Contact! The Restricted Canadian Army Tactical Wargame (1980)

CONTACT! is not a just a set of wargaming rules. It is an instruction booklet for replicating war on the table-top as used at the height of the cold war between the Western Allies in NATO and the Russians leading the Warsaw Pact in the East. It is of interest, not just as a wargame, but as a statement from a very dangerous era of history. It is easy to forget that between 1945 and 1989 there were times that both sides were aware that the Soviet dominated WARSAW Pact could come storming over the borders and race for the Rhine.

There were alerts, on both sides, when the cold war started to move towards being a hot war. The author remembers one occasion in the early 1980s, when the UK Territorial Army (active reserves) in the UK one weekend found itself deploying to Germany instead of the expected weekend peacetime manoeuvres.

It is interesting to note that the rules bear some resemblance to the Wargame Rules for Armoured Warfare, 1950-1985, as published by the Wargames Research Group (better known as WRG) in 1979. Indeed, the editor of the rules, Capt Donnelly, acknowledged their influence on the development of CONTACT!

The sequence of play and the movement rules were very similar those in WRG, but the fire/ movement system was simplified. The direct fire procedures had been modified and the game used percentage probabilities based on operational research instead of the 6 sided dice. Releases of secret information from the cold war show that in most cases, the WRG figures were close to the true figures.

The indirect fire system was clearly derived from operational research. The CONTACT! artillery system played well and provided one of the great training strengths of the game. It demonstrated that artillery support took time and that the artillery of the 1980's rarely killed armoured vehicles when using high explosives. However, the great strength of the artillery was to neutralise virtually any target area.

In the rest of the rules there are a number of simplifications to the WRG system. These were introduced to help maintain playability and pace of the game as the target audience was serving officers. For example, the game was based on the assumption that the elements (units) would always use the most appropriate weapon and ammunition for a given target. Soldiers wanted to know the effect of the tank overall, not ponder whether to use HESH of APDS. Infantry were assumed to fire at armour with their M72 and small arms against infantry.

The rules were regularly used for military training courses, with great success. They also influenced other low level tactical training wargames used in British and the American Army.

Additions to these rules

These rules were designed for the Canadian Army against the WARSAW Pact in the 1980's.

However, I have included some weapon cards for the British and American Armies to extend the rules to include these two key allies in NATO. These cards are marked as optional.

I have also included the ORBAT of the Canadian Army's contribution to NATO (Annex F). For the WARSAW Pact side, I have added extensive information on their ORBATs and detailed information about their tactics (Annex G). I have added information about British ORBATs and tactics in Annex H.

I have made a few comments of my own in the rules and these are in italics and boxes to differentiate themselves from the original rules.

Extract from the rules Soviet Formations