Operation Sealion

Like many of my friends at the time (the mid 1970s), I was interested in Operation Sealion as a wargaming project. I can vaguely remember a series of articles that appeared in Airfix magazine around that time, but as was the way with these things, nothing ever came of it. Then whilst browsing the excellent Vintage Wargaming site, I came across said articles.

http://vintagewargaming.blogspot.com/search/label/Operation%20Sealion

These were immediately printed out and read with more than a hint of nostalgia. My desire to wargame this was certainly reborn. With this in mind, I looked for copies of "Invasion, The German Invasion of England July 1940" by Kenneth Macksey. This book had been favourably mentioned before on the BKC forum, and a search of Amazon showed them freely available for as little as £0.01, with p&p of only £2.80. This seemed exceptionally good value to me and a copy was duly ordered.

Having just finished reading the book, I can highly recommend it as a good read and more importantly as very useful for those wanting to game this operation. The maps are very useful allowing various 'actions' to be chosen to suit individual tastes. Coupled with the above series of articles, it would be very easy to generate a small, or large, campaign based around the airborne and seaborne invasion, the counter attacks, breakout etc.

With this in mind, the following site has 1940 OS maps available to be viewed and printed, just perfect for adding detail, especially with regards to the actions described in the book.

http://www.ponies.me.uk/maps/osmap.html

So now all I have to do is start painting enough forces to make a start on a mini-campaign, again probably played solo. Luckily I have everything I need, bar Fallschirmjager, but I am already putting together an order for those Pendraken boys.

With luck and a fair wind, I will get to game this sometime in the summer. Famous last words as always. If only I could paint as quickly as Nik Harwood.