The Napoleonic Invasion of Britain 1969

Back in the late 60s and early 70s I had a subscription to Miniature Warfare Magazine, the first 'proper' wargame magazine produced by John Tunstill. The content of the magazines was of variable quality and went downhill dramatically after 1971 but every now and then there would be something published that caught my imagination.

The January/February 1970 issues carried such an article entitled The Napoleonic Invasion of Britain by Bletchley Wargames Group. That sounds like a fun game I thought, Napoleon invading the green and pleasant land and the British throwing him back into the sea! At that point I didn’t have a British army or even a French one for that matter, so I never got to try out my own invasion, but the idea stuck in the back of my mind.

Having recently stumbled on a link to the Murat Maps I thought the map of Southern England would be perfect for an attempt at this piece of 70s nostalgia. Better than the map used in the original game, which was a modern Ordinance Survey Map - somehow ordering Ney to “advance up the A24 and take the second exit from the Horsham roundabout on to the A264” never really did sound right to me. The Murat Maps (click here) are a great free resource with potential (perhaps one day) to provide the basis for a huge Napoleonic campaign.

So, fortunately Rob has agreed to be my opponent in a play-by-email version of the campaign, and I’ll fight any resulting table battles as solo affairs. For hidden movement without an Umpire we will be using a 21st century version of Featherstone's 'Matchbox' system using the tabs on an Excel spreadsheet instead of matchboxes.

I have split the OOB’s for each army into quite small forces in the hope the campaign will throw up some interesting smallish scenarios that should be fun as solo games. I’ll see how we get on and keep you posted.