Incoming!
Arrived. Sebastian Bae’s Littoral Commander: Indo-Pacific from The Dietz Foundation (2023).
Arrived. O’Hara, Vincent P., and Trent Hone. Fighting in the Dark: Naval Combat at Night: 1904-1944. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2023.
In Execution
First Impressions. Shayne Logan’s Old School Tactical: Volume 2 – Western Front 1944/45 (Flying Pig Games, 2017). Long overdue posting. “Old School” with a more modern twist?
Deep Dive. Jon Southard’s Carrier Battle: Philippine Sea (Compass Games, 2023). The programmed learning process is taking time as this is not the only item I want to put on the gaming table.
In Planning
History to Wargame. Fighting in the Dark and wargames. The book has seven chapters each covering a different nation and time period:
- The Russian navy in “Stumbling in the Dark: The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905” by Stephen McLaughlin.
- The German navy in “Tactics of Frustration: The German Navy and Night Combat, 1914-1916” by Leonard R. Heinz.
- The British navy in “The British and Night Fighting At and Over the Sea, 1916-1939” by James Goldrick.
- The Italian navy in “Forced to Fight: Italy, 1940-1943” by Vincent P.O’Hara and Enrico Cernuschi.
- The Japanese navy in “How Can They Be That Good? Japan, 1922-1942” by Jonathan Parshall.
- The U.S. navy in “Mastering the Masters: The U.S. Navy, 1942-1944” by Trent Hone.
- The British and Canadian navies in “Controlling the Chops: Destroyer Night Action and the Battle of Ile de Batz, October 1943-June 1944” by Michael Whitby.
My original plan was to use a different tactical naval combat wargame for each period but reviewing the different games in my collection I discovered it may not be that easy. Many of the actions analyzed in Fighting in the Dark were fought by smaller combatants, often destroyers or torpedo boats. It turns out that many (not all, but many) of the “tactical” naval combat wargames in my collection focus on larger combatants like battleships or cruisers. In many cases, the destroyers or smaller ships are amalgamated into a single counter representing a squadron or flotilla of ships. I own a very small handful of titles that focus on very small combatants which may work but those games almost have the opposite problem where destroyers are the “monsters” of the battle.
Manifested to Arrive w/in 30 Days
Ryan, Mick. White Sun War, 2023.
At the end of April my next book will be published by Casemate Publishers. Called White Sun War, it is a fictional account of a war over Taiwan that takes place in 2028. The narrator for the story is a future historian, looking back from 2038 on the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the war.
Mick Ryan, “Exploring ‘White Sun War’,” Futura Doctrina, 11 March 2023
Annual Leave
Mrs. RockyMountainNavy arranged family leave that will take me out of pocket for several weeks this summer. As a result, it is very likely I engage in family gaming with smaller, lighter, and certainly more portable titles. That will also mean a few weeks of lighter blogging here too…
Feature image courtesy RMN
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