Chaos on the Battlefield vs. Our Perfect Knowledge

In our games, command and control (hereafter C&C) rules are used to lessen the effect of the all-knowing, 100-foot tall telepathic general. In real life C&C is about alleviating the confusion on the battlefield.

 

Some players dislike C&C rules; each to their own. If you have more than two players per side, you don’t need C&C rules because any plan other than attacking all along the line will soon go down the drain. (This is the advised plan for convention games.) Players aren’t interested in watching others play. They want to roll dice and cause mayhem. More than once I’ve seen players in strong defensive positions leave them to attack. Long-range artillery fire was boring. Bayonets!

 

In smaller games I find C&C rules important. The Fencibles are a small club. These days it is a stretch get 4 players together.

 

In our games, we usually have perfect knowledge of our own forces and the enemy too. We know how many they have and what sort too. Look, across the table, it’s the Aquitanian Arquebusiers; we know how tough they are.

 

Poniatowski at Borodino saw 10,000 troops through the smoke massed on the next hill. Unlike us, he didn’t know they were just Moscow militia, mostly armed with pikes. Even his exhausted troops might have seen them off.

 

Without C&C a player will not suffer the indignity of units failing to move when desired, unlike actual battles. At Gettysburg, Colonel Porter Alexander was tasked with coordinating the preliminary bombardment of Union lines before Pickett’s charge. He managed to borrow nine (some sources say a dozen) howitzers from A. P. Hill’s corps. 

They formed up behind Pickett’s division, intended to follow the attack in support. Alexander then went off to tend to some other business while the barrage continued. Upon returning, the howitzers were gone, no idea where they went. Colonel Alexander was outranked by Pickett and his three brigadiers, and by the Army Artillery commander, Brigadier General Pendleton. Any of them, unaware of the plan, could have ordered the howitzers to go elsewhere. No one informed Alexander.

 

I don’t think this was critical to the failure of the attack. If they had gone forward behind the infantry, the most likely effect would have been more Confederate casualties as they got hit by shots that sailed just over the infantry. A moderate sized artillery force, for all practical purposes, just disappeared. It does demonstrate what groups of real, non-telepathic people do.

 

On the second day of the battle of Chickamauga, Confederate General Braxton Bragg had ordered an attack at dawn by his right wing. After hours of silence, he rode that way to find the wing commander, Lt. General Polk, eating breakfast while reading a paper. Polk blamed the inaction on Lt. General D. H. Hill. A combination of truly inept staff work and touchy relations among the generals had resulted in the attack orders failing to get to Hill. Neither liked or respected Bragg. The cool relations between Polk and the prickly Hill didn’t help much. An early attack in strength might well have cut the Union army’s line of retreat. The battle would have gone from a severe Union defeat to a first-rate disaster.

 

I prefer simple C&C rules and chaos in the games. I think profiling the command environment of the armies portrayed is as necessary as getting the numbers of troops and their weapons right. Bring on the chaos and the petty feuds among the generals.