Barbarosa in life and art

 I apologize for the title, seems overweening looking at it. Cleverness and Sarcasm,poster childs for what not to try on the 'net.

Life

I have just started on the  first  volume of the book by Mr. Glantz on the early phase of the Eastern Front in 1941.

I should say the volumes 1,3, and 4. The last two supplement the narrative of the first two volumes, best read as a cross referencing exercise.  

BTW,  the other two books showing are not part of the program and will be reviewed in separate posts. 

Now that sets up the life part,  onto the art, by which I mean playing the way with assumptions and all that stuff.

Art

The overall map is made from the Europa series game Fire in the East. Since the action is bath tubbed,  we'll use multiple digital images to create situations.  The strategic turn will have eight hours,  each hour is a tactical turn. Each map hex is over one foot across on the table top. 

The campaign has two objectives,  one is to represent situations that might have occurred and the second  a walk through a WW2 rule set for Soviet and German units in 1941. The campaign units are scaled to be used in the bath tubbed format .

What struck me reading about the campaign  is the sheer size of the effort and the movement of both sides during the first months of the campaign.  There will be many arrows on the maps and numbers to get the units recorded in position.   I don't have graphics skills for counters and believe that the numbers will work out best.

Now, the OOB will be as follows : 

Soviet-

Two Rifle Brigades_

One Tank Brigade 

One NKVD HQ company 

Three NKVD smg stands

One Field Gun Battalion 

One 122mm Howitzer battalion

One 152mm Howitzer battalion

One Engineer battalion

The German army-

One Infantry Regiment of three battalions and a HQ 

One Panzer Regiment of two panzer battalions, one motorized battalion.

One Artillery battalion 

Engineer, Antiaircraft, Aufklarung (  recon  ) assets 

I think these will be good listed on a separate page in the blog. ( I would keep it  until the campaign ends.)