Wargaming in the Military

The use of games to represent the manoeuvres of warriors on stylised boards can be found throughout the historical record; archaeologists have unearthed sets of miniature soldiers that represent Sumerian and Egyptian armies. Many of the earliest board games that, like chess and go, are still played today are either military-themed, or explore military concepts of strategy and tactics. Games establish consequence-free realities in which we can explore and experience situations that in actuality are too dangerous, rarefied or consequential. This makes them the ideal sphere in which to experience war.

In his 1913 book Little Wars, H. G. Wells captured the allure of the wargame that captivated his interest as a boy, and held his attention into adulthood:

Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of accumulating victory or disaster —- and no smashed or sanguinary bodies, no shattered fine buildings, nor devastated countrysides, no petty cruelties, none of that awful utiiversal boredom and embitterment, that tiresome delay or stoppage of embarrassment of every gracious, bold, sweet and charming thing, that we who are old enough to remember a real modern war know to be the reality of belligerence.

For similar reasons wargames have proved themselves of supreme value to professional militaries, who are able to use the board as a kind of divination pool in which they test tactics and strategies in fictional fronts. H. G. Wells perceived this usefulness, arguing in Little Wars that ‘the British Empire will gain new strength from nursery floors’.* One of the earliest known games, wei hei (meaning ‘encirclement’), was designed by the Chinese general Sun Tzu for this purpose.

In the seventeenth century, recognising the limitations of abstract wargames like chess in preparing to lead an actual army into battle, more complex variants such as Koenigsspiel, or king’s game, emerged. Invented in Germany in 1644 by Christopher Weikhmann, Koenigsspiel added units such as colonels, captains, couriers, bodyguards and private soldiers to chess’s traditional roster of kings and knights. Weikhmann claimed the game was a ‘compendium of the most useful military and political principles’. Wargames continued to evolve in complexity, size and realism till, by the 1850s, ‘Kriegsspiel’ were widely used by the German military.

Around this time, John Clerk, a Scotsman who had never been to sea, designed a game to represent combat between warships with the aim of devising more efficient tactics. Clerk wrote up his findings and suggestions in a book titled An Essay on Naval Tactics. In the preface he explained how he, a man with experience of neither combat nor sea, might presume to correct those naval officers and commanders who had spent their life fighting on the ocean.

As I never was at sea myself, I have been asked, how should I have been able to acquire any knowledge in naval tactics, or should have presumed to suggest my opinion upon that subject . .. 1 had recourse not only to every species of demonstration, by plans and drawings, but also to the use of a small number of models of ships which, when disposed in proper arrangement, gave most correct representations of hostile fleets . . . and being easily moved and put into any relative position required, and thus permanently seen and well considered, every possible idea of a naval system could be discussed without the possibility of any dispute.”

Clerk’s assertion that it was possible for admirals to become experts from the comfort of armchairs was contentious but, eventually, accepted. The Germans were first to accept and embrace wargaming as an imperfect yet instructive mirror of reality. Then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the growing size of armies made it impractical and often foolishly provocative to practise full-scale neobilisation. Other nations began to adopt wargames to simulate deploying to a range of potential locations.”

Simone Parkin, A Game of Birds and Wolves (2020)

• history
• wargaming
• world war ii
• ww2
• wwii