EmbraCraig's Americans in the Desert (1942)

As mentioned in the about section, I knew virtually nothing about the US involvement in North Africa up until this year. @Oriskany’s series earlier in the summer was a nice primer, but I needed more detail to plan my force.

I started a thread on the old BoW forums, where Oriskany replied with some really nice info, which is now sadly lost (the Internet Way Back machine teases me by showing me the forum thread title in one of the snapshots, but not the content, unfortunately). I did find some useful book titles to get things kicked off though.

• An Army At Dawn by Rick Atkinson – a really well written history of the US campaign in North Africa. I’m still reading this one, but will highly recommend it from what I’ve read so far. Not useful in gaming terms really, but very good background.
• US Armored Units in the North African and Italian Campaigns 1942–45 – Osprey – a write up on the development and organisation of the US Armored units. Really well detailed, and good notes on why the organisation changed as the war went on, but deals more at company level and up, so not as useful for the scale of project I’m working on as I’d hoped.
• World War II US Armored Infantry Tactics – Osprey – This has been the gold medal find for me. Includes a full listing of the men and armaments of an Armored Infantry platoon in both 1942 and 1943 versions, broken down in an easy to read format. Basically, they printed my army list for me. Also includes detailed notes on the theory and practice of how they fought – it’ll be interesting to see how well those notes work out on the game table.

The TOE is available (in a bit of a less user friendly format than the Osprey book) here. I had a few surprises – the squad leaders have carbines, rather than SMGs as I expected, and I didn’t really expect the platoon to include its own anti tank gun. Also, no BARs in any of the squads – apparently they had a tripod to dismount the half track machine gun if they wanted mobile firepower, so didn’t feel a BAR was required for each squad.

So armed with this research, I got an army list together.

The first important decision list-wise was to go with inexperienced troops. I thought twice about this, but it fits with the Operation Torch force selector from the Armies of the USA book, and having read a bit about the landings in Army at Dawn, it feels appropriate enough. After that, it’s mostly a matter of following the TOE as written. Officers and squad NCOs will have M1 carbines instead of the SMGs that most BA armies use, since only the squad drivers have SMGs in the TOE (and in BA, they’ll be staying in the half tracks).

The real platoon organisation also includes a rifle squad 1 in the HQ half track – in my game list, this ends up crewing the anti tank gun and the bazooka team. I’ve ignored the extra men in the machine gun and mortar squads for now, and just gone with 2 MMG teams and 1 60mm mortar (light mortar in BA terms).

Transport wise, we have 4 M3 Half Tracks and 1 M2 Half Track – in real life in 1942, only the M2 would have had an HMG as stock fitting, but Bolt Action doesn’t give us this option, so I’m just taking them with HMGs as allowed by the rules.

That gives us a list that just about fits into 750 points for the armoured infantry on their own, making it pretty easy to make up to a 1k points list by adding some armour later. Since the infantry all have transports, it also means that adding the 3 Shermans makes it work as a Tank War force at 1,250 points which fits with most of my local BA tournaments if I enter any going forward. With that said, it’s all looking pretty good research wise.

Next step – shopping… update on that to follow.