Games - Armies of Great Britain

The Regina Rifles streetfighting in Caen, by Peter Dennis Osprey Publishing Ltd. Taken from Campaign 143: Caen 1944.

T his book is a supplement for the Bolt Action World War II tabletop wargame. It contains all the background, rules and Army List information needed to field a British or Commonwealth Army in the Bolt Action game. Inside youll find details of organisation and equipment covering British & Commonwealth forces from the beginning of the war (the British declaration of war in 1939) to the very end (the surrender of Japan in 1945).

The core of this book is the Army List. This includes all information you need to field a British or Commonwealth army in your games. All the major guns and vehicles are detailed, together with a selection of varying qualities of troop types.

Alongside this main list are 14 Theatre Selectors, which give the force details for different periods and theatres of the war. Over six years of fighting, the British & Commonwealth armies changed a lot, and many vehicles and types of equipment that were common in 1939 had been abandoned by 1945. These sub-lists allow players to select forces suitable for the theatre they are playing in. To avoid a lot of repetition, the main list includes all the options and rules information, with the Theatre Selectors narrowing this down to the most appropriate elements.

The list of vehicles and equipment used by the British & Commonwealth armies is vast. The British tried to supply their armed forces with domestic weaponry, but the scale of war was simply too large for this to be viable. Even so, every domestic manufacturer that could possibly contribute did so, which led to a bewildering assortment of types and variations. Add to this the domestic designs and productions of many of the Commonwealth nations and you have a very large list indeed. On top of all this there was an abundance of equipment available under the lend-lease programme from the Americans and the British used this too. Whilst we have tried to include as much as we can, the sheer number of possible items means that there are unavoidable gaps in the listings. However, as well as the more familiar tanks, we have tried to include some of the interesting, less common and less well known vehicles in case you wish to expand your collection and play some what if games. What would have happened if the Germans had launched their invasion of Britain in 1940? What if it had happened in 1941 instead of Barbarossa?

In a similar fashion, the Theatre Selectors are not an exhaustive list of all the types of unit that were fielded by the British and Commonwealth forces in World War II, nor does it necessarily include every single vehicle that was to be found in that area at that time. Again, this is too large a list to be practical. What we have aimed for is to give the flavour of a campaign and to offer a mixture of the famous and familiar campaigns (Market Garden and El Alamein) together with the less well known (Raiders and the East African campaign). With a little research, and agreement from your opponent, you can easily adapt one of the Theatre Selectors given here to fit any campaign that interests you.

Bren gun

British troops assaulting Japanese Bunkers, by Peter Dennis Osprey Publishing Ltd. Taken from Campaign 229: Kohima 1944.

Throughout the 1930s the rearmament of Germany became increasingly brazen, though none realised its true magnitude until it was far too late. Herr Hitler played a masterful game of diplomacy, bending the politicians of Europe to his will, largely by playing on their unwillingness to risk another world war and a second lost generation of youth. The old men of parliament had been the young men of the trenches and few wished those days to return. Hitler was able to annexe vast tracts of land first in the Rhineland and then Austria and the Sudetenland, to expand the Greater German Reich with nothing more than feeble words of complaint from elsewhere. Eventually though, he would go too far.

This act turned out to be the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Britain honoured its pact with Poland and declared war on Germany, as did France and others. The German army smashed through the Polish forces while the allies prepared to act, and then the Soviets invaded Poland too, from the east. The Polish army, brave though it was, succumbed to the inevitable before reinforcements could be sent. Europe was stunned by the speed at which one of the major powers in Europe had fallen. This was the new style of war this was blitzkrieg.

With Poland partitioned between the Germans and Soviets there was little Britain and France could do. In 1939 nobody had the resources and equipment to mount an invasion across mainland Europe. But after all the strong words and the loss of Poland in under a month, there was nothing. War had been declared, but where to fight?

Both sides armed themselves for the coming battle, the Germans fine-tuning their new tactics, and the British mustering whatever forces they could. The Phoney War ended in April with the invasion of Norway, then in May came the invasion of Belgium, the Low Countries and then France. One again, the speed with which events unfolded caught everyone except the Germans entirely by surprise.

The invasion was almost an exact copy of the 1914 attack, but this time there were tanks. The BEF (British Expeditionary Force) and the bulk of the French forces were in positions near the Maginot line, far to the south of where they needed to be. The BEF withdrew north quickly, trying to avoid being surrounded and losing its link with the Channel ports and a route of retreat should things go as badly as they had for plucky little Poland.

A nice day for a stroll

An orderly withdrawal began to disintegrate as German columns penetrated deep behind the allied lines, causing havoc. Even major and successful counterattacks such as the one at Arras by the British seemed to bring only a temporary pause in the German advance. With no hope of stalling the blitzkrieg, the British fought a series of rearguard actions as they retreated north towards Dunkirk to save what little they could. The French were no more able than the British to halt the panzers, but they had nowhere to go and the surrender was signed just six weeks after the invasion began - in the same railway carriage where the Germans had signed the treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. Hitler would have his revenge.