|
Arctic
Convoy: Operational Scenarios
Part 1
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
November 2008
I can't claim that Second
World War at Sea: Arctic Convoy was
a game I'd always wanted to design, or
even a topic I'd thought much about before
working on the game. Fans wanted it, our
marketing princess wanted a Second
World War at Sea boxed game, and
company cash flow certainly called for
it.  That made for an unusual, and ultimately
very satisfying, design experience. I had
enough background in World War II naval history
to understand the campaign, and of course
knew about its broad outlines. But many of
the individual actions were new to me, and
it was fascinating to see it all come together.
Thanks to political reality, the convoys
had to be pushed through regardless of Soviet
tank and plane production in their own factories.
Whether the Red Army "needed" the
materiel — and there are a few reputable
historians who dispute this — really didn't
matter. The Soviet Union had to be given
tangible proof of Western support in its
struggle against the Nazis. Not sending them
was not an option.
But geography lay in the Germans' favor.
Arctic conditions would force the convoys
to come within range of bases in northern
Norway. And while the Allies had a significant
edge in naval fighting power, the hard conditions
of the Murmansk Run meant that warships could
not be run continually without suffering
machinery breakdowns. Convoy escorts had
to sail every time a convoy went to sea;
the Germans could pick and choose when they
wished to intercept. They had a limiting
factor of their own: fuel oil shortages meant
they would not sail without a good chance
of success (the Kriegsmarine, of course,
heaped scorn on its ally the Regia Marina
for following the same policy in the Mediterranean).
Until now I'd considered Bomb
Alley the
best of the Second
World War at Sea games,
with its fine brawling-in-a-bathtub quality
(and it's the only boxed game I designed
all on my own, so surely there's some ego
factor in there). I went into the Arctic
Convoy design work looking at the counter
sheets thinking it would be very difficult
to craft a balanced game that was fun for
everyone: there are eleven Allied battleships,
for example, to just one for the Germans.
Instead, that part turned out to be easy.
All 11 are never available at once, and there's
a lot of gray water in which that one Nazi
battleship can hide before she strikes.
Depending on what you're after, I think
Arctic Convoy edges out Bomb
Alley. It doesn't
have the inevitability of combat present
in the Mediterranean, but the cat-and-mouse
hunt is very tense. The game should be a
very satisfying play experience.
Here's a look at 10 of the operational scenarios.
 First Sortie
2–15 March 1942
The German battleship Tirpitz moved from
Germany to Norway in January, preparing
to interdict convoy traffic in the Arctic.
Allied aircraft searched frantically for
the battleship, but had not yet located her
when a German recon plane spotted Convoy
PQ12 heading toward Murmansk. The battleship
headed out with a destroyer escort, but the
British Home Fleet was also at sea.
Aftermath
Tirpitz came within 50 miles of QP8 and
110 miles of PQ12; some of her destroyers
passed much closer to the Allied convoys.
But the only contact came from the air, and
a British escort shot down a Luftwaffe
bomber while Tirpitz fended off an attack
by carrier-based torpedo bombers and
avoided a night-time ambush laid by eight
British destroyers off the Norwegian coast.
The Germans had burned 8,000 tons of fuel
oil, with absolutely no result to show for
it. Scharnhorst's End
22–31 December 1943
In mid-December, Adolf Hitler authorized
use of the battle cruiser Scharnhorst against
the next Allied convoy to northern Russia.
The temporary fleet commander, Rear Admiral
Erich "Achmed" Bey, strongly urged
using only destroyers, but Admiral Karl Doenitz
was not about to set aside the hard-won permission
to send Scharnhorst to sea. Aboard his flagship,
Vice Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser had his staff
practice all the radio signals they would
need for a radar-guided surface engagement,
including, "Make to Admiralty: Scharnhorst sunk." Aftermath
Scharnhorst came close to the approaching
convoy, but was intercepted by a squadron
of three British cruisers. After a day-long
running fight, she ran into the British
battleship Duke
of York and a destroyer
squadron. Suffering up to a dozen torpedo
hits, she exploded and sank in the evening
of 26 December. First Convoy
19 August – 10 September 1941
With the decision to send aid to
the Soviet Union via Arctic waters,
the Royal Navy gained responsibility
for a new theater of war but no additional
ships or aircraft. Adding to the headaches
of Jack Tovey, commander of the Home
Fleet, his political and military superiors
could not help demanding new special
missions. And so Tovey's fleet sailed,
with covering the first Allied convoy
to Archangel as just one of its responsibilities. Aftermath
This would be the first and last
Churchillian adventure in the far
north. The Home Fleet staff was overstretched
planning multiple, simultaneous missions:
air attacks on German ports, surface
raids against coastal traffic, a
trip to Spitzbergen, flying off fighter
planes for the Soviets, and of course
a convoy loaded with wool and rubber.
Service in the far north was very
hard on ships and men; they could
not handle frivolous extra tasks
and hope to escort the vital convoys
at even partial efficiency. The Royal
Navy accomplished all of its goals
but afterwards Home Fleet commander Sir
John Tovey insisted on a tight mission
focus. Winston Churchill accused him
of holding "an unenterprising attitude
of mind," but the admiral held firm
against more hare-brained schemes.
 "I See
Nothing But Red."
22 December 1942 – 9 January 1943
The Western
Allies suspended convoy traffic to North
Russia in the fall of 1942 to divert
their assets to the invasion of North
Africa, Operation Torch. When they
resumed at the end of the year, the
Germans were ready to intercept with
a complicated double operation: One
cruiser would attack the convoy,
while the other would move on into
the North Atlantic to raid there. Aftermath
Bad weather
disorganized the convoy, and when
a submarine made a sighting the
Germans set out to intercept. Adm.
Oskar Kummetz's force ran into
the convoy escort and fought a
confused night battle in which
one British destroyer and a minesweeper
were sunk. A German destroyer was
sunk after mistaking Sheffield for Admiral
Hipper and trying to line
up behind her. Lützow slipped
past the British but contented herself
with lobbing 11-inch shells at the convoy
from long range — despite the escort's
having been drawn away. Enraged by the
results, or lack of them, Adolf Hitler
ordered all the Navy's capital ships
scrapped, though bureaucratic inertia
saved them from the cutting torches. Polish Blood
21 May – 1 June 1942
Deploying Tirpitz to
northern waters had benefits far beyond
what the fighting value of one very average
battleship implied. Heavy ships had to
be detailed to protect the convoys, with
enough strength to still defend the merchant
ships if Tirpitz lured some of them away.
Unable to deploy what they considered
sufficient strength, the Royal Navy
waited while over 90 loaded ships piled
up and both Franklin Roosevelt and
Josef Stalin complained to Winston
Churchill. Churchill ordered a very
large convoy to set out regardless
of the threat. "The operation is justified
if half gets through," he wrote. "Failure
on our part to make the attempt would weaken
our influence with both our major allies." But
once again, the Allied Powers would find
themselves fighting to the last drop of Polish
blood. Aftermath
The Germans did not sortie with their
surface warships, but the planes came
in waves; over 100 separate air attacks
were recorded. Seven merchant ships were
sunk, plus another after its arrival
in Murmansk. The Polish destroyer Garland
suffered four near-misses that riddled
the ship with splinters. Twenty-five
of her crew died and 43 were injured,
and she staggered into Murmansk to be
met by medics from the tanker Hopewell.
In her whitewashed corridors they found,
written in the blood of dying sailors,
Niech ?yje Polska. Oranges and Lemons
6–14 September 1943
Stung by Allied attempts
to hunt down German meteorological teams
in the Svalbard Archipelago, Adolf Hitler
asked the Navy to stage a raid against
the islands. Taking aboard a battalion
of infantry, a German squadron set out
with two battleships and nine destroyers
— the most powerful force the Kriegsmarine
deployed outside of coastal waters. Aftermath
In the best tradition of Britain's
sailing admirals, Home Fleet commander
Bruce Fraser set out to intercept the
Germans with what he had available
on the spot — a force slightly inferior
to the enemy squadron. The Germans
vandalized the islands' tiny capital,
Longyearben, and set a coal mine fire
that would burn for another nine years.
Then they boarded their ships and returned
to Norway unscathed; there would be no "even
fight" in Arctic waters after all.  The Next Convoy
2– 22 September 1942
The disaster of Convoy PQ.17 shook
the confidence of both merchant and
naval sailors. A morale-building speech
by Rear Adm. Robert "Bullshit
Bob" Burnett, commander of the "fighting
destroyer escort," did little to encourage
them. Meanwhile, leaders in the Soviet Union
also lost faith in the ability and the will
of their Western Allies to continue sending
support. To restore morale all around, Winston
Churchill insisted that the next convoy be
defended by fleet carriers and a heavy escort
of battleships. The carriers were not available,
and the mission plans were captured by the
Germans when a bomber foolishly sent over
Norway to Murmansk with a full set of briefing
papers was shot down and recovered. Aftermath
The Germans planned to hit the incoming
convoy with submarines and aircraft,
and the outgoing convoy with surface
ships. The surface ships did not sortie
after all, but the Luftwaffe more than
made up for their lack, sinking 13 ships
from PQ.18. The Germans pressed their
attacks to the very end of the convoy
run, and the timely arrival of four Soviet
destroyers drove off several intense
attacks. U-boats claimed four ships from
the returning QP.14. Operation Zarin
22–29 September 1942
With the German surface
squadrons ready for action but having
missed Convoy QP.14, the naval command
ordered an alternative mission. Still
obsessed by the traffic from Siberia
that Admiral Scheer had failed to find
and destroy, the Germans now would
try an offensive mining operation to
interrupt these routes. An earlier
mission had ended in disaster when
the minelayer Ulm was shot up by British
destroyers; this time the minelaying force
would be much more heavily armed. Aftermath
The cruiser and destroyers successfully
laid their mines and returned to base
without incident. As one of the few arenas
where the German navy could be assured
of surface superiority, they came back
into the Kara Sea several times during
the war, but never justified the wear
on their ships and personnel and the
fuel expenditure with serious results.  Someone Had Blundered
26 June – 12 July 1942
In later years, the
designation "PQ.17" would
become synonymous with "utter disaster." With
the Red Army falling back before an overwhelming
German offensive, every bit of assistance
was needed and the ill-fated convoy would
be pushed through with a powerful escort.
Though PQ.16 had suffered serious losses,
PQ.17's escorting battleships were considered
more than enough to repel any German attack. Aftermath
The most powerful force the Germans
sent to sea during World War II began
to fall apart even before leaving coastal
waters, as one armored cruiser and three
destroyers suffered grounding damage.
Based on intelligence that the German
ships were moving — though there
was no confirmation that they had headed
out to sea — and knowledge that
they could reach the convoy before the
Allied battleships could get there, First
Sea Lord Dudley Pound ordered PQ.17 to
scatter. German aircraft and submarines
then hunted down the scattered merchant
ships, sinking 24 of them with hundreds
of tanks and planes and thousands of
other vehicles aboard plus 100,000 tons
of other war material. Morale plummeted
among the Allied forces; in the first
Anglo-American naval operation of the
war, as some American sailors saw it
the "yellow Limey
bastards" abandoned
the merchant crews. This was unfair:
At least one British destroyer commander
seriously contemplated faking a machinery
failure rather than accede to his orders,
while the commander of the heavy cruiser
London reported his crew as "near
mutinous" over
the decision. The People's Battleship
15–31 August 1944
Following Italy's surrender
in September 1943, the Soviet Union demanded
a share of the Italian fleet. To mollify
their Soviet ally without antagonizing
a potential new Italian friend, the United
States and Britain agreed to temporarily
transfer several aged warships of their
own to Soviet control. The British transferred
the ancient battleship Royal
Sovereign in May 1944, and in August she set sail
along with eight old destroyers as part
of a convoy escort. The Germans had completed
repairs on the battleship Tirpitz and
conducted her shakedown exercises just
a few days before, but a British carrier
strike was expected to keep her out
of action. Aftermath
The convoy arrived safely, losing
one escort to a German submarine's
acoustic torpedo. The Soviet battleship
and destroyers separated from the
convoy and the submarines concentrated
on the wallowing old ship, loosing numerous
torpedoes at her which detonated short
of the target. Meanwhile, the Home Fleet's
carrier force made 247 sorties against
Tirpitz, scoring minor damage to the
battleship on the few occasions they
could get through the heavy flak
screen and waiting fighters. A u-boat
torpedoed the Canadian-manned carrier
Nabob, which made it back to port
but never sailed again. Tirpitz did not
leave port, and the Red Banner Northern
Fleet was spared an unequal surface action.
Continued in Part 2.
Click here to order
Arctic
Convoy now!
| 
