Besides doing stuff with my regular friends like hanging out at their houses, playing in the park, and playing Little League baseball, I had a secret life playing wargames with a different set of secret friends. None of my regular friends knew about my secret life, because I was worried they’d think I was weird like Duncan, and into strange stuff that was complicated and that they didn’t understand. That is except Mike, because he was the only one of my regular friends who I let come over to my house, so he had seen all my wargames, either in their boxes or set up on the table in my room.

And I only let Mike come over to my house because he knew that my mom and dad were divorced, but said he wouldn’t tell ANYONE, and he was the kind of person you could really trust. And when he came over and saw all my wargames, he was interested in them and why I liked to play them, though he didn’t want to play them with me. But again I told him not to tell any of my other friends and again he promised and I trusted him. I guess I didn’t trust any of my other regular friends not to think I was strange and even tell on me to my other friends if THEY came over to my house and saw my wargames or figured out that my dad wasn’t there anymore and he and mom were divorced.

So when Mike asked me why I liked them and liked playing them, even if just by myself, I told him. I had always liked playing with soldiers since as far back as I could remember, playing with them in the basement, bathtub and backyard of my old house. And when I first started, it was mostly the shooting and blowing up and getting killed and wounded part that was interesting, because dad had been a soldier in World War Two. Mike said his dad had been in that war too, but he wasn’t a soldier, he was an “intelligence officer”. They were always trying to figure out what the Germans were planning and also how to keep the Germans from finding out what we were planning.

But as I played with soldiers more and more, and read about World War Two and the Civil War my soldiers were in, what also was interesting for me was all the different places where wars were fought, and how you had to move all these guys around with ships and trucks and trains. And all the strategy of the best places to attack or defend by building forts and when to attack and the weather and supplies.

So the wargames were neat because they were about all that other stuff. They had maps of where you were fighting the war or the battle, some on land and others at sea. On the land maps there was different kinds of “terrain” that you had to move your “units” through or around, or set them up in the best places to defend. Different kinds of units could do different things. Some could fight better, some were faster. And then you might also have to think about supply and the weather. I specially liked setting up the units of both sides and trying to figure out the best place for each unit to go, thinking about what would make it hardest for the other side to beat them.

And each game was different, with a different map, with different terrain and different units and a different situation that all had to be figured out. Each game had this booklet with all its rules, pages and pages of them that you had to read and remember, so you could play it right. And there were also charts where you figured out who wins each little battle, by adding up the attack and defense “factors” on each side and then figuring out the “ratio” of factors for the attacker and defender, and then rolling the “die”, that was the word for one dice, to figure out what happened in each battle. Just because you had more factors in a battle didn’t mean you always won, so it was part strategy and part luck.

Though Mike didn’t want to play my wargames, we did talk about the war in Vietnam. It was always interesting to me to talk about it, why it got started, who the main generals were, how they got all the soldiers together and moved them around, what it might be like to actually be in a war and fight in a battle where you could get wounded or killed. And if you got wounded, what that would be like. I had read a lot of books about the wars in the past, like World War Two, World War One, the Civil War, the Revolutionary War and even the Napoleon wars, but Vietnam was the war right now that there were no books about yet.

Mike had read more in newspapers and magazines about the war in Vietnam. He knew that the guy in charge of the US army there was General Westmoreland, and that his strategy was to always try to kill a lot more of their soldiers than our soldiers, what they called “attrition”. I remembered reading in one book about the Civil War that that was General Grant’s strategy for the Union side. He didn’t try to win battles so much as get more Confederate soldiers killed in each battle than Union soldiers. I guess that was “attrition” too, and I guess it worked in the Civil War because the Union won, though it didn’t work for the dead soldiers.

We got out the giant “Life Pictorial Atlas” with the red cover from the bookshelf in the office, and found the map of Vietnam, and Mike explained to me that it was their own country’s Civil War between the north part and the south part. Our country was helping the south because the north was communist and were helped by the Soviet Union and China. But Mike said the leaders of the south part were pretty bad. He showed me where the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” was and how the north used it to try and sneak soldiers into the south. He said that the “Vietcong” they kept talking about on the news were guys that lived in the south but fought for the north, and the “ARVN” were the south guys that were fighting with the US and other countries against the north.

But Mike always said his dad thought the US shouldn’t be fighting this war, and Mike didn’t think we should either. I told him mom also didn’t think we should be fighting it, that our “kids shouldn’t be dying over there”. Mike asked me what I thought about the war, and I said that I didn’t think we should either, but I still thought wars were really interesting, so that’s why I liked to play the games. He said that that made sense.

So though Mike knew a lot about this new Vietnam War, he didn’t think it was good, so maybe that’s why he didn’t like all the games I had about the other wars. He had said, “Well some wars I guess you have to fight, but it doesn’t usually turn out very good, even if you DO win.”

***

Jake had called and talked to me a few times on the phone. He was my old friend from Bach School who had moved over to this part of Ann Arbor, but on the other side of Washtenaw, so he had gone to school at Angell instead of Burns Park. But now that we were both done with sixth grade and elementary school, we’d both be going to Tappan in the fall.

We both had bought the new Avalon Hill wargame “Battle of the Bulge”, and we both liked it a lot and had each played it by ourselves many times, but we figured it would be fun to play it together, now that it was summer. He had wanted to come over to my house to play, but I wasn’t letting ANY of my friends come over, except Mike, because I didn’t want my other friends to figure out mom and dad were divorced. And I didn’t even want mom to know that I didn’t want my friends to come over because of that. She would ask me sometimes if I had friends other than Mike, and why I never invited any of them over.

Since Jake didn’t really know any of my other school friends, maybe it would be okay to let him come over because even if he figured out mom and dad were divorced, he wouldn’t tell my other friends because he didn’t know them. But then maybe if he found out, he might not want to be my friend anymore. Mom had told me that some of her old friends had stopped inviting her to their parties and would make “an excuse” not to talk to her when she called them on the phone. I wasn’t sure Jake, or even my other school friends might not do stuff like that too if they knew.

So Jake said I could come over to HIS house so we could play. He lived on Cambridge, but on the other side of Washtenaw. I had been there a couple times so I knew how to get there. I just had to ride down our street to Cambridge, go right, down to Washtenaw, cross Washtenaw and keep going on Cambridge til I got to his house. It was a big house like ours with the pointy roofs, brown painted wood parts and lots of bricks and those same kind of neat windows like ours where you cranked them open and closed rather than pulling them up and down. His house was as big as ours, but his family lived in the WHOLE THING rather than half of ours like we did.

When I got there I rang the doorbell and hoped Jake would open it, but it was his mom instead.

“Is Jake here?” I asked. I mean he had called me and told me he was waiting for me to come over, so I KNEW he was there, but still that’s what I’d say if any of my friends’ moms or dads came to the door. Saying something like “I’m here to see Jake” just sounded weird to me.

“It’s Cooper, right?” she asked, “You’re Jane and Eric’s son.” I nodded.

“How’s your dad doing?” she asked, “Jake’s dad says he’s got some sort of a new job at U of M.” I nodded again but didn’t say anything. I didn’t like her asking questions about dad, and I wondered if she was trying to figure out if mom and dad were divorced.

“He’s not teaching here, right?” she asked. I was getting more worried that she was asking me all these questions and I just wanted to get to Jake.

So I shook my head and said, “He’s working at the Language Learning Center, that place on Hill and Forest.” I figured I could tell her that and then she’d let me see Jake.

“Oh, yes yes yes”, she said, waving her finger in the air, “Well tell him Doctor MacNeil and Margaret send him our best.” I nodded again and thought, “C’mon lady, just tell me where Jake is!” I also thought it was strange that she didn’t ask about mom. Was she one of those people mom had talked about that didn’t like her anymore because she and dad got divorced.

She was still thinking about something and not looking at me, so I asked, “Is Jake in his room?” Then she finally looked at me.

“Oh, sorry”, she said, “He’s actually out in the backyard. Just head down the hallway here and out the backdoor in the kitchen. Keep going until you find him.” I nodded and ran down the hallway and out the screen door backdoor.

They had a really big backyard with lots of trees and big bushes like I was going into the woods instead of a regular backyard. I couldn’t see Jake anywhere. I walked around behind this big bush that I couldn’t see through and there was a different bush behind that, and trees above me with all their green leaves. It was kind of neat actually, “neat” rather than “cool” because I really liked it in a little kid kind of way. I didn’t feel like I was in somebody’s backyard or even Ann Arbor anymore, but some magical woods, like Winnie the Pooh’s Hundred Acre Woods. I kept walking through this whole thing and finally there was Jake sitting at a round table with a glass top part with the Battle of the Bulge game set up on it.

Jake, sitting at the table looking at the board, saw me and waved his hand.

“You guys got a super neat backyard”, I said. He nodded.

“Yeah”, he said, “I like it back here. It’s like my own little world.”

I smelled a familiar smell that I hadn’t smelled in a long time, and memories filled my mind of playing in Allmendinger Park. I looked around and all the bushes around us were green with those bunches of little purple flowers, lilac bushes.

“Anyway”, he said, looking at the gameboard, “I put all the units on the U.S. and German order of appearance sheets and then put the U.S. ‘At Start’ units on the board. And now I’ve been looking at the best way for the Germans to set up their units to attack. There are different strategies.” I nodded.

He was right, there were different strategies. I had done the same thing with the game many times. Set it up on the table in our room or under the bed. Put the U.S. units where the Order of Appearance chart said they should go and then tried to set up the Germans in the best possible way for them to attack and try to break through.

“Yeah, I know”, I said, “When I first set it up I always thought the Germans should put most of their units in the south and capture Clervaux and try to get to Bastogne as quickly as possible, but you have to get across those two rivers so the U.S. just retreats and guards the bridges. But the last couple times I was setting it up I was looking at maybe attacking most in the north instead, at that open part where Losheim is.”

“The Losheim Gap”, he said, nodding, pointing to it on the board. “Did you see the Battle of the Bulge movie?” I nodded.

I’d seen it with dad and David, though mom had been worried about us seeing a violent war movie watching so many soldiers getting killed. After the movie, dad said it didn’t seem that realistic, though I thought it was neat to see all those tanks rolling through the woods and crashing down trees. He said it was way too “Hollywood”.

“It was kind of stupid”, I said to Jake, “Though it was neat watching all those tanks.”

“Stupid, I know”, he said, “MY dad said that those were all American tanks painted gray to look like they were German.”

“Anyway”, he said, “I think doing the big German attack in the north around Losheim and Saint Vith is the German’s best way to try to win. I know they’re the badguys, but just figuring out what’s the best strategy, you know.”

I nodded. I had thought about that too. In all the wargames that were about real wars there was usually one side that was the goodguys and the other was the badguys. But if you played the game so the goodguys always won, then that wasn’t very interesting, so not very fun. When you played these games by yourself you had to play BOTH sides, so what was most interesting was trying to move, attack and defend with the goodguy units the best possible way when you were doing their turn, but then trying to move, attack and defend with the badguy units the best possible way when doing theirs. That made it more interesting because you didn’t know who was going to win. I mean who wanted to watch a sports game where you knew which side was going to win.

“Yeah”, I said, “If you don’t know who’s going to win and you try the best for each side it’s more interesting, and if it’s more interesting it’s more fun.” He nodded, really fast, like that was the same as what he was thinking.

“So which side do you want to play?” he asked.

I thought about those times back at my old house in the basement where my friend Paul and I tried to play the Avalon Hill D-Day game together, each of us playing a different side. Sometimes the moves would take a long time for one side and the one of us playing the other side would just have to sit there and wait. What we usually ended up doing was playing both sides together. And when Molly and I would play with soldiers and dinosaurs, we would kind of play both sides together too, just trying to figure out the most interesting things that could happen.

“You know”, I said, “I think it’s more fun if we play both sides together.”

“What?” he said, “But it’s a game, you’re supposed to play against each other.”

I thought about Mike and our Little League game between his Huron Valley team and our Tube Benders team, and how Billy and Stuart really wanted to beat the other team so bad, but Mike just wanted it to be a good game.

“Yeah”, I said, “But we don’t HAVE to.” He didn’t say anything and just thought about that.

Finally he said, “Okay, let’s do that. That way we can talk more about what we’re thinking.”

So the U.S. units were already set up on the board like it said in the Order of Appearance chart. We both looked at where they were.

“So I’ve played this beginning part lots of times”, I said, “And I think it works best for the Germans to make their main attack up here in the north around Saint Vith, because there’s no rivers there in your way except the Our River. So on the first turn the Germans should attack these three units and eliminate these two and at least try to make the third one retreat.”

“Yeah”, he said, nodding, “I think so too. There are too many rivers and rough terrain in the way if you attack in the south towards Bastogne.” Then he looked at that north part of the board and was thinking.

“But if you JUST do that”, he said, “Then all those U.S. units lined up on the road next to Monschau up at the top here can go on the road through Malmedy and Stavelot and get to Saint Vith to help defend it. And if so, the unit that WAS in Saint Vith can be moved here to defend on the other side of that bridge over the Our right by Saint Vith, and then the Germans need to take a whole other turn to get their units from the middle section over the river.”

“So you think they should attack Monschau too?” I asked. He shook his head.

“No”, he said, “Because it takes too many units to get a three to one attack against Monschau because the defender is doubled in the city, and the other U.S. units on the road next to Monschau can move over to the other road and then use that road to use the rest of their movement factor to get over here west of Saint Vith, where they can help block the German advance.”

“But you can only move one square through rough terrain”, I said, “So they couldn’t use the road until the next turn.” He shook his head.

“That’s not how it works”, he said, and he grabbed the “Basic Game” instructions and opened it to the page that had the “Rough Terrain” section. It was rule number “8” in that section that talked about that. He read it to me…

8. Units beginning their Turn on non-road rough terrain squares may move one square onto a rough terrain road square and then move along the road in the same Turn. They may not, however, move off the road onto another rough terrain square in that turn.

“Hmm”, I said, “I forgot that rule.”

Then I looked at that part of the board and said, “But those units are on rough terrain squares WITH a road, so those aren’t ‘non-road rough terrain squares’.”

“Yeah”, he said, “That’s true, but it’s a DIFFERENT road! The road doesn’t go from the hex they’re in to the one they want to move to, so I figure it’s LIKE a non-road rough terrain square.”

“Yeah, I guess so”, I said, “Why would having a road in your rough terrain square make it harder to move to another rough terrain square next to you and use a different road.” I shook my head and stared at the board.

“Sometimes the rules are confusing”, he said, “Or don’t exactly cover the situation you have! So you have to figure out what makes the most sense.” I nodded.

“So”, he said, “If the Germans attack this unit two squares down the road from Monschau, which is not in rough terrain so It’s not doubled, and you attack it at at least six to one odds, then you can’t roll a Contact or Engaged and you’ll either eliminate it or make it retreat and get to advance into its square.”

He looked at me and said, “I like the Tournament Game Battle Results Table better than the Basic Game one, don’t you?” I nodded.

“Oh yeah”, I said, “I mean even the Basic Game Battle Results Table in this game is so much better than the regular Combat Results Table in the other Avalon Hill games like D-Day, where most of the dice roles end up eliminating all the units on one side or even both sides.”

“I KNOW!” he said, nodding, “In both of these tables there are a lot more retreats than eliminations, and the Engaged and Contact results make it more interesting.”

“Yeah”, I said, “So you don’t lose most of the units you use for soak-off attacks.”

“Yeah”, he said, ”And the Tournament Game Table has that result of Contact where nothing happens, and both sides can reinforce an Engaged result. And I especially like the results where the attacker can advance more than one square.”

“Me too”, I said. We both finally stopped talking about the Battle Results Table and got back to planning the Germans’ first move.

“So once the German units advance into that square”, he said, “The two U.S. units north of that square, along with the unit you attacked that gets retreated to here, can’t use the road to Malmedy to escape. AND, if the German attack against this unit between Losheim and Elsenborn, at five to one or six to one, gets an attacker advance more than one result, then you can move attacking units into or next to Elsenborn, and these other three U.S. units between Elsenborn and Monschau are stuck too, and can’t escape and help with the defense next turn around Saint Vith.”

I looked at the board where he was pointing and said, “Oh yeah… wow!”

“And”, I said, “If you surround that one US unit on the east side of the Our and this other one ON the river, and attack this first one at at least six to one and the other at at least three to one, then you will for sure eliminate the first one because it can’t retreat, and the other, even if you just roll a Contact, won’t be able to move, because it’ll be surrounded. Then in the U.S. turn it will have to counterattack at one-to-five odds, and since it can’t retreat, it will be eliminated too and won’t slow down the Germans at all.”

“Forgive me you two hard at work generals”, his mom’s voice surprised us, “But I brought you out some lemonade.” She had come around the lilac bush holding two glasses with yellow liquid and ice cubes in them. We each took a glass.

“Thank you, mother”, Jake said. I figured I should say thank you too.

“Thanks Mrs MacNeil”, I said. She did a big smile. I noticed that she didn’t say to call her by her first name like MY mom would have.

“You’re both welcome”, she said, “I’m so glad Jacob has at least one friend who enjoys these Avalon Hill games as much as he does.” Then she looked at Jake and asked, “Don’t any of your school friends like to play these games?” Jake looked kind of mad, like he didn’t like his mom asking him that.

“No, mother”, he said, rolling his eyes.

“Well”, she said, clapping her hands once, “At least you have your friend Cooper. I’ll leave you two generals alone to continue conquering the world!” She smiled at me again, turned and walked away behind the big lilac bushes back towards the house. Jake looked at me like he was embarrassed about what his mom said.

“None of MY school friends like to play these wargames either”, I said to him, “None of them even know I play them. Well, except for my friend Mike, but he doesn’t like to play them.”

“Hunh”, Jake said, thinking about that, “Why not?”

“He thinks wars are pretty sad and stupid”, I said, “He thinks some of them, like World War Two, had to be fought to beat Hitler, but it was still sad and stupid.”

“Hunh”, Jake said again, “My dad and your dad fought in the war. What about his dad?”

“His dad was in army intelligence”, I said.

“Wow!” he said, looking at me like that was really interesting, “Was his dad a secret agent?”

“No”, I said, shaking my head, “He tried to figure out what the Germans were planning and also how to keep the Germans from finding out what the Allies were planning. Secret codes and stuff like that.”

“Wow”, Jake said again.

So sipping our lemonade on a hot summer day with the smell of sweet lilac bushes around us, we made the Germans first move of their units in the Battle of the Bulge game, focusing their attack on the north, but using those same tricks we used in the north to pin U.S. units in the south part of the board too, so they couldn’t use the roads to escape the front line and get back in front of the advancing Germans. It was December 16, 1944. There were two turns a day, A.M. and P.M., for 15 days, including Christmas, for a total of 30 turns. I liked that each turn was such a short time, twelve hours, nothing more. I thought of all the soldiers, never stopping, never really sleeping, dead tired, but better THAT than ACTUALLY dead.

So the Germans did break through at first around Saint Vith, but by the December 17 P.M. turn, two U.S. armored divisions and the 1st Infantry division had reinforced the battle and it was looking better for the goodguys. But then on the next turn, December 18 A.M., a four-to-one German attack west of Clervaux against a U.S. armored brigade rolled a two, the best possible roll for the Germans, because they could retreat the U.S. unit FOUR squares and advance all their units THREE. That let them surround another U.S. armored division, capture Houffalize, and get a German armored regiment within three squares of Bastogne. But in the U.S. half of the turn, they were able to get the two U.S. parachute divisions, EIGHT whole regiments, finally there to defend Bastogne.

Jake and I spent A LOT of time on each turn figuring out all the different ways we could move German and then U.S. units in the best possible way. Sometimes we had the same idea, but sometimes we had different ideas and we would have an “argument” about it, that’s what mom would call it, until we agreed, or one of us let the other “win” the argument. So by the time Jake’s mom said we had to stop playing, because they were going out for dinner, we had only gotten to the December 24 A.M. turn, the day before Christmas and the 17th turn of the game, with 13 turns more to go.

The Germans had done pretty good, they had captured Bastogne, crossed the Ourthe River, and even captured the Dinant fortress on the Meuse river. But in the “How to Win” section of the rules it said…

GERMAN player wins if he either: (a) gets any 20 Units across the Meuse River between S-16 and A-47 inclusive by his December 23 P.M. Turn, or (b) eliminates all U.S. Units from the Mapboard. Units yet to come on would also be considered eliminated.

U.S. player wins if he avoids the German condition of victory by his December 30 P.M. Turn.

The Germans had only gotten a few units across the Meuse river by the December 23 P.M. turn, but they still had a chance to eliminate all U.S. units on the map, but neither of us were sure they’d be able to do that.

***

I was over at Vincent’s house, across and just down the street from ours. It was more like an apartment really, like the place dad was living in now on Henry Street by the A and P. You went in the front door into a living room with a doorway to a kitchen in the back and doorways to two small bedrooms and a bathroom on the left. It didn’t even have a basement, so it didn’t seem like a real house, because real houses had basements.

Vincent and his mom lived there, but he didn’t seem to have a dad. Maybe HIS mom and dad were divorced like mine, or maybe his dad was away all the time working, or even dead. But he and his mom never said anything about him having a dad, and I never asked, because then they might ask about my dad, and I never wanted to talk with other people about mom and dad being divorced. Vincent’s mom was even friends with my mom, and had been to a couple of mom’s parties at the house, so I worried that mom might have told her that she and dad were divorced, but Vincent’s mom had never said anything to me.

Vincent and I were sitting on the living room floor, and we were setting up my Avalon Hill Midway game so I could show him how to play it with me. Vincent’s mom was sitting at the living room table, that was against a wall so she could use it like a desk, doing some kind of work.

Unlike the Avalon Hill army wargames, like D-Day and Battle of the Bulge, the naval wargames, like Midway and Bismarck, you couldn’t really play by yourself. You needed another player, because you weren’t supposed to know where the other side’s ships were, and you had to search for them and try to find them before you could attack them. In the naval games, each side had their own map where they put and moved their ships, and you couldn’t see the other side’s map and where their ships were. It was kind of like that Battleship game, only a lot more complicated and a lot more fun.

Luckily, I had found out that Vincent liked to play the naval wargames. He was a year younger than me so he wasn’t like one of my regular school friends, even though he went to the Burns Park school, because he was only in the fourth grade when I was in sixth grade. I was a year younger than most of my regular school friends, because I’d skipped kindergarten a long time ago. But since my regular friends and I were all in the same grade, they didn’t think about me being a year younger, if they even knew. If I HADN’T skipped kindergarten, I would have been a fifth grader and they probably wouldn’t even play with me, and I wouldn’t have been on the same baseball teams as them. MIKE knew I was younger, he seemed to know everything, but like my other secret, that my mom and dad were divorced, he didn’t tell anybody.

Just like at my old school, Bach School, kids in different grades than you were like on other teams. So if you were in the sixth grade, like my regular friends and I had been, then the kids in fifth grade were way younger and didn’t know as much. You might talk to them, but they weren’t your regular friends, and you might not even remember their names. And if a kid was in FOURTH GRADE, then you definitely weren’t friends with them, they were still stupid little kids compared to us sixth graders. Mike didn’t feel that way, but all of my other regular school friends did.

All the younger kids who lived close to us on our street, like Al and Gus and Arnold, played with my brother David sometimes. Al and Gus were the same age as David, and had been in his second grade class, so they were two of HIS regular friends. Arnold was a year older, so he had been in the third grade class. Vincent had been in the fourth grade class, but he played with all of the rest of them, including David. One day all of them had come over to our house to listen to the new Beatles album we had got, “Yesterday and Today”, that David really liked and had told them about. I was there too, playing my new Battle of the Bulge game on the big green table in our bedroom. The other younger kids looked at it for a minute, but Vincent was really interested, and when he saw that it was an Avalon Hill game, he told me he had an Avalon Hill game too, called “U-Boat”, which was the German word for submarine.

I had seen the U-Boat game at Riders, but it wasn’t as interesting to me as the other games, because it didn’t have a map of a real place, and it only had six units. But Vincent really wanted to show it to me, and David and all the younger neighborhood kids were all talking loud and being annoying, so I went with Vincent over to his house and he showed me the game and we played it. He invited me over a couple other times to play it again. I liked playing the games at his house instead of mine, in case some of my regular friends came over to my house and wanted me to play in a pickup game in the park, so they didn’t see I was playing with a FOURTH GRADER!

Then one time I brought over my Avalon Hill Bismarck game to his house, which I showed him how to play and we played. He agreed it was more fun, because it had real historical ships and a real map of the North Atlantic Ocean, Great Britain and the coast of Western Europe. He had played the German side at first, because they only had two ships, the Bismarck and the Prince Eugen, and not a whole bunch of ships like the British. The Germans just had to try to get their two ships from the German port of Kiel through the North Atlantic around Great Britain and to one of the French ports of Brest, Saint Nazaire or Bordeaux, without getting found and sunk by the British. The British had to break their big navy up into smaller “task forces” so they could search more places for the two German ships.

I remembered that song that had been on the radio when I was a little kid when we lived back at our old house…

In May of nineteen forty-one the war had just begun
The Germans had the biggest ship, they had the biggest guns
The Bismarck was the fastest ship that ever sailed the sea
On her deck were guns as big as steers and shells as big as trees

I remembered that boys in Allmendinger Park who liked to talk about World War Two and argue about which country had the best tanks, fighter planes or bombers, would also argue about what was the best battleship, the German’s Bismarck or the Japanese’s Yamato. The Yamato had thicker armor and bigger guns, but the Bismarck was faster and had a longer range.

So Vincent was really smart and he figured out stuff quickly, and he reminded me of me when I was ten years old and first played my D-Day game. He also figured out that I didn’t want my regular friends to find out that I played with him, so if he wanted to play wargames with me, instead of coming over to my house and maybe accidentally running into my regular friends, he would call me on the phone and then I would come over.

Though Midway was a naval game like Bismarck, it was kind of different because the battles weren’t between ships but between ships and airplanes. I had read in books about World War Two that there were special kinds of planes that were built to just attack enemy ships. Some were called “dive bombers” and others were called “torpedo bombers”, and they were both carried on aircraft carriers along with special kinds of naval fighter planes. And most of the biggest naval battles in the Pacific between the U.S. and the Japanese had planes from aircraft carriers attacking the aircraft carriers and other ships of the other side.

I had read that, in May of 1942, five months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. got into the war against Japan and Germany, the first battle like that in the Pacific between the Japanese and the U.S. was the Battle of Coral Sea, where Japanese carrier planes badly damaged the U.S. carrier Lexington, and the U.S. carrier planes sank the Japanese carrier Shoho and damaged the Shokaku. But the ships on both sides never got close enough to shoot at each other, it was only planes from each side’s carriers that attacked the ships on the other side. Though the Japanese sank more ships, the U.S. made the Japanese fleet retreat and kept them from capturing Port Moresby.

The next big naval battle, Midway, was one month later, and was the most famous naval battle of World War Two, which I guess is why Avalon Hill made a game about it. The Japanese were trying to capture Midway Island and had a really big fleet with a bunch of battleships, cruisers, and SIX aircraft carriers, four big ones and two small ones. The U.S. just had some cruisers and three carriers. Just like the Coral Sea battle, the ships never shot at each other, it was just the planes from the aircraft carriers. At the end of the battle, the U.S. had sunk ALL FOUR big Japanese carriers, and the Japanese had only sunk one, the Yorktown.

I had read that in the real battle, the U.S. got lucky and figured out the code the Japanese were using, so they figured out where the Japanese fleet was and did a surprise attack with planes that sank those four carriers. But in the Midway game you didn’t have to play it that way, and maybe the Japanese could find and surprise the U.S. fleet first instead.

So like the Bismarck game, each side had their own mapboard that the other side couldn’t see, because the game came with this cardboard screen that you put up between the two. Then you separated your fleet of ships into “task forces”, and you had units for each one of those task forces that you moved around on your mapboard. Then you would do “searches” with special search planes from your task forces, plus the U.S. could also do searches with planes from Midway island, which were those giant “seaplanes” that could fly farther and search areas of the mapboard farther away.

So in the Bismarck game, if you were playing the British, you mostly searched with your ships, and if they found the Bismarck then they would have what they called a “surface” battle, where the ships shot at each other. But in Midway, you searched with planes, so if they found the enemy ships, then you could attack them with those dive bombers, torpedo bombers and fighters from any of your aircraft carriers that were “in range”, that is close enough to get to that square.

Vincent was really smart, so even though he was ten he figured out how to play pretty good. He played the U.S., which was easier for him because he didn’t have as many ships and it was easier to try to defend, than figure out a good plan of attack for the Japanese. I played the Japanese, which I actually LIKED playing because they had more ships and more planes, and it was fun trying to figure out how to do better than the real Japanese did in the real war, even though they were the badguys.

I ended up winning that game, because I kind of tricked Vincent by letting him find, attack and sink my two small carriers, but that helped me figure out where HIS three carriers were, and I was able to attack them, sink two of them, and damage the third. Then I was able to get to Midway Island, invade, and capture it, which gave me fifteen extra points. Even though he didn’t win that first time, he liked the game a lot, and he said that he would save his allowance money to buy the game, and Bismarck too, or get his mom to buy them for him for Christmas.

But if the Japanese in the real war had done what I had done when I played Vincent, sinking two of his carriers and badly damaging the third, plus capturing Midway Island, maybe they could have gone on to attack Pearl Harbor again and capture that TOO! That would have made World War Two in the Pacific really different. I don’t know if they could have won the war, because the U.S. was a giant country and Japan was just an island, but it would have been much harder for the U.S. to win.

***

So Jake and Vincent were my secret wargaming friends that my regular friends didn’t know about. I thought that was kind of cool because me and all my regular friends had had secret clubs all year, but I had my own special secret stuff from all of them.

But there WAS another strategy type game that one of my regular friends had. Frankie had the Avalon Hill LeMans car racing game, and I’d played it a couple times over at his house, with him and Stuart and some of my other regular friends. It wasn’t super complicated, but it was neat how it worked with each kind of car you could race being different.

Each car had six “gears” and a number of spaces on the racing track it could go in each gear, and could only shift up one gear each turn. And each car had rules about how many gears it could shift down in one turn that were different for the different “classes” of cars.

There were four classes, “C”, “D”, “E” and “F”. The “Class C” cars – Jaguar, Corvette and Ferrari – were the fastest, but they had the hardest time shifting down and braking, like before they went through a turn, because if you went through a turn too fast, you would spin out, or at least had a chance to spin out. The “Class F” cars – MG, Cooper and Lotus – were the slowest, but they had the easiest time shifting down and braking. The “Class D” and “Class E” cars were kind of in the middle, not as fast as the “C” ones, but not able to shift down or brake as easily as the “F” ones.

The gameboard had two very different tracks you could do your race on. The “LeMans” track, had long straightaways and and only five turns, three of them were those sharper “hairpin” turns. The “Monte Carlo” track had shorter straightaways and more turns, eight, and four of them were hairpins. So the faster, “Class C” cars seemed to do best on the LeMans track and the easier to gear down “Class F” cars on the Monte Carlo track.

So even though I played the game with Frankie and my other regular friends, I still wouldn’t tell them that I played the Avalon Hill wargames. I had never heard any of them talk about playing any of those wargames. Some had played that Risk game, but still, I wasn’t going to take any chances that they’d think I was weird.

I was happy to have my “secret life”, playing wargames by myself, or with my two secret friends, Jake and Vincent, imagining I was a general or an admiral, maybe changing the course of history. It wasn’t the fighting part that I liked the most, it was the other stuff that was part of all these games. It was the maps of different parts of the world that I had to figure out how to get across. It was all the different units and ships, some faster, some stronger, some that could do special things. And it also was all the ways they made each game feel more real, and using thinking and strategy, and not just whether you could roll the dice better. All the rules, the charts, and the “terrain” that affected how you could move or defend in a battle, and how the turns worked. It was kind of a different way of pretending stuff, using maps and charts and rules and little squares of cardboard units with stuff printed on them. And I was starting to think about making my own wargames, with my own maps, charts, rules and units.