Re-Fighting History: WWII, Boardgames, and War in the East

Georgetown University Wargaming Society (Washington DC) offers a regular series of webinars on different facets of wargaming, military history, wargame design, and assorted other topics.  The quality of the presentations and topics run the gamut of my interest level and attention span.  Tuesday's offering looks especially inviting to me with a focus on the War in the East in WWII.  With the cover of the boardgame Drang Nach Osten! (DNO later reimplemented by Fire in the East) in the event announcement, will GDW/GRD's Europa series of boardgames be included for discussion?  Perhaps Dr. Best will identify the WWII boardgame(s) that meet the military simulation threshold on value-added as effective simulation tools.  Perhaps none reach this threshold.  Can this discussion and evaluation of WWII boardgames as a simulation value be generalized to other periods and other games?  What about extending to miniature Wargaming?  I look forward to seeing what topics are in store and discovering if any boardgames meet this threshold. 

Webinar Event:

Re-fighting History: The War in the East, Boardgames, and Histories of WWII

Date/Time: 17 OCT 2023 3pm PDT 

Description

Jeremy Best will challenge the efficacy of military boardgames as accurate representations of historical conflict.  In his webinar, Dr. Jeremy Best will present early conclusions from his research into the history of military boardgames, the memory of World War II, and the limitations of military simulations for understanding war. The first modern military boardgames emerged in the late 1950s and from the very beginning the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union took center stage. Hundreds of games, thousands of scenarios have been produced – all of them claiming and aspiring to authentically recreate historical conditions. Part of the appeal of these games was that in re-fighting the battles, campaigns, even entire war players could rewrite that history. For all their efforts at accurate simulation, these games often fail as history. In the webinar, Dr. Best will discuss the ways in which games represent the Eastern Front, the blindspots of these representations, and the possible consequences of such inaccuracies. More generally, these insights lead to certain questions about the efficacy of wargames in general for understanding warfare.

 

Bio  

Jeremy Best is an associate professor of modern Europe at Iowa State University with a specific interest in the cultural history of Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current research project is a manuscript in development tentatively titled “Toy Soldiering: West German Rearmament, the Holocaust, and the United States” on the history of tabletop wargaming, Holocaust memory, and the perpetuation of the Clean Wehrmacht Myth in America and West Germany. Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire, his first book, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021. That book won the Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Prize in 2021, was named one of “Ten Outstanding Books in Mission Studies, Intercultural Theology, and World Christianity for 2021” by the International Bulletin of Mission Research, and named to the shortlist for the 2022 Waterloo Center for German Studies Book Prize. In addition to his academic work, Professor Best has worked as a public-facing historian publishing in The Washington Post, The History News Network, and Perspectives on History.

If interested but cannot make this event, GU Wargaming Society content is usually published to YouTube following the event.