Gamers: the last gentlemen of warfare?

An article by Bob Crumpton

I am going to be a bit controversial with parts of this article. I warn you in advance!

Irrespective of time, date and place, one of the main axioms of War is to defeat an enemy. Yesterday, that enemy may have been a friend, and tomorrow may be so again. Who knows, who cares? Warfare is generally caused by someone wanting someone else’s “possessions” enough to be prepared to kill for him or her. The possessions may be land, loot or people. The motivation may be political, religious or downright greed, but in the end, it’s down to a scrap.

War-gamers tend to deal with military units ‘in the field’. Units meet in conflict, rules, dice and mechanisms are followed, and somewhere along the line there is a nominal victor, and loser. Unit “x” suffers “y” number of casualties, and behaves accordingly. Not often do we say: “Well there were 30 casualties, of which 22 were killed outright, 3 were wounded and left on the field to die, 3 were killed whilst trying to surrender and 2 are unaccounted for”. Nowhere do we say, “Well actually 1 in 6 of those casualties need to be explained to a war-crimes tribunal or court of enquiry”.

The nearest a gamer comes to a “war crime” is asking if the rules allow him a “free hack” as the enemy rout, “Err excuse me General Smith, so your enemies had thrown down their weapons and were running away, and you sent in your lancers to spear them in the back?” So how about civilians? Due to the cost of figures, who can afford to portray columns of civilians in retreat, clogging up your approach lines, surrendered enemy in their thousands making their way home in the opposite direction to your advance?

“War Crimes”

The Greeks, Alexander, The Romans, the Celtic Britons, Attila, Genghis, Napoleon, all destroyed cities and their entire populations as statutory

lessons to others to toe the line. The British invented the ‘concentration camp’ (what about the Spanish in the Cuba?, credit where credit is due - Ed) in the Boer War “Hey Hans we know where your wife and kids are….” WW1 gas warfare was originally designed to flood out the HOME FRONTS with incapacitated servicemen not specifically to kill men at the front. In fact they said if you blinded one guy and left him alive it took 2 to lead him to safety – so you took 3 enemy out of the equation at the front before even working out the manpower and cost expenditure of after-care.

Guerrilla warfare is successful because no one knows who the enemy is. The British lost North America because of it. The only times Washington was beaten was when he tried to take on the redcoats in set battles. The Americans tripped on the same hurdle against the Koreans and Vietnamese. The Germans felt it all over Europe in WW2. How does a ‘civilised’ army counter guerrillas?

If a platoon commander goes into a village after his unit has drawn fire, the natives are sullen and hostile, and he decides to shoot every male over 15 years old, he is a war criminal. If he was a squadron leader and his planes dropped 100 tons of bombs on an ‘enemy’ city killing 1000 people, men, women and children, destroying hospitals, schools etc, he’d only have to repeat it 24 times to get a medal.

So what am I trying to say? Perhaps that war itself is a crime against humanity, but we as a species are going to carry on doing it – so why pretend there have to be civilised rules to an uncivilised activity. We can hardly claim moral superiority. If we went to war in 1939 to free Poland, and we beat the Germans in 1945 – did we win? Well not if the goal was to free Poland, because we handed it into Russian captivity for 40 odd years. Hundreds of Polish servicemen who fought with us during the war chose to commit suicide at British ports after the war, rather than be handed into the ‘care’ of the Russians – we refused them asylum. Was that a war crime or Expediency?

Do I want gaming to be more realistic – bet your life I don’t in the context of the above? Do I want rule-sets allowing for columns of refugees, defeated enemies etc – No thank you? Perhaps I’m just saying “Look, they’re models – I’m a big kid playing – I’ve personally never fired a shot in anger – I am not a warmonger – I don’t do politics, pass me a cup of tea and a tape measure please.

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