Journal No. 63: Doom Turtles
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
September 2026

We’re moving our offices, and throwing out a lot of old stuff. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the pieces: post-war American and Soviet tanks, from the old Iron Curtain expansion, and drawing-board German heavy tanks and helicopters, from the old Secret Weapons book. There they were. Time to use them or toss them. Of course, I chose to use them.

We published Iron Curtain a year before Secret Weapons, but set the background story in the early days of the Cold War, with the Soviets and Americans fighting one another. Once we had the German super-tanks, for reasons I don’t remember (or maybe for no reason at all), the drawing-board Soviet and American tanks never fought the Germans in any of the scenario expansions we’ve published since then. We used them instead as part of an early Cold War story arc.

Golden Journal No. 63: Doom Turtles corrects that oversight. We’ve got the pieces from the old Iron Curtain (two half sheets totaling 154 pieces), and from the old Secret Weapons book (one half-sheet of 77 pieces). Because we have many more Secret Weapons sheets than the others, we’re putting three of them in each book. That makes 385 pieces total. That is a lot of pieces.

That gives us a force pool of:

American
• M26 Pershing tank. Not quite as capable as the German Panther, but much closer in capability.

• M45 Pershing. The support version, with a 105mm howitzer instead of the 90mm cannon.

• M24 Chaffee light tank. Fast and well-armed, armored better than other light tanks. But still a light tank.

• M4/76 Sherman. At the time we published Iron Curtain, the Sherman with better anti-tank capabilities had not yet appeared in any games. Now you’ll have lots of them. You’ll need them.

• Sherman Jumbo. A Sherman with much thicker armor.

• M28 “Doom Turtle” super-heavy tank. Known as the T28, because it was never accepted for service. Slower than guys on foot, but armored like a battleship with a high-velocity 105mm gun and the best tank name ever.

• M29 heavy tank. America’s answer to the Tiger II, with that same 105mm rifled cannon.

• M30 heavy tank. An alternative to the T29, with a 155mm rifled cannon better suited for a cruiser than a tank.

• M32 heavy tank. The “Jumbo” version of the Pershing.

• M36 Jackson tank destroyer. Like the M4/76, we hadn’t put this Panther-slayer into a game yet. Now you have more of them.

• 90mm anti-tank gun. It still might not be enough.

• M39 APC. A tank destroyer without a turret, to carry infantry into battle. First in a long line.

Soviet
• JS3 Stalin. A new heavy breakthrough tank that made its debut in the victory parade just after the war ended.

• JS4 Stalin. The next-generation heavy breakthrough tank, incorporating lessons from captured German tanks and American Lend-Lease tanks.

• T44 medium tank. A slight improvement over the T34/85, but not enough to interrupt production of the older tank. Even so, they did build 1,800 of them, and you can use them.

• Su101 tank destroyer. Good speed, weak armor, and a 100mm high-velocity gun. The assault gun version of the T44.

• AK-armed infantry. They have the AK47, a fully-automatic assault rifle.

German
• Panzer Maus. Who’s the leader of the club? The iconic German failure, with thick armor, a gigantic cannon, and slow enough to be run down and blown up by one guy with a Molotov cocktail.

• Tiger III super-heavy tank. A somewhat better design. Also known as the E100.

• Coelian. A Panther chassis mounting a pair of 37mm automatic cannon, for anti-aircraft use.

• Kugelbliz. A pair of 30mm autocannon on a Panzer IV chassis, in a very advanced ball mount.

• Panther II medium tank. The supreme leader wanted a Panther tank with more armor, and since he was right about everything, the MAN factory’s design bureau came up with this tank. One prototype was captured; my old friend Belton Cooper had a photo of a Panther knocked out in the streets of Köln that looks a lot like this model and not a standard Panther.

• X7. An anti-tank missile. The Germans get anti-tank missiles.

• 128mm anti-tank gun. Prodigious power and range, matched by its weight; this gun can’t be moved during the course of a game.

That’s not everything you’ll use to play the scenarios. There are 20 of those, split evenly between the Eastern and Western Fronts. The Eastern Front scenarios use Fire & Sword, and take place on the Hungarian plain as the Germans deploy their wonder weapons and find that the Soviets have some of their own. The ten scenarios are split into two five-scenario chapters: one of them with the Germans on the offensive, the other with the Soviets attacking.

On the Western Front, the core game is Ardennes 1944, but the structure is similar. In five chapters the Germans are attacking, and in the second five, the Americans are kicking them back to where they started. This time, it’s the Pershing against the Panther II, the Doom Turtle against the Maus.

The scenarios play differently, and not just because there are now so many tanks on the map at the same time (we’re not going to give you all of those super-tanks and then tell you to only use one or two). These tanks are an artifact of a very brief window in the history of military technology, when the race between guns and armor had reached its maximum level. Larger guns could not be mounted on tanks without turning them into rue land battleships, nor could tanks bear the weight of the thick armor necessary to stop the ever-growing velocity of these giant cannons.

More elegant design of both the tank itself and its engine would soon trim that weight, and advances in artillery design would provide more powerful main guns that did not drag down the tank’s speed. But what we’re seeing here at the end of World War II and the years just after is the last gasp of a brute-force approach

I find that fascinating as a historical insight. But it also makes for unusual game play. The tanks are very slow, they’re nearly invulnerable, and they can dish out enormous punishment. They only really have to fear each other (and that crazy guy with the gasoline-filled bottle). Play moves slowly over the map, much like a 1918-style tank attack.

And you get to play with the Doom Turtle. What other game lets you do that?

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children.

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