Above the Trenches
Design Essays

Bloody April: Establishing the Order of Battle

The former was supposed to be a quick-to-produce closeup look at the quest for better fighters. I think it succeeded in everything except the "quick" part -- development took much longer than I expected.

The latter is a storyboarding aide that took on a life of its own. Indeed even now it's not actually done, but it's far enough along that I can put it aside for a bit and return to Above the Trenches.

So I left off sketching out the combat resolution system. However, I now think that going further without reference to the historical situation is unlikely to be fruitful. So let's take a look at the most famous part of the air war, Bloody April. This was during the spring of 1917, when the Royal Flying Corps was called on to support the Arras offensive. Still mostly equipped with obsolescent types, and facing an enemy armed with modern Albatros fighters, the RFC took a fearful beating.

As is often the case, the French role is usually ignored, but this was also the time of Nivelle's Aisne Offensive, which was futile enough to spark mutiny in the French Army.

Here's the situation on April 15th, courtesy of my map:

Things are a little hard to make out due to the poor resolution of computer screens, but it will do for our purposes. I added the British wing command names to satisfy my own curiosity, as given the game scale it works out that each counter is about wing-sized (four squadrons).

The first thing that jumps out at me is that 5, 13, and 35 squadrons look rather misplaced near St. Quentin. Double checking their location (Savy) on Google does seem to indicate that this position is right, though.

I've added the squadron airplane types in bright blue. Here's a guide to what they represent and how they are rated in Above the Trenches terms:

I can't find exact details of what the Jastas were equipped with, but in general there were many Albatros D.IIs (F3), leavened with some slightly better Albatros D.IIIs (still F3) as well as some Halberstadt D.IIs (F2).

In the final game these values should be adjusted by pilot ratings and aces, but those will be topics for later essays. Let's see what happens with the raw values.

The brown-red lines show the geographical divisions of the map; from left to right: Ypres, Arras, Somme, Aisne, and Champagne. Off map to the right are Verdun and Nancy.

Arriving at game dispositions is then a question of noting the numbers and dividing by four. The only tough bit is the Army and HQ wings, with their mixtures of fighters and bombers. It seems to make sense to round the HQ wing in favor of bombers, and the Army wings in favor of fighters.

I have no information handy for the non-Jasta German squadrons, but let's run with what we've got. My analysis results in the following:

On the face of it, getting historical results may be a little difficult. I've got two ideas in that regard.

First, the quality of the British pilots was often below par due to inadequate training, pilots being rushed into the expanded Royal Flying Corps. Treating some of the F2s as F1s is probably not unreasonable.

Second, perhaps some attention to combat sequencing will help out.