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Before the dreadnoughts, the
battleships ruled the seas. Armed with four huge guns in armored turrets,
they swept the ironclads into the dustbin of history. Now they take their
rightful place on your gaming table.
Finally, the scenario
book you've been demanding for the Origins Award winning
Great War At Sea
series is here: Great White Fleet. Twenty operational scenarios
featuring the battleships and armored cruisers of the pre-dreadnought era.
Most are based on actual war plans, including the Russian Admiralty's 1903
wargame that decided the Tsar on war with Japan.
For those wanting more
detail in their games, also included are Karl Laskas' variant tactical rules
for pre-dreadnoughts. Covers arcs of fire, formation movement, and more.
An additional map
extends the
U.S. Navy Plan Orange
map southward, allowing players to explore American war plans involving the
island of Mindanao and its anchorages.
48 pages, softcover. |
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The Red war plan saw a pair of
primary goals: the conquest of Canada, and trade warfare. The first would be
primarily the Army’s job. The Navy would disrupt British trade while
protecting American merchant shipping. Though the Americans respected
British fighting power, the plans themselves reveal great confidence in the
ability of American shipyards to outstrip British production and in the
individual superiority of American sailors. There is also a powerful
undercurrent of anti-Japanese hostility in the text of the plans. In some of
the more hysterical passages, the British are seen practically as racial
traitors for allying themselves with the Japanese. One pretext for war given
several times in documents from 1919 and 1920 is an intelligence report
claiming that the Royal Navy was on the verge of transferring eight modern
dreadnoughts to Japan.
American plans to build
powerful new dreadnoughts during the course of the First World War caused
great hostility between the two navies. The British pointed out the great
need for destroyers and merchant ships, while resources went instead for new
battleships that could not possibly see action before the war ended.
American naval leaders saw this pressure as an attempt to maintain British
naval supremacy. Some in the Royal navy believed the new warships could only
be meant as a challenge, and wondered if they had only beaten the Germans to
lose control of the seas after all. The Americans, they feared, were arming
for the next war even while the last was still under way. |
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During the late 1800s, two
emerging industrial powers began to build large modern fleets: the United
States and Germany. Perhaps inevitably, tensions rose between them. Each
entered the imperialist race very late and had to content itself with the
leftovers which the British and French had passed by. When the United States
seized Spain’s colonial empire in 1898, German jealousy raged hotly. Some
German business leaders lusted for the Philippines and Puerto Rico, urging
the Kaiser to purchase them from the Spanish before the war ended, or from
the Americans afterwards.
German and American squadrons did not, as
legend has it, almost come to blows in Manila Bay during the
Spanish-American War — the British spread that story, eager to cultivate
American public opinion. We included a scenario for that in our
1898
game anyway. But the German and American admirals on the scene did cultivate
an intense dislike for one another, and the feelings spread to the top on
both sides.
A century later, it’s
difficult to say how seriously each nation’s leaders considered war with the
other. On either side of the Atlantic, naval planning staffs wrote elaborate
scenarios for a possible German-American naval war. It’s these documents
that serve as the basis for our game. So while the game is “hypothetical,”
it’s drawn from the actual war plans of both nations and is, in its own way,
an even more “accurate” wargame than those based on battles or campaigns
that did take place.
Though there’s no evidence
that either nation’s intelligence services penetrated the other’s naval
staff, the two plans oddly mirror one another. Both discounted intervention
by other nations. The German “Operations Plan III” posited a trans-Atlantic
strike by the German High Seas Fleet to capture Puerto Rico as a base in the
first phase of the war, followed by an invasion of the American mainland if
the United States refused to negotiate. This second wave would attack a
major U.S. port, probably New York but perhaps Savannah. |
