Welcome to the Rat’s Patrol, a blog about military history, research and wargaming with a focus on 20th century conflicts! I’m Ed, your host for this journey, and I’ve had an intense love of Military History since I read
War Through The Ages when I was 13. That love led to a BA in History, time in the past as both an enlisted man and officer in the US Army and a lifelong fascination with wargaming. World War 2, particularly the Russo-German conflict, will be the main focus here, but don’t be surprised if other subjects creep in! Hopefully, you’ll find some of this useful and come back to visit soon! All of this brings up the question of what this blog will provide that all of the other gaming and military history blogs don’t. While many gaming blogs are primarily painting blogs, focusing on the aesthetic aspects of miniature gaming, the focus here will be more on the underlying history and how that informs my gaming. That means sharing book reviews, highlighting useful research resources, relating my misadventures in gaming (hopefully highlighting why things went wrong!) and creating scenarios & army lists for the games I play. Since the game content will be tightly coupled to historical analysis, I hope that it will be easily portable to other systems with the same scale. As my favorite rules writers put it, I want to play the period, not the rules, so hopefully that will show through!
Rat 6 – Out!