I first came across the Battle of Ortona in a brief discussion about mouseholeing in Anthony King’s recent Urban Warfare book. My interest was really piqued though by an episode of John Spencer’s Urban Warfare Podcast from the Modern Warfare Institute (MWI) at West Point where he interviewed Jayson Geroux (a Canadian and now also at MWI) about his Masters Thesis on Ortona. The battle occurred as the Canadians raced up the east coast of Italy late in 1943 trying to get to the Gustav line, which ran from Rome to the east coast. The Allies thought it terminated at the Arielli River, and so thought that Ortona would be a minor mopping up operation. But having taken 2 days to cover a few hundred yards they realised that Ortona itself was the eastern anchor of the line. It really did seem to be the archetypal WW2 urban battle with combined arms, narrow streets, mouseholeing, fires, flame, boobytraps and snipers; and all fought over 7 days in Christmas 1943. Not wishing to reinvent the wheel I did a quick Google search and found that High Flying Dice Games in Canada (run by Paul Rohrborough, a friend of Philip Sabin) did a game – Christmas in Hell (CiH). I duly ordered it and thought it might be a good game to take to COW as I only had a couple of months to get something ready.
My first play through was a bit of a disaster. A long exchange of emails for clarifications with Paul improved things on the next run through, but there were a number of elements that I thought were getting in the way of a good game. And needless to say the more I started modding it the more changes I wanted to make – hence the gradual shift from v1.1 to v1.5! By the end I think the only things remaining from the original game were the events chits drawn for the German AI (this is fundamentally a solo game), the close assault rules, and the rubble! The rubble was why I stuck with the game rather than chose something else. It has a really simple way of representing the way in which a town (and particularly historically Ortona) becomes choked with rubble when it’s the subject of a full-on fight, and how that rubble really impedes mobility. The other thing I really liked was that when I’d played other random chit based solo games (such as Battle for Ramadi and The Battle of Hue – both from Tiny Battle Publishing) there were different pots for each chit type – so it was very consistent (and boring) in what you’d be up against. CiH’s single pot meant that things were more random (odd sometimes but that’s fine), and the use of dummy chits and different number of chits dependent on when you where in the battle all added to the variety.
The main changes I made to Christmas in Hell were:
• The map. The CiH map is a fairly abstract collection of buildings that sort of give some sense of the shape and density changes in Ortona, but without actually looking like it. Using a contemporary aerial reconnaissance photo and Canadian sketch from Jayson’s MA (and some useful clarifications from Jayson himself) I hacked the Open Streetmap map of modern Ortona back to something like its 1943 version.
• The grid. CiH covered the town in about 35 areas in an irregular grid. Ever since I saw Storm Over Arnhem it struck me that irregular grids were the way to go with urban games. However the grid bore no relation to the underlying terrain, and even included big green areas that in real life are cliff-sides and were totally unusable in the battle! It also struck me that any urban grid should separate the main thoroughfares out into their own long areas, so you get the variety of fighting along those main routes (which in Ortona were the only places that tanks could go) and the more close-quarters fights in the side-streets. So I did a new map with about double the areas, and with tank symbols to show which areas tanks could move in, and fire into. I also gave each area a Protection Value (PV) to represent the density and solidity of the buildings in the area.
• The unit scale. CiH uses platoon manoeuvre units, each rolling typically 4 dice in combat. There are 8 companies involved in the main fight – 24 platoons. The CiH grid gives you a frontage of about 5 areas, so that’s about 5 platoons per areas (20 dice!) before you add tanks and machine guns! Quite apart from all the dice the board gets VERY crowded. The accounts of the battle are very much Company based, and so I decided that that made sense of the game, 25% less counters and dice at a stroke.
• The fire combat system. CiH had separate rolls for anti-tank and anti-personnel fire and then an extra roll when using tanks or anti-tank guns to see if more rubble had been created. I kept forgetting to use the anti-tank rules, and even in the Bath Spa play test I kept forgetting to use the rubble rules. So I came up with the idea of having a single roll but using white dice for HE/AT and green dice for small arms. The number of dice (starting with green) then get reduced for Protection Value and Rubble. When rolling the dice (5s for Infantry hits, 6 for tanks/guns) any double increases rubble by 1, and any triple or multiple doubles by 2. I’m pretty happy with the system as one throw takes care of something that needed 3 throws in CiH, and all seems pretty elegant.
• Six Pounders. The Canadians in CiH only have MG counters, not 6pdrs, even though the German’s get Pak counters. This seemed odd as the histories of the battle, and the quotes from participants are full of praise for the 6 pounders. They were man-handled everywhere, over rubble piles too bit for tanks and even up onto 2nd and 3rd storeys! They were described by one soldier as "anti-rubble, anti-sniper and anti-house" weapons. So in re-doing all the Canadian counters I added in the 6 pounders.
There were a lot of other smaller game changes, but I think those were the main ones. The two other things I added were more about the narrative of the battle.
Ortona is nicely contained both geographically and narratively, and the fact that Christmas happens mid-battle just adds to the story. So for each turn (morning, afternoon, night) I did a short piece of narrative, mostly drawn from memoirs, of the battle, and usually tied to some specific game mechanic or phase.
Christmas needed something special. A famous photo of the battle shows the soldiers of the Seaforths sitting down as a big square table in a ruined church for Christmas dinner. There are debates about the true provenance of the photo, but there is no doubt that the dinner did take place. But the Loyal Eddies were told by their CO to have a shorter and less sumptuous dinner just behind their positions, and some section leaders refused to let their men go anywhere lest they got killed (as some did coming back from the dinner). So I gave each player a set of 4 options for Christmas day – a big dinner, a small dinner, staying put, or attacking as normal. Once revealed those who went for dinners would have to suffer a one or two rounds of mortar fire, whilst those who go on the attack find that everything is at -1 as the soldiers’ hearts just weren’t in it.
Note: Having just played Storm Over Arnhem I realise how much Christmas in Hell owes to that game, not just the area map but also the close combat system and a few other mechanics. That said the AI and rubble are all CiH's home and the rubble in particular makes it feel "urban" in a way that Storm over Arnhem doesn't acheive.
So how did it go on the day. I had five players, a CO for each of the Loyal Eddies, Seaforths and the Three Rivers’ Shermans, and two assistants for the German AI.
It was the first in-person COW game I’d run and whilst I knew it would be a push to get close to running all 15 turns in 2 hours I really should have guessed that a COW group would spend far longer discussing things and asking questions than we did in our play test. In the end I think we only just got to Christmas day – so at least we could have the session with the Christmas cards! The rules were a lot more complex than those of the other games I played at COW (a lesson for the future), and so learning them on the hoof took more time – but certainly people were picking them up by the end. I’d decided that it would be nice to have rule summaries and counter legends around the edge of the A1 map, but in practice the areas were already quite small, and that meant even less space for them, and the suggestion that next time I use the whole of the A1 for the map is one I’ll certainly follow. Alex had a useful keen eye for where the very compressed QRS lacked clarity and also identified some other rules improvements (such as it being successively easier to de-mine an area).
Overall though I think that everyone enjoyed it, and I think it certainly gives a good feel for how a town soon becomes choked with rubble as you fight through it with heavy weapons – reducing any ability to quickly move forces between axes or to respond to infiltrations as we had happen towards the end – and that I think was really the objective and focus of my game rather than any other particular aspect of urban combat.
As for the future I’m likely to develop the game in two ways. The first is to turn it into a more generic set of urban rules, particularly for WW2, so as to use with other smaller urban battles. I might also aim for a 6 turn limit, so Ortona would be played in day turns, shorter battles still at 4 hours, or even 2 hours. The second is to make it more abstract so it’s a fight for “anytown”, and use a card-based system to generate a random street to fight down, but with otherwise the same mechanics. That could give a nice introduction to urban combat that can be played quickly (and even competitively) in 30 minutes or so. Perhaps I’ll take that along to COW2023, because having run my first COW game I certainly want to run more.
My thanks to Graham, Alex, Alan, Ed and Ed for putting up with the fiddly counters, for all the constructive advice and for being patient with a novice GM!
Bibliography:
Chiavini, R. Christmas in Hell. [Game]. Canada: High Flying Dice Games. Available at: http://www.hfdgames.com/ortona.html
Geroux, J. (2021). Italian Stalingrad: The Battle of Ortona. [Podcast] Interview with J. Spencer. Urban Warfare Podcast. USA: Modern Warfare Institute. Available at: https://mwi.usma.edu/italian-stalingrad-the-battle-of-ortona/
Geroux, J. (2021). The Urban Battle of Ortona. Masters Thesis. Canada: University of New Brunswick. Available at: https://unbscholar.lib.unb.ca/islandora/object/unbscholar%3A10433
Gooderson, I. (2008). Assimilating Urban Battle Experience – The Canadians at Ortona. Canadian Military Journal, Winter 2007-2008. Canada: National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. Available at: http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo8/no4/doc/gooderso-eng.pdf
King, A. (2021). Urban Warfare. London: Polity.
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