Game 446: Eastern Front (1941)

Photo collected by Imperial War Museum, original source unknown

In the spring of 1941, two years after the fall of Poland and subsequently uneasy relations with Russia, Hitler's German Reich stood near the peak of its power. Northern France was occupied, Yugoslavia partitioned after a short-lived uprising, and the complete invasion of Greece well underway. His generals were assured that Russia, militarily weakened and disorganized in the wake of Stalin's purges, was next. In June, aided by Romanian and Finnish allies, Germany mobilized millions of personnel and tens of thousands of tanks, combat vehicles, and artillery pieces to the borders of an unprepared Soviet Union to launch the largest and bloodiest operation in military history.

Chris Crawford's Eastern Front, his third commercial computer wargame (and second extant one), casts you as Germany's supreme commander general of the entire eastern front, and simulates 41 weeks of war, each presented as a turn. It is not a whale, despite being one of the most famous and well received computer wargames of the decade, but as the next whale is a Crawford title, it seemed pertinent to play this as a predecessor. The Wargaming Scribe did this one awhile ago now - check out his AAR if you haven't already.

Eastern Front 1941 has a host of features that make the selection of wargames that I've played from its time and even a bit later look very primitive in comparison. While SSI was pushing the limits on what could be done with Applesoft BASIC, Crawford was driving Atari's metal with raw assembly.

• Unprecedented scale; command upwards of 100 units on a two-million km² map featuring smooth 4-way scrolling.
  
• An intuitive interface that is mostly controllable with a single-button joystick.
• Simultaneous "we go" turn execution; you plan the marching and attack orders for the next week and then watch all of the pieces move and succeed or fail in compressed semi-realtime.
• Competent AI that self-optimizes its plans during your own turn, and requires very little time for further thinking once you hit the "end turn" button. The longer you take, the smarter it plays.
  
• Seasonal weather effects that dramatically impact play. Autumn mud brings everything to a sticky halt, winter climate brings chilly death to your frostbitten men.
  
• Probably the best wargame manual I've seen yet. Even the earlier, cheaply printed APX manuals are excellent.
• Expansion disks including additional scenarios, a scenario editor, and even the source code.
  

 

I've mentioned that I don't like playing as the Germans, who are the only gameplay option in Eastern Front 1941, as they were in Crawford's earlier Tanktics. I'll do it, but I'll still feel weird about it. Tanktics can get a pass since it only depicts a small tank skirmish that ends as soon as the last T-34 is disabled, but on an operations level, every city taken represents thousands of rapes, murders, and mutilations encouraged by Nazi racial doctrine. Every successful push is followed closely by S.S. death squads to carry out massacres and summarily execute Jewish prisoners as matter of policy, with millions more fated to die in captivity. All of this is, of course, sanitized away as a sterile game of numbers and pictograms, and the crimes against humanity barely even whispered in the manual. Perhaps this is somewhat accurate to the experience of high strategists, but even the least fanatical, most duty-focused army commander couldn't have been completely ignorant that they were fighting a war of annihilation.

Anyway. I'll be playing the original 1981 APX version, which is more or less feature-complete. The 1982 re-release adds more scenarios, some incremental UI/UX improvements, and the rather appreciated ability to save your game ("after all, the game [only] takes about two or three hours to play," rationalizes the APX version manual) but otherwise looks and plays the same. Prior to writing this, I have played a number of turns for practice and understanding the rules and strategy, but no game went past August yet. So this post begins my first complete playthrough.

We start with a giant cluster of German units, colored white, stationed around Warsaw running up against a weak line of Russian units, colored red. Circles with X's represent infantry and squares represent cavalry or armor - the latter tends to be stronger, but combat strength is given as an absolute quantifier. A 100-strength infantry fights just as well as a 100-strength panzer division; the panzers just tend to have more strength than that.

Cavalry/armor, however, moves faster. Under perfect conditions, a rarity, they can move up to eight spaces in a turn. Infantry, under perfect conditions, move up to five. Combat, terrain, and traffic from friendly units slow things down.

It's critical to plan moves very carefully, very thoroughly. It took me a bit to reckon with the fact that this is simultaneous turn execution, and not alternating turns, and that profoundly changes the way you plan out your marching orders. You don't move your units one-by-one; you queue up orders for every single unit, even the ones in the back who can't move right now, planning for the eventuality that the fighting in the front will create room for them to move as the week advances.

I made myself a mapping aid tool to produce a larger, annotatable picture.

• This is a scoring game with no definitive win condition. The bulk of points are received for moving raw muster strength east, and sizable bonus points for capturing Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad, annotated with red stars.
  
• Germans units are the strongest overall. However, they do not receive reinforcements from home - any losses a German unit takes are permanent.
• Finns are the next-strongest, but they can't attack, they just create zones of control. For now, I can't do very much with them, but if I can secure Leningrad and drive out the militia, they'll be usable.
  
• Romanians are weaker than Finns, and will later be complemented by Hungarian reinforcements, which are comparable in power.
• Russians units are poor, but will receive regular reinforcements in the form of muster strength replenishment. More Russian units will also come from the cities and map borders as the year advances.
  
• Russian militia, which are represented by the same icon as Russian infantry but can be recognized by query, can move and create zones of control but do not attack.
  

Let's look at some numbers:

 

Finland:

Axis	Strength	Strength	Russia
2 Finnish Infantry	112	110	1 Militia Army
4 Finnish Infantry	104	101	4 Militia Army

Poland/Slovakia:

Axis	Strength	Strength	Russia
		85	7 Tank Army
38 Infantry Corps	120	118	8 Infantry Army
28 Infantry Corps	112	70	1 Tank Army
41 Panzer Corps	198	137	11 Infantry Army
26 Infantry Corps	104
10 Infantry Corps	101
56 Panzer Corps	194	91	4 Infantry Army
2 Infantry Corps	123
1 Infantry Corps	129	86	8 Tank Army
5 Infantry Corps	136	75	3 Cavalry Army
24 Panzer Corps	203	132	3 Infantry Army
6 Infantry Corps	127	90	6 Cavalry Army
7 Infantry Corps	150
46 Panzer Corps	192	131	10 Infantry Army
8 Infantry Corps	129
47 Panzer Corps	199	71	5 Tank Army
9 Infantry Corps	136
57 Panzer Corps	184	125	5 Infantry Army
29 Infantry Corps	111
3 Panzer Corps	202	124	6 Infantry Army
49 Infantry Corps	140
14 Panzer Corps	195	151	12 Infantry Army
17 Infantry Corps	119
48 Panzer Corps	191	130	26 Infantry Army
4 Infantry Corps	142	88	3 Tank Army
		77	4 Tank Army

Hungary:

Axis	Strength	Strength	Russia
54 Infantry Corps	106	79	11 Tank Army
		79	12 Tank Army
30 Infantry Corps	131	80	5 Cavalry Army
11 Infantry Corp	125	126	9 Infantry Army

 

Romania:

Axis	Strength	Strength	Russia
4 Rumanian Infantry	92	91	4 Cavalry Army
2 Rumanian Infantry	96
1 Rumanian Infantry	97	84	2 Cavalry Army

 

Advantage is decisively mine on all fronts, especially the main army group, but time is not on my side. My units don't get reinforcements, and Russia's do, unless they're dead.

To make the best use of my numbers game, I'm going to want to destroy as many Russian units as I can, as quickly as I can, as efficiently as I can. The most efficient way to do this is with pincer attacks; any defending unit that becomes overwhelmed will abandon its orders and retreat, and if it cannot retreat, it will instead suffer enhanced casualties and possibly disperse entirely. A pincer attack makes retreat impossible, cuts off reinforcements, makes the defender fight more poorly, and only requires two attackers per victim.

My initial goal - scatter the Russian armies like a pool rack. Push them, break them, move them around to make pincering the isolated units easier. Bully the weaker units, use tanks like bulldozers, and assume every attack and every push will be successful - better to overplan and have units with uncued moves than have units that spend part of the turn sitting still!

I plan out the turn, and agonize over every step. Bad planning can get units stuck all trying to enter the same squares at the same time from different directions, and I make use of visual maps to ensure this will not happen.

It's a bit overwhelming to have to coordinate seven days of movements at once for so many units, and I kind of wish I could just plan the turns one day at a time, so I did. I used movable GIMP layers to simulate day-to-day action, with these rules:

• Days 1-3: Move panzers.
• Days 4-6: Move panzers and infantry.
  
• Day 7: Most units rest, unless moving would be particularly beneficial and the preceding terrain crossed that week was fairly quick. If I'm feeling lucky about a piece I'll move it twice.
  
• Russians don't move, except to retreat when an attack succeeds.
• Attacks are always successful. Pincer attacks instantly eliminate the defender.

This isn't by any means a perfect method, and the resulting plan looks like chaos when I put it all together, but there's purpose behind every move. Overconfidence can still work out to my benefit as long as I keep pushing east. My biggest drawback is that race conditions can lead to gridlock if I plan to have two units cross the same spot on different days but they wind up reaching it at the same time from opposite directions (After you, Franz! No, after you, Hans!).

 

June 22 - June 28

Finns will hold - that's all they can do for some time. Germans and Rumanians will push the Russians into unfavorable terrain like rivers, coastlines, and swamps, and pincer attack as much as possible.

Let's see how this actually pans out.

Sadly, there is no way to view the overall battle situation! You can scroll freely during turn resolution, but if your viewport isn't pointed at a thing when it happens, you don't see it. The best I can do is observe once the turn ends and manually compare to the turn before, which couldn't have been very convenient in 1981!

I overlaid my plans on the results:

Poland/Slovakia did quite well! There's a bit of gridlock here and there, and my northmost infantry got in the way of the panzer, spoiling an aggressive advance which assumed it would get to move first, and the panzer blocks an infantry who was meant to follow, but overall I am pleased. Nobody else spends the week sitting on their helmets waiting for the horses to get out of the way.

Romanian troops didn't do quite as well, with a Russian cavalry unit holding steady despite being attacked by two nominally superior infantry forces at once.

I have more numbers.

Poland/Slovakia:

Axis	Old strength	Current strength	Current strength	Old strength	USSR
			86	85	7 Tank Army
38 Infantry Corps	120	120	92	118	8 Infantry Army
28 Infantry Corps	112	112	69	70	1 Tank Army
41 Panzer Corps	198	195		137	11 Infantry Army
26 Infantry Corps	104	104
10 Infantry Corps	101	101
56 Panzer Corps	194	194	88	91	4 Infantry Army
2 Infantry Corps	123	123
1 Infantry Corps	129	120	81	86	8 Tank Army
5 Infantry Corps	136	136	76	75	3 Cavalry Army
24 Panzer Corps	203	192		132	3 Infantry Army
6 Infantry Corps	127	127		90	6 Cavalry Army
7 Infantry Corps	150	150
46 Panzer Corps	192	181	105	131	10 Infantry Army
8 Infantry Corps	129	129
47 Panzer Corps	199	192	60	71	5 Tank Army
9 Infantry Corps	136	136
57 Panzer Corps	184	171		125	5 Infantry Army
29 Infantry Corps	111	111
3 Panzer Corps	202	202	119	124	6 Infantry Army
49 Infantry Corps	140	140
14 Panzer Corps	195	193		151	12 Infantry Army
17 Infantry Corps	119	119
48 Panzer Corps	191	191	108	130	26 Infantry Army
4 Infantry Corps	142	142	43	88	3 Tank Army
			78	77	4 Tank Army

Hungary:

Axis	Old strength	Current strength	Current strength	Old strength	USSR
54 Infantry Corps	106	106	35	79	11 Tank Army
			80	79	12 Tank Army
30 Infantry Corps	131	131	75	80	5 Cavalry Army
11 Infantry Corp	125	125	122	126	9 Infantry Army

Romania:

Axis	Old strength	Current strength	Current strength	Old strength	USSR
4 Rumanian Infantry	92	92	83	91	4 Cavalry Army
2 Rumanian Infantry	96	96
1 Rumanian Infantry	97	97	78	84	2 Cavalry Army

 

These are good trades, but how long can I keep this aggression up? The manual says I have 96 Soviet units to look forward to, and my tanks aren't going to last another 40 weeks if they keep taking hits the way they have this turn. Will my strategy of deliberate overconfidence lead to a mistake that the Soviets can exploit?

It took me almost an hour and a half to plan out this turn, but Scribe assures me that they get quicker. We'll see, but rest assured that my next posts will be more condensed than this one. I don't want to write about the anatomies of 40 individual turns, you don't want to read them.