North Africa: Support For Your FOW Desert Germans
By Richard Steer
A lot of the focus on the upcoming North Africa release for Flames of War has been on the new units that have been added, and the historical units that haven’t been. This is understandable because as gamers we love having new toys to play with. One area that I haven’t seen much discussion about is the force charts in the book and the way that the source material for the compilation has been combined. In particular, the German support options have some subtle structural changes that are worth taking a closer look at.
The original Afrika Korps book had a relatively simple support tree, with most unit slots containing just a single option. Afrika Korps was the first German book to be published for V4, and as new books were released expanding the Mid-War German forces into other theatres, the question about how the books could be combined became complicated, to the point that Battlefront had to address how each book interacted with the other books via multiple entries in the Lessons From The Front FAQ.
Fallschirmjäger were added to Mid-War through the Death From Above booklet, with a self-contained force chart that had very little crossover with the other German books. It had a very restrictive support tree, for example with the force’s three anti-tank gun options all occupying the same unit slot. The wording of the Formation Support box was unusual: it allowed the use of compulsory FJ units as Formation Support for other German Forces, but didn’t say anything about bringing in Black Box units to support the FJ themselves.
North Africa shakes up Mid-War German forces by combining these two sources into a single force chart, as well as adding the units from the 90th Light Division boxed set. This clarifies the question about what units from other books are valid options, as well as presenting players with a wider number of support options to choose from.
The first thing to note is that there is no restriction on what Formations you need to take in order to be able to field different support units. Without such a restriction, you are free to mix and match between DAK and Fallschirmjäger units in a way that wasn’t possible with the previous books. For example the Fallschirmjäger company now has access to the full range of DAK support.
It is worth taking a closer look at the anti-tank options on the left-hand side of the chart.
The Diana remains in the same slots it was in with the 90th Light list, being an alternative to the Marder 7.62cm and/or the Tiger. The Fallschirmjäger Marder II has been added to the same slot as the Marder 7.62cm. The 5cm Tank-Hunter Platoon is now a support unit, but this is not meaningful as the unit was already available as Black Box Formation Support from the Afrika Rifle Company.
The biggest bonus for Fallschirmjäger players is that their three anti-tank gun units that previously shared a single slot are now split across two slots, increasing the amount of AT available to you if you want to keep to an FJ theme.
Moving across to the artillery units, the two Fallschirmjäger artillery batteries are added to the second artillery box, along with the Bison self-propelled infantry gun. It is still a requirement that in order to include a Fallschirmjäger Observation Post in your Force you must take either the 7.5cm Artillery Battery or the 10.5cm Recoilless Battery, so unfortunately this isn’t a backdoor to get an infantry observer team into an Afrika Korps list without also investing in some Fearless Veteran artillery.
The final piece to note is the two boxes in the bottom lefthand corner of the chart. These address the question of mixing units between books. It has been simplified down to the Formation Support units being Black Box German units that can come from either North Africa or the as yet unpublished Eastern Front compilation. Notably this now gives the Fallschirmjäger Company access to Black Box units from other German Formations. While it doesn’t allow the inclusion of entire Formations from Eastern Front, this tie-in between the books will be important as hopefully, it will allow the inclusion of some of the units that people have noted as being missing from North Africa, particularly for representing German forces in Tunisia.
The option of taking Italian units as Allied Support remains with the option of a single Black Box unit and one Formation, with the new options here being Italian paras, the P26/40, and the Semovente 75/34.
Reviewing the changes, Fallschirmjäger Companies are the main beneficiary, gaining access to Formation Support and a wider range of cheaper support units, particularly with the anti-tank and artillery options. In return, other formations can take Fallschirmjäger support units, but this isn’t as attractive because in most cases there were already existing options fulfilling the same role at a cheaper price. The two significant exceptions to this are the Fallschirm Pioneer Platoon, which could be an intriguing addition to a DAK force, and the 2cm Anti-aircraft Platoon, which provides a much more resilient alternative to the SdKfz 10/4 platoon.
These are all relatively small changes that aren’t as exciting as the addition of new models to the game, but they open up some new options for German players.