The Mariner's Mirror the journal of the Society for Nautical Research this month has an article about the introduction of Seekriegsspiel in the Prussian navy:
The Mariner's Mirror 110:1 (February 2024) 84-96
The author is Jorit Wintjes, a military history lecturer at the University of Wurzburg. He regularly runs wargaming courses at the Helmut Schmit University of Hamburg. He is a co-founder of the Conflict Simulation Group and has reconstructed and developed Kriegsspiel-type wargames for training decision making processes which have been run at various German army institutions.
Kriesspiel were started in the Prussian army in 1824, there having already been marching tables for about 50 years. These games were about manoeuvres at the tactical level and substituted for expensive real military manoeuvres. By the 1870s these had greatly expanded to cover the tactical level, a wider operational level and theatre simulations for entire campaigns. There were specialist games for siege warfare, the logistics of casualty management and supply logistics. In general the games had changed from being a manoeuvre simulator to being a decision simulator. In 1876 Admiral Albrecht von Stosch introduced Seekriegsspiel to the Prussian navy. This was part of his plans to expand the navy and reform the officer corps. Up to then navy officers had tended to be practical men who had plenty mercantile experience. Stosch wanted a more warlike breed as in the army from which he came. As well as the wargames, Stosch also founded a naval academy at Kiel. These first navy wargames were at two levels, a tactical level and a strategic level. The strategic part included several different operations such as harassing an enemy coastline but focussed mainly on locating the enemy battlefleet, while the tactical part simulated the actual battle between two opposing fleets. For the former large-scale navigational charts were used, while the latter was run at a scale of 1:2000 on large sheets of gridded blank paper on which the courses of the ships were plotted. Also silhouettes to the same scale were used to depict individual ships. Tables provided key information for each ship, including armament, armor, coal bunkerage and consumption. Basic rules covered the effects of artillery fire, torpedo attacks or ramming attempts. Often the umpires apparently decided on the individual outcome of any individual action, although in some cases dice were used as well. For turning and movement templates were used and the wargames also included the use of actual meteorological data. Contemporary opinion held that 'the strategic part of the Seekriegsspiel is the more interesting and the one that is based on facts and experiences', while the tactical part was seen as dependent on 'various different theories and personal convictions'. One shortcoming was that there was no data on the turning circles of ships at different speeds.
Stosch was later criticised after a collision between two battleships in the English Channel in May 1878. The ships were in two columns and turned to avoid two sailing ships. The Kronprinz Wilhelm rammed the Grosser Kurfurst, which promptly sank. In the wake of the disaster off Folkstone it turned out that the turning regulations had been drawn up on the basis of the Seekriegsspiel rules. This was, Stosch's opponents said, a classic case of bookish theory versus practical experience.
The British army became interested in wargames after a talk by the Prussian military attache, Rudolf von Roerdansz, at the Royal United Services Institution in 1871. Interest was slower to take off in the Royal Navy. Lieutenant William Castle published a naval war game in 1873. But it was The Duel published by Captain Philip Colomb in 1879 which was the first reasonably realistic tactical naval war game. Its had its limitations as it was a ship versus ship simulation. The advance in it was that it incorporated hard data on the speed and turning rate of an ironclad gained during trials with HMS Thunderer in 1877 and 1878. The two ships had to operate at only two fixed speeds, 8.2 and 10.4 knots. A further limitation of The Duel was that all shells fired were assumed to hit the target. However, the damage caused by hits did vary according to the target angle with most damage being done on the beam. These characteristics were sufficient to ensure that the ship that was best manoeuvred would win [and it would also favour ships whose guns had the largest arcs of fire]. The limitation caused by assuming all shells hit home was perhaps not serious when ranges were very close. But by the late 1880s, with ranges lengthening, The Duel was becoming dated.
There was immediate interest in Prussia in The Duel. The Austrian naval officer, Dell'Adami, translated The Duel into German. It is clear he had played the game and he soon developed it. The Duel was a sequential game in that that the players alternately made moves, but did not, for instance, both execute turns at the same time. dell'Adami allowed for this possibility and effectively introduced the concept of 'reactive action', which would become popular among war gamers nearly a century later. As to the question of shells missing a brief German article was published in 1885 suggesting a method for a more realistic depiction of gun fire. In the Prussian tradition dice and tables were used to determine the accuracy of the artillery fire. Even so the problem of fully depicting ship-to-ship action was not fully solved. In 1903 the official German navy publication Marine Rundschau carried a long article on a wargame published by the Portsmouth Naval War Game Society which depicted a war between Germany and the United States. The wargame resulted in several tactical scenarios for which Jane's wargame was used and the German author concluded that 'attempts to resolve tactical situations by using this type of wargame were commendable'.
In May 1914 Vice Admiral von Spee, commander of the east Asiatic Squadron, sent the scenarios and after action reports of two major wargames to Berlin that he had run during the winter months of 1912/13 and 1913/14. Their purpose was to test the viability of German plans for a conflict involving Britain, France and Russia. His assessment was straightforward: the plans, which saw the East Asiatic Squadron waging merchant warfare in the South China Sea were impossible to put into practice as a sufficient supply of coal could not be guaranteed. He therefore suggested operations to be based on Tsingtau and asked Berlin for permission to keep his ships together and at his disposal in case it would be impossible for the squadron to return to Tsingtau. A few months later von Spee would act as he suggested here. The report on these wargames is held at BAMA, Freiburg [RM 5 6762], but has not been digitalised yet,
Neil Robertson
The Mariner's Mirror 110:1 (February 2024) 84-96
The author is Jorit Wintjes, a military history lecturer at the University of Wurzburg. He regularly runs wargaming courses at the Helmut Schmit University of Hamburg. He is a co-founder of the Conflict Simulation Group and has reconstructed and developed Kriegsspiel-type wargames for training decision making processes which have been run at various German army institutions.
Kriesspiel were started in the Prussian army in 1824, there having already been marching tables for about 50 years. These games were about manoeuvres at the tactical level and substituted for expensive real military manoeuvres. By the 1870s these had greatly expanded to cover the tactical level, a wider operational level and theatre simulations for entire campaigns. There were specialist games for siege warfare, the logistics of casualty management and supply logistics. In general the games had changed from being a manoeuvre simulator to being a decision simulator. In 1876 Admiral Albrecht von Stosch introduced Seekriegsspiel to the Prussian navy. This was part of his plans to expand the navy and reform the officer corps. Up to then navy officers had tended to be practical men who had plenty mercantile experience. Stosch wanted a more warlike breed as in the army from which he came. As well as the wargames, Stosch also founded a naval academy at Kiel. These first navy wargames were at two levels, a tactical level and a strategic level. The strategic part included several different operations such as harassing an enemy coastline but focussed mainly on locating the enemy battlefleet, while the tactical part simulated the actual battle between two opposing fleets. For the former large-scale navigational charts were used, while the latter was run at a scale of 1:2000 on large sheets of gridded blank paper on which the courses of the ships were plotted. Also silhouettes to the same scale were used to depict individual ships. Tables provided key information for each ship, including armament, armor, coal bunkerage and consumption. Basic rules covered the effects of artillery fire, torpedo attacks or ramming attempts. Often the umpires apparently decided on the individual outcome of any individual action, although in some cases dice were used as well. For turning and movement templates were used and the wargames also included the use of actual meteorological data. Contemporary opinion held that 'the strategic part of the Seekriegsspiel is the more interesting and the one that is based on facts and experiences', while the tactical part was seen as dependent on 'various different theories and personal convictions'. One shortcoming was that there was no data on the turning circles of ships at different speeds.
Stosch was later criticised after a collision between two battleships in the English Channel in May 1878. The ships were in two columns and turned to avoid two sailing ships. The Kronprinz Wilhelm rammed the Grosser Kurfurst, which promptly sank. In the wake of the disaster off Folkstone it turned out that the turning regulations had been drawn up on the basis of the Seekriegsspiel rules. This was, Stosch's opponents said, a classic case of bookish theory versus practical experience.
The British army became interested in wargames after a talk by the Prussian military attache, Rudolf von Roerdansz, at the Royal United Services Institution in 1871. Interest was slower to take off in the Royal Navy. Lieutenant William Castle published a naval war game in 1873. But it was The Duel published by Captain Philip Colomb in 1879 which was the first reasonably realistic tactical naval war game. Its had its limitations as it was a ship versus ship simulation. The advance in it was that it incorporated hard data on the speed and turning rate of an ironclad gained during trials with HMS Thunderer in 1877 and 1878. The two ships had to operate at only two fixed speeds, 8.2 and 10.4 knots. A further limitation of The Duel was that all shells fired were assumed to hit the target. However, the damage caused by hits did vary according to the target angle with most damage being done on the beam. These characteristics were sufficient to ensure that the ship that was best manoeuvred would win [and it would also favour ships whose guns had the largest arcs of fire]. The limitation caused by assuming all shells hit home was perhaps not serious when ranges were very close. But by the late 1880s, with ranges lengthening, The Duel was becoming dated.
There was immediate interest in Prussia in The Duel. The Austrian naval officer, Dell'Adami, translated The Duel into German. It is clear he had played the game and he soon developed it. The Duel was a sequential game in that that the players alternately made moves, but did not, for instance, both execute turns at the same time. dell'Adami allowed for this possibility and effectively introduced the concept of 'reactive action', which would become popular among war gamers nearly a century later. As to the question of shells missing a brief German article was published in 1885 suggesting a method for a more realistic depiction of gun fire. In the Prussian tradition dice and tables were used to determine the accuracy of the artillery fire. Even so the problem of fully depicting ship-to-ship action was not fully solved. In 1903 the official German navy publication Marine Rundschau carried a long article on a wargame published by the Portsmouth Naval War Game Society which depicted a war between Germany and the United States. The wargame resulted in several tactical scenarios for which Jane's wargame was used and the German author concluded that 'attempts to resolve tactical situations by using this type of wargame were commendable'.
In May 1914 Vice Admiral von Spee, commander of the east Asiatic Squadron, sent the scenarios and after action reports of two major wargames to Berlin that he had run during the winter months of 1912/13 and 1913/14. Their purpose was to test the viability of German plans for a conflict involving Britain, France and Russia. His assessment was straightforward: the plans, which saw the East Asiatic Squadron waging merchant warfare in the South China Sea were impossible to put into practice as a sufficient supply of coal could not be guaranteed. He therefore suggested operations to be based on Tsingtau and asked Berlin for permission to keep his ships together and at his disposal in case it would be impossible for the squadron to return to Tsingtau. A few months later von Spee would act as he suggested here. The report on these wargames is held at BAMA, Freiburg [RM 5 6762], but has not been digitalised yet,
Neil Robertson
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