Pieces of Iron Wolves
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2010

Many years ago, when I first concocted the idea of what would become the Panzer Grenadier series, I made up a huge list of all the many kinds of extras that I would someday write or design for it. It was a very long list with all sorts of the quirky and unusual stuff I like to include in games.

Years went by, the original game was finally published and the series took root with boxed games, books and smaller scenario supplements. One of the first book supplements I wanted to write was one I called "Phantom Armies." This would roll together several of the more marginal supplements off that original list: Czechs, Austrians, Turks, Luxembourgers, Lithuanians and a few more armies that did not actually fight in the Second World War. It would have been a lot of fun to write and design, but absolutely no one would have bought it.

Not that this always has proven a barrier, but all of those phantoms together simply would not fit on a sheet of 165 counters. And if Phantom Armies would be a tough sell, then the Turkish Army fighting a series of what-if scenarios would do even worse.

But then along came our Instant Gratification line, with Doug McNair agitating madly for an ongoing series of downloadable games and supplements we could sell directly off the website. Gamers liked them, and liked them so much that they asked/pleaded/angrily demanded “real” counters for them. And so we complied: Iron Wolves is now available with outstanding, thick playing pieces.

Not an Iron Wolf, but a defender of Lithuania all the same.

Iron Wolves began several years ago when I was working on our version of Third Reich. All of the "minor country" armies had to be researched, including Lithuania's. Some time after that, I wrote a piece for Daily Content about Lithuania's army and her uncomfortable position between Nazi Germany, dictatorial Poland and the Communist Soviet Union. At the same time, as I often find myself doing for reasons I fail to understand, I sketched out the Lithuanian forces in Panzer Grenadier format and roughed out some scenarios for them. From there to Iron Wolves was an easy step.

So what does Iron Wolves include? There are 165 pieces, but they’re not just like the counter sheets in the boxed games and books: These are, in my personal opinion, much nicer. Of those 165, 107 represent pre-war Lithuanian troops, weapons and leaders, with another 30 more from the collaborationist Lithuanian Defense Force and 28 for the Polish Home Army.

Foot Soldiers

Lithuania tried to create a modern, mechanized army, but its three divisions remained a bayonet force in 1939. They existed in peacetime as cadre forces, to be fleshed out by members of the "Rifle Association" — a "club" controlled by the Ministry of Defense and serving as an army reserve in all but name.

Lithuania seized hundreds of thousands of varied rifles during the chaos of the Russian Civil War and the Soviet-Polish War, but standardized its small arms in the early 193's. Infantrymen carried either the Belgian-made FN Model 30 bolt-action rifle or the Czech-made Vz.24.

Lithuanian infantrymen with a Maxim machine gun.

Lithuania's infantry regiments received comparatively lavish allotments of machine guns. The army held on to the Maxim M1910 weapons taken during the independence struggle — a perfectly serviceable weapon despite its anachronistic look with its shield and small wheels. Lithuania also purchased Czech ZB.26 light machine guns and Vickers and Browning medium machine guns.

Armor

Lithuania obtained its first real tanks in 1923, when it bought a dozen of the ubiquitous Renault FT-17 light tanks from France. All of the Lithuanian models carried machine guns only, and all of them appear to still have been in operation in 1939.

The backbone of the Armored Detachment was the Vickers Four-Ton Tank. Lithuania bought 16 of them in 1933, and 16 more in 1936. This was an export design, armed with machine guns only in a rotating turret. The British Army used the small vehicles only for training, but numerous countries bought them including Latvia, Belgium and Switzerland.

In 1938 the Lithuanians sought a much more capable tank, and after looking at various Czech and Swedish models settled on the LTL design offered by the Czech firm CKD. The Lithuanians chose an Oerlikon automatic 20mm cannon as the main armament rather than the standard 37mm gun used on most Czech tanks, appreciating its firepower against soft targets. The tanks had not been delivered when the Germans seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939; the new management diverted the vehicles to Slovakia after re-arming them with the standard 37mm gun.

Had Lithuania fallen into the German orbit as envisioned during the talks between German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, it's easy to assume that the Lithuanian Army would have had somewhat better luck obtaining arms from Czech factories. Germany did not provide many modern arms to her allies, but we included more capable Czech-made tanks in the mix to allow for some 1941 scenarios. The Lithuanians had shown interest in all the vehicles included in the set, though turning that interest into a purchase would not have been easy.

Heavy Weapons

Along with the Renault light tanks, the Lithuanians also purchased a large number of used French Schneider Model 1897 75mm field guns in the early 1920s, and these remained the backbone of the artillery branch in 1939. "Heavy" artillery consisted of British 18-pounders. Like their mortal enemies, the Poles, Lithuania equipped its forces with the Swedish 37mm Bofors anti-tank gun; unlike the Poles, the Lithuanians actually paid for their guns and so had far fewer available in relative terms.

It's hard to judge the fighting ability of an army that didn't take the field, but Lithuania took its military training very seriously, with universal conscription and what appear to have been serious attempts to keep a solid cadre. They probably would not have been quite as good as the Poles, but would have suffered the same handicap of grossly inadequate artillery support. But if Lithuanian arms were inadequate, Lithuanian courage ultimately would be enough to collapse Soviet oppression in January 1991.

Iron Wolves is now available — click here to order your copy!