The Cheshire Parlimentarians

Okay, enough fluff and history let's see the troops I have painted so far.  Here's Sir William himself to wave us off.

 

The Cheshire Horse

I'll start with the cavalry. At Brereton's insistence, the Cheshire Horse were merged into a single large regiment under his personal command.  This was probably to avoid having several small regiments under various competing local gentry.  Abram says they numbered 5 troops and perhaps 3-400 men in early 1643, but a year later were 14 troops strong.  A simple linear expansion can't be assumed but by the time of Nantwich they probably had the greater part of the 1000 officers and men they would peak at in 1645.  This powerful and coordinated force bears reasonable comparison with Cromwell's Ironsides, and was well equipped and officered.  

I won't be doing all fourteen troops, but assuming squadrons of two bases, at a scale of about 150-200 men per squadron, Brereton's Regiment of Horse might have fielded 3 or 4 such bodies in early 1644, for 6-800 cavalry overall.  I will probably eventually do five squadrons, so I have the numbers for Rowton Moor as well.

 

The cornets are oversize to allow some hints at the flag designs in Abrams' "More like Lions than Men" but don't look too closely at the details.  I may redo them at some point but I'm happy enough for now.

The figures are all 3d resin prints provided by my club mates. They seem a little continental rather than English in look, so I have clipped a few feathers and modified a few hats.  They are true 15mm scale, so will probably match well with Peter Pig, Warlord Epic and Steel Fist Miniatures ranges. The wonderful KeepYourPowderDry blog has some good posts on figures here.  A couple of other highlights, amongst the many useful posts there, are these on coats and colours.

The first unit is Brereton's own troop. This troop arrived with Brereton in January 1643 and continued even after the regiment was passed to Colonel Jones, following the self denying ordinance. 

The second unit of Horse is Colonel Jones' troop.  Michael Jones was the staunch protestant son a Welsh puritan bishop in Ireland.  He had served in the King's Irish army but refused to fight for the Royalists following the cessation of arms with the Irish Confederates, defecting to Brereton on returning to England.  It is unclear exactly when Jones joined as Brereton's Lieutenant Colonel of Horse but if not before Nantwich these troops can serve as Sergeant Major Browne's troop.  John Browne was a professional officer, probably formerly of Lord Brooke's regiment in the Earl of Essex' army, one of several officers sent to Brereton on request.  Browne seems to have left Cheshire in July 1644 and the capable Captain Zankey of Brereton's troop was promoted to Sergeant Major.  Abram has an image for the cornet of Jones' troop but not one for Browne's, so they may have been similar or even the same unit.

The third Horse unit I have painted is Colonel Duckenfield's troop.  Robert Duckenfield was a member of the Cheshire gentry and a close associate of Sir William Brereton.  Duckenfield commanded a Regiment of Foot in the Cheshire army at Nantwich and elsewhere, so his troop was commanded by his brother Francis.  

The last mounted unit I have painted is a unit of dragoons.  Brereton arrived in Cheshire with three troops of dragoons and seems to have quickly raised two more.  They were formed into a regiment but the number of men and troops seems to vary over time.  They may have been firelocks from the beginning but were equipped as such by 1644 at the latest.  

I'm not sure if I will need dismounted dragoons but these will serve as them or as commanded shot instead.

 

The Cheshire Foot 

Now we can switch to the infantry.  Four Cheshire Regiments of Foot are known at Nantwich.  The quality of the Cheshire foot was generally good, and although less experienced than their Irish army opponents, they were probably more committed and performed well.  They had gained considerable experience prior to the battle, and been well trained and handled by Sergeant Major James Lothian.  This excellent Scottish professional officer had arrived early in 1643 and conducted most of the army's foot and siege operations.  Lothian was unfortunately captured at Burford near Nantwich in December, and not exchanged until July 1644, but his students did him proud in the battle.

Sir William Brereton’s Regiment of Foot
At least some are know to have been issued with grey coats, and there is evidence they carried black, and possibly also white Colours.  I have given them black colours, and kept the white for Duckenfield's regiment, as these match the colours known for their respective troops of horse.  This seems reasonable as the reference to white colours could possibly have been another unit of Brereton's army, rather than his own regiment.  Brereton's regiment was very large and may at times have fielded more than one battalia.  I have fielded them only as a single unit as I wanted to make each battalia distinct, and they may have detached companies to bolster other units or provide garrisons anyway.

Colonel Robert Duckenfield’s Regiment of Foot
The coats and colours of Duckenfield's regiment are unknown but I have assumed grey coats, which seems typical of many northern foot.  I have given them the white Colours that are recorded as carried by some companies of Brereton's army.  These could have belonged to Brereton's own regiment, or another Cheshire regiment.  As Duckenfield's horse troop carried a white cornet, they seemed the most likely candidates.

 

The last two regiments of Cheshire foot known to be at Nantwich were Sir George Booth’s Regiment of Foot and Colonel Henry Mainwaring’s Regiment of Foot.  It is again unknown what coats were worn, or colours carried, by either.  

Booth's regiment may have been within the garrison of Nantwich but I'm not yet clear on that.  George Booth Senior seems to have commanded the town, although it could have been his grandson namesake.  Whoever commanded the garrison, they sallied out to attack the Royalist rearguard late in the battle.  The Nantwich trained bands seem likely to have been present in the town itself, but they can't have been alone and the overall picture is still quite confused.  Different accounts contradicting each other.  I'll do some more research on this.

Mainwaring's seem to have been with the main field army but were probably, by the time of Nantwich, a smaller unit whose companies were brigaded with another regiment, or distributed across multiple battalia.  If Booth's were not in the garrison it may have been with them that Mainwaring's were brigaded, as they fought together against Prince Rupert later in the year.   

Whatever the situation, I have painted this third foot battalia with red coats and a blue colour.  They can stand in for any unknown unit in the Nantwich army, and also serve as a New Model Army unit, such as Robert Overton’s Regiment of Foot.   Overton's fought at St Fagans in the second civil war, which is another battle I would like to re-fight eventually.

 

It was quite normal to form composite battalia in the civil wars, and it is possible there were only six such bodies of Parliamentarian foot at Nantwich.  In light of this reasoning, I will make the last three foot battalia from the Lancashire units.  

All this is excluding the Folorn Hope, probably composed of dragoons under Captain Thomas Morgan, and a possibly a body of 'clubmen', which may have served as pioneers.  

 

Finally to round out the arms of service I have this single base of light guns.  I seem to recall reading that a brace of drakes was sent to Brereton from London in 1643 but I'm struggling to find the reference now.   I'll confirm it if I do.

Cheshire in 1643-4

Sir William Brereton arrived in Nantwich in January 1643 to secure the county of Chester for Parliament.  He brought with him just two troops of horse, three troops of dragoons, and his own company of foot.  This tiny force formed the nucleus of an army that was to frustrate Royalist plans in the north west for the next three years, and make a significant contribution to parliament's ultimate victory in the first civil war.

 

Click on the image below for a higher resolution map of Cheshire from the time of the civil war, it has good detail and I might use it to make maps for a campaign eventually.  This site is great for period maps.  This is the Cheshire page. 

The Roundheads quickly secured the town of Nantwich in south-east Cheshire as their main base, and drove the local Royalists, under Sir Thomas Aston and Lord Capel, from most of the county.  However, by late 1643 Lord Byron had come north from Oxford to take command, and joined with soldiers of the King's Irish Army landing in Chester and North wales.  This drastically changed the military situation in favour of the Royalists.  

Ragged and mutinous though they were on arrival, these veteran reinforcements were a real danger to the Parliamentarian cause, and the Committee of Both Kingdoms sent a relief force of cavalry from Lincolnshire, under Sir Thomas Fairfax.  

 

Hastily reequipped in Chester, Byron's army immediately went on the attack, before idleness could alienate the city and breed rebellion.  Now badly outnumbered, Brereton's forces fell back on Nantwich and Manchester, losing a confused battle at Middlewich, and all the gains they had made that summer.  The Cavalier's most celebrated victory was the daring capture of Beeston castle by the bombastic Captain Thomas Sandford and his firelocks, 

Byron's advance quickly surrounded Nantwich, but a direct assault against the garrison was a costly failure, and his army settled down for a miserable winter siege.  If the town fell, the Royalists could push on into Lancashire, where they hoped to recruit many more men, and then aid the Earl of Newcastle in defeating the Scots and securing the the North of England for the King.  

 

Sadly for Charles it was not to be, as Fairfax' column crossed the Pennines in terrible weather, joining up with Brereton's small Cheshire army, and several regiments of Lancashire Parliamentarians, at Manchester.  Combining their forces under Fairfax overall command, they hurried to relieve the now desperate garrison.  Arriving outside Nantwich from the north on the 25th of January, they fought and won a battle against Byron's army in the fields between Welsh Row and Acton.  

The English Civil War in Cheshire

Over the winter, I have been revisiting my interest in the British Civil Wars of the 17th century.   Gunpowder, radicalism, and lacework, it has everything.

The usual description given to this period is the English Civil War, which implies something unique, definite, or confined to England, which doesn't really cover the situation but is so well know it can't really be avoided.

Some of the guys at SSWG were starting to paint up figures for this period, so I jumped on the project with them.  We have all picked a bit of a theme for our forces and mine will concentrate on the battles in and around Cheshire, Lancashire and the Welsh Marches.  

I'm an Essex boy now but Cheshire is my former stomping ground, so I'm aiming to do both sides for the battle of Nantwich in January 1644.  I'll probably try to make things a bit generic, and the unknowns allow some wiggle room, so I can cover several of the other battles in the region too. 

My sympathies lie more with the Parliamentarians these days so I have started with the Cheshire forces of Sir William Brereton.   

Later I will add the Yorkshire and Lancashire troops under 'Black Tom' Fairfax that marched to relieve the siege of Nantwich in the depths of winter 1644.  

The Royalists opposing them were mostly English troops from the garrison of Ireland, under command of that 'Bloody Braggaddoccio' Lord Byron.

In preparation I have reading More Like Lions than Men by Andrew Abram and The King's Irish by John Barratt.  Both are excellent, with loads of detail on the units and campaign.  

For background inspiration I have been re-watching By the Sword Divided and The Devil's Whore.

I even manage to squeeze in a visit to Nantwich for this year's Holly Holy Day battle reenactment.

Actually painted figures and more discussion of building the armies to follow...

WW2 Operational Level Rules - Part II

The next major thread of tabletop operational rules are those based on KISS Rommel.  The KISS part of the name thankfully isn't an order but stands for Keep It Simple Stupid, and the combat rules are pretty simple.

KISS Rommel first emerged back in issue 175 of Wargames Illustrated as a set of Simple WW2 Western Desert Rules by Norman Mackenzie.  I don't know if back issues are still available but the original rules, and variants for other theatres, can be found here, here and here.

These rules are a similar battalion per unit scale to Megablitz but more streamlined.  However, the most interesting part to me is the battle set-up system.  Each player has a deck of cards representing the divisions under their command.  In a typical game the player may choose one and is then randomly dealt another four.  One of each deck represents a division failing to arrive or being redeployed, so a player will end up with 4-5 divisions of varying type and strength.  A simple campaign system has the first battle be at Tobruk with victory pushing the location one or two points towards a last stand in Tunisia or Cairo.  It would be easy to graft on a handicapping system like reduced supply, or increased enemy air superiority, as you get further from your home base to represent the famous pendulum of war.

The combat rules are very simple with units making 5+ attacks and the defender getting a 4+ to 6+ save depending on type and circumstances.  Ranges are short except for artillery and aircraft.  Hit units are scattered, not destroyed, if near their divisional HQ and each division may return one unit to the fight at the beginning of their turn.  

These simple but relatively elegant ideas seem to 'just work' and spawned a wave of imitations and variations.  An Italian version Alto Comando can be found here.  An English version called High Command is here.  The WW2 Divisional Wargame Rules from Pz8 are also a development with slightly expanded combat rules and can be found here.

In the above links there are variants for Eastern Front, Greece, Blitzkreig era France, the Pacific and the inevitable Normandy/1944-5 ETO.  

WW2 Operational Level Rules - Part I

After our recent 6mm tactical games, I have a hankering for something more operational level.  I'd like the idea of playing more of a battle and less of a skirmish.  That isn't easy in WW2 as the scale is huge, and arguably operations are better run as board games, but I've been checking out what is available on the tabletop.

The granddaddy of this genre seem to Chris Kemp's Not Quite Mechanised, which emerged from the Wargames Development organisation and their Conference of Wargamers; a wonderfully British and geeky institution.  

Chris has a blog of the same name here and seemingly another older one here.  I think the wordpress one is the current one but I found this old free version of the rules here.  It seems for a very long time NQM was ever changing but a printed version is now available and I have the rules on order from Lulu.

From an earlier version of NQM came Tom Gow's Megablitz as an actual published product.  The book is now long out of print, and the Yahoo group swept away with the others, but I managed to snag a used copy in lovely condition and there is Bob Cordery's old website here. 

Bob also gives his recollections of the development of NQM and Megablitz here and here.  Tim's blog has a lot of old posts and Steven Thomas has some clarifications for Megablitz here.  

Steven also has a wider and in depth look at the whole operational level of game rules here. 

Another development of the NQM/Megablitz stable is a free set by David Kershaw called Assault Gun.  They no longer seem to be under development or played much but are still available via the Board Game Geek file section here.  

The exact scale of all these games varies slightly, with multiple options from company to brigade stands in NQM, to battalions or infantry regiments in Megablitz and Assault Gun, but the general level is that you command whole Corps, Divisions and possibly army groups. Movement likewise varies from squares to hexes to freeform in NQM.  Megablitz and assault gun are freeform but here are some thoughts for Megablitz with squares.  Logistics are included to some extent but without a lot of book keeping.  i might want even more detail here but that might be tedious.  I'm interested to try this level out as something different from the wall to wall elites that usually predominate in WW2 tactical rules.  I'm keen to see how the German commanders cope with inadequate horses to move their heavy artillery, or having to keep their panzers supplied across the vast expanses of desert or steppe.  Games are typically based on historical or hypothetical scenarios.

An interesting aside is how most of them seem to have been played with larger scale miniatures than I would  have expected. 15 or 20mm look to be the norm.  I would have thought 6mm was the natural scale for operational battles but then I suppose we are probably back to the whole question of whether this could be done better as a board game.  

See Martin Rapier's 20mm Megablitz games here vs. Fister's micro armour here.  Both look great, so it's probably my perception/prejudice more than anything else.  

Visually, I like these multi-based 6mm units from Peter at GridBasedWargaming.  I think this might be the way to go but the larger bases mean you need a bigger playing area.  We probably have that but it's something to ponder.  

Next time, I'll pull together the links and thoughts on Kiss Rommel and that vein of operational rules. 

6mm Flames of War in the Desert

For a long time we've had a plan to play some Flames of War in 6mm using the early war desert lists in Hellfire and back! book.  We bought and quickly painted up some troops ages ago and then never got around to playing the game ... until recently.

We are using the old 3rd edition rules, which, as old gognards we prefer and never moved on from.  Battlefront have made all the old third edition books available via this web page here, and for free!  Which is pretty decent of them, if a bit surprising, given their rather commercial reputation.  The files can be accessed directly on this drive here.

This report is for our second game. The first game went very well for my DAK tank company.  racing east from Tripoli they encountered a British armoured force and the panzers destroyed all before them. The swift kradschützen bikers then dismounted to storm the objective for a convincing win.  The victory was marred only slightly by the heroic death of the company CO, Haumptmann Klutz.  He had advanced into 25-pdr range at the end of the battle, to draw fire from the infantry, and paid a heavy price.  The Luftwaffe support had also been quite rampant in game one, with this particularly successful bomb run putting paid to three British tanks.

 

So moving on, we join the Panzers - now under command of the blonde and youthful Leutnant Himmelsplitz - as they push deeper into Cyrenaica and encounter a formidable British gun line of 25-pdr and motor riflemen digging in.  The accompanying Luftwaffe boys dig in their 88 but cannot see the British guns clearly enough through the heat haze to open fire.

The panzers begin a wide flanking attack on the right, throwing up clouds of desert dust.

 

Stukas scream down on the infantry but are driven away by ferocious AA fire from just behind the British gun line.  The Tommies have learned from the first encounter and this is going to be a tougher nut to crack.

Suddenly fire rains from the sky as the 25-pdr make short work of the 88.  “We never even saw them until they opened fire” laments a stunned gefreiter Potz.

The panzers approach their supply dump objective but find it guarded by two British tanks.  They call the Leutenant  for back up and prepare to attack.

The panzers delay costs them time but eventually they go in with a well coordinated attack just as reinforcements arrive.

The original two Britischer panzers are quickly silenced but out of nowhere a horde of Tommy armour appears!

Meanwhile, more DAK reinforcements have taken up positions to defend the objectives they hold (a pair of downed Stukas with engine trouble).

The intense tank fight is brutal but the weak armour of the British tanks means even the 20mm guns of the Panzer IIs are effective.

There can be only ever have been one winner but the cost is considerable and both sides see their burning tanks litter the desert

Things get rather unclear from this point [I forgot to take enough photos] as the fighting went on into the dusk.  A British counter attack of Portee AT guns and armoured cars was destroyed but the light panzers strayed into the 25-pdr's direct fire range and were quickly shown their error.   The last bailed out armoured car was was assaulted and captured by the Kradshurschen platoon.

With only two Panzers remaining Leutnant Himmelsplitz assaulted the dug in riflemen as 25-pdr shells dropped all around him.   The day ended in confusion with both sides claiming victory*.

The test games were quite a success.  The British armour is not great under these rules but we liked the look of the 6mm figures.  I think keeping the ranges but using smaller figures helps with the 'car park' effect you can sometimes get in 15mm Flames of War. 

 *The motor rifles were broken in a second round of assault, which should have broken the British company but we forgot the company morale test and had the 25-pdrs fire, which destroyed the last panzer, which would have broken the unit except the Brits should already have broken.  We called it draw as it was late, we'd had fun and we were on about turn 19 by this point.