£5.00Unit Organisations for the Russian Front 1941-1945 (RAPID FIRE! Second Supplement) (PDF)

Published in 1996, following the launch of the first Rapid Fire! rule set, this long out of print publication was our second supplement, and a follow up to Colin’s Unit Organisations for the 1944-45 Campaign in North West Europe. As we have with our more recent Battlegroups series, it seemed logical at the time to produce the orbats first before tackling the scenarios to use them in.

The aim of Unit Organisations for the Russian Front was to give wargamers the widest possible range of units to play their Russian Front games with. This was quite a challenge because a) there were seven nation’s armies involved and b) I wanted to cover the whole four years of the conflict. As I state in the preamble to our pdf of the scenario book, research was challenging at the time, with no internet and limited availability of English language sources from the Soviet view point, so, as authors often state in defence of their mistakes, any errors are mine and I take full responsibility!

The text should be self explanatory but the points system used was the original one we devised for the first edition of the Rapid Fire rules, so can’t be directly compared to the points values in our more recent publications. Similarly, some of the company sizes will have to be adapted if featuring odd numbers. Simply increase 7 to 8 and 9 to 10. Some HQ units are also larger than we currently favour in recent orbats, so these can be reduced to three figures plus any attached support weapons.

Little change needs to be made to the Wargames Organisations at the rear of the book, again with the proviso that the points values don’t necessarily match our current versions. The vehicle, gun and aircraft stats, which have largely remain unchanged, can also be used by converting the old RF armour classes from ABCDE to 12345.

A couple of things sprang out at me as I was re-reading the text. Firstly, my maths failed me when adding up the number of figures required for the Soviet Reduced Strength Rifle Regiment on page 58. Each battalion should have 22 figures and the total for the regiment should be 54. Secondly, the Hungarian Bicycle Battalion (Notes on page 34) can add a 105mm howitzer and an L3/35 light tank. I read this (correct) information at the time but thought it was too weird to be true!

Unit Organisations for the Russian Front was written before the days of sophisticated computer programmes, with all the maps being created using the drawing facility in Microsoft Word. With the original final drafts long lost we have created this pdf reproduction manually, so we’d like to apologise for difference in quality between this andour usual pdf publications.

We hope you find these orbats useful, especially if you’re new to Rapid Fire or weren’t active in the hobby (or even born!) when this book was first published.