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Weathering the StormAfter football and the tabloid's obsession with sex scandals, talking about the weather is another great British tradition. So after the wet and cold month of May, comes sunny June. However throughout history battles tend to draw storms like no other event (except maybe, a bank holiday weekend). Two June events were the D-Day landings which took place in a predicted break in the weather, and the storm the night before Waterloo, which turned the roads into mires and prevented the French artillery starting early. I'm sure Paul Hooper will have the details of a small colonial battle, where the plucky British troops sheltered against a rain storm, while their more numerous opponents got soaked, only to discover that gunpowder isn't quite so effective when wet. I'd be tempted to say that weather is an often overlooked factor in many wargames, but I would likely be taken to task by overlooking the more obscure sets of arcane rules that are not complete without the additional 10 tables needed to simulate the effects of a 3% change in humidity on bowstrings and the resulting drop in range and power. Can you imagine the result of a random lightning strike hitting your ancients army, especially if it struck your golden lightning conductor, sorry, army standard? (more likely than winning the lottery according to statisticians, and we know people win that on an almost weekly basis). And who would want to be the Mongol emperor re-enacting the planned invasion of Japan, when a tsunami destroyed his fleet and an army of 500,000? It is undeniable that weather was the ultimate factor in a number of
campaigns, with both the French and Germans, at the height of their power,
defeated by the effects of a Russian winter. The Russian, who should have
known better, had a similar result against the Finns. |