As some of you know I've dragged my kids along to lots of battlefields. Then they got older & moaned so we stopped going to so many, I'd sneak a few in though. Now the youngest , who's 12 , plays a lot of War Thunder , Heroes & Generals and other games I don't keep track of..bad Dad. Yesterday he asked if we could go back to Normandy as he was too young to remember going before. He's been nicking books of my shelf & keeps going on about various weapons. The other two have no interest but at least one of them has , thanks mainly to gaming online.
The new Battlefield WW1 jobby has triggered a few enquiries from my eldest. Everyone else I knows' kids seem to be more generally interested in WW2 than mine. Horrocks's "This is a tale you will tell your grandchildren... and mighty bored they'll be" springs to mind, but indoctrination is a slow burn thing sometimes; Grandad got them to a point where just mentioning the word 'hydraulics' made them physically wince when they were smaller, but now they seem to have a curious depth of understanding on one of his favourite subjects... Planes work on them too. They happily visit Air museums, enjoyed airshows from tiny, and will run outside to see a WW2 plane fly over. On the brighter side, the younger whinged and whinged on the way to our last trip to Bovington but after an hour inside ran up and said "This is the best place EVER!" while wearing a septic tin lid. Softly softly. Osmosis will get to them, and the odd WW2 game doesn't hurt.
Try Order of Battle; it is your ordinary turn-based, hexagonally divided board (battlefield), wargame, with an eye-catching twist in the form of 3D animated units and combat. Currently covers campaigns in the Pacific from USN, USMC, IJN perspectives; China from IJA perspective; the Soviet attack on Finland; and this month, Blitzkrieg (Dantzig to Barbarossa and points in between) through Wehrmacht eyes. Besides, there are a lot of user-developed scenarios like Borneo (Oboe), Imphal and Kohima, Wake Island, to mention a few. Some say it is addictive, and I just crowned 98 hours of hard-slog from Pearl to the Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo Next stop, after 10 quid well spent, the China Campaign 37-41.
