Arctic Convoy: Germany
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2008

Within a few weeks, we'll be releasing the ninth boxed game in our Second World War at Sea series. Arctic Convoy covers the fighting at the top of the world, with Allied (mostly British) forces escorting convoys through the Barents and Norwegian Seas to their destinations at Murmansk and Archangel in far northern Russia.

Five of the previous eight games have taken place in the Pacific theater, with the Imperial Japanese Navy facing the United States Navy (or in one case, the Royal Navy). Yet when I first started messing around with the game design ideas that became Second World War at Sea and its sister, Great War at Sea, I had little interest in those subjects. Prodded by old friend Richard Gutenkunst, I looked at a pair of subjects from the European Theater, which he suggested calling "Convoy to Malta" and "Convoy to Murmansk."

The Malta game finally appeared some two decades later, re-titled Bomb Alley by Doug McNair. And now the Murmansk game is finally off to press, and once again it's packed with the toys we know players love. Today we'll have a look at the Germans — they're badly outnumbered, but they almost always get to pick when and how they will strike, so they don't need overwhelming force to win the game.

The Kriegsmarine contingent includes all the ships that participated in the Arctic campaign, as well as a few that could have but did not — as it is in the real world and in other games in the series, players do not always have perfect intelligence regarding the other side's capabilities. All of them have been given new artwork since Bismarck, the last boxed game in the series.

Battleships

Though not the super-battleship concocted by Nazi propagandists and latter-day amateur historians, Tirpitz certainly managed to tie down a huge concentration of Allied naval and air power merely by existing. She's fast and well-protected, with a powerful armament when compared to the British King George V class or reconditioned veterans of the Great War. But as we showed in an earlier Content piece, Tirpitz and her sister Bismarck did not by any measure mark a new age of battleship design and owe much to the old Imperial Navy's last battleships. She is no match for the big American modern battleships like Alabama or South Dakota, but unfortunately these rarely appear in Arctic Convoy scenarios.

Though often called a "battle cruiser," Scharnhorst was actually a small battleship with a light main armament. She does have sufficient strength to overwhelm any Allied cruiser, requiring battleship escorts if she is on the prowl. Her final mission is covered, and she appears as a potential convoy raider in a number of other scenarios as well.

Aircraft Carrier

German Grand Admiral Erich Raeder claimed in 1942 that his surface fleet would have much greater success against the Allied convoys if they only had an aircraft carrier to aid in couting and in keeping Allied aircraft away from German ships. Adolf Hitler personally ordered the heavy cruiser Seydlitz, which was then nearing completion, converted into an aircraft carrier, and she's present here to test out Raeder's assertion. As a converted cruiser, she's not a very large ship and carries an even smaller air group than the purpose-built carrier Graf Zeppelin, which appeared in Bismarck. Her air group has a dozen dive-bombers and a dozen fighters — we've provided both the Me109T, which was ready in 1942, and the Me155 variant ordered when the carrier program resumed in 1942.

Cruisers

The Germans built their so-called "pocket battleships" to attack enemy merchant shipping, and here they do that very well. Though not fast or well-armored, their big guns will allow them to shoot up a cruiser escort and get at the transports. As with Scharnhorst, the presence of these ships forces the Allies to provide a capital ship escort. Two of them are included; their third sister is in Cone of Fire and was lost in 1939.

The traditional heavy cruisers built for the German Navy had serious mechanical troubles and never really fulfilled their potential. Admiral Hipper made several forays into the Arctic waters against Allied convoys and skirmished with their escorts. Prinz Eugen was several times assigned to move to northern Norway but did not make any actual sorties there.

German light cruisers were in no way comparable to the big, capable ships built by the United States or Britain or even the smaller ships laid down by Italy and Japan. They performed only limited duties during the war years, though the British expected to meet them in the Arctic and the Germans made plans to use them there.

Destroyers

Well aware that they would be outnumbered in any future war at sea, the Germans tried to compensate by building ships superior to any other of the same type. While this sounded good on paper and in meetings, the policy resulted in ships prone to frequent breakdown, with sophisticated systems adopted well before the technology had been thoroughly proven.

The 1934 type destroyers were equivalent to those built by other navies at about the same time, though they suffered from a weak hull structure and trouble with their high-pressure steam propulsion. The 1936 type, which came into service in 1941, took those problems and compounded them with poor manufacturing standards as wartime production caused factories and shipyards to cut corners and more and more unwilling slave laborers replaced the highly skilled workers drafted into the armed forces. The German designers attempted to fit a heavier armament on the boats, and the 150mm guns caused many problems: they were too heavy for their structural supports, and their cartridges came in two pieces causing handling problems and lowering their rate of fire.

Despite all these problems, the destroyers were active against enemy convoys, participating in a number of surface actions against the escorts, and also in raids along the Soviet Arctic coastline. They are the only destroyers in the Second World War at Sea series with a secondary gunnery factor.

While the fans have wanted this game for many years, in some ways it was a little sad to finish this one. The Second World War at Sea series now has all of the "major" theaters and battles covered. With its lovely artwork and Doug McNair development this is probably the best of the games from a player's standpoint, and it will feel very satisfying to see it in people's hands.

Click here to pre-order Arctic Convoy now!