War Diaries Talk

In the real world, unit components don't all stay in one place

  • keln by keln

    I just started this, so I could be totally missing something, but I'm at a loss as how to properly document the different components of a "unit", in this case a battalion, when it's various companies, and sometimes "composite units made mostly of men from C and D" go elsewhere and do other things. I had one situation where A and B went to a village to bivouac and C and D went to support another Brigade entirely some 30 km away. Then they met up a few days later and formed composite units off and on to support this other division in attacks. It's a nightmare to document with the limited tools available. If we are dealing with units that aren't at the very bottom level (platoon I suppose?), then we need tools to document what organic components of a unit are doing separately. I think that is as historically important as wherever the hq happens to be while all of the action is occuring amongst it's various components. I also ran into a little officer drama in the middle of these battles where an officer was passed up to take over command, and reading between the lines, it seemed a bit of a coup. A tag for those little tidbits would be nice as well.

    Posted

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    If parts of a Unit are truly detached then you can tag each separately. With some Units like for example Engineer Squadrons this is how they work all the time so it's far more of an issue than with an Infantry Battalion. Because every Unit is different, it would be far too complex to provide a series of tags referring to sub-Units.

    Really there are two different situations here.

    The first is the one you describe where sub-units are actually in different places doing different things. If one is completely detached to another Unit then they will very likely get included in the description of what that Unit is doing rather than having detail given in their own Unit diary. However you can certainly tag each separate part of the Battalion individually in this case.

    The second is where the Battalion are all together but the individual Company dispositions are described. In this case we don't want the Company activities described individually, as the Unit is acting as a whole.

    The main thing to remember is that we can't tag everything and if we started having sub-unit tags it would be in danger of becoming too complicated.

    As for your officer drama. How would you suggest we capture this kind of thing? I'm not sure what tag you'd use for anything like this, but maybe there's a hashtag that might do? Check out the hashtag section of this forum to see how we are using them.

    Posted