Researching the OOBs

The Barbarossa 25 (B25 herafter for brevity's sake) OOBs are a good starting point. But there are some issues I need to work out, plus I need to make sure I can field all the miniatures required for any given tabletop game. So I need to work on my own OOBs a bit.

The Germans start with 3 Infantry divisions, and that scales down perfectly to a single division. The single Panzer division has one Panzer regiment of two Panzer battalions, so it doesn't scale down so nicely. I definitely will narrow this down to a single Panzer Brigade, but haven't settled on a composition.

If I strictly divide by 3, I get only 2 companies of panzers, and I hardly think that two companies of panzers (6 tank models) will be enough to give an accurate feeling of the German blitzkreig. So I'm considering giving the panzer brigade a full panzer battalion and a full regiment of motorized infantry.

The B25 OOB also gives the Germans a very strong separate motorized infantry regiment ("Klein Deutschland"), and one separate motorized infantry battalion. This I'm going to amalgamate together to a single reinforced motorized infantry kampfgruppe.

The Soviet OOB is a bit more challenging to me. The designer, Frank Chadwick, reorganized the RKKA (Soviet army) into brigades in his OOB. This was done, he said, early on in the playtest campaign.

The problem I have is that the OOBs are also representative of late '41 Soviets and not the "Stumbling Colossus" of June 1941.

His OOB also has 7 tank brigades for the Soviets and no motorized/mechanized brigades. I am thinking of changing to two of each, with the stronger tank brigade (with T-34s) located in Moscow reserve.

I found a great site on the RKKA that I'm using to formulate my forces: RKKA in World War II.

I think I'll follow Mr. Chadwick's idea and organize into brigades at the start, albeit ones matching Summer 1941 organizations more closely.

For example, I'll be removing the PTRS/PTRD antitank rifle stands, since these weren't in service till the fall. I'll add another 45mm antitank gun where needed as a replacement. I will also add another battery of 76mm field guns to the brigades and remove the army level field artillery regiments.

At some point the Soviet OOB may look more like that of a romaticised Russian army that matches my miniatures collection than an accurate RKKA OOB. I'm tempted, for one thing, to start the game with more Soviet cavalry than actually existed in the summer of 1941 (As the cavalry was in the process of motorization).

If this process goes too far, does the Soviet Union become more of a fictional "Ruritania"? And Germany Graustark?

Introduction

This blog is my site for recording my Barbarossa miniature wargame campaign. It is intended to document a wargame campaign covering the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 - Operation Barbarossa.

Years ago (in 1988 - My God! That was twenty years ago!) Game Designer's Workshop (GDW) published a campaign supplement to their Command Decision wargame rules, called "Barbarossa 25". I've always been fascinated reading this supplement and contemplating its staging.


In this campaign supplement, everything is scaled down, roughly, by a factor of 25. Thus 25 kilometers of Russia terain became one kilometer of wargame terrain, each 25 divisions were represented ("bathtubbed") down to a single division, and a month was reduced to a single day.

Now that still resulted in an awful lot of troops - the initial German invasion force was three entire infantry divisions, one panzer division, plus all the assorted supporting troops and miscellaneous units. The Russians had about double this (hordes of lower quality troops).

Now I game solo most of the time, and can't commit to a regular gaming schedule due to the demands of real life, so Barbarossa 25 is clearly beyond my capabilities to stage - I wouldn't be able to fight a single campaign day's combat in a month of real time.

So I decided to scale Barbarossa down even further, from a scale of 1/25 to 1/75, so that is how Barbarossa 75 was born.