2019 No More War Games

2019, Steven B. Zwickel

I was  watching a boy playing with an action figure and it got me thinking about my toys when I was a child.

I never played with action figures, mostly because there weren’t any, but also because they would have been considered dolls, and no self-respecting boy in the 1950s would ever think of playing with dolls. (Not entirely true, now that I think about it. From time to time my sister would take out her dolls to play with them and I would either make fun of them, tip over the tea party to make my sister angry, or grab one and play keep-away to make her even angrier. So, in that sense, I did “play” with dolls.)

I find modern-day action figures for boys troubling for a couple of reasons. First, there’s way the figures look—enormous shoulders and bulging muscles on their arms and legs. If they were female, there’d be a huge outcry over “body shaming”—the modern term for making girls feel inadequate. The musclebound action figures seem like an ad aimed at boys to encourage them to start taking steroids.

The other reason the action figures concern me is that they always seem to be fighting the bad guys (in whatever fantasy world  they may be) all by themselves. In fact, boys seem to play with the figures alone, by themselves, in combat against some imaginary enemy. The action figures always seem to come equipped with an impressive arsenal of weapons that can stab, slash, shoot, or impale their enemies. But they do it all alone; they are not part of a platoon, much less an army, of other muscular action figures. And boys who play with these toys also seem to play by themselves.

I don’t know how this affects the boys, but the contrast to the way my friends and I played when we were young is striking.

We played war games. We were a dozen years removed from the end of World War II and our parents had fought the “Japs” (Yes, we called them that. And we called them “Nips” and a lot worse.) and Nazis (We saw no difference between Germans and Nazis—to us they were the same evil bad guys.) and won. Our folks may have been pacifists before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but I never heard of a parent who objected to our playing war in the 1950s.

Our war games were never about a single soldier; we played with entire armies. Toy stores sold plastic bags with 144 soldiers in fighting stances. Inside the comic books we hid from our parents were ads for even larger bags with more soldiers. I think I had 288 Civil War soldiers, both Union and Confederate, a large collection of WWII GIs (with tanks!), and several groups of Indians and cowboys.

Our armies were kept in cigar boxes and we’d carry them from our house to our friends when we wanted to play war. The battlefields were made up of whatever was handy—often wooden blocks stood in for houses and forests, but the phone book always made a good hill and a rolled up sheet of newspaper could be a river (when flattened) or a fence soldiers could hide behind.

When the centennial of the Civil War came around in 1960 and 1961 dozens of articles about the battles, the battlefields, the soldiers, and the meaning of the war to both north and south appeared in all the major papers and magazines. I remember a particular issue of Life (March 17, 1961 if you want to look it up) that contained all the parts and instructions for a game called 1863. The board was a map of the USA printed on a gatefold in the magazine. You would cut out the pieces printed in the magazine and glue them to small squares of cardboard to represent the different military units. Millions of people learned how to play a war game from 1863 and the game was soon printed and sold by Parker Brothers with plastic soldiers in a gray and blue box. 

Civil War toy soldiers appeared everywhere. The ones you ordered from the comic books were plastic, cast in blue and gray in different poses. The soldiers were about an inch high and molded in low relief—so flat that they were almost 2D. Each rested on a flat base so they could stand up and face the enemy.

Playing war games with friends was a social activity that required imagination and communication. We each had our own preferences and ideas about how to set up and use our soldiers. One of my friends was obsessed with Custer’s Last Stand and he always played the US Cavalry, even though they always lost. Another friend usually wanted to wage war on Iwo Jima. I was partial to Civil War games and often took the South side.

My family took a trip to Gettysburg when I was eight or nine and we hired a guide to show us around the battlefield. He rattled off statistics and I had trouble understanding his accent. “There were 400 keelt, 500 wunded, and 110 meezing” meant 400 killed, 500 wounded, and 110 missing.

For a while, I thought the South had a point. Kids tend to be conservative in their thinking and the idea that the Union wanted to mess with the southern states’ traditions seemed wrong. But I soon realized that the traditions involved slavery, which I absolutely hated. That put me firmly on the Union side in future war games.

The trip to Gettysburg inspired me to buy my first board war game. A company called Avalon Hill had come up with new ways to simulate combat, using a board with a battlefield map, dice to create randomness and uncertainty, and lots of small (easy to lose) cardboard pieces representing different military units. 

The Avalon Hill Gettysburg game came with hundreds of square cardboard pieces and a book of complex rules. It was played on a map divided into hexagons, which permitted players to position units facing six different directions. After playing it a few times, it became clear that, once the whole Union army got to the battlefield, there was nothing the South could do to win the game.

A few years later, Avalon Hill came out with an updated version of Gettysburg that had a better map and more complicated rules.

I was interested in how battles were won and lost and I bought other Avalon Hill war games. Some were fun, some taught me history lessons, and a few had rules that made them simply unplayable. When I got a computer, one of the extras I purchased was a war game based on the Eastern Front in World War II. All the games had rules that evened up the contest so that, theoretically, the weaker side had a shot at winning.

But as the Civil War had first piqued my interest, it also led me away from war games when I came across a diorama of part of the Gettysburg battlefield called the battle of the railroad cut. Without going into a lot of detail, a railroad company had started to build a line into the town and excavated a path through the hills to the west. The southerners advanced on Gettysburg from the west and several units walked right through the railroad cut. Union soldiers in front of them and standing on the sides of the cut opened fire. It was “shooting fish in a barrel.” They called on the rebels to surrender, but they refused and the slaughter continued until the few remaining rebels were captured or escaped.

The story made me question the whole idea of war games. War isn’t a game, of course, but this episode left me with a strong distaste for war in any form. I learned that no one in their right mind would want to play a truly realistic war game. I learned that the outcomes of many famous “history-changing” battles were pretty much inevitable—in the real world there are no rules to make it an even match. With extremely rare exceptions, the larger, more powerful army always wins. 
I have stopped playing war games. I still play checkers with my granddaughter, but I think that's as close to combat as I ever want to go.

"Most of what we call history consists of the adventures of small bands of heavily armed teenagers lacking adult supervision"

---Steven Zwickel

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"I was now embarked on a military career. This orientation was entirely due to my collection of soldiers. I had ultimately nearly fifteen hundred. They were all of one size, all British, and organized as an infantry division with a cavalry brigade.

        "My brother Jack commanded the hostile army. But by a Treaty for the Limitation of Armaments he was only allowed to have coloured troops; and they were not allowed to have artillery. Very important! I could muster myself only eighteen field-guns—besides fortress pieces. But all the other services were complete—except one. It is what every army is always

short of—transport. My father’s old friend, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, admiring my array, noticed this deficiency and provided a fund from which it was to some extent supplied.

    "The day came when my father himself paid a formal visit of inspection. All the troops were arranged in the correct formation of attack. He spent twenty minutes studying the scene—which was really impressive—with a keen eye and captivating smile. At the end he asked me if I would like to

go into the Army. I thought it would be splendid to command an Army, so I said ‘Yes’ at once: and immediately I was taken at my word. For years I thought my father with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities o( military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to

the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar. However that may be, the toy soldiers turned the current of my life. Henceforward all my education was directed to, passing into Sandhurst, and afterwards to the technical details of the profession of arms. Anything else I had to pick

up for myself."

- Winston Churchill, My Early Years, “Harrow” p. 19 

        

(Churchill entered Harrow in 1888, when he was 14, and left in 1892 for Sandhurst, which he entered in 1893 when he was 19)