Let's Play Victory at Sea

So, I've painted the Royal Navy fleet and the German fleet for Victory at Sea, and even bought the starter set and rulebook. It's high time we tried playing it!

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Since we just want to get a feel for the rules, we went for a small 200-point skirmish. On the German side, my fictional Admiral Hipper-class cruiser, the Admiral Bellingshausen; for the British, HMS Belfast and the two Tribal-class destroyers, HMS Cossack and Bedouin. The starter set comes with a booklet that has all the rules in it, as well as nifty little turning gauges. Each fleet box has cards for all the ships inside.

To be perfectly honest, this was a very short battle. The Admiral Bellingshausen scored some hits on the Belfast and damaged the destroyers, but not enough: Cossack's torpedoes missed, but Bedouin scored a direct hit and the Bellingshausen blew up!

So that was it! I'm glad to report that the rules were very easy to pick up: some fairly simple D6 rolls and easy book-keeping, and a manageable amount of special rules. This  very brief game was fun enough that I definitely hope to do this again.

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Before my miniature-buying hiatus, I picked up the Schleswig-Holstein. A German pre-dreadnought battleship and veteran of Jutland, she fired the opening shots of World War II against Poland.

She's also hilariously tiny. Here she is next to a Type 1936A destroyer and a Hipper:

Wikipedia confirms this is pretty much right: the Schleswig-Holstein was 127m long and 22m abeam, to the 1936A's 125m. So she's absolutely dwarfed by the 200-meter Admiral Hipper.

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The starter set, Battle for the Pacific, comes with three Japanese cruisers and three destroyers, as well as three US cruisers and a whopping six Fletcher-class destroyers.

All the cruisers are in the lighter resin and are very good quality models. The destroyers are in the darker, softer resin, and will need more work. A couple are wonky enough to need boiling.

I'm going to start with the Japanese ships since I've got a bit of an Axis thing going here. 

As per David Williams's Naval Camouflage 1914-1945 and this excellent website, with only very few exceptions, Imperial Japanese Navy warships were painted a uniform grey. I've seen several people use London Grey for the hull and Mahogany Brown for decks on cruisers and larger ships, so I'm going with that. I painted the Fubuki-class destroyers London Grey, with black tops for the smokestacks, and I think it worked great.

One thing I like to do is differentiate between individual ships, even when the models don't; destroyers don't have ship names on the bases, but just the class. With most navies, this is easy: I just freehand the pennant number on there. The Japanese, however, didn't use them. So freehand it is...

The Furutaka is in London Grey, with Mahogany Brown decks.

And so are the Mogami and Kumano.

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So I do have to say I quite like Victory at Sea so far: I'm enjoying painting the miniatures, and the game itself seems fun. I hope I get to play some more!

Let's Paint Victory at Sea: The Royal Navy

‘Thou looks't like Antichrist in that lewd hat,’ she said in a sombre voice, for the hounds had lost their fox and the only tolerable-looking man had vanished.

 - Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

Earlier, I started a Victory at Sea collection because a friendly nearby mail-order store sold the Kriegsmarine fleet box at a considerable discount. I noticed I quite liked painting the little ships, so when I found they actually had a Royal Navy fleet box at one of their stores, well, I bought it.

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Of course, there are so many reasons why I would buy a Royal Navy box. But I'm going to start with the models that actually pushed me into doing it: the Fairey Swordfish squadrons. It is nothing short of hilarious that the UK entered the Second World War still flying a biplane made out of cloth. And they made a great success of it, too, from striking the Italian fleet at Taranto to sinking the Bismarck. I've never built or painted a biplane model before!

Like the Stukas earlier, the Swordfish are made out of a rubbery resin that's quite annoying to work with, and the planes and the stand had a lot of flash to clear away. I also still quite dislike the flying stand. The Swordfish has a more complicated one, where you can use a ring to mark what role these particular Swordfish are flying in. One of them broke when I fitted it, for the simple reason that it's too small. Again, not the best idea.

Still, I got them assembled and undercoated, and painted the stands Blue. The planes are Sky Grey, with London Grey top bits.

The fleet box also comes with a carrier: the ancient HMS Eagle, originally laid down as the Almirante Cochrane for the Chilean navy. I decided on a simple paint job of London Grey and Medium Sea Grey, and tried to do something like the camo pattern seen in this picture on Wikimedia Commons.

Referring to David Williams's Naval Camouflage 1914-1945, I take that camo to be one of the unofficial predecessors to the Admiralty Disruptive Patterns introduced in 1942.

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I really enjoyed playing the PC version of Victory at Sea. Every now and then, you can get captured enemy ships as part of your fleet. It's a bit ahistorical, but fun, so I like it. At one point in my German campaign, I was given a Tribal-class destroyer called HMS Tartar. There actually was an HMS Tartar, which was absolutely everywhere, from the Arctic to the Mediterranean to Burma and the Japanese surrender, but I think I'm painting mine in German colors as a memento of my campaign.

If I understand the German system for designating captured ships, this would have been a ZB, so I'm calling it the ZB Tartar.

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My first Kriegsmarine campaign ended unceremoniously at the hands of a Royal Navy Town-class cruiser. So I might as well get started with HMS Belfast. She's a museum ship in London now, and I vaguely remember visiting when I was in high school. First things first, though: like the softer Kriegsmarine ships, both the Tribal and the Belfast needed straightening.

After the resin was heated, bent ever so gently into shape and weighed down for a bit, the ships were ready for assembly and painting.

I'm not really that interested in making even my historical miniatures that "accurate", and anyway I feel like it would just be boring to try to replicate the Belfast's actual camo. Instead, I went for a sort of basic Royal Navy scheme of London Grey and Medium Sea Grey, with Off-White masts, and the decks are Pale Sand.

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The obvious next thing to do was to paint the remaining two Tribal-class destroyers pink. Hey, the Barbie movie had just come out. First, of course, both the Tribals and the HMS Dido had to be boiled and straightened.

So these are HMS Cossack (03) and HMS Bedouin (67), both decked out in real-life Royal Navy camouflage from World War II, namely Mountbatten Pink. The horizontal surfaces are Medium Sea Grey and the verticals are Sunset Red.

And since I already boiled her, I've painted the Dido as well. As I was searching for examples of naval camouflage, I came across this absolutely lovely model of the Dido in green camo, and decided to try something similar myself. The base color is Green Sky, with Ivory and Black Green patterns. I like how it turned out!

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Finally, we have HMS Neptune and Duke of York, both thankfully in the lighter-colored resin and therefore unboiled. For the Neptune, I've gone for something like the camouflage pattern in this picture, using Sky Grey as the lightest color.

The Duke of York got my take on what Naval Camouflage says was the standard scheme for the King George V battleships.

And with that, the Royal Navy fleet is done! Here's a very badly lit photo of the whole thing, it was February in Finland, this is the best I could do.

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It was fun to try all the different paint schemes, and to paint a carrier. Luckily I've got more little ships!

Let's Paint Victory at Sea: the Kriegsmarine Fleet Box

In war, there is a conception known as the creation of a diversion, which consists of extending the scope of one's own operations to other areas in such a way that the enemy, to defend them, will be forced to withdraw forces from the main theatre of operations and thus to relax his pressure on it. A diversion, however, is of value only when, seen as a whole, it results in an advantage to the side creating it.

 - Admiral Karl Dönitz, Memoirs, chapter 10: the Battle of the Atlantic: November 1940–December 1941

I love small scale war games, and I love naval history. So when a friendly nearby mail-order gaming store offered Warlord's Victory at Sea rulebook for a competitive price, and a sizeable discount on the German navy fleet box, I knew what to do.

 - General Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) in KOEI's L'Empereur (1989)

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The German navy in World War II is perennially interesting because it offers so much fodder for all kinds of alternate histories. Decisively outnumbered by the Royal Navy, unsuccessful in the ferocious bureaucratic infighting of Nazi Germany and hampered by terrible national leadership, the Kriegsmarine still had excellently engineered, powerful fighting ships that could more than hold their own against their enemies. Reading the naval history of the Second World War, even through Anglo-American triumphalism, it's hard to not ask if the Germans couldn't have done more with what they had.

The trouble started at the top. Like most fascists, Hitler was basically a moron who replaced knowledge with bluster and bigotry. Sure, he was a successful politician, but I've always found the whole mythology of Hitler's supposed genius to be highly dubious. After nazism ended in utter defeat, just about everyone involved with it found it very convenient to blame everything on Hitler, and so he came to be portrayed as this sort of demonic spirit that somehow possessed all of Germany. It's complete nonsense. If there's anything the Trump phenomenon has taught us, surely it's that you can be a successful fascist demagogue while also being a complete idiot.

As a war leader and strategist, Hitler was useless. The post-WWI German navy never quite seemed to have a clear concept of what it was for. The ships it was allowed under the Treaty of Versailles made it essentially a coast defence force, but the Germans set out to circumvent this even before the Nazis came to power. Eventually in 1938 Hitler decided that he might have to fight Great Britain after all, and the naval building program known as Plan Z came into effect. The new fleet was to be ready by 1945, and Hitler apparently told the navy that the war would start in 1948.

As we know, the war actually started in 1939, when Plan Z had barely got underway. Because Germany faced an appalling shortage of steel, most work on the warships was immediately stopped. The fate of the German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin is a good example. Laid down in 1936 and launched in 1938, the ship was almost finished when the war started. In April 1940, work on her was stopped after the heavy losses in the Norwegian campaign. In 1942, however, Hitler and the navy had second thoughts, because now aircraft carriers were beginning to look like a really good idea, so work on the Graf Zeppelin was restarted in May. It lasted until December, when Hitler had a tantrum over the inconclusive Battle of the Barents Sea, fired Grand Admiral Raeder and stopped all work on big surface ships. The Graf Zeppelin was never finished, and was eventually sunk off the coast of Poland by the Soviets after the war.

So there's strategic leadership for you. Hitler's incompetence was magnified by the navy's inability to stand up to him, and its own lack of strategic direction. All in all, it never really seemed obvious what the Kriegsmarine was actually for, and the few heavy ships it did have were more or less squandered in penny-packet actions, or deployed so cautiously that they never got anything done.

This is what makes it such an interesting subject for wargaming: what if the German navy had actually been deployed as a battlefleet, and had fought fleet actions against some of its enemies?

This, incidentally, was why I was reading Correlli Barnett earlier. At the end of 1941, the Royal Navy was in a bad way. That November, HMS Barham was sunk in the Mediterranean by a German submarine; in December, the Prince of Wales and Repulse were destroyed by Japanese aircraft off Singapore, and HMS Queen Elizabeth and Valiant were sunk in Alexandria harbor in a raid by Italian special forces. In the space of a little over a month, the Royal Navy lost four battleships and a battlecruiser.

What this meant in practice was that the Royal Navy had no modern capital ships in the Mediterranean Fleet, and only the ancient HMS Malaya at Gibraltar. The Home Fleet was reduced to two battleships. The Americans had transferred all three of their operational battleships to the Pacific.

If the German navy had come out and challenged the Royal Navy, the outcome could have been shocking. Especially if the Italian navy had simultaneously mounted an operation in the Mediterranean, diverting Force H from Gibraltar. The whole war at sea could have been changed.

Of course, they did no such thing. But this, I feel, is very much what wargames are for.

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Now, though, it's time to get to those models. Surprisingly, the ships in the box come in two different kinds of resin: lighter and darker grey. The light grey ships are great: next to no flash or anything that needed much attention at all. The dark grey ones, well, aren't. It's a much softer resin, there's a lot of clipping and filing to do, and all of the ships are a bit banana-shaped. The destroyers, the Köln and the Blücher are done in the worse resin, and as you can see, the Blücher is auditioning for a refit to a ski-jump carrier.

I tried dunking one of the destroyers in hot water and bending it a bit. It didn't go well.

My next attempt was with water brought to a near boil, and it actually worked. I'm not exactly delighted that I had to do this, but it wasn't that much trouble in the end. I unbent my ships while making dinner, and frankly I'm still surprised I didn't end up serving my flatmate the Köln in tomato sauce.

Sadly the bigger ships rebounded a bit overnight, even though I dunked them in cold water, but the end result is still a damn sight better than how I got them. Then it was on to the metal bits. The destroyers were all right, you just have to glue on a funnel, but the cruisers were very, very fiddly. Some of those bits are right on the edge of what's physically possible.

After fitting masts and davits and what have you to the Köningsberg and Köln, all I'll say is that the Kriegsmarine better make do with two light cruisers, because they are not getting more.

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The first ship I'm going to paint is one of the Type 1936A destroyers. In reality, the 1936As were only known by their hull numbers, and as near as I can tell, didn't even display those anywhere. That's all very boring, though, and since I was reading Michael Moorcock's Land Leviathan when I got these, my very first Kriegsmarine ship is going to be the Z26 Gräfin von Landsfeld.

I went for Light Grey for the sides and Sky Grey for the superstructure. Apparently the exact colors of Kriegsmarine ships are the subject of a long-standing argument, like the one on Soviet air force colors, and while I find these things fascinating, I also want to paint my miniatures, so I picked the two closest-seeming Vallejo colors. The decks are in Beige Brown, which someone recommended; it's darker than most people seem to use, but I don't know, I kinda like it.

I painted the water around the ship in Blue, Dark Blue and Blue Green, with some Off-White foam in places. Maybe it's a little Mediterranean, but I like it. I'm also into this alternate-history idea of naming the 1936As after German (or Germanized!) noblewomen, so here's the one I broke earlier, as the Z23 Herzogin Margarete von Bayern, and the Z24 Kaiserin Matilda.

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Next up, the two light cruisers. I'm going to be honest here and admit that I'm not that keen on trying to figure out the exact historically accurate color schemes for these ships: I'm painting the main deck Beige Brown and the superstructure above it Sky Grey, and calling it done.

The Blücher is getting the same treatment.

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The box also came with four Stuka squadrons, also in the darker, more annoying resin, and they were a chore to prepare. I also kind of don't get solid flying stands when the same darn company sells transparent ones for its WWII air combat game. But still, the little planes are cute.

I painted the stands Blue and the planes with the same colors as in said WWII air combat game, that is, Light Grey with Neutral Grey stripes, and Green Grey for the barely visible underside.

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At this point in the project, the Steam summer sale happened, and the PC version of Victory at Sea was available at an 85% discount. I bought it, and it's fun. It's based on the original Mongoose ruleset, and it's very arcadey, almost like a mobile game, but surprisingly fun.

I tried it as the Germans, obviously, and they gave me a 1936-class destroyer to sail around in. The manual is four pages and they do the usual video tutorials that explain the controls, but that's about it. After a couple of introductory battles, I was told to go raid shipping around England, so I did. My first attempt ended when I decided to find out if i could take on a Town-class cruiser, and it turned out I couldn't. At least there's a Steam achievement for being sunk!

In my next game, I started out skippering the Z43, and ended up commanding a battlefleet with multiple battleships and a carrier. Toward the end of the campaign, the game becomes more than a bit repetitive; the overall design of the campaign isn't great, with the enemy sending out their ships in penny packets that are ludicrously easy to destroy. It's a shame, because the combat system is actually fun and exciting, but the game just doesn't know how to make use of it. I've had a good time playing it, but it could have been so much better.

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Then it's on to the last ships. First, the two other Admiral Hippers: the nameship of the class and the Prinz Eugen. I don't know why Warlord thought we needed three of these, to be honest. But they're in the better resin and there's less fiddling about, so why not. Here's the Hipper.

The Prinz Eugen, though, doesn't really interest me at all. So instead, I've decided to name it after the Hipper-class cruiser I invented for my video game fleet: she is now the Admiral Bellingshausen.

And, finally, the Scharnhorst.

I expected the Scharnhorst to be bigger, but next to the Hippers it drives home that they really were battlecruisers.

There they all are!

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All in all, I've had a great time painting my little ships and playing Victory at Sea on the computer. I've already got more little ships, and at some point I hope I get to try the tabletop game as well.

Mission tactics at sea

For future reference, I want to record this outstanding example of mission tactics / Aufragstaktik / whatever you want to call it. I've been thinking about World War II and specifically naval warfare in it, so I'm re-reading Correlli Barnett's excellent Engage the Enemy More Closely. There's a lot to disagree with in Barnett's account, and David Edgerton has done so, at length. I still think that much of Barnett's criticism of British grand strategy in the war is fundamentally correct, and I think I'll want to return to that later.

For now, though, here's a quote from Barnett's narrative of the Second Battle of Sirte in 1942, where a Royal Navy cruiser squadron under Admiral Philip Vian drove off a considerably superior Italian force.

"His own flagship Cleopatra had been hit in the bridge early in the action, killing fifteen and temporarily knocking out her radio. But, wrote Vian in his memoirs, "The damage sustained was of no importance. The leaders of the divisions of the striking force were well aware of my intentions, and communication, for the time, was unnecessary.""

That's command for you.

Warhammer 40,000: Ooarai Girls Academy

"We're lucky the school's on a carrier ship."
- Girls und Panzer 1

Vincent van Gogh: Still life (Vase with twelve sunflowers), 1888

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As my opponents seemed to quite like the idea of tanks, the obvious thing to add to our Imperial army was a Leman Russ battle tank. I wanted to do something a little bit different for the model, though, and this is what I ended up with:

The model is a Panzer IV ausf. D from Warlord Games, and it's excellent; admittedly there were a couple of unsightly lumps of resin, but they were fairly easy to remove, and maybe I don't entirely know what to do with almost any of the metal doohickeys, but I think overall the model is very good and definitely worth its price.

Accompanying the tank is in the image above is a Gestapo officer from Warlord's delightful Guarding the Chateau set, i.e. Herr Flick of the Ordo Hereticus.

I'll admit that the reason I chose a Pz.IV for our Leman Russ was Girls und Panzer. Seeing as how I've done my master's thesis on tanks, I was vaguely aware that it existed, and I encountered the full absurdity of the manga when buying a goon a tank-related present. So when browsing 1/56 scale tanks online, I ended up buying the Pz.IV ausf. D that the protagonists use in their tankery exercises in the first manga.

Of course, one thing leads to another. I originally intended to have just a single Leman Russ named Ooarai Girls Academy. However, because it would be advantageous from a rules standpoint to field an entire spearhead detachment of tanks, it seems like it might be a decent idea to collect three more Ooarai tanks, one of them an HQ tank. So I googled for a female tank commander miniature - only to find that something called Company B sells not only Ooarai decals but also anime tank commanders. So obviously I ordered some.

Here's the Ooarai Girls Academy Panzer IV, then, with proper markings and everything:

The running gear was painted Vallejo Gunmetal Grey, and given a wash of Smoke and Black Glaze. The hull color is German Grey.

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One of the most delightful and senseless absurdities of Girls und Panzer is that for some reason that completely escapes me, all of the tankery high schools are based on aircraft carriers. With Japanese entertainment, I find one just has to accept some things. This does, however, make a Warhammer 40,000 conversion remarkably easy from a fluff standpoint. Clearly the 40k Ooarai Girls Academy is an arm of the Schola Progenium that trains orphan girls into Imperial Guard tank crews on a giant starship. It makes as much sense as anything else.

Because the Ooarai tanks will eventually form their own detachment, they'll benefit from a regimental doctrine. Clearly the best doctrine for a detachment of Leman Russes is Tallarn. So if anyone finds 28mm models of Japanese schoolgirls dressed like they're in the Afrika Korps, let me know!

Char B1 bis

This Warlord Char B1 bis represents the Public Morals Committee tank. As it's the obvious candidate to be a Commissar Tank if someone wants to field one at some point, it needed a commander from Company B; I assembled this as a French tank in all other respects, but accommodating the commander in the turret required the German hatch as opposed to the original French cupola.

Here's the finished article with a Commissar tank stripe.

Pz.38(t) ausf. B

Next up: the student council tank, a Pz.38(t) from Warlord. For 40k purposes, I want this to be the HQ tank. Because a Tank Commander has a BS of 3+, it seems compulsory to take sponson weapons here, but they really interfere with the Girls und Panzer aesthetic. The solution? Magnets.

Those are plasma cannons from the Sentinel kit; they look a little big on an actual 28mm vehicle, but then everything smaller would just look like a plasma gun.

Here's the unpainted tank without plasma cannons:

And here with.

I think it painted up all right.

And the plasma guns are delightfully easy to attach and detach.

This is such a cute little tank!

M3 Lee

Finally, the volleyball team. Compared to the other tanks, the M3 is the size of a house.

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I had also ordered a Renault FT 17 from Warlord ages ago, and as part of this project, I painted it up in Ooarai colors as well.

Finally, since we were buying World War II vehicles, how could we resist a Salamander Recon Tank from the Imperial Armor index, represented by a Warlord Games Sd.kfz 222, i.e. Lieutenant Grüber's little tank from 'Allo 'Allo.

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I've said this before, but I'll say it again: I really like Warlord vehicles! These little tanks were a lot of fun to paint.