Tag Archives: Military history

Welcome to Cold Steel Games!

Welcome to Cold Steel Games! This is a fork of my main blog Themself to split out the military history and game related stuff from the reading and writing that has come to dominate it over the last two or three years.

Why Cold Steel?

It’s a re-purposing of a domain I’ve held for a decade that was originally used for hosting a game design of a WW1 game about night patrols in no man’s land called ‘Hot Blood & Cold Steel’. The game still exists, and I’ll be adding a page with the contents of the old website (spruced up a bit) and a link to download the Hot Blood & Cold Steel game rules and printable tiles.

Posts here will be ocassional rather than to a fixed schedule (Themself typically has posts Monday, Wednesday and Friday every week). All of them will be game or military history related, and I intend to stick with that. Some of the posts here will probably be re blogged on Themself as well, keeping it a one stop shop for all my public writing.

You’ll probably notice that there are already a load of articles here. I imported all the relevant stuff from Themself so that all my military and game related material is here, apart from the stuff over on my Full Moon Games wiki.

All that remains is to write more wargaming stuff!

Allies at Dieppe – 4 Commando and the US Rangers by Will Fowler

This is an excellent history of a small unit action set in the wider context of the war, and well explained for those not steeped in military history or the second world war.

Lord Lovat, Newhaven, 1942 IWM caption : THE DIEPPE RAID, 19 AUGUST 1942 Lt Col The Lord Lovat, CO of No. 4 Commando, at Newhaven after returning from the raid. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The author starts with setting the background, explaining the grand sweep of the war and the events that lead to the formation of the commandos in mid-1940 and then a high-level overview of the commando training and the early operations so that you understand what commandos are all about, and the strategic context that lead to the assault on Dieppe in late summer 1942.

The build up to the attack is well covered, based heavily on the account by the embedded journalist that accompanied 4 Commando. After that the assault narrative splits into two, one for each of the groups that landed, and based on a mixture of accounts and interviews with various survivors of the operation.

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