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Panzer Campaigns - France '40

	Author: Bill Trotter Article Type: PC Game Review Publication Date: 12/8/2005 Developer: John Tiller Publisher: HPS Sims Related Categories: World War II, Turn-based, Operational

FRANCE '40 - TO REDEEM THE GLORY OF “LA BELLE FRANCE”!

I enjoy a good action game as much as anyone. Even in the days of bilious CGA graphics, my wargamer’s imagination often superimposed newsreel montages of combat over the crude representations and unit symbols. Nowadays, of course, we’re accustomed to graphics that, in effect, put you inside a personal war movie, but the trade-off is that we’re dependent on someone else’s imagination – the game designer’s – to provide that extra frisson of immersion. As always, technology brings new pleasures, even as it causes old ones to atrophy. I find that my “action game” sessions become fatiguing after a certain amount of time, while my attention span is generally longer with a classic hex-and-unit-counter game. I don’t think this is a generational phenomenon so much as simply a human one. 

So the main attraction of wargaming, however much I might savor the jaw-dropping photo-realism of the best contemporary bang-bang titles, remains the same as it was the day I first set up Avalon Hill’s Stalingrad on my parents’ dining room table almost forty years ago: to savor for a while the illusion of being in command during one of History’s great turning-point military engagements. 

I suspect almost everyone who plays history-based conflict simulations is also an avid reader of military history. Which means, almost inevitably, that you and I have spent many an idle hour wondering why General Sir Breathmint Bumbershoot lost the Battle of Runningsore. His mistakes, when analyzed long after-the-fact, are so blindingly obvious, their consequences so dire, that sometimes we want to hop into a time machine and help him out. One thing wargames do, better than almost anything anyone else one can think of, is to give us the opportunity to re-arrange History the way we think it ought to have gone. This is by no means a cold, scholarly obsession, but it does have an intellectual component that action games, by their very nature, cannot satisfy. 

Fortunately, the audience for in-depth historical simulations – a genre that seemed on the brink of extinction only six or seven years ago – has demonstrably grown and seems likely to keep doing so. That “subjective optimism” derives from the increase in emails I’ve received from young pilgrims who have matured to college age and have become interested in war and strategy gaming through those hybrid shooter/tactical simulations; a latent and laudable intellectual curiosity has been stimulated and many of them are keen to explore the larger historical themes in which those games are embedded. I’ve stayed in periodic contact with some of them, and as they’ve grown more comfortable with the larger concepts of historical gaming, many have moved up from “populist” titles (the Panzer General series, Axis and Allies, etc.) and are ready to take the plunge into hardcore wargaming. 

Some who have “taken the plunge” are going to become life-long members of the wargaming fraternity (a much more suitable word, I think, than “community”!). They are confirming what I’ve long believed: the more a campaign’s outcome pivoted on a handful of clearly mistaken moves/assumptions, the greater the allure to the history-buff of jumping in and taking charge, just to see “what would have happened IF…” In a well-designed game that incorporates alternate history possibilities, you can trust the designer to give you plausible alternative outcomes, not just a “Guns-of-the-South” fantasy. Lord knows, those can be fun, but they’re also a cheap thrill – of course you can get your jollies by giving Lee a squadron of tanks at Gettysburg, but a victory earned “by magic” is not something you want to boast about in the forums.

Which brings us to the subject of World War Two’s most dramatic example of an “upset victory” – Hitler’s lightning conquest of France and the Lowlands in the late spring of 1940.

It’s rather surprising that there hasn’t been a good, detailed simulation of that campaign before now, but the new addition to HPS’s venerable Panzer Campaigns series, France ’40, does a splendid job of filling in that gap. I recently finished a humongous 188-turn mega-campaign, a feat that ate up 2-3 hours a day for seven weeks. Like everyone else who’s studied the real Blitzkrieg offensive, I’d long been astonished at what an utter botch the Allies made of their one big chance to smash the Wehrmacht in early 1940 and thereby save Europe from four more years of unspeakable horror and destruction. The most glaring fact about the campaign is that the Allied debacle was not a foregone conclusion. In terms of numbers of men and quality of equipment, there was no logical reason for the German victory. The French had more and better artillery (except for the fabled “88”, and those guns couldn’t be everywhere at once), their land-battleship heavy tank, the Char-B, was better-armed and armored than 80% of Hitler’s tanks; they had at least two fighters fully capable of taking on the ME-109, and they were defending a part of Europe whose terrain consists largely of natural obstacles to military operations. Finally, contrary to the enormous myth that’s grown up around it, the Maginot Line actually was as close to “impregnable” as any line of fixed defenses has ever been in all of History – on the few occasions when the Germans did try frontal assaults on portions of it, they got shellacked.

Of course, the reasons for the Anglo-French collapse are not to be found in the quantity and quality of their equipment, but in the rotten-to-the-core military/political bureaucracies that dictated its deployment and tactical doctrines. To an admirable extent, the designers of France ’40 have managed to suggest that state of moral bankruptcy in the mechanics of their game. But the game-player is, of course, the Supreme Commander; he enjoys all the perquisites and powers of an absolute dictator and can roll roughshod over the conflicting egos, narrow-minded bureaucratic agendas, and outmoded theories that so paralyzed the Allied defense. The inefficiencies that clogged the French command structure are just so many Gordian knots to be sliced through by your keen strategic insight and power to influence events, right? You impose a rational plan; you move the units, and you ruthlessly do What Needs To Be Done in order to change the course of History.

Or so I thought…