Some military histories seek to explain campaigns. Others catalogue operations, equipment, or command decisions. The finest, however, remind us that wars are ultimately fought by individuals whose courage, endurance, and quiet professionalism give meaning to events that might otherwise be reduced to maps and statistics. Mark Baker’s Buckham’s Bombers belongs firmly in this latter category. It is a work that combines meticulous historical research with the instincts of a gifted storyteller, producing a narrative that is at once intimate and expansive. Through the experiences of Flight Lieutenant Bruce Buckham and the men who flew with him, Baker illuminates not only the hazardous world of RAF Bomber Command but also the character of a generation of Australians whose contribution to the air war has too often been overshadowed by more familiar campaigns.
From its opening pages, the book establishes that this is not merely the biography of a decorated airman. It is the story of a crew, for no man flew a Lancaster alone. Seven men entered the aircraft before each operation, each carrying responsibilities that could not be surrendered or shared once the wheels left the runway. Pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator, flight engineer, and air gunners formed a single fighting organism whose survival depended upon discipline, competence, and absolute trust. Baker understands this implicitly, and his narrative never allows the reader to forget that every successful mission represented a collective achievement. The bond between these men, strengthened by shared danger and sustained by humour that often masked exhaustion and fear, forms the emotional heart of the book.
Bruce Buckham emerges not as the conventional wartime hero of popular mythology but as something altogether more convincing. Baker presents him as an intelligent, modest, and quietly determined Australian whose greatest qualities lay not in flamboyance but in consistency. There is no need to embellish his achievements because the record itself is remarkable. His leadership is measured in calm decisions taken under extraordinary pressure, in the confidence he inspired in those around him, and in the professionalism that enabled his crew to survive missions from which many others failed to return. The absence of self promotion in Buckham’s own recollections only strengthens the reader’s admiration, allowing his character to emerge naturally through his actions rather than through heroic rhetoric.
One of the book’s enduring strengths lies in the quality of its research. Baker spent many years recording Buckham’s memories while supporting those recollections with operational record books, squadron documents, official reports, and a wide range of archival material. This patient scholarship gives the narrative considerable authority. More importantly, it enables Baker to move confidently between the personal and the operational without sacrificing either historical accuracy or narrative momentum. Individual memories are anchored within the documentary record, while official reports acquire warmth and humanity through the voices of those who actually lived the events they describe.
The operational chapters are among the finest in the book. Baker possesses the rare ability to explain the complexities of aerial warfare without allowing technical detail to overwhelm the narrative. Navigation across occupied Europe, the constant battle against weather, the demands of maintaining formation in darkness, the deadly effectiveness of German night fighters, and the ever present menace of anti aircraft fire are all described with admirable clarity. The Lancaster itself is never romanticised. It becomes what it truly was, an extraordinarily capable machine carrying seven vulnerable men into one of the most dangerous combat environments of the Second World War. Baker reminds the reader that every mission demanded not moments of courage but hours of sustained concentration during which the smallest error could prove fatal.
Underlying the narrative is a profound appreciation of the psychological burden carried by Bomber Command crews. Unlike many forms of combat, bombing operations required men to confront danger repeatedly with little opportunity to influence the larger course of events. They could fly perfectly and still fail to return through mechanical failure, weather, enemy action, or simple chance. Baker captures this relentless uncertainty with remarkable restraint. He does not rely upon melodrama because none is required. The knowledge that every take off might be a final departure hangs over the narrative with quiet persistence, lending even routine preparations an atmosphere of subdued tension. The cumulative effect is to reveal not only physical courage but also the extraordinary emotional resilience demanded of young men who accepted such risks as part of their daily existence.
The final sections dealing with the destruction of the German battleship Tirpitz provide the narrative with both historical significance and dramatic resolution. Few warships exercised such disproportionate influence upon Allied strategy. Sheltered within the Norwegian fjords and protected by formidable natural and artificial defences, Tirpitz tied down Allied naval resources for years and became a symbol of German naval power out of all proportion to the number of occasions on which she actually entered combat. Baker patiently traces the succession of unsuccessful attempts to destroy the battleship before bringing Buckham and his crew into the story’s climax. By this stage the reader fully understands why the operation mattered and appreciates the immense difficulties confronting those tasked with carrying it out. The successful attacks therefore possess a satisfying sense of inevitability born not of certainty but of perseverance. Victory is achieved because countless airmen continued to fly missions despite repeated failure, and because crews such as Buckham’s possessed the skill and determination required when the decisive opportunity finally arrived.
Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is that it refuses to separate individual experience from historical context. Baker understands that the strategic bombing campaign was neither an abstraction nor simply a series of operational orders issued from distant headquarters. It was lived one sortie at a time by young men whose world contracted to the interior of a bomber aircraft suspended in darkness over hostile territory. At the same time, he never loses sight of the broader campaign. The Battle of Berlin, preparations for the invasion of Normandy, the campaign against German industry, and the hunt for Tirpitz all appear not as disconnected episodes but as interconnected chapters in a vast struggle whose outcome depended upon thousands of individual acts of endurance. In doing so, Baker achieves the difficult balance that distinguishes the finest military history, allowing the strategic and the personal to illuminate one another rather than compete for the reader’s attention.
His prose contributes greatly to this success. Baker writes with clarity, confidence, and admirable economy. There is an understated quality to the narrative that perfectly suits its subject. Heroism is never proclaimed because it reveals itself naturally through the actions of ordinary men confronted by extraordinary circumstances. Moments of humour sit comfortably beside episodes of tragedy because that is how veterans themselves so often remembered the war. Conversations are reproduced with authenticity, operational detail is woven seamlessly into the story, and the narrative moves forward with the steady assurance of an author who knows both his subject and his audience.
If the book invites one criticism, it is only that readers interested in the continuing historiographical debates surrounding the effectiveness and morality of the strategic bombing offensive may wish for greater engagement with those wider questions. Baker touches upon them only lightly, choosing instead to concentrate upon the lived experience of those who carried out the campaign. Yet this is less a weakness than a conscious decision. Buckham’s Bombers is not intended to resolve every debate surrounding Bomber Command. Its purpose is to restore the humanity that can too easily disappear beneath arguments over policy, tonnage, and statistics, and in that purpose it succeeds admirably.
In recent decades Australian military history has increasingly sought to recover the stories of individuals whose service has been overshadowed by larger narratives. Buckham’s Bombers stands comfortably within that tradition while setting a standard that many similar works would do well to emulate. It is founded upon careful research, written with sensitivity and restraint, and driven by a genuine respect for the men whose experiences it records. More than simply recounting the career of one distinguished airman, Baker offers a meditation on courage, comradeship, duty, and survival in one of the most demanding theatres of the Second World War.
When the final page is turned, what lingers is not the destruction of a battleship or the success of a bombing operation, significant though those events undoubtedly were. Instead, it is the image of a crew climbing once more into the familiar confines of a Lancaster, checking instruments almost by routine, exchanging the quiet banter that concealed apprehension, and disappearing into the darkness with no certainty of return. It is that profoundly human perspective that elevates Buckham’s Bombers beyond conventional operational history. Mark Baker has written not simply an account of air operations over Europe but a fitting memorial to the Australians who flew them, and in doing so has produced one of the most compelling works on the Australian experience of Bomber Command to appear in recent years.
There are many memoirs of Australian soldiers who served during the Second World War, but relatively few combine frontline combat, imprisonment, escape, and survival into a single compelling narrative. Dangerous Days: A Digger’s Great Escape by Ernest Brough is one such book. It is both an adventure story and a deeply personal account of an ordinary Australian whose determination and resilience carried him through some of the most difficult experiences imaginable.
Ernest Brough enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force as a young Victorian and served with distinction in the North African campaign. He experienced the brutal fighting that characterised the desert war, including the long siege of Tobruk and the battles that ultimately turned the tide against the Axis forces. Like so many Australian soldiers, he endured relentless heat, dust, shortages of water and supplies, and the constant danger of artillery fire and aerial attack. Brough’s descriptions of frontline service are vivid without becoming melodramatic. His writing conveys the uncertainty and exhaustion of campaigning in the desert while highlighting the quiet professionalism and humour that sustained Australian soldiers under extreme pressure.
The memoir takes a dramatic turn following his capture by German forces. Rather than allowing captivity to define the remainder of the story, Brough presents prisoner of war life as another test of endurance. He writes candidly about hunger, boredom, uncertainty, and the psychological strain of imprisonment. His observations remind the reader that captivity was not simply a pause in military service but a continuing battle against despair and the gradual erosion of hope.
The centrepiece of the book is, of course, the escape that gives the memoir its subtitle. Escaping from a prisoner of war camp was never simply a matter of climbing a fence. It required planning, patience, courage, and an extraordinary willingness to accept enormous risks. Brough and his companions travelled through occupied Europe with few resources beyond their determination. They relied on improvised navigation, avoided German patrols, crossed difficult terrain, and depended on the kindness and bravery of civilians and resistance fighters who risked their own lives to assist escaped prisoners.
What makes these chapters particularly effective is that Brough never presents himself as a fearless adventurer. He readily acknowledges uncertainty, fear, and moments when success seemed almost impossible. This honesty gives the narrative considerable credibility. The reader comes away with the impression not of an action hero but of an ordinary Australian soldier whose perseverance proved stronger than his circumstances.
Brough’s writing style is direct, uncomplicated, and refreshingly modest. There is little embellishment or unnecessary drama. Instead, he allows events to speak for themselves, a quality common to many of the finest Australian wartime memoirs. His understated prose often makes the most dramatic episodes even more powerful because they are presented without exaggeration. The humour that occasionally emerges, particularly in interactions with fellow prisoners and soldiers, also reflects the distinctly Australian character of the narrative and provides welcome relief from the constant tension.
Beyond the excitement of the escape itself, Dangerous Days offers valuable historical insights into the experiences of Australian prisoners of war in Europe. It illustrates the organisation of German prison camps, the ingenuity required to prepare an escape, the importance of resistance networks, and the uncertain relationship between escaped Allied servicemen and the civilian populations who sheltered them. For historians, the memoir provides a useful firsthand perspective that complements official histories and archival records. For general readers, it offers an engaging account that never loses sight of the human dimension of war.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its emphasis on mateship. Throughout the memoir, survival depends not upon individual heroics but upon cooperation, trust, and shared sacrifice. Brough repeatedly acknowledges the contribution of others, reflecting a humility that enhances rather than diminishes his own achievements. This focus on collective effort captures an important aspect of the Australian military tradition and explains why the memoir continues to resonate with readers decades after its first publication.
The memoir also serves as a reminder that the effects of war did not end with liberation or victory. Although the escape concludes successfully, the physical and emotional consequences of prolonged combat and captivity linger beneath the surface of Brough’s narrative. His experiences reflect the resilience of a generation whose hardships often remained understated long after the war had ended.
For readers interested in Australian military history, prisoner of war experiences, or stories of courage under adversity, Dangerous Days: A Digger’s Great Escape is an outstanding memoir. It combines historical significance with an engaging narrative and offers a deeply authentic account of endurance, resourcefulness, and survival. More than an exciting escape story, it is a testament to the character of ordinary Australian soldiers who faced extraordinary circumstances with quiet determination and remarkable courage.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Highly recommended for readers of Australian military history, Second World War memoirs, and anyone interested in true stories of endurance, escape, and survival.
Wargaming communities are built around knowledge, but not all knowledge at the table is equal. A club night, campaign weekend, convention game, or online rules discussion brings together many kinds of expertise: tactical experience, historical reading, rules familiarity, painting skill, probability, scenario design, modelling practice, and social judgement. These skills overlap, but they are not the same. The best figure painter in the room may not be the strongest tactician, the loudest rules lawyer may not understand the design purpose of the rules, and the player with the largest collection may not possess the clearest historical judgement. This makes tabletop wargaming especially vulnerable to misplaced confidence, because the hobby rewards strong opinion while often lacking formal ways to test whether that opinion is sound.
The problem is commonly described as the Dunning Kruger effect, although the phrase is often misused as a general insult for stupidity. In its more precise form, the effect refers to a pattern in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their own ability because they lack the knowledge required to recognise the limits of their performance.¹ The issue is not ignorance alone. It is ignorance combined with confidence. This combination can be disruptive in any field, but it becomes particularly visible in wargaming because the game table invites players to make decisions, explain outcomes, criticise rules, correct others, and present themselves as authorities.
Kruger and Dunning’s original study argued that poor performers suffer from a “double burden”: they perform badly, and the same lack of competence that produces poor performance also prevents them from recognising the poor quality of that performance.² David Dunning and his colleagues later developed this point by arguing that the skills needed to produce correct responses are often closely related to the skills needed to recognise correct responses.³ In wargaming terms, the player who does not understand command friction may not realise why a command rule is working as intended. The player who has never designed a balanced scenario may not recognise why a simple points total cannot solve an asymmetric historical battle. The player who has not studied probability may mistake an unlikely die roll for proof that the system is broken.
Wargaming gives this pattern an unusually rich field in which to operate because the hobby is both technical and interpretive. A player may need to understand written rules, distances, timing, probabilities, army composition, historical organisation, terrain effects, unit capabilities, morale systems, and the intentions of the scenario designer. At the same time, the player must read the social situation at the table, deciding when to press an argument, when to accept a ruling, when to offer advice, and when the pleasure of the game is more important than proving a point. Gary Alan Fine’s study of role playing games described gaming groups as social worlds, sustained by shared understandings and repeated interaction.⁴ Wargaming clubs are similar social worlds, but they add the weight of material display, tactical judgement, historical argument, and public performance.
The Dunning Kruger problem often appears first in rules discussion. A player reads a rule once, applies it badly, loses a game, and then announces that the rules are flawed. Sometimes the criticism is justified, because rules can certainly be badly written, badly edited, poorly tested, or internally contradictory. Yet sometimes the player has not understood the design logic. A morale rule may seem too severe if the player assumes the game is measuring physical casualties, but it may make sense if the rule is measuring cohesion, willingness to advance, and the psychological effect of fire. An activation system may appear unfair if the player expects perfect control over every unit, but it may be central to a design that seeks to represent uncertainty and lost opportunity. A command radius may feel artificial until the player recognises that the rule is trying to prevent the godlike control that tabletop commanders otherwise possess.
This is particularly important in historical wargaming, where players often treat themselves as interpreters of the past. Philip Sabin has argued that simulation games can help students and researchers understand conflict by forcing them to confront decision making under uncertainty rather than merely explaining events after the fact.⁵ That strength is also a danger. A player may believe that reading about a battle is the same as understanding how to model it. Another may know uniform details while misunderstanding doctrine, logistics, training, morale, command culture, or the political purpose of the campaign. Historical knowledge at the wargames table is therefore uneven. It may be deep in one area and shallow in another. The Dunning Kruger effect becomes damaging when narrow knowledge is mistaken for general authority.
One common form of this misplaced authority is the “fact collector” problem. The fact collector knows weapon ranges, armour thicknesses, unit names, battlefield dates, and the correct colour of facings, but may have little understanding of why armies behaved as they did. This does not make factual knowledge unimportant. Accuracy matters, and careful research can enrich a game enormously. The problem arises when isolated facts are used to overrule broader interpretation. A player who knows the theoretical range of a rifle may insist that troops should fire effectively across the whole table, while ignoring smoke, stress, terrain, poor visibility, command control, ammunition limits, and the difficulty of battlefield identification. A player who knows that cavalry could move quickly may miss the wider tactical problem of when mounted troops could move safely, when they could exploit disorder, and when they were vulnerable to fire.
The issue also appears in tactical self assessment. Newer players often explain defeat through bad dice, bad balance, or an overpowered opposing army, while stronger players are more likely to examine deployment, timing, movement, objective choice, concentration of force, reserve use, and risk management. This does not mean experienced players are immune to excuse making. Veterans can be just as defensive as beginners, and long experience can harden into arrogance. Yet tactical competence usually involves seeing decision chains rather than isolated moments. The beginner sees the failed morale test. The better player sees the exposed flank, unsupported advance, poor timing, and unnecessary risk that made the morale test decisive.
This is where overconfidence research beyond the original Dunning Kruger article becomes useful. Moore and Healy distinguish between different forms of overconfidence: overestimation of one’s actual performance, overplacement of oneself relative to others, and overprecision in one’s beliefs.⁶ All three appear in wargaming communities. The player who believes they played better than they did is overestimating. The player who assumes they are superior to most opponents after limited experience is overplacing. The player who insists that a unit, rule, army, or tactic is definitely broken after two games is displaying overprecision. These distinctions matter because each form requires a different response. A player who misreads their own performance needs feedback. A player who ranks themselves too highly needs stronger opposition. A player who is too certain needs evidence, repetition, and exposure to alternative interpretations.
Confirmation bias further deepens the problem. Raymond Nickerson defines confirmation bias as the tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways that favour existing beliefs, expectations, or hypotheses.⁷ Wargamers do this constantly. A player who believes artillery is too powerful remembers every devastating barrage and forgets every game in which the guns were late, ineffective, badly placed, or irrelevant to the objective. A player who believes cavalry is useless remembers every failed charge and forgets every moment when cavalry shaped the enemy’s movement by threat alone. A player who dislikes a ruleset notices every awkward result while overlooking every occasion on which the design produced exactly the intended uncertainty. The table becomes an evidence machine, but the player collects only the evidence that confirms what they already think.
Probability is another area where confidence often exceeds understanding. Wargamers speak frequently about odds, averages, modifiers, and likely outcomes, but many rely more heavily on memory than mathematics. Extreme events are remembered because they are dramatic. Ordinary probabilities disappear because they are ordinary. A player may claim that a rule is absurd because a unit failed three morale tests in a row, even though unlikely sequences are inevitable across enough games. Another may insist that a weapon “never hits” because several misses occurred at a memorable point in a campaign. In reality, random systems produce clusters, streaks, and anomalies, and a small number of emotionally charged examples is a poor basis for design judgement.
There is a social dimension to this as well. Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital helps explain why some forms of knowledge carry status within hobby communities.⁸ In wargaming, authority may attach to age, collection size, tournament record, painting awards, historical reading, rules mastery, or simply length of membership in a club. These forms of capital are not meaningless. A long established player may indeed have valuable experience. A tournament player may understand competitive balance. A historical researcher may see errors others miss. Yet cultural capital can also protect overconfidence. If a club has always treated one player as the authority on a period, that player may continue to be believed even when they are wrong. If a tournament winner speaks on historical design, others may mistake competitive success for broad expertise. If an older member dismisses a newcomer’s correction, seniority becomes a substitute for evidence.
Commercial gaming can intensify this problem because army choice, list building, faction loyalty, and online commentary all become part of identity. Carter, Gibbs, and Harrop’s study of Warhammer 40,000 army construction showed that much of the game occurs before the battle itself, through collecting, modelling, preparation, list design, and engagement with the wider hobby culture.⁹ Once a player has invested money, time, emotion, and identity in a faction or style of play, criticism of that army or rule system can feel personal. Confidence then becomes defensive. The player is not merely arguing that a rule is fair. They are defending their purchases, their taste, their preparation, and their status within the community.
Online spaces magnify the Dunning Kruger problem because they reward speed and certainty more often than caution and method. A confident claim that a game is broken, a faction is unbeatable, a historical interpretation is obvious, or a rule is mathematically absurd can travel further than a careful explanation. Battle reports, tier lists, short videos, and forum arguments often remove the local context that makes a result meaningful. Was the table too open? Were the objectives poorly designed? Did one player forget a rule? Was the army list suited to the scenario? Did unusual dice distort the outcome? Without this context, one game becomes evidence, and repeated retelling turns it into doctrine.
Artificial intelligence now adds another layer to this problem. AI tools can help wargamers draft scenarios, calculate probabilities, summarise historical material, write campaign notes, and generate playtest questions. Used carefully, they can be valuable assistants. Used carelessly, they can produce confident nonsense. The danger is not only that an AI system may be wrong, but that a player may accept its output because it looks organised, authoritative, and complete. Recent research on human reliance on AI has examined how self assessment and overconfidence shape whether users rely appropriately on AI systems.¹⁰ For wargaming communities, the lesson is straightforward: AI can assist judgement, but it cannot replace tested knowledge, play experience, historical checking, and common sense.
The Dunning Kruger effect also interacts with the culture of house rules. House ruling is one of the great pleasures of wargaming. It allows groups to adapt games to local taste, historical interest, campaign needs, or neglected periods. Many excellent systems have grown out of dissatisfaction with existing rules. Yet premature house ruling is often a symptom of overconfidence. A player who does not yet understand a ruleset may begin altering it after a single game, removing friction, weakening morale, increasing movement, adding special rules, or changing combat results without recognising the consequences. The result may be a worse game, not because house rules are bad, but because the player has changed the machinery before understanding how it works.
Scenario design shows the same pattern. A confident but inexperienced designer may believe that equal points produce a fair game, that historical forces automatically produce historical interest, or that adding more special rules creates more realism. In practice, good scenarios depend on objectives, time pressure, terrain, force asymmetry, information, reserves, morale, and victory conditions. A small imbalance may create drama. A perfect points match may create boredom. A historically accurate force may need carefully written objectives to avoid becoming a simple massacre. Good scenario design therefore requires humility because the designer must ask not only whether the forces are correct, but whether the players will face meaningful decisions.
The community cost of misplaced confidence can be high. A player who is inexperienced can usually be taught. A player who is inexperienced and certain is much harder to help. They may reject advice, dominate conversation, correct others incorrectly, challenge umpires, derail campaign planning, or insist that every defeat proves a flaw in the rules. Over time, this can damage the generosity of a club. Experienced players stop offering advice because it is ignored. New players receive bad guidance from the loudest voice in the room. Rules discussions become performances of certainty rather than attempts to understand the game. The table slows down, not because the rules are too complex, but because confidence has become detached from competence.
The opposite problem also exists. Some genuinely competent players underestimate their ability, especially when they compare their own uncertainty with the apparent confidence of others. This is important because the popular version of the Dunning Kruger effect often imagines a simple world in which fools are confident and experts are humble. Reality is more complicated. Moore and Healy’s distinction between forms of overconfidence helps here, because confidence varies according to the task, the comparison group, and the kind of judgement being made.¹¹ A thoughtful player may be cautious because they understand complexity, while a shallow player may be certain because they do not. A community that rewards certainty too strongly may therefore silence some of its best thinkers.
The answer is not to suppress argument. Wargaming would be poorer without argument, theory, enthusiasm, after action debate, and strong views about rules and history. The answer is to connect confidence to evidence. Clubs can do this by encouraging post game discussion that begins with decisions rather than excuses. Campaign groups can record outcomes over time so balance claims are tested against patterns rather than memories. Scenario designers can ask players what choices felt meaningful rather than merely who won. Umpires can distinguish between genuine ambiguity and disappointment. Experienced members can model uncertainty by saying, “I may be wrong, but this is how I understand the rule,” which invites correction without surrendering authority.
Friendly rigour is the best community response. A club should welcome enthusiasm, but test claims. It should encourage newcomers, but not allow confident misunderstanding to become doctrine. It should respect veterans, but not treat seniority as proof. It should value tournament experience, but not mistake it for historical expertise. It should use AI tools, online commentary, and published reviews, but not accept them without checking. The important questions are simple: How do we know? Have we tested it? Does the rule actually say that? Did the scenario create the result? Is this a repeated pattern or one memorable game? Are we criticising the design, or objecting to losing?
In this sense, the Dunning Kruger effect is not merely an individual flaw. It is a community management problem. Every gaming group creates incentives for how knowledge is displayed and rewarded. If the loudest player gains authority, volume becomes expertise. If the most confident player is always followed, certainty becomes evidence. If the best painter is treated as the best historian, skill in one area becomes false authority in another. If online opinion is repeated without testing, popularity becomes proof. A healthy wargaming community resists these shortcuts by making room for correction, reflection, experiment, and humility.
The deeper issue is the politics of expertise. Who gets believed at the table? Who gets corrected? Who is allowed to be wrong? Who is encouraged to learn? Who is dismissed before speaking? These questions shape the life of a club as surely as rules, armies, and terrain. Misplaced confidence can damage games, but well managed uncertainty can strengthen them. A good wargaming community does not require everyone to be an expert. It requires players to know that expertise is partial, earned, and always open to testing. When players learn to distrust easy certainty, the games become better, the history becomes richer, the rules are read more carefully, and the community becomes less dependent on whoever speaks first, loudest, or longest.
Footnotes
Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–1134.
Kruger and Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” 1121–1134.
David Dunning, Kerri Johnson, Joyce Ehrlinger, and Justin Kruger, “Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 12, no. 3 (2003): 83–87.
Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 1–16.
Philip Sabin, Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 1–18.
Don A. Moore and Paul J. Healy, “The Trouble with Overconfidence,” Psychological Review 115, no. 2 (2008): 502–517.
Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology 2, no. 2 (1998): 175–220.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1–7.
Marcus Carter, Martin Gibbs, and Mitchell Harrop, “Drafting an Army: The Playful Pastime of Warhammer 40,000,” Games and Culture 9, no. 2 (2014): 122–147.
Gaole He, Lucie Kuiper, and Ujwal Gadiraju, “Knowing About Knowing: An Illusion of Human Competence Can Hinder Appropriate Reliance on AI Systems,” arXiv, 2023.
Moore and Healy, “The Trouble with Overconfidence,” 502–517.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 199–208.
Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991), 29–48.
Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1–20.
Donald Featherstone, War Games: Battles and Manoeuvres with Model Soldiers (London: Stanley Paul, 1962), 9–24.
Tony Bath, Setting Up a Wargames Campaign (Worthing: Wargames Research Group, 1973), 3–18.
I have written a new free campaign for Dracula’s America called The Witching Coast, and it is now available to download from the Free Downloads tab on the Guru Pig webpage. The campaign is designed for the six factions that i have – Sisters of Salem, Church of Dagon, Dark Confederacy, Twilight Order,Congregation, and the Red Hand Coven. Each of which has their own unique campaign and scenario victory conditions.
This is a five scenario campaign set entirely in and around Innsmouth, that charming little seaside town where the streets are damp, the locals are suspicious, the churches are not quite what they seem, and it is probably best not to ask too many questions about what is moving out near the reef. The campaign takes players through New Church Green, the Gilman House and Old Square, the Marsh Refinery and waterfront warehouses, the Esoteric Order of Dagon Hall on Waite Street, and finally out toward Devil Reef itself.
The campaign includes rules for the Sisters of Salem, Church of Dagon, Dark Confederacy, Twilight Order, Congregation and Red Hand Coven, with each faction having its own objectives across the campaign. This means that every posse is not simply trying to win the same fight. Some are trying to seal the breach, some are trying to open it, some are trying to preserve old wards, some are looking for relics, prisoners or secrets, and some are just trying to make sure Innsmouth belongs to the right sort of monster.
Also included are rules for Innsmouth Folk, the suspicious bystanders, frightened townspeople, watchful locals and hostile citizens who make the town feel properly uncomfortable. They can get in the way, raise the alarm, reveal clues, hide secrets, or turn nasty when the shooting starts. There are also tabletop maps for each scenario, faction objectives, campaign victory conditions and enough damp, gloomy, fish smelling horror to keep any sensible posse regretting its life choices.
This is an unofficial fan made campaign and you will need the official Dracula’s America rules and relevant supplements to play. No rules are reproduced in the campaign, just new scenarios, objectives and campaign material for your tabletop.
Best of all, The Witching Coast is completely free. Head over to the Free Downloads tab on the Guru Pig webpage, grab a copy, gather your posse and see whether you can survive Innsmouth without being shot, drowned, sacrificed, arrested, cursed or quietly dragged away by the locals.
Bring ammunition. Bring lanterns. Do not trust the hotel staff.
I have finally made a start on painting my Church of Dagon posse for Dracula’s America, which means I am once again stepping carefully into the sort of religious establishment where the sermons are damp, the congregation looks suspiciously fishy, and the collection plate probably contains teeth. These figures have been lurking in the lead pile for far too long, whispering from the shelf and giving the other miniatures the wrong sort of ideas, so it was clearly time to drag them into the light, or at least into the unpleasant greenish glow that seems more appropriate for Innsmouth.
Step 1. Figures assembled and based
Step 2. Undercoated with Tamiya TS3
Step 3. Skin painted with Necrotic Flesh colour.
Step 4. Hair Colours painted. As I wanted them to be painted in basic earthy colours I also painted other parts of the models that could use the hair colour as well. Hair colours used were Army Painter Babe Blonde, Dirt Splatter, Matt Black, and Fur Brown. The grey was Vallejo Medium Sea Grey.
Step 5. Next I just wanted one posse signature colour to provide some cohesion and as a point of difference. I decided to use Warlord Games Royal Blue which provides some colour without going OTT.
From here I paint each figure individually picking out the fiddly bits, re- painting “over the line” mistakes and dry brushing and washing for highlights. More coming soon.
I should probably begin with a confession. I am not a computer nerd. I am just a plain old common nerd, which is an entirely different branch of the species. I know how to drive computers in much the same way I know how to drive a car. I can make them go where I want, most of the time, but I have no real idea what is happening under the bonnet. If something starts clanking, smoking, flashing, or making noises it should not make, I do not reach confidently for a toolbox. I stare at it suspiciously and hope someone cleverer wanders past.
Computers themselves remain, to me, a form of eldritch magic. I press keys, things appear, files vanish, programs sulk, and occasionally the machine decides that what I really wanted was an update at the worst possible moment. Somewhere inside the box there are probably tiny demons, wires, runes, and a committee of disgruntled goblins making decisions I was not consulted about. Artificial intelligence, therefore, sits even deeper in the cave of sorcery. I use it, I prod it, I argue with it, and sometimes I am impressed by it, but I do not pretend to fully understand how it works.
Despite this I am going to have a go anyway!
This post has come about in response to a discussion I had with Soldier of Tin and others about AI and his Postcard Post. As often happens in the hobby, a passing exchange sent me off thinking about something larger than the original conversation. AI is one of those subjects that tends to produce strong reactions, ranging from breathless excitement to pitchforks and flaming torches, with most sensible people standing somewhere in the middle wondering whether it might at least help sort out a campaign roste
That is probably a useful place to start when talking about AI in wargaming. I am not approaching it as a programmer, technician, futurist, or prophet of the silicon age. I am approaching it as a wargamer, rules tinkerer, campaign scribbler, and lifelong collector of too many figures. What interests me is not whether AI is clever in some abstract technical sense, but whether it helps us make better games, write clearer rules, organise campaigns, test ideas, and get more toys onto the table before we are distracted by the next shiny project.
Artificial intelligence has arrived at the wargaming table, whether we invited it or not. Like most new tools in the hobby, it has been greeted with equal parts enthusiasm, suspicion, wild exaggeration, and the occasional cry that civilisation has finally ended. It has not. Dice still roll badly. Players still forget morale tests. Someone still argues about line of sight.
AI is not a magic oracle, but it is already a useful assistant for wargamers, rules writers, campaign organisers, and solo players. As I argue in A Wargamer’s Guide to Writing Rules, modern designers now have access to tools that can help with research, editing, scenario generation, play testing analysis, probability work, and consistency checking, but those tools remain aids rather than replacements for judgement, creativity, historical understanding, and real players at the table.
The first great advantage of AI is speed. It can take a rough idea for a scenario and quickly suggest objectives, terrain, force structures, complications, and victory conditions. For a club night or campaign game, this can be enormously helpful. Instead of staring at a blank page wondering why your “simple raid scenario” has somehow become a three week research project, AI can provide a working draft in minutes. That draft still needs the designer’s eye, but it gets the process moving.
AI is also useful for organising material. Many wargamers are drowning in notes, army lists, half finished rules, campaign maps, and brilliant ideas written on scraps of paper that made perfect sense at the time and now resemble intercepted enemy signals. AI can help sort these into usable structures. It can summarise playtest feedback, identify repeated complaints, compare versions of a rule, and point out where terminology has drifted. If one section says “suppressed,” another says “pinned,” and a third says “shaken,” AI is quite good at asking whether these are meant to be the same thing.
For rules writers, one of the strongest uses is coherency checking. AI can read a draft and look for contradictions, missing procedures, unclear examples, and edge cases. It can ask annoying but useful questions such as: what happens if a unit is both hidden and forced to retreat, who acts first when two reaction rules trigger together, or whether a morale test happens before or after casualties are removed. These are exactly the sorts of problems that cause arguments at the table and errata after publication.
AI can also support probability and play testing. It can help build simple Monte Carlo tests, run through likely outcomes, and expose mechanisms that are much more lethal, random, or predictable than the designer imagined. This does not replace rolling dice with actual players, but it can identify problems before a rule reaches the table. It is better to discover during testing that your elite cavalry are statistically doomed than after three club members have painted forty figures and now want your head.
There are also clear benefits for solo gaming. AI can help generate events, enemy behaviour tables, campaign consequences, rumours, unexpected reinforcements, and narrative hooks. It can make a solo campaign feel less predictable by adding controlled uncertainty. Used carefully, it can become a kind of assistant umpire, not replacing the player’s imagination but giving it something to react against.
The minuses, however, are real.
The most obvious problem is accuracy. AI can be wrong, and worse, it can be wrong confidently. It may invent a unit, misstate a battle, confuse one campaign with another, or produce a quotation that sounds excellent but never existed. This is especially dangerous in historical wargaming, where plausibility can disguise nonsense. If AI tells you that a particular battalion fought at a particular battle, check it. If it gives you an order of battle, check it. If it provides a source, check that the source actually exists. “The computer said so” is not research.
There is also the risk of blandness. AI is very good at producing competent generic material. That is useful, but it can also flatten creativity. A scenario generated entirely by AI may be tidy, balanced, and utterly forgettable. Good wargames usually contain a human spark: a strange historical detail, a designer’s obsession, a club joke, a nasty little tactical dilemma, or a dramatic imbalance that makes the game memorable. AI can assist with this, but it cannot care about the game in the way the designer does.
Another danger is over reliance. If every scenario, rule, army list, and campaign event is generated without judgement, the designer gradually stops designing and starts accepting. That is not using a tool. That is surrendering the craft. The best use of AI is conversational and critical. Ask it for options, then reject most of them. Ask it for weaknesses, then decide which ones matter. Ask it for a draft, then rewrite it until it sounds like you rather than a committee trapped inside a laptop.
AI can also give a false impression of testing. A simulation may tell you that a rule produces acceptable averages across ten thousand runs, but averages do not tell you whether players enjoyed it, understood it, or felt cheated by it. Mathematical balance is not the same as table balance. Human players notice pace, drama, frustration, agency, and fun. A rule can be statistically sound and still be dull. Real playtesting remains essential.
The best way to think about AI in wargaming is simple. It is a very useful assistant and a very poor master. Use it to draft, test, organise, question, summarise, and challenge. Use it to find weak points in rules and to suggest alternatives. Use it to help with the dull jobs that slow projects down. But do not let it replace historical judgement, player observation, design instinct, or the glorious messiness of actual games played by actual people.
AI will not save bad rules. It will not make a dull game exciting by itself. It will not replace the club, the campaign notebook, the argument over the hill, or the story of the militia unit that somehow held off the guards cavalry for three turns.
What it can do is help us write, test, and present better games.
And if it can help us get one more half finished rules project onto the table before we are distracted by another period, another army, or another box of unpainted figures, then it has probably earned its place beside the dice, the ruler, and the cold cup of tea.
I have used ChatGpt for the illustrations in this post.
This is J. Harland reporting from the frontier, where the ground has begun to tremble again and the sound is not thunder. The Plague have brought up their tracked artillery.
Until now, most of us feared the rush. The claws in the dark. The infected bodies breaking from the ruins. The sudden scream from a place you thought was empty. But this is different. This is heavier. Slower. More deliberate.
Out beyond the forward line, half seen through dust and smoke, corrupted gun platforms are crawling into position. Their tracks grind over rubble and bone. Their barrels lift. Their crews move around them with the jerking purpose of things that remember just enough of what they once were to make them dangerous.
When the first shell lands, everyone knows the assault has already begun.
There is something especially unpleasant about Plague artillery. Infantry, beasts and infected monstrosities are bad enough when they come screaming across the battlefield, but artillery gives the Plague something far worse. It gives them reach. It lets the infection announce itself before the first mutant is seen.
These weapons are not clean military machines crewed by disciplined gunners. They are captured, rebuilt and corrupted systems, dragged into position by infected labour and tended by creatures that still remember just enough of their former training to make them dangerous. The barrels are stained, the mechanisms are half ruined, and the crews work with a horrible mixture of instinct, memory and mutation.
On the battlefield their role is simple. They break up defensive lines, drive troops out of cover, and force the enemy to move before the main Plague assault arrives. A shell landing among a prepared position does not merely kill. It throws men into confusion. It opens gaps. It turns a strongpoint into a place of smoke, dust and panic. That is when the rest of the horde begins to close in.
For my Mantic Plague force, the artillery adds a useful sense of weight. The army is no longer just a rush of claws, teeth and infected bodies. It now has support, depth and a nasty way of reaching across the table. It also suits the theme of the Plague perfectly. These are not elegant weapons. They are ugly, brutal and corrupted, which is exactly how Plague artillery should look.
This is J. Harland, signing off from the frontier. The guns have fallen silent for now, but silence is not safety. With the Plague, it usually just means the next barrage is being loaded.
The W.A.A.A.F. Book, edited by Clare Stevenson and Honor Darling, is one of those volumes that is valuable not because it offers a sweeping operational history, but because it preserves the voices of the women who served. Published by Hale & Iremonger in Sydney in 1984, the book runs to 288 pages and includes illustrations, facsimiles and portraits. Its subject is the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force, wartime service, and the personal experiences of Australian women during the Second World War.
The WAAAF was formed in March 1941, initially to release male RAAF personnel in Australia for overseas service. It became the largest of Australia’s Second World War women’s services, with more than 18,000 women serving at its peak in October 1944 and about 27,000 enlisting across the life of the organisation. That simple set of figures is important, because it reminds us that the WAAAF was not a minor footnote to the war. It was a major part of the Australian wartime machine, and without it the RAAF would have struggled to function at the scale it did.
The great strength of this book is that it is close to the experience. It is not written from the comfortable distance of later academic interpretation. It is a book shaped by memory, service, comradeship and reflection. That gives it a different character from a conventional military history. The emphasis is not on campaigns, aircraft types, command decisions or grand strategy, although all of those things sit in the background. Instead, the book brings forward the human experience of women who entered a military world that had not been built for them, learned new skills, endured restrictions, performed essential work, and then often saw that contribution pushed to the edges of the national war story.
Clare Stevenson was an especially significant figure to have associated with such a volume. She was appointed Director of the WAAAF in June 1941 and was responsible for the management and expansion of the service. The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that she fought for standards, rights, training, housing, clothing, education and better treatment for WAAAF personnel, all while confronting discrimination in pay and conditions. This matters when reading the book. Stevenson was not simply an editor looking back fondly on old times. She had carried much of the burden of making the WAAAF work.
Honor Darling also brought an appropriate background to the task. She had been a journalist before joining the WAAAF in 1942, served until the end of the war, and edited a magazine for WAAAF members. That editorial experience shows in the purpose of the book. It is a gathered memory, but not a shapeless one. It has the feel of a service community trying to tell its own story before it disappears into scattered recollection.
For the modern reader, the book is particularly useful because it captures the texture of service. The WAAAF was not glamorous in the way wartime recruiting posters sometimes suggested. Its members worked in administration, signals, transport, technical trades and other ground roles, taking on work that had previously been treated as male work. They had to prove themselves twice over: first as competent service personnel, and second as women in a system that often doubted they should be there at all. That tension gives the book much of its importance.
As a source, it needs to be read with some care. Memory books tend to soften edges. They can favour pride, humour and affection over bitterness, conflict or institutional failure. That is not a flaw so much as a feature of the form. This is not the last word on the WAAAF, and it should be read alongside later historical work on women’s wartime service, gender, labour and the Australian home front. But it remains a valuable primary style collection because it preserves how former WAAAF members wanted their service remembered.
The book also reminds us that the Second World War changed Australian society in ways that were not confined to the battlefield. Women who joined the WAAAF entered uniformed service, handled responsibility, gained training, worked within a military organisation, and demonstrated that the old assumptions about women’s capacity were increasingly difficult to defend. The war did not produce equality, and many of the old barriers returned once the emergency passed, but the experience could not simply be undone.
The most moving aspect of The W.A.A.A.F. Book is that it gives dignity to work that was often treated as background labour. Aircraft did not fly because pilots alone made them fly. They flew because clerks, drivers, teleprinter operators, cooks, mechanics, storewomen, wireless operators and many others kept the system moving. The WAAAF did not merely “release men” for other duties. Its members became part of the operational fabric of the RAAF.
In that sense, this is a book about recognition. It records a generation of women who served in a military organisation that needed them, even if it did not always know how to value them properly. It is affectionate, sometimes nostalgic, and necessarily partial, but it is also important. For anyone interested in Australian military history, women’s service, the home front, or the social changes produced by the Second World War, The W.A.A.A.F. Book is well worth reading.
It is not a battlefield history. It is something more intimate: a record of service from those who lived it. I loved it!
It has been some time since I willingly stepped back inside a church, and I am pleased to report that the roof did not fall in, the walls did not crack, and no sudden bolt of divine judgement reduced me to a smoking pair of boots. Admittedly, this may have had something to do with the fact that this particular church belongs to Dagon, which means the usual rules of holiness, salvation and basic structural integrity probably do not apply. In fact, if anything was going to be cursed, damp, suspiciously fish scented and full of people best avoided after dark, this was always going to be it.
I have always liked Jonathan Haythornthwaite’s Dracula’s America, partly because it combines two things that have rarely done me any harm on the tabletop: the Old West and deeply questionable supernatural decision making. It is a setting full of gunfighters, vampires, secret cults, cursed posses and all the other healthy influences one naturally looks for in a wholesome afternoon’s gaming.
So, after only ten or so years of careful contemplation, strategic neglect, and the occasional ceremonial moving of the box from one shelf to another, the Church of Dagon has finally emerged from the lead pile. This is not procrastination, of course. It is a mature and considered hobby process, involving long term planning, deep reflection, and a great deal of pretending not to notice the unopened packs every time I walked past them.
The figures have been waiting patiently for their moment, although in the case of the Church of Dagon, “patiently” probably means muttering in the dark, growing scales, and conducting small private rituals among the other neglected miniatures. There is something entirely appropriate about a cursed cult spending a decade hidden away in a box, slowly gathering strength while I was distracted by other projects. If anything, it feels like proper background development.
Now they have finally been dragged into the light, or at least into the slightly dusty glow of the painting desk, it seems only fair to give them the attention they deserve. This particular congregation is not overly concerned with salvation, good works, or improving the moral condition of the frontier. Their interests appear to lie more in tentacles, mutation, damp robes, suspicious chanting, and the sort of sermon that ends with everyone being dragged into the water.
In that sense, the Church of Dagon is probably the perfect Dracula’s America project. It lets me reduce the lead pile while also indulging in something grim, strange, and deeply unhealthy looking. More importantly, it allows me to pretend that returning to figures bought over a decade ago is not a sign of hobby disorganisation, but a carefully timed resurrection of an eldritch cult whose hour has finally come.
One of the more unsettling posses in Dracula’s America is the Church of Dagon. In a game already full of vampires, cursed soldiers, witches, skinwalkers and dark powers, the Church of Dagon manages to feel different. They are not simply another band of gunmen with a few strange habits. They are a cult, and worse still, they are a cult that believes the world is not ending, but finally beginning.
The Church of Dagon belongs to the stranger, wetter and more rotten corners of the Weird West. These are not men and women riding out under a clean prairie sky in search of gold, revenge or political power. They come from the swamps, river towns, hidden settlements and forgotten coastal communities where old beliefs have taken root in the mud. Their faith is not Christian, although they may borrow the language of revival meetings and frontier preaching. Their god is older, colder and far less interested in saving souls.
Dagon himself comes from the deep places. In Lovecraftian horror he is associated with ancient sea powers, monstrous underwater races, human corruption and the terrible idea that humanity is not alone, not special, and not even entirely human in some bloodlines. That makes him a perfect fit for Dracula’s America. The setting already imagines an America where history has gone badly wrong, where Dracula rules, supernatural forces walk openly or half openly, and ordinary men and women must survive in a world where the old certainties have collapsed. Into that world steps the Church of Dagon, promising revelation, power and belonging to those willing to kneel before something vast and inhuman.
The cult’s appeal is easy enough to understand. The American frontier was full of people living under pressure. War, poverty, disease, displacement, greed and isolation all shaped frontier life. In the world of Dracula’s America, those pressures are made worse by the presence of real monsters and real magic. A preacher who claims to have seen the truth beneath the waves, or heard the voice of an ancient power in a dream, might find followers among the desperate, the broken and the ambitious. Some would join out of fear. Some would join for power. Some would join because they had already begun to change and needed someone to tell them the change was holy.
That is the real horror of the Church of Dagon. They do not necessarily see themselves as villains. Like many cults, they believe they are the chosen few. They speak of revelation, judgement and the return of powers older than mankind. They believe the strange mutations among them are not signs of corruption, but marks of blessing. A man with scaled skin, webbed hands or something worse beneath his coat is not pitied by the faithful. He is proof. He is a sign that Dagon has noticed them.
On the tabletop this gives the posse a very strong identity. A Church of Dagon force should not feel like a normal outlaw gang with a monster added on. It should feel like a religious procession gone wrong. The Priest of Dagon is the centre of the group, not merely as a leader, but as the mouthpiece of something beyond the world. Around him are cultists, gunmen and hybrids, all tied together by a shared belief that the old order must be washed away. Their weapons may be pistols, rifles and shotguns, but their real strength lies in fanaticism and the promise of eldritch power.
For painting and modelling, the Church offers plenty of character. Robes, dark coats, swamp colours, pallid flesh, scaled skin, glassy eyes and hints of sea green or muddy brown all suit them well. They should look as though they have stepped out of a decaying chapel beside a black river. A few normal looking cultists are useful, because they make the hybrids seem even more disturbing. The best horror is often in the contrast between the ordinary and the impossible. A man with a revolver and a preacher’s hat is frightening enough. The thing beside him with claws, scales and a half human face is worse.
The Church of Dagon also offers excellent scenario possibilities. They might be searching for a relic dredged from a riverbed, kidnapping townsfolk for a midnight rite, defending a hidden shrine in the bayou, or trying to summon something that should have remained beneath the water. Other factions have every reason to oppose them. The Salem Sisterhood would see them as a threat to the arcane balance. The Twilight Order would recognise them as servants of abomination. Ordinary posses might simply want to stop children disappearing from town. Even Dracula’s servants might not welcome a rival power gathering worshippers in the dark places of America.
What I like most about the Church of Dagon is that they bring a different kind of horror to the Weird West. Vampires are aristocratic horror. Were beasts are savage horror. Ghosts are tragic horror. The Church of Dagon is cult horror. It is the horror of secret meetings, whispered prayers, strange births, locked church doors, and the feeling that something ancient is waiting patiently beneath the surface. In Dracula’s America, that makes them a wonderful faction for anyone who wants their games to feel less like a shootout and more like the final act of a very bad sermon.
The West was already dangerous enough with guns, vampires and ambition. The Church of Dagon makes it clear that some dangers did not come from the West at all. Some came from below.
Eight figures is not a lot to paint so I will put one on the end of each painting stick and will have them done in a reasonable time frame……………….or NOT!
The second instalment in the exploits of Jack Hennessy and his section of the 2/4th Battalion of the Australian 6th Division follows the men from the heat and hard fighting of North Africa into the mountains, roads and shattered villages of Greece. The book is now available on Amazon.
After their successes against the Italians, Hennessy and his mates are given little time to rest. The war has moved again, and the Australians are rushed across the Mediterranean to help stop the German and Italian invasion of Greece. What begins as another campaign soon becomes something very different. The enemy is faster, stronger and better supplied. The air belongs to the Luftwaffe. The roads are crowded with refugees, retreating columns and exhausted soldiers trying to hold one more line before falling back again.
For Hennessy and his section, Greece is not a story of easy victories. It is a campaign of withdrawal, endurance and sacrifice. They fight in cold mountain passes, under constant air attack, and along roads where every delay may save men further south. The Long Withdrawal is a story of mateship under pressure, courage without glory, and the cost paid by ordinary soldiers when grand strategy begins to fall apart.
Back Page Blurb:
The desert taught them how to advance.
Greece will teach them how to withdraw.
Jack Hennessy is not a hero in search of glory. A fitter by trade and a quiet leader by necessity, he has learned that survival depends less on bravado than on reliability, discipline and the men beside him. Around him remains a section of ordinary Australians: larrikins, labourers, boys barely grown, and veterans already marked by war.
After North Africa, they are no longer raw volunteers. They have faced heat, dust, fear and fire. But April 1941 carries them into a different campaign, one of mountain roads, broken passes, refugee columns, delayed orders and skies ruled by German aircraft.
As the Allied line bends south through Greece, Hennessy’s men are caught in a fighting withdrawal where positions are held only long enough to be abandoned, rumours outrun truth, and every mile costs something. From Servia Pass to Brallos, from burning roads to the dark embarkation beaches, The Long Withdrawal follows soldiers learning that retreat demands its own kind of courage. Survival is not victory. And Crete is not the end.
