History and Development of Richthofen's Reign
In the early 1980s, when I would have been perhaps twelve years old, I became aware of the existence of an incomplete collection of magazines that my father had once subscribed to, but discontinued due to my parents financial situation at that earlier time. The series was called The History of the Second World War, published by Purnell in 1966, and sold for 55c per issue, at a time when newspapers were 5c. There were maybe twenty different copies, each featuring four main stories. Being in chronological order, the subject matter available to me ended late in 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union but before Pearl Harbour. The content was not as interesting to me then as the illustrations, but I was drawn in particular to Vol 1 #12, which featured the Battle of Britain.
Only a couple of years previously I had discovered plastic aeroplane kits, which at first I never painted because the paint was too expensive (I still cringe when I see some of the stars stuck on upside down on my first kit, a US F4 Phantom). Now it became apparent that my two new interests seemed to coincide, and I became mightily interested in WW2 aircraft. Every so often Mum went to Sydney, and I gave her a list of models that I wanted, with enough money to buy either a big one, or else several smaller ones. She returned one time with a 1/72 scale Bf 109E, and I was very happy, and said words to the effect that the 109 was one I had sought for some time (I can only imagine that I didn’t look too hard, as this plane can be found in any store that sells kits). More importantly, I also started digging out reference books in order to learn more, and the more I learned, the more there was to learn.
My parents always encouraged my brother and myself to read, and one day in a Doubleday catalogue I saw my dream book, and I absolutely had to have it. It was written by Bill Gunston, and was titled The Illustrated Encyclopedia of World War Two Aircraft. It cost me the then princely sum of $20, but I ordered it without a qualm. The agonising part was waiting for it in the mail. Until then, mail was a thing that I collected only if asked to. Well, when I thought that a reasonable amount of time had passed for my book to arrive, I started sweating on the mailman, and every day when he came I ran to check the mail. I still remember that time. It was early summer, and the mail arrived at around 11am three times a week. When my book refused to show, I endured the knowledge that I wouldn’t see it the next day either. Fridays were even worse, because that meant a three day wait until the next delivery. And so it went. It took so long! Needless to say, I did eventually get my book. On the day that it arrived I opened it at the mailbox because I didn’t want to lose a minute further before looking at it. I started reading it while walking back to the house, and even knew at the time that it would have been much quicker to run back to the house and then read the book. How many times is the product not everything you’d imagined? For a wonder, thankfully, that was not the case this time. It had everything I thought it would; profiles, line drawings, cut-aways, fold-outs, data and text.
More than that, though, it had unexpected information. There was a colour profile of a German Me 262 jet fighter, as flown by Walter Nowotny, of whom I had never heard. The caption said he had claimed 258 kills, and I thought, ‘No wonder, in such a machine.’ There was a large colour fold-out of Urban Drew’s P-51, in which he shot down two Me 262s in a single action, and I thought, ‘Wow, what an amazing feat’.
Bf 109F
There was also an illustration of a Bf 109F belonging to Hans-Joachim Marseille, which stated that he scored most of his 158 kills on this type. This gave me pause. I looked up the data on the 109F and found it to be unremarkable in performance and also firepower, and I thought, ‘How do I pronounce his name, and how can this be true?’ It wasn’t until later that I learned that Marseille was a fair way down the list of German aces (a list headed by somebody called Erich Hartmann), and it was even longer before I found out that only three of Nowotny’s kills were with jets, and that Drew bagged his pair of Me 262s as they were on approach to land.
But the question had already been asked in my mind: ‘How can this be?’ I decided that that there must be a way to evaluate the available data to run a comparison between one plane and another. Obviously, it couldn’t be subjective. Too many people have too many opinions when it comes to listing the merits and deficiencies of makes and models.
Fans of Spitfires say, ‘Spitfires won the Battle of Britain’.
Hurricane devotees say, ‘No they didn’t. Hurricanes shot down more of the enemy.’
Champions of the Mustang say, ‘Hermann Goering said he knew the war was lost when he first saw P-51s over Berlin.’
German bashers say, ‘The Luftwaffe aces only had high scores because they mainly fought the Russians, who everyone knows were useless.’
No one says, ‘If the Russians were so bad, how come all of the highest scoring pilots who flew against Germany belonged to the Red Air Force?’
Nor do you hear, ‘Japanese pilots were more experienced and skilled than those of the USA during the early part of the Pacific War.’
But the data was out there. Just because no one seemed interested in being objective about these things only meant that they were more interested in themselves than what really was. What I thought about it was, ‘Well, I’m seventeen years old now, and I know that I can do it.’ Twenty years later this youthful arrogance is amusing to me, but without it my life would not be where it is at this point. At any rate, I took my first steps by trying to interpret the raw data and experimented with calculations. Not surprisingly, no solution miraculously leaped out at me. I kept trying different things. Progress was slow.
In my first year of University (it was still a College of Advanced Education at the time, but when it was found out that I was in attendance the CAE was upgraded) I read Bomber, by Len Deighton. This was not required reading for any of my courses. Studying had always taken second place to my pastimes, and in later years work would also do so. Partway into the novel, a piece of information from the text blasted me out of relaxation and into research mode. The information that Deighton had supplied stated that in WW2 an estimated twenty 20mm cannon shells were needed to destroy a Lancaster heavy bomber. What was remarkable about this was that when running comparisons on the sizes of various aircraft, the number that I had settled on for the Lancaster was nineteen. This gave me the first solid starting point in determining the effect of firepower upon an airframe. Things moved rapidly from there for some time, but not in all areas. Fuel economy and manoeuvrability were still problems that would not go away, but by this time I had a moderately workable system for re-enacting WW2 air combat at a reduced but historically proportionate scale.
And scale was a key element. Outnumbered forces were at a disadvantage in the obvious sense, but inferiority in numbers meant a greater opportunity for individuals to expand their levels of experience and knowledge. It was always my view that only by replicating actual proportions will true results emerge. From this stems the biggest factor that determines the chances for a pilot to build a score. No matter how good the technology is, it is of no account if it is used incorrectly. In WW2, Germany had more than a hundred pilots who claimed at least one hundred kills, whereas forty kills was seen to be exceptional for most other nationalities. The Germans for the most part had equipment that was comparable to their opponents. The difference was that they had more opportunity and greater experience than those they faced.
Yet as advanced as my system was becoming, there was one glaringly obvious point that I was trying to ignore, and I knew that I couldn’t. Only those planes that were designed to destroy aircraft were being given proper attention. Bombers were being set up as nothing more than targets for the fighters. In reality they were as important to the war effort in the role that they played than were the fighters in their role. This was true whether they were used for strategic bombing, or in support of ground forces. Furthermore, if the bombers were to be used with an outcome in mind, there also needed to be a focus on ground and naval forces. Effectively, I needed to do all of the same research from the beginning for armour and shipping. So I did. The new research had new problems, of which ballistics qualities for anti-armour projectiles was the hardest.
It took a long time. Even when not actually sitting down to nut out a problem, you can’t help thinking things over. At times very complex formulae have been used. Sometimes simplicity is all that is necessary. My only source of information was reference books (the Internet did not exist at the time). I would wander through book stores until I saw something that I could use. I would buy them on spec, and usually they proved to be of limited use. The bibliographies of these books sometimes indicated further reading which could be more useful, and I would order them, too. Occasionally a title was out of print. In one case that meant years of waiting before I was able to obtain the desired book, a text that has since proved crucial (also written by Bill Gunston). Often my research took unexpected turns. More than once I have had to abandon assumptions that I had considered cornerstones for many years. Some of the information has been elusive. At one point I employed the services of a research consultant to pursue avenues that I had stalled on. Not all of the threads are complete, but they nearly are.
The WW2 campaign still has some way to go before it is ready. I realised this in 1998. At the time my most frustrating experience was trying to find information that no one in the entire world except me had any use for. Even the Internet only yields information if someone has seen fit to provide it in the first place. As a way to fill in time while I waited on the rest, I decided that it wouldn’t be nearly as difficult to expand on the system that I had if I focused on present day weapons. The new format is similar, with only some allowances needed to cater to new technologies. So I spent more money and devised a means of predicting an outcome if WW3 was ever unfortunate enough to occur with the gloves off. I sent the idea to a publisher, but it wasn’t really their field (when I reread over the submission it now also seems poorly organised, although it looked OK at the time). Bent on pressing on regardless, I soon realised that this idea for a current campaign would need constant revision in order to be prevented from becoming dated. I almost despaired.
Almost, but not quite. Given that the only viable solution to my problem was to pick an historical campaign, I was left with either WW1 or WW2. I was still waiting for things to sort themselves out with the WW2 scenario. On the other hand, WW1 was so long ago, and there seemed to be nearly none of the data that I needed in order to reconstruct the air war. This proved to be untrue.
One day I was browsing in a bookstore when I chanced upon two books relating to military aircraft back to the year dot. Between them they contained enough information of the type that I required to give me a hope of succeeding in this new endeavour. Mostly things compared well enough to leave me optimistic. There were, though, two problems. Aircraft weights and ways to measure fuel consumption were different to what I had expected, and I was by this time extremely reluctant to go back to the drawing board. Nevertheless, because I was so used to doing so, I did.
I familiarised myself with the primitive contraptions that at the time were state-of-the-art. I learned what an Albatros DIII was, and why it was feared by the Allies so much when it first appeared. I discovered that the Fokker Dreidecker wasn’t produced in anywhere near the numbers as its fame suggests. I found out that there were significant differences between the Spad VII and its successor, the Spad XIII, and that these differences are not usually recognised as being as pronounced as they were in reality.
Albatros DIII
When my last calculations were complete the trials to test my theories were ready to commence. The process used to compare the different planes of WW1, as well as all of the other technologies that I had studied from other periods, is very detailed indeed. When a plane is hit by gunfire, the extent of the damage is so precise that you can almost count the bullet holes. If the crew are hit, you see the immediate result of this, too.
What has taken the most time in developing this idea is running exhaustive trials, one after the other, to check the validity of my theories. Each trial took a minimum of twenty days to complete. The number of times that I have trialled the WW1 scenario from beginning to end would be close to a dozen. The number of times that I have had to abandon a trial because things are obviously going wrong is a somewhat larger number. However, what has proven to be the most difficult part of this entire project has been conveying what I mean to paper so that others can grasp my meaning. Richthofen’s Reign is the public face of two decades of labour. Although the process that I have gone through is presented in chronological sequence, there were a lot of times when events overlapped. Things were not always so clear. Above all, I wonder if I would have even attempted any of this if I had known in advance how long it would have taken to complete, given that I was a teenager at the time and twenty years have now elapsed. At times the thing that was easiest to believe was that there was only a bit more to do. At other times the motivation was more a refusal to accept that everything to that point was all for nothing.
It is my hope that my ideas will be accepted as a serious attempt to predict the outcome of battles between different technologies. If reasonable accuracy can be had using this system for WW1 aircraft, it should also apply to WW2 as well as for today. It is intended that this title be the first in a series. If it proves popular, it will be easier to market the others. These include campaigns for WW2 and modern times, but also a couple of simpler works dedicated to infantry combat in WW1 and WW2. Additionally, since beginning my research into WW1 air operations, I have developed enough interest in the subject to want to write a more comprehensive study, at actual 1:1 scale. No doubt a full scale reconstruction will take you, the gamer, many years to complete even if you are addicted to it. But wouldn’t it be nice to have just one pilot (even if he is fictitious) attempt to exceed the eighty kills of Manfred von Richthofen?
It has now been some while since I devoted any real amount of time to the WW2 project, but the information I’ve needed has built up a little over that period, and some thought processes have had time to gel. The one thing that I can say with confidence is this: I can pull the raw data on a plane or tank from a manual, apply the formulae that I use, and know reasonably well how that weapon will compare to another. I have done this many times on less well known types, and later have had confirmation by an independent source.
For that matter, because the maths is the same, I would like to think it could also predice the outcome if the Red Baron flew his vivid Dreidecker forward in time to duel with an F-15 Eagle. Then again, I think the outcome in that case would be fairly obvious.
The Red Baron vs an F-15 imaginary scenario.