Liberating Europe
On New Year’s Day, 1942, Americans were still sifting the wrecks and rubble of Pearl Harbor and retreating to the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. British and Canadian forces had just surrendered in Hong Kong. Freezing Germans were being counter-attacked by Soviet troops on the outskirts of Moscow. In North Africa, British troops were advancing rapidly through Libya, unaware that Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps was about to enter the fray.
In Washington, D.C., January 1st saw the Arcadia Conference achieve its goal. The Declaration by United Nations was the dawn of a formal global alliance against the Axis powers. This pact made only two declarations: that signatories would go all out in fighting the Axis powers; and that no allied country would make a separate peace.
The “Big Four” powers of the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union and the Republic of China signed on New Year’s Day. On Jan. 2, another 22 signatures were added: the British dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; the British administration of India; nine Latin American countries; and eight European governments in exile. By 1945, the declaration would have a further 21 adherents.
​
The now worldwide array of allies on both sides of the war was captured in the 1942 American game Battle Checkers. The Allied pieces started on spaces named for most of the initial parties to the Declaration of United Nations: the U.S., the U.K., Russia, China, Canada, Australia, Greece and the Netherlands Indies (the Dutch colonies in Asia). The Axis pieces start on Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Finland and (Japanese-occupied) Indo-China.
The cover of the box shows the geographic spread of the alliance. It shows American flags on the U.S. mainland, Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines. British flags decorate the U.K., Canada, South Africa, Australia and Egypt. Soviet flags spread across that vast country. And three Dutch flags appear over its Asian territories.
​
A broader picture of the growing alliance (or at least the non-Axis world) can be seen in the 1943 Liberty Flag Game. Each card in this 35-card deck features the flag and key statistics on a country.
Conspicuously absent are Germany, Japan and Italy. Also missing are neutrals such as Sweden, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey. Included are all countries in the Americas, occupied countries in Western Europe, Britain and its Dominions but not colonies, the Phillipine Commonwealth (sic), the Soviet Union and Nationalist China. The cards form 17 pairs and a Statue of Liberty wild card.
As America was drawn into the global war, and decided to focus on Europe first, fiction tended to run ahead of fact. This was more a matter of imagination than official propaganda.
Stories and novels of derring-do were immensely popular, especially among younger men and boys. One of the most famous fictional heroes of the time was Dave Dawson, along with his sidekick Freddie Farmer.
The Dawson novels were turned into a couple of games. The first, in 1942, focused on the European theatre. The main point of the Dave Dawson Victory Game was to show that all four armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines) had roles to play in turning back the Axis tide.
While up to four players moved along tracks representing each of these services, their risks and encounters were identical. Red spaces send players back two spaces. Landing on one of the four numbered spaces on each track requires turning over the corresponding “order” card. The first card represents a minor victory and provides a jump forward of two spaces. The second marks a major military defeat that sends the player back to the “Strategy Board” starting space.
However, to suggest that armies learn from their defeats, landing on the same space a second time provides an advance forward of six spaces. The third space is an enemy defeat that advances the player three spaces, while the fourth space is a counter-attack that sends the player back by five spaces.
The game has an unusual mechanism for determining moves. Instead of rolling a die, players flick a checker up a scale on one side of the board, which must bounce back. The number it lands on determines how many spaces the player’s piece advances.
In reality, counter-attack in both Europe and the Pacific required a long build-up of forces and supplies. This need was captured in the 1943 game Ferry Command.
This Milton Bradley game focuses attention of the B-17F Flying Fortress, but notes its important role in moving supplies to friendly bases as well as dropping bombs on Germany.
The board and rules do take odd liberties with the truth. Supplies to Russia via Murmansk went by sea, not by bomber. And while planes could deliver crates of Garand rifles, ammunition and medical supplies, they certainly did not deliver shipment of planes.
Rather, fighters, pursuit planes (P-38 Lightnings), two-engine bombers and other four-engine bombers were either crated and moved by sea, or were flown to their destinations in stages.
In addition to the northern run to Murmansk, the board has routes from the United States eastward to London, the fortress of Gibraltar at the entrance to the Mediterranean, and Sierra Leone in Africa. From San Francisco, routes head across the Pacific to Dutch Harbor in Alaska, Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and Sydney, Australia.
​
The game extolls the virtues of the B-17, using its nickname of “Queen of the Skies”, providing its full specifications, and predicting a long future of cargo-hauling after the war is won.
The rules quote Lt. Gen. H.H. (Hap) Arnold calling the plane “the backbone and guts of our world-wide air offensive” and citing experienced gained “in the blazing skies over Tunisia, in the icy breath of the Arctic, in the moist fog of the Pacific area” as leading to 400 improvements in the F model of the B-17.
The rules also note that while the plane was designed by Boeing, it was simultaneously being built by Boeing competitors Douglas and Vega as well “in a superb demonstration of co-operation by American business in the all-out war effort.”
The mechanics are rather basic. Players start by drawing a cargo and a destination. They roll one die on the way out, and two dice on the return trip (because planes can fly faster when empty). Landing on a blue dash means “losing the beam”. Players are stuck there until they roll a 3. However, they are permitted to roll two dice no matter which direction they are moving, and can use a 3 on either die, or from the sum of the two dice (i.e. a 1 and a 2).
The game ends as soon as the first player completes five round trips. At that point, players add up the value of the cargoes they have delivered, and the one with the highest total wins the game. Cargoes still in transit count for nothing.
​
As the war proceeded, Allied publishers moved from an emphasis on air and naval conflict toward more land-based combat.
Sometimes these came in combination. Land and Sea War Games has a pair: a dexterity game about air combat; and a die-rolling game focused on tanks and artillery.
The 1942 slide puzzle Tank Attack was already focused on moving the war back to land (while pitching the sale of War Bonds on its envelope).
In the United States, E.E. Fairchild also used a board with a mid-board river as the critical barrier base for a 1943 wargame. Battle is a game of movement across a network of dots rather than squares. The pattern is 11 dots wide and a total of 14 dots deep. There is a home-base area on each side of the board. The river across the middle of the board lies closer to the friendly side on the left flank and closer to the enemy side on the right, with a vertical jog in the middle.
​
Each player gets 11 men, two tanks and two anti-tank guns, as well as a pontoon bridge. A player has a choice on each move: either place a piece onto the friendly side of the board, or move a piece that is already there.
Pieces can move forward, backward or sideways as far as desired, but not across the river. Once the first piece has been placed, any subsequent piece may only be placed adjacent to a piece already on the board – friendly or enemy.
The critical strategic decision is where to cross the river. Each player’s bridge can be placed vertically or horizontally across any river space. However, once placed, it cannot be moved. Pieces do not stop on the bridge: they move directly from one side to the other. Pieces may not move into enemy territory except across their own bridge, and not until two turns after the bridge is placed.
The combat resolution is very similar to that of the pre-war German Wehrschach Tak-Tik.
Infantry pieces can capture an enemy by surrounding it. This requires having a piece directly on two opposing sides of the enemy piece, either horizontally or vertically (not diagonally).
​
Tanks and guns, on the other hand, can kill an enemy piece simply by moving into range. The tanks can shoot three spaces; the guns two. Neither the tank nor the gun can shoot at an enemy piece on the turn it is placed. Nor can either ranged piece shoot across the river. However, a player who mistakenly moves a piece into range of an enemy tank or gun loses it right away, and the opponent still gets the next move.
A very different mechanism can be seen in the battery-operated game Electric Patrol. Each player is tasked with laying a telephone wire from a Base in one corner to an Outpost in the opposite corner.
Each player gets 7 plastic soldiers, in red and green. Soldiers start on a triangle of spaces in the home half of the board and on the Base (the latter carrying the telephone thimble on top). Each player has a circle of 8 metal contacts with a rotating lever that can touch them to complete a circuit. The board is marked with various obstacles like dense forest washed out roads and bridges.
The Green player starts by moving his own lever one contact in either direction. He then moves the Red lever, counting each contact until a light flashes.
This is the number of spaces one soldier can move in any direction. However, the piece must move in a straight line to the full count of spaces. Players then repeat the process in turn.
Landing on obstacles, which include high-tension wires, dense forest, barbed wire and washed-out roads and bridges, may eliminate the soldier or delay progress. Passing over an enemy eliminates the piece. First player to get the telephone to the Outpost wins.
Wartime games generally avoided basing themselves on specific battles or operations. The only game linked directly to the North African campaign, for instance, had nothing to do with military conflict. Rather, the battle in Bizerte Gertie (obviously aimed at military men!) is to avoid getting stuck with the ugliest date. Players take the role of Buck Privates with a one-night pass in the northernmost port in Tunisia. Their goal is “to meet and date exotic maids waiting in the Park and stroll with them on the moonlit beach”.
The first three privates to pick up dates get Bizerte Gertie, Sally from Bali or New Guinea Minnie. The laggard gets stuck with Alice the Hound Dog. However, the player with Alice can swap her with another player’s date by landing on that player’s space. Players must make it through the “Yoo-Hoo” zone where their dates may attract the attention of Officers who must be eluded, successfully enter the Play-a-Way Club (“no dogs allowed”) and then make it to the beach. The first to arrive there collects the kitty (as well as kisses, one presumes).
This untitled game board tells quite a tale about the American contribution to victory in Europe. The game track starts with the embarkation in the United States, and moves through the trip across the Atlantic to the landing on the beaches. It then shows images of armored combat, troops trekking across a war-torn landscape and strategic bombing of a city.
Space 35 shows airborne troops emerging from a Waco CG-4A glider. This American glider could carry 13 troops or cargo such as a Jeep, 75mm howitzer or quarter-ton trailer.
British gliders like the Horsa and Hamilcar could carry a lot more cargo, but the Waco needed much less space to land. The United States produced almost 14,000 of them between 1942 and 1945.
The Waco gliders were first used in the July 1943 invasion of Sicily, where they suffered heavy losses. The gliders also saw use as part of the D-Day invasion in June, 1944, in Operation Market Garden in September, 1944, and in the crossing of the Rhine River in March, 1945.
Space 47 (above right) shows a soldier calling for help on a Motorola SCR-536. The SCR-536 was the original walkie-talkie (initially called a handie-talkie). The five-pound handset had a range of between a few hundred yards in rough terrain to 3 miles over open water. It was developed in 1940 at Motorola predecessor Galvin Manufacturing. By mid-1941, it was in mass production. By war’s end, Motorola had produced more than 130,000 of them.
Walkie-talkies were carried by American troops that landed in Africa, Sicily, Italy and Normandy, and used widely by both regular and airborne infantry. A typical infantry company had six of them: one for each platoon, two for the weapons platoon and one for the company commander. Similar scenes appear on the undated game Frontline Jeep Patrol by Lido Toy Co. of New York.
Players race plastic jeeps to deliver a critical message to a frontline unit and then return to their command post. The game has only 16 illustrated spaces and a 1 to 5 spinner built into the board.
Most of the scenes show European-type landscapes. Situations include being hit with pre-registered artillery fire at a crossroads, skirting a minefield, getting caught in anti-tank crossfire, being strafed by low-level planes and getting protection from friendly artillery.
However, some scenes reflect combat in the Pacific. One shows “escape from ambush” with a sniper falling from a palm tree. Another shows being caught in a “90 m.m. Mortar Barrage”. The only mortars of that calibre used during WWII were Japanese.
This land variant of Battleships was published in Oct. 1943, while France was still occupied by the Germans. Its pieces are the same size, but represent an attacking tank force and a defending set of fortifications. The cardboard pieces are placed on large 10 x 10 boards, while small boards are used for plotting. Small red and green cardboard disks mark hits and misses on the plotting boards, while white ones are used to mark hits on the pieces on the large boards.
Each player has three large (3-space), three medium (2-space) and 5 small (1-space) pieces. These are laid out on the large boards in secret. Players take turns calling out a single square. If the defender has a piece on that square, he must call the hit and name the piece. A hit grants the attacker another shot. The first player to eliminate all the opponent's pieces wins.
The bullets were still flying when a French designer published Jeu du Maquis, the first game celebrating the trials and achievements of the French underground resistance during WWII.
Civilian resistance was organized by comités départementals de libération (CDL), committees that were supposed to include all political factions within each region. The game's publisher promised on the game board that 2 francs from each sale would be dedicated to the care of children under the auspices of the C.D.L of Thonon, a region in eastern France .
​
The images on the track tell the story of the resistance. Penalty spaces include: Montluc prison in Lyon, where the Gestapo tortured thousands and killed at least 900 prisoners; Oradour-sur-Glane, where 634 villagers were massacred by SS troops in June 1944; and the plateau of Glières, a landing zone for British arms where 5,000 Wermacht and Vichy troops killed 121 maquisards in a March 1944 assault.
​
Yellow bonus spaces mark maquisard activities such as patrolling roads and blocking bridges, as well as punishing "miliciens" the Nazi-controlled French police; releasing hostages and prisoners, stealing arms from the Germans and the arrest and trial of those considered traitors to France.
The game itself is a fairly simple roll and move affair, with the winner being the first to get four playing pieces to the central space celebrating the August 1944 liberation. However, it has an unusual mechanism that allows some die rolls to be held in reserve. Players roll 2D6 for each move, and must move one pawn by the full amount. When any of a player's pawns are on a white "refuge" space, that player can put the total into a "tactical reserve", to a maximum of 10 points. Any roll that would push the reserve above 10 cannot be added at all. These points can then be added in whole or in part to a future die roll (helping to avoid penalty spaces).
​
The game that most directly records the progress of Allied armies in the European Theatre was published in France soon after the liberation of Paris. Le Jeu de la Libération has a layout like a Parcheesi board.
​
The four corners are the starting spaces for the French, British, American and Soviet players and labelled with their flags and the name of the game in their languages.
​
The playing pieces start from the lowest-numbered space beside their corner, proceed clockwise all the way around the outside of the board, and then up an alley from their national flag toward Berlin in the middle of the board.
Each of the 52 spaces around edges is numbered and labelled with the name and national flag of a city on the path to liberation. The outer path is linear neither in terms of date or location. The flags show 17 French spaces, 12 Russian and 10 Italian, along with two each from the U.K. and Belgium, and one each in Poland, Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia and Estonia. Not all of these locations had to be liberated: in particular, London, Croydon and Moscow were never Axis-occupied. The four spaces at the inner corner have no labels and are illustrations of warfare.
Once a player’s piece has made a full circuit around the edge of the board, it moves from its national flag up a final ladder of locations toward Berlin in the center. These are listed as geographical pathways.
The final Soviet run goes from Sebastopol through Odessa, Kiev, Minsk, Cracowe and Brest-Litovsk. The French player moves from Caen to Falaise, Genes, Belfort, Mulhause and Strasbourg.
The Americans are credited with the liberation of Brest, Nancy, Metz, Verdun, Luxembourg and Liege. The British player’s line includes Nettuno and Milan in Italy, Bruxelles and Anvers in Belgium, and La Haye and Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
​
The full French wartime experience was captured shortly after the war ended in a Jeu de l’Oie (Game of Goose) featuring General Charles de Gaulle as both war hero and leader of the nation. The first space shows the German invasion of 1940 as a jackboot descending on France. This is immediately followed by the promotion of de Gaulle to Général de brigade (a two-star general in the French military). He was head of the still-forming 4th Armoured Division in mid-May when he launched the only significant counter-attack against the Germans at Moncornet. Along with his image is the word “espoir” or hope.
​
The game track follows the war through the formation of the Free French forces in England, combat in North Africa, partisan activity and Nazi occupation in France, the German invasion of Russia, the entry of the United States into the war, and combat and the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany.
Space 62 shows a tri-colored French cock standing on a Nazi flag, crowing as the sun rises. The center space, 63, shows de Gaulle being handed a bouquet of flowers by a young girl. The corners of the board have a shield representing the Fourth Republic, and the game clearly was published shortly before or after that was actually declared.
De Gaulle took charge as head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic in September 1944. Although he was elected unanimously as head of the new Fourth Republic in November, 1945, he resigned in a huff barely two months later.
The long war with Nazi Germany was over. But it would not be long before French troops found themselves fighting again, as the country tried to hang on to its pre-war colonies.
​
​
​