It is the 25th anniversary year of the HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers, which followed the men of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division from their training camp in Toccoa, Georgia to the end of the war in Germany in 1945, via several major battles of the Second World War in Europe.
I caught the first episode entirely by accident whilst in a hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. I was due to catch a flight early next morning (10th September 2001) down to Florida, so was getting an early night and staying in my hotel. I must have flicked over to HBO within a minute or two of the first episode starting and was immediately hooked. The tragic events of the next day (9/11) overshadowed the launch of BoB, but I was hooked right from the first few minutes and have been a huge fan ever since. Over the years, I have watched the series many times on DVD, though had not seen any of the episodes within the last few years due to a new TV being incompatible with my DVD player. The Band of Brothers box set has been gathering dust for the last few years as a result.
Something I started doing during the pandemic is listening to podcasts and having avidly consumed all of the incomparable We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast from James Holland and Al Murray, I looked around for something else to listen to and discovered across the official HBO Band of Brothers podcast, which is hosted by Roger Bennett.
The BoB podcast features in-depth interviews with significant contributors to the show, such as Tom Hanks and John Orloff, but also features discussions with some of the actors. If you're a fan of the Second World War and/or BoB, then I highly recommend it. Listening to the podcast re-stoked my interest, so I found an older TV, which had a SCART socket, so that I could plug my DVD player into it and start re-watching the series again.
Episode 4 ("Replacements") particularly caught my imagination. When fighting with toy soldiers on the tabletop (i.e. playing Iron Cross) the battle scene from that episode is the sort of thing I see in my head when playing. Iron Cross allows for the fast-developing attack, but with a huge amount of uncertainty about which way it could work out, which I had not found when playing other games. I'm not a big fan of having to learn lots of rules, so the simplicity of Iron Cross suits me perfectly, but it still allows for lots of decision-making during the game and therefore fun. Iron Cross plug over! ;-)
A machine that had completely passed me by until watching Ep.4 was the Jagdpanther, which emerges from behind a barn and starts to systematically destroy the British Sherman and Cromwell tanks. I built a Rubicon kit of a Jagdpanther a few weeks ago, which set me thinking about gaming the Easy Company attack on Nuenen.
I've done a lot more reading about the subject in the last couple of weeks and it turns out that whilst the 101st Airborne did fight in the town of Nuenen, the battle depicted in BoB is partly fictional, obviously for the purposes of dramatic effect and creative licence, though it is rooted in reality. For example, the Jagdpanthers, which destroyed the British 44th Royal Tank Regiment, were not situated in Nuenen, but a battle did take place not too far away in Koevering. The layout of the town in that episode is also not strictly factual, though the buildings featured are based on real buildings in Nuenen. None of this detracts from enjoying BoB though.
So... onto my next big project, which has got me quite excited, though with a little trepidation regarding the scale. I have created much bigger gaming tables before: below are a few photos of a demo table (a collaboration between Great Escape Games and 4Ground for Salute 2014), which featured 111 separate buildings and was very loosely modelled the town of Villers Bocage. Here are a few photos of the Villers Bocage table. For Salute 2015, I helped to create a new demo table which measured 18 feet long by 6 feet wide. I played a game on that table again recently - see photos here.
The trepidation about this project stems from the fact that I want to accurately recreate the town of Nuenen as faithfully as possible to its depiction in BoB. Why? Because it is a challenge and I enjoy a challenge. The difficulty with that goal stems from the fact that, whilst the battle is captured on film, there is really a huge lack of detail to refer to. The TV drama is focused on the advance of the men of Easy Company into the outskirts of the town and their subsequent retreat; it is not focused on the buildings themselves, which only form the backdrop to the action.
I mentioned my plan to someone and they asked why I would want to build a fictional town to re-fight a fictional battle, which I suppose is a reasonable question. I think that many (most?) tabletop wargaming battles are not really accurate representations of a real battle, but the clincher for me is that I think most wargamers get into the hobby, or certainly have their interest (re)ignited from seeing TV or film, such as Band of Brothers, and are able to picture a specific scene when playing.
The real attack on Nuenen by the 101st Airborne is documented to some degree and there are some historical records about the town, but can anyone accurately piece that together and picture it in their head? I hope that rebuilding the BoB version of Nuenen in 1/56th scale will capture the imagination far more because we can all watch the battle scene on Youtube at any time and compare it to what I'm building.
Anyway, what I have managed to do so far (after re-watching Ep.4 frame by frame several times over) is map out what I think is the layout of the fictional Nuenen. I am reasonably confident that I have got the overall layout correct, though the map I have sketched needs a little bit more refinement on the scale/size and relative positions of the buildings. I've sketched a map - the key makes perfect sense to me, but if you've got questions or comments, please post a note in the comments section of the blog. I have now started on "designing" each building and will post up some progress shots soon.
In the episode, the tanks are slowly rolling left to right along the road at the top of the map. The black cloud shape at the top-right is the burning German half-track. Lt Brewer walks out in front of the lead Sherman, raises his binoculars to his eyes, and then gets shot at the position marked with the red cross. The blue arrow shows the subsequent advance of Sgt "Bull" Randleman and his squad. The Germans are located to the right of the map. It will all start to make more sense as I start sharing pictures of the buildings!
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