Toys of the Spice Islands, Part 2
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2010

Sometimes, I really miss Winston Hamilton.

Winston ran a small wargame company that published a series of games aiming to portray all of the Second World War at a very small scale (16 miles across each hex). When complete, there would be dozens of maps and tens of thousands of counters. The series, now long-defunct, had a small but fanatical following. It also had what have to be the blandest graphics ever put in a commercial game product.

Winston died some years ago, his body ravaged by cancer. But he was one of my favorite people, a fiercely loyal friend and deeply thoughtful philosopher, hiding those under a carefully calculated prickliness. Having made a small fortune in insurance, he was also a communist. A heavily decorated combat engineer in Vietnam, he stood among the Winter Soldiers who flung their medals at the Pentagon in 1972. The man defined contrariness, and he reveled in it.

So anyway, one day in the early 1990s a game artist presented Winston with a full set of new airplane and ship art for the counters in his beloved game series. Being Winston, there was of course only one answer he could give:

"I can get that art ... anywhere!"

I ran Avalanche Press for well over a decade before I tried out that principle for myself. You pretty much can get that art anywhere if you're stubborn and obsessed enough, but I actually enjoyed working on the ship drawings that festoon our Second World War at Sea: Spice Islands game. Here's a look at the rest of the toys of Spice Islands, wrapping up the overview started in Part 1.

Aircraft Carriers

The Royal Netherlands Navy did obtain aircraft carriers, but not until after the Second World War. They don't seem to have seriously studied building them before the war, but I wanted them to have them in the game — one of the underlying purposes of the scenario design was to let players fight with more-or-less evenly matched forces on the wonderful Strike South maps.

There are three light carriers provided, improved and enlarged versions of the British Hermes. Ships like this were studied by the Royal Navy and particularly by the Royal Canadian Navy — Sir John Jellicoe, the victor of Jutland, pressed hard for this type of aircraft carrier during the 1920s. The Dutch were probably aware of the Jellicoe recommendations regarding Canada's fleet plans, but I have no evidence that they looked at the Improved Hermes concept with any seriousness.

Aircraft carriers need airplanes. The Dutch East Indies forces, to a much greater extent than those of the homeland, looked to American manufacturers for aircraft and I went with the hypothesis that they'd have done to same to fill their carrier decks. They carry Wildcat fighters and Vindicator dive bombers — many small carriers did not have armored stowage for torpedoes and did not field torpedo bombers, and I extended that principle to the Dutch as well.

Small Cruisers

The Dutch embraced the light cruiser as a compromise between their defense needs and their unwillingness to spend large sums on the fleet. And usually these ships showed all the problems of a compromise, summed up in the light cruiser De Ruyter, the Dutch flagship during the actual battles of 1942.

De Ruyter had initially been intended as a heavy cruiser, bearing 8-inch guns. But in an effort to save money, she was downgraded to 6-inch guns and greatly reduced in size. Only one unit was built instead of the four initially considered, and so we have her three unbuilt sisters in the Spice Islands mix, the Gelderland class. The De Ruyter drawing has received a major upgrade from Strike South.

We also have her in heavy cruiser guise, with six 8-inch guns and a heavier anti-aircraft battery. Dutch ships usually carried a heavier anti-aircraft suite than comparable ships in other navies, and boasted the sophisticated Hazemeyer control system that boosted their effectiveness. The De Kock class is only a weak heavy cruiser, however, and not the sort of upgrade provided by the big Aemilla class described in part one of this overview. They're named for the Dutch leaders who conquered the East Indies.

When the Dutch finally started to build up their surface forces, they ordered a pair of flotilla leaders to support them in battle with heavier weapons and to serve as flagships. Since we've given the Dutch a large number of destroyers in Spice Islands, there needed to be flotilla leaders for them, and so we have four copies of the leader Tromp, here christened the Utrecht class.

Destroyers

The Dutch relied heavily on their destroyer flotilla during the actual battles, and they come well-equipped in Spice Islands. There are 20 of the Gerard Callenbergh class boats, a type actually designed and built at the outbreak of World War II. But plans included two full flotillas of them, only four of which would be laid down (as the Tjerk Hiddes class). Isaac Sweers served the Allies while Callenbergh was seized by the Nazis and incorporated into their navy; the other two were broken up incomplete. Keeping with the original Dutch design, they each carry a seaplane — highly unusual in the Second World War at Sea series. All are named for Dutch naval heroes.

Aware of the Japanese "Special Type" destroyers, the Dutch considered building a destroyer maximized for surface combat but instead went with the balanced Tjerk Hiddes design. Not constrained by the bounds of reality, in Spice Islands the Dutch get this ship as well. The Zeeslang class have a heavy gun and torpedo armament and are large destroyers, not much smaller than the flotilla leaders. They carry the names of Dutch torpedo boats of the early 20th century.

Aircraft

While the Netherlands had a vibrant aircraft industry of their own, they imported most of their planes for the Dutch East Indies. And continuing that practice in our alternative-history Spice Islands also helps cover up the fact that I'm just not very good at drawing airplanes.

The Dutch get fairly powerful air forces, in keeping with their East Indies defense plans. They have P-40 and Hurricane fighters, plus Mosquito and Lightning heavy fighters. The Dutch liked the Mosquito in fighter configuration though they never actually ordered it, and used both P-40s (Kittyhawk) and Hurricanes during the war, so those three are very solidly grounded in reality. I had only intended to give them one heavy fighter, but didn't have a drawing for the actual plane built in the Netherlands, the Fokker G.1. I was going to have a second-generation fighter in the game, probably the Vought Corsair, but realized the scenarios would not extend past 1942 and that a full array of new planes would have to accompany it. So late in the design process I substituted the Lightning, which I'd removed earlier for the Mosquito.

In the attack category, the Dutch have two British planes, the Blenheim and Beaufort, both of which they actually operated in the theater — just not in these numbers. The Fortress (B-17) is something of a stretch; the Dutch had seen and admired them but the Americans were not exporting this fine plane before the war. And that's the real "alternative" in the aircraft category: all of the planes shown were at least studied by the Dutch and most of them actually flown by them. But in just about every case, all production went to the domestic air force (British or American) with none left over for third parties. The Dutch would have liked these planes and could have bought them — but no one was selling.

The Royal Netherlands Navy relied on big flying boats for reconnaissance, and operated both the Dornier Do.24 and Consolidated Catalina in the East Indies. Spice Islands simply gives them more of these fine planes.

It's been written that our game line "reeks of product," and I'm proud of that. We need to be giving consumers what they want rather than indulging our own egos — that's why we have the download line. Spice Islands fits very nicely with that concept, and I'm very pleased with the result. It's a pretty package with good scenarios and a sort of sound basis for its alternative history. Well, maybe not on that last but I can live with that.

This piece originally appeared in November 2009.

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