Category: News & Musings

Confusion of British 2pdr & 6pdr HE in WW2 Addendum

Over the years there has been a lot of confusion around British HE for 2pdr and 6pdr guns – especially in the early part of the war. This is my follow up to my original post on this subject.

Further to my post in 2022 about The Confusion of British 2pdr & 6pdr HE in WW2 I finally acquired a copy of Firing Now! Tank, Anti-Tank and Self-Propelled Artillery Ammunition UK & USA 1939-1945 by Dick Taylor in late 2023 which I had been looking for for some time (the limited amounts of second hand copies were extortionate prices, but there seems to have mow been a second printing or a new POD edition). My copy of A15 Cruiser Mk. VI Crusader Tank – A Technical History by P.M. Knight had also arrived several months earlier in 2023 and has added to the information. The effect is these have added some data to my research in the original post.

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Leipzig Refight in 28mm for Easter

Several of the local Napoleonic’s Gamers are doing a large refight of Leipzig over Easter 2024 with 28mm armies at a 1/100 ratio (so essentially Regiments/Brigades are ‘bath-tubbed’ down to Battalions). Check out this video for the initial deployment and description of the formations…

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Eighties Colonial War Game Armies

Following on from my post a few days ago about some photos I had found of a colonial Anglo-Zulu War game in the mid-1980’s, my friend who provided the armies then still has them! And as it turns out recently he had had them out of their storage containers for the first time in a long while to check their condition and do a bit of a review. He even took photos, so with his generosity, here’s some photos of the full 1/72 plastic colonial wargaming army collection we used for games in the mid-1980’s through to the very early-90’s.

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False Memory: What We ‘Know’ About WW1

There are many myths around the British Army in World War I, the old “Lions led by Donkeys” being the first of them, such as Alan Clark claiming to quote it from a German general’s remark. But in fact he just made that up (and in truth it was actually first used by the French about the British in the Crimean War). Furthermore things such as portrayed in Black Adder Goes Forth where British Generals are completely incompetent public school boy types who live it up in comfort in chateaus miles behind the lines, while sending their men off to their deaths, are just nonsensical and don’t align with historical evidence. While there may well have been one or two real generals like this, the actual majority, and the truth, is likely far from that (you can just look at the casualty rate of senior British Officers commanding Divisions and above for example).

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Wargaming Tomes Collection: Part Three

Continuing on from Wargaming Tomes Collection: Part Two here’s a look at the remaining parts of my classic wargaming books from the 1960’s through to 1990, including some classic book series such as the WRG Armies & Enemies and Tank Battles in Miniature by Don Featherstone & Bruce Quarrie; and some new publications of old material and authors from the classic era by John Curry and his History of Wargaming Project.

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Anglo-Zulu War Eighties Wargame

Recently I dug out some very old photos – some of my very first records of wargaming and they included these Anglo-Zulu War game photos played with my good friend Wayne in the mid-1980’s (probably 1985 or possibly 1986). We used 1/72 ESCI figures primarily (as their 1879 British & Zulu Figures, along with the Crimean War Russian Infantry & Artillery, had just been released). We started out with the Anglo-Zulu war (including a multi-player campaign at one point) and then expanded to the Sudan and the North-West Frontier. However this is possibly one of our very first games, and is from the Anglo-Zulu war.

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The Confusion of British 2pdr & 6pdr HE in WW2

Over the years there has been a lot of confusion around British HE for 2pdr and 6pdr guns – especially in the early part of the war. e.g. The 2pdr didn’t have HE, yes it did originally in 1940 but they stopped making it, no it didn’t, yes it did and they even had 11,000 rounds of it siting in storage at the outbreak of World War II – they just never issued it to the troops! Anyway I thought it might be useful (for my sanity and anybody else’s) to collate the facts as known (at least as I now know them), given a lot more information has come to light in the last 10-15 years on the subject. This was partly sparked by a recent YouTube video I watched (on the Matilda) that quoted quite inaccurately the claim that the British had 2pdr HE (in storage in 1939-1941) and never issued it, either through incompetence or criminal negligence!

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Wargaming Tomes Collection: Part Two

One of the amazing things about vintage wargaming books, especially from the classic era (for want of a better term) of the 1960’s through until the early 1980’s, is how they still inspire today (at least in my mind) and in many cases the originality of ideas. As time goes by I have continued to collect more and more of these, and to ‘back fill’ my collection that started in the 1970’s and 1980’s, so continuing on from Part One here’s a look at more of my classic wargaming books from the 1960’s through to 1990, including some of the more obscure book series such Knight’s Battles for Wargamers, Concise Campaigns, Bellona Battles for Wargamers and Background Books for Wargamers and Modellers.

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Wargaming Tomes Collection: Part One

I recently moved house (well actually about 10 months ago – but it was inter-city to be fair), and I am only finally getting around to properly starting to unpack and sort my wargaming books, figures and terrain, and my somewhat extensive library of history books. Initially, on the book side, I’m focussing on my wargaming related titles and rulesets as these have the most immediate potential use; and as I have a particular fondness for old classic wargaming books (you know the ones by Donald Featherstone and Charles Grant and the others of their generation) I have quite a few of these; and thought I might post a few lists of titles to jog people’s memories and nostalgia…

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Site Update

Apologies if you are visiting the site and having issues with the format – I am just in the process of changing over the theme to rectify issues with images and such not displaying correctly, and this may take me a day or two to complete. Please bear with me and if anything is inaccessible or not working please check back later in the week.

Update 19 March 2014: New format now in place and should be displaying correctly. Just need to finish tweaking the colours, etc, but site should be fully functional again. Please let me know if you find anything not working. Continue reading “Site Update”

Wargaming.info Migration Update 26 April 2011

As previously posted (A Not So Small Migration) I have migrated Wargaming.info to WordPress, and as such have needed to reconfigure or redesign some facets – such as Image Galleries – so there are currently parts of the site missing data. Right now I have finally started to upload the image galleries for those posts that had large numbers of photos, having now got all the necessary components working to display the images properly. As of tonight I have completed everything back as far as late September 2010, older posts which had large galleries will still be missing their images (there’s about 16 of them in total), but I will gradually get 1 or 2 of these a day done I hope over the next 2 weeks or so to have the site back to 100%.

I have also started retagging many of the posts, again working in reverse chronological order, so the tag cloud will gradually become more complete and accurate over the next couple of weeks or so, but in the meantime only about 22% are done (the most recent ones).

A Not So Small Migration

WordPress LogoOver the last few days I have been migrating Wargaming.info from Joomla to WordPress – for a variety of reasons – but needless to say it has required a reasonable amount of effort (and has been the third such major migration I have done in about 4 years in my quest to find the ideal platform). The site is now back up and running in its new environment, however it does unfortunately mean any external links to specific pages on the site will mostly be broken (while in Joomla I could load multiple aliases for pages, the by maintaining external links to old page addresses, I have yet to figure out how easily that can be done in WordPress). Also it may or not break RSS subscriptions – so you may need to reselect RSS notifications if you had these previously. So first of all my apologies to anyone this affects!

I have not as yet completed all work, but I wanted to get the new design up and running as soon as possible, so:

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