stuart had been content to just seize and hold Scotland, consolidate his power there, and proclaim the Union at an end and reassert Scottish independence? And put it to George II that they could agree on those terms to end the clash, the Stuarts accepting the Hanoverian dynasty as monarchs of England and the Hanoverians accepting the Stuarts as rulers of the kingdom of Scots? Would the London government have quietly agreed to a compromise that allowed the northern realm to go its own way (again) in exchange for peace and a treaty of neutrality between them?

The 1715 uprising was even more likely to succeed in Scotland had the Jacobites been happy with that (and not been cursed with outrageously stupid leadership). There was a lot more support for the Stuart cause and sundering of the Union than a generation later.

Then there's the question of religion -- had James Stuart been willing to become a Protestant, I think he would have been welcomed in London when Queen Anne died. "Was London worth not a mass?"

The Stuarts greedily wanted it ALL (and refused to budge on their Catholicism until it was much, much too late, in Charlie's case) and perhaps this was their undoing, ultimately. Focusing on the unattainable instead of being content with a smaller victory.

I don't think the Stuarts would have accepted Scotland as a consolation prize. Literally the only thing of value in Scotland was the Jacobites. Everything else about the kingdom was a liability. Ruling Scotland was a doom of permanent poverty and irrelevance. I mean, poverty and irrelevance is what they got anyway, but the Stuarts and Windsors had both risen from provincial backwater landholders to cosmopolitan monarchies. There's no way either was going back willingly.

It would have been a fitting end to the Stuart story, however. They came out of Scotland to rule England, the great enemy and repeated conqueror, for almost a century – settling back onto the throne of an independent Scotland after a violent contest to remove it from English hegemony would have been poetic.

(And yes, I know the kingdom of Great Britain included Wales and Ireland, but that's not who the Scots were quarreling with. The romanticized contest was always and ever with the English.)

Well stated, Admiral!

Also, FWIW, I think that a second Stuart Restoration on a litter carried by French soldiers would have made them French puppets. They could only have ruled as Catholics with French support, and I would lay odds that a third exile was a near certain doom.

It's a really fun wargame idea though. I'm collecting the French troops to fight Saxe's invasion of 1744 as a wargames campaign. If the landing had actually succeeded, the IRL campaign probably would have been a quiet march to London and an uncontested crowning ceremony, but we wargamers don't have to be so sanguine about simulating reality. I plan an increasingly stiff resistance from Harwich to the Thames, some fun sea fights over supply lines, and maybe two sieges of London.

The awareness of owing a debt to France is something of a problem for a restored Stuart monarch, but would that have been any worse than William of Orange using his position on the throne to continually prop up his interests in Holland and use England and Scotland both as recruiting grounds for his armies and spending their treasuries on Dutch interests? Somehow William survived that. I think the Stuarts could have as well. And inevitably they'd have fallen out with France, as Great Britain always did in those times.

I definitely have extra French regulars on hand for my 1745 games, for those type of hypothetical battles. Plus Hessians, who only got involved in some minor skirmishing late in the war but might have become more than garrison troops for the Hanoverians.

Dervishes.

Piper, there's a difference between owing a debt--or having other interests, as the Hanoverian monarchs did--and being unable to stay on your throne without foreign backing. At that point you become a puppet monarch, like Napoleon's various relatives, ruling as long as your backer says you may. That's Yellow Admiral's point as I understand it. I'm not entirely convinced he's right, but it's certainly a possibility.

Oh. Doomed armies. How about 1866 Hanover?

Curiously, I wandered across a short YouTube documentary today from a Scottish historian who discusses just this thing -- What if the Jacobites Never Left Scotland?

YouTube link

I'm not sure much was decided by this round table discussion, except the speakers all seemed to enjoy their beers and in-jokes.