Until the early 1990s, post–World War II
military historians explored every aspect of war and society, but most avoided the
study of the actual battle. It was no longer fashionable to comment on how the battles
were actually fought and won. Paddy challenged this view and was instrumental in
changing the practice of a generation of military historians by making tactics a
valid academic subject. He became a well-recognized military historian, who commented
on military organization, tactics and leadership on the battlefield. What was less
well-known was his extensive use of games to help develop his understanding of
battlefield tactics, military culture, and command decisions.
His careful analysis of contemporary letters
and memoirs, supported by his wargames, led him to challenge the orthodox explanation—proposed
by Sir Charles Oman in his History of the Peninsular War and subsequently
repeated by numerous popular military historians—that the greater volume of musketry
delivered by British lines in repeated volleys had defeated the French columns in
Portugal and Spain. Paddy argued that British officers aimed to keep their men in
check until they could deliver one or two shattering volleys at the enemy, then
ordered them to give a rousing cheer and charge with the bayonet to drive the enemy
off in disorder, and his conclusions are now widely accepted and may be said to
have completely supplanted the earlier “firepower” theories.
Paddy Griffith was one of a team of academics
who were recruited to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst by Brigadier Peter
Young and David Chandler in the early 1970s. Peter Young knew Paddy through Donald
Featherstone and the emerging hobby of wargaming. Paddy’s main job was lecturing
on military history as part of the 2-year commissioning course and at the Camberley
staff college. Always an innovative thinker, he introduced wargaming as part of
the curriculum. He believed adults learnt by playing just as children did.
At the staff college, Dr Griffith’s role
was umpiring secret U.K. wargames and those of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). Sometimes he participated as a member or leader of a Warsaw Pact command
because of his recognized understanding of the doctrine of those Soviet Union–dominated
forces. His wargames had a direct input into NATO policy. One of his key strategic
views became public with the book Not Over by Christmas (1981) with the
foreword by Field Marshal Lord Carver and cowritten with Colonel Elmar Dinter. The
book was a critical, wargame-based analysis of NATO’s forward defense policy on
the West German border against the threat of the Russian-led Warsaw Pact. The book
suggested that a more flexible defense, involving falling back, would be more successful.
It is interesting to note that NATO’s tactics did alter to the sounder “defense-in-depth”
strategy that he and others advocated. However, it is for others to assess what
part his book (and the wargames) played in this policy change.
While at Sandhurst, he was a prolific writer
of military history books, with a smat- tering of wargaming publications as well.
The Wikipedia entry for Paddy lists 34 books; perhaps the most significant
books were the following:
• Forward Into Battle: Fighting Tactics From Waterloo
to the Near Future (1981)
• Rally Once Again; Battle Tactics of the American
Civil War (1987)
• Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British
Army’s Art of Attack 1916- 1918 (1984)
What was not obvious was the input of wargaming
to support the scholarship of these books.
In addition to the professional games, he
took the opportunity to run some high-profile historical wargames, to analyze key
points in history. Probably the most well-known of these was on Operation Sealion,
the planned German Invasion of England in 1940. The assembled team of players and
umpires included senior officers from the British and German armed forces who took
part in the preparations for the actual operation. The out- come of this game was
written up by Richard Cox in his book Operation Sea Lion (1977). Paddy recently
continued these “mega-games” at education events at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford
with games on Operation Sea Lion, the Invasion of Crete, and the 1940 Norwegian
Campaign. While in his hospital bed suffering from cancer, he was working on final
preparations for his “what if” game of the Axis invasion of Malta in 1942.
In 1980, while he was still a lecturer in
War Studies at RMA Sandhurst, Paddy Griffith organized a conference titled New
Directions in WarGaming. He was dissatisfied that hobby wargaming was not developing
because of its focus on using toy soldiers and gained a reputation as a maverick
in the hobby precisely because of his rejection of toy soldiers. He strongly
believed that if hobby wargaming was going to be more than just entertainment, then
it should reflect the cultural imperatives of the period being represented, the
command perspective of the time, and the particular roles being taken by the players.
Perhaps his favorite type of wargame was a modification of the military com mand
postexercise, derived from the early 19th-century Prussian kriegsspiel training
game for officers, where the players work in isolated cells with maps, limited communications
and the “fog of war,” just like the real thing, as used in the Channel Four television
series Game of War.
The first conference was held at Moor Park
College near Farnham, lasted over the weekend of 23 to 25, May 1980, and set the
pattern for a series of subsequent conferences. Sessions consisted of lectures,
workshops, papers, and practical experiments.
At this conference, Dr Griffith was the primary
force behind the foundation of Wargame Developments, a group consisting of professional
military personnel, civil servants, educators, and both professional and amateur
wargame designers. Since 1981, these conferences—the Conference of Wargamers (COW)—have
been held in Northamptonshire, United Kingdom.
Paddy Griffith’s legacy in establishing the
conference lives on. The COW continues to be attended by professional military personnel,
professional simulation designers, military historians, and amateur wargame enthusiasts.
They all share a keen interest in developing accurate simulations of historical
events and command problems as well as studying current events and foreseeable future
situations from the perspective of simula- tion. They are not afraid to ask difficult
moral and ethical questions, something that Paddy Griffith encouraged with what
he termed black wargames.
Paddy will never be remembered for devising
a particular set of wargame rules—unlike H. G. Wells (Little Wars), Brigadier
Peter Young (Charge), or Charles Grant senior (The War Game)—nor for
one particular genre of wargame, in the way that Donald Featherstone will
always be linked to the face-to-face, tabletop toy soldier game.
Paddy was never interested in developing
and perfecting one style of game or set of rules—he was far more concerned with
the underlying structure of games than with the minutiae of mechanisms of rules.
He will be remembered for proposing and experimenting with a wide variety of game
designs, both in person at COW and in print in numerous articles in amateur and
commercial wargame magazines and in his three wargame books.
In Napoleonic Wargaming for Fun (1980),
he presented not one but a variety of rules for wargaming different aspects of the
Napoleonic Wars, ranging from fairly conventional toy soldier games portraying skirmishes
between parties of light infantrymen and battle- field encounters between brigades,
divisions, or army corps, via a siege kriegsspiel, to a highly stylized combined
map and board game recreating an army commander’s daily routine while on campaign.
In A Book of Sandhurst War Games (1982),
he published four board games covering an expedition in medieval France by the Black
Prince; battlefield tactics in Napoleon’s campaign in France against the Russians
in 1814; a two-player naval game highlight- ing the problems encountered by Arctic
convoys in the Second World War, and a role-playing skirmish based on S. L. A. Marshall’s
analysis of infantry combat in the Pacific campaign.
His final book, Sprawling Wargames Multiplayer
Wargaming (2009), described his mega-games of various Second World War operations
and other free–kriegsspiel style umpire-controlled games.
While striding through military history and
wargaming, Paddy “marched to the sounds of the drum he could hear” and so was not
shy at challenging currently established methods, views, and understanding. This
made him a lively character to deal with, but an engaging one.
Many wargamers have been content to continue
moving toy soldiers across a tabletop in sociable, entertaining wargames that are
loosely based on military history. Paddy recognized that style of wargaming as a
valid personal choice but believed wargaming had the potential to be more than that.
For him the experimentation was, perhaps, more stimulating and important than the
individual games. It is clear that he demonstrated to many the value of games to
understanding of history. Others, such as Professor Phil Sabin with his book Ancient
Battles Reconstructing the Great Clashes of the Ancient World (2008) or Andrew
Roberts with The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (2010),
have openly used wargaming as part of their scholarship. To what extent Paddy has
influenced the general wargaming hobby may become apparent in future years—it
is too early to say yet.
Paddy died unexpectedly while recovering
from cancer. He is survived by his wife Geneviève and his son Robert.
—John Curry
The History of Wargaming Project, Bristol, UK
Reflections by Donald Featherstone
Paddy Griffith, history lecturer at the Royal
Military Academy Camberley, came as a guest to an April Dinner of the Wessex Military
Dining Club, staying overnight with me to avoid the perennial fear of drinking and
driving. Returning to my home at near midnight, sated with good food and quite sufficient
quantities of drink, we discussed a pet theory recently discovered to be a shared
interest. It revolved around realism on the wargames table and whether the antics
our armies got up to really simulated, even coin- cidentally, what actually takes
place on the battlefield. We both strongly felt that there was much to be desired
in the habits and activities permitted by the rules on wargames tables, particularly
during the Napoleonic period that was under discussion. Despite the late hour, we
retired to the wargames room where we stood around the table posing formations in
belligerent attitudes as we sought solutions to our problems.
Paddy (or Patrick as he wrote for his first
article in August 1965 in my Wargamer’s Newsletter) believed that the British
won their victories by firing a single volley, then charging. The French columns
wavered and fell back in disarray. So we set up the figures on the table top in
my attic to represent a particular battle (I do not remember which after 40 years)
and talked through the sequence of events. I read from the various memoirs while
he moved the figures. Time and time again, he sent me down the loft ladder to my
study to retrieve another memoir from the Napoleonic Wars. (I had a large collection
of the army historical journal and so had many relatively unknown accounts of these
wars.) Again and again he laid the figures out and we studied the climatic encounters
of the past. Eventually my wife grew tired of berating us to retire to our beds
and she withdrew gracefully to hers.
Years later, I was pleased to see his write-up
of his theory of battle and British feat of arms (Forward Into Battle: Fighting
Tactics From Waterloo to the Near Future, 1981). I wish I had asked him to present
it to the Wessex Military Dining Club.
I remember the evening (and the long night)
as it showed me that, although made of plastic and metal, the small warriors on
the table top could speak to us about the past.
—Donald Featherstone
