Sunday, May 29, 2022

Organising a Historical refight pt 1 : The New Zealand division on Crete 1941

 A couple of weeks ago I managed to recover the Paradise.net web pages on our refight of Crete 1941 from 2002 on the Wayback website. As its the pre-digital age there were not a lot of pictures taken of either the game or the planning and setup. I thought I would post it all up again as it may be of some interest to those thinking about doing something similar.

In the series of blog posts I'll go through the process of researching the battle and transfering it to the tabletop though a lot of its going to be a bit hazy as it was 20 years ago. The overall process from idea to staging the game at Call to Arms was about 7-8 months. I started off by doing as much reading as I could. Being employed at Victoria unversity at the time gave me access to the university library collection which surprisingly enough contained several translated German accounts of the battle. My main souce was the New Zealand official history by Davin. This is part of the Official history series compiled after WW2 with Sir Howard Kippenberg (a brigade commander on Crete) in charge of the project. Most of the books have been digitised which is just as well as they fetch high prices on the second hand market. The Wellington Library had a full set which also proved handy. I also read the chapters on Crete in each of the battalion histories. This assisted in sorting out a correct OOB and deployment map. It also gave some ideas for changes to the base Spearhead rules.

In the next part I will cover the OOB for the NZ division.

1 comment:

  1. Awesome, excellent stuff - looking forward to this :)

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