With Dr Who FINALLY redeeming itself for the year after a string of frankly pretty bland offerings, AWB sits down again on a Sunday night to watch more liberties being taken with history in the name of light entertainment.
This ep of The Boffin The Builder and The Bombardier, which is apparently ep6 for those trying to follow the semi random screening order they seem to be shown in, has proved a slightly tricky one for AWB to review. On the plus side, the show finally shows some wargame figures, thereby completely vindicating AWB's decision to follow this little show for the last 8 weeks. A table full of 25s are used about mid point through the screening to give the new viewers a bit of an idea of what was actually happening in the battle they were describing, although points must be deducted as AWB is a firm believer that wargaming figures look silly with a gloss varnish.
More points are lost because the ep basically revolves around an obscure little period of European history at the start of the 19th Century that frankly is poorly documented, not very popular and of little interest to anyone. Napoleon? Never heard of him.
Okay, AWB concedes that some people MAY have heard of Napoleon, but would rather study tanks. That is the AWB mission statement and AWB will be sticking to it.
So, frantically googling to brush up on the background details, we push on with the review.
Basically our gang have got themselves a 3pdr of some sort to play with and are going to use the 1807 Battle of Friedland as an excuse to shoot it. Friedland, to paraphrase, was a battle between Russia and France that the French won and forced the Treaties of Tilsit and ended the War of the Fourth Coalition. The premise for the show was that Senarmont, then a corps artillery commander, established the principles of modern artillery by concentrating fire on a single target.
Now, as confessed before, AWB is not a shining depository of Napoleonic knowledge but some of the assumptions made here do seem very generalised and mildly misleading. A better informed description of what Senarmont did during this battle can probably be found HERE and since anything AWB is about to say was discovered from that website anyway, let us just give credit where due and direct people to the link.
What does seem to have been skipped over is the stage of the battle at which Senarmont did his party trick. The battle involved the Russians crossing over the river in order to try and smash an isolated French force and ending up being dragged into a major battle as the rest of the French army arrived. Towards evening the Russians were forced back into a constricted space with their backs to the river and it was then when Senarmont advanced his batteries and fired into the massed targets. Of minor detail not mentioned on TBCubed was the fact that Senarmont didn't do this alone, but had a battalion of infantry and four regiments of dragoons to cover him and from the accounts read by AWB, the Russians were unable or unwilling to actively counter the move forward. This sort of implies to AWB that the true conclusion to be made is not that massed firepower is a great idea (which AWB doesn't necessarily disagree with) but that aggressive use of artillery was possible or perhaps more importantly, aggressive use of a combined arms battle group was a very good and effective idea.
TBCubed rounded off the ep by showing in simple terms what happens if you break and attempt to run in the face of cavalry by having Will (the buttmonkey character) be chased across the paddock by a suitably dressed horsewoman with a big sword. (Spoiler - if you run, you die...). What did grate a bit for AWB was the casual way mounted troops were described as 'opportunists' of the battlefield and thereby reducing the reputation of an entire arm into some sort of casuals who rather then being able to dictate decisions on the battlefield, merely reacted to them.
Also rising a brief eyebrow was the attempt to explain the concept of Fog of War, a situation not actually done badly at all by our Boffin presenter, but by the war the phrase actually seems to have come full circle. Credited by most (or at least by AWB) to be a term invented by von Clausewitz to describe the literal fog produced on the battlefield by massed blackpowder weapons that reduced visibility and increased confusion, the term is so well understood by the current generation of computer/console gamers to mean limited intelligence that our Boffin had to explain that the fog of war was in this period literal in a strange case of the origin of the word coming full circle. Well, AWB was amused by it at least...
So, how much do we enjoy this episode?
Big points for showing how a muzzle loaded smooth bore cannon was operated and what a canister blast was like, points for showing the dangers of trying to run in the face of mounted troops and double plus points for the wargaming figures, but again, minus points for the massive generalisations that keep getting made that seem, to AWB at least, like they could have easily been tightened up without losing the attention of the intended audience.
Oh and massive points loss for the ABC for still not having a remotely useful supporting website.
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