Religion and Oil
The Middle East
On May Day, 1948, the residents of the small kibbutz at Nirim put up a large sign on the wall of their dining hall. It read: “Not the tank shall prevail, but the man.”
Two weeks later, on May 14, David Ben Gurion declared the creation of the state of Israel. The next night, the armies of Arab states surrounding the new state launched an invasion.
In the south, the Egyptian army sent a full division under General Ali al-Mwawi along the coastal road toward Tel Aviv. Fearing for his supply lines, the general ordered an attack on each village along the way. Nirim was the closest community to the Egyptian border. While not named, it is the fortified settlement (blue circle with bumps) closest to the southwest corner of this map from the 1973 game Sinai.
The kibbutz had been founded only two years earlier. It had only 40 adults to defend itself. This small force had 34 rifles and submachine guns, two light machine guns and a single 52 mm mortar. However, the kibbutz was surrounded by a fence and minefield.
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The Egyptians sent in more than 500 troops of the 6th Infantry Battalion and armored vehicles including 20 Bren-gun carriers. These troops were backed up by 81 mm mortars, 2-pounder, 6-pounder and 25-pounder artillery and by air forces.
The defenders first spotted the advancing Egyptians at 5:30 a.m. An artillery barrage began at 7:00 and lasted for an hour. This smashed many of the wooden buildings in the village. It also cut off communications with the rest of Israel. Egyptian forces then moved to surround the village.
The battalion’s adjutant was Gamal Abdel Nasser, who later became Egyptian President. At the time, he observed that his troops were “slow… and without energy” in making their assault. They proved unable to breach the fence and unwilling to cross the well-marked minefield. Shortly after noon, the infantry pulled back. Artillery fire continued for another two days, but Egyptian forces never again attacked the kibbutz.
They lost three dozen soldiers in their abortive assault. The defenders had seven killed, including Holocaust survivor Rivka Salzman. Haim Bar Lev, who commanded the Israeli 8th Battalion (Mechanized) in the southern region at the time, later said that the battle of Nirim decided the outcome of the war, because if 45 lightly armed Israelis could stand against great odds, all of Israel could withstand the war. That was the first of four wars in 25 years involving Israel, but game makers would not begin tackling Middle Eastern conflict until the last of those conflicts.
The game Sinai was published in Strategy & Tactics magazine shortly after Egypt and Syria launched the so-called Yom Kippur War on Oct. 6, 1973. Despite the name, the game’s map board covers not only the Sinai Peninsula but all of Israel and parts of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It has scenarios covering the 1956 and 1967 wars as well as the 1973 conflict.
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This was followed quickly by a more sophisticated take on the most recent war: Bar-Lev: The Yom Kippur War. It was published in 1974 by Conflict Games, and republished as recently as 2019. The first edition was considered complex for its time, bringing together air and ground combat. The game covered fighting on the Golan Heights in the north as well as the Egyptian invasion across the Suez Canal. A 1977 remake by GDW added new concepts like Headquarters units as well as updated graphics.
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In 1977, Strategy & Tactics # 61 brought the 1973 battles down to the tactical level with October War.
The game offered both scenarios representing individual small-scale battles and an innovative campaign system. The full campaign gives players a set pool of troops, and each player has to decide how to allocate their troops across the full set of scenarios.
That year, Avalon Hill published its own contribution with The Arab-Israeli Wars. This was an even more ambitious title, focused on tank battles at the tactical level.
The result is a game that includes specialized rules covering aspects of mobile warfare like roadblocks, minefields, electronic warfare, bore-sighting and firing while moving. The game includes scenarios from the 1956 and 1967 wars as well as the most recent one, and added two scenarios of possible future conflict.
The Yom Kippur War did not mark the end of Cold War conflict in the Middle East. In 1979, the Shah of Iran fled his country, and supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini invaded and occupied the American Embassy in Tehran. On April 24, 1980, the United States launched a military operation to rescue the 53 hostages, but this was aborted when three of the helicopters failed before even reaching the Iranian capital.
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This led quickly to publication of Raid on Iran later that year by Steve Jackson Games. It is a fairly basic “what if” game that assumes the raiders did successfully reach Tehran. One player commands the American troops searching an abstract city map to find and rescue the hostages. The other player uses Iranian militants and mobs to prevent the rescue.
One game published in 1983 achieved that rarest of status: a speculative game about a possible future conflict that actually came to pass. Gulf Strike by Victory Games aimed to simulate combined air, naval and ground operations in the Persian Gulf region. Jim Dunnigan, in his book Zones of Control, noted that it was such an accurate reflection of the factors facing military commanders in the region that it was used by the U.S. military in its first analysis of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, just one day after Saddam Hussein had launched his forces southward.
The first edition had four mapsheets and 910 counters. A second edition in 1988 added another mapsheet and 130 counters. And in 1990, a third edition added the Desert Shield expansion module, with 12 pages of extra rules and 260 new counters to reflect the actual invasion of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The Gulf War prompted several more games shortly after Hussein’s actual invasion.
These included A Line in the Sand from TSR and Phase Line Smash from GDW. The former is a much simpler version of Gulf Strike.
Also for two players, the map board for A Line in the Sand is divided into irregularly shaped areas rather than a hex grid. The counters are much larger, and there are far fewer of them. Some counters are designed to lie flat; others are cardboard and are folded into stands to hold them upright.
Phase Line Smash is designed specifically as a solitaire game. Players take the American role against Hussein in the liberation of Kuwait. The campaign’s ultimate outcome is not in doubt, of course, but winning is not easy.
To win, the player must better the historical result. Considering that the US VII Corps chewed up 4,600 armored vehicles and smashed 10 divisions in four days, while taking only 239 casualties, this is not easy.
The player has to move quickly, but cannot get careless. Winning requires both taking territory and minimizing American casualties.
The player activates one unit at a time. There are three types of possible attacks that must be coordinated with artillery and air strikes.
The right combination can blow a hole in the Iraqi line and roll up a flank in a single turn. However, the mechanics make losses to friendly fire quite possible, and the game engine will respond to opportunities like an exposed flank.
The game can get even more difficult if command is split among multiple American players.
Managing the flow of supplies is critical to progress – and squabbling over who gets dibs on the next load of food and ammo can prove disruptive to all. The history of a lopsided victory does not get in the way of a challenging game.
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