Africa Orientale Italiana:
Playbook edition
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2023

I have a love for quirky historical topics; one of my grad school advisors warned me this would be dangerous for my career as a professional historian. She was obviously right, and it’s not that far off-target for wargame publishing, either.

We published Panzer Grenadier: Africa Orientale Italiana in 2019. It’s based on the Allied campaigns to subdue the Italian colonies in East Africa – Eritrea, Somaliland, and Ethiopia – in 1940 and 1941. Plus, the Italian conquest of British Somaliland in 1940, the only victorious campaign waged by the fascists during World War II. The campaign fascinates me, taking place well outside of the main theaters of war without particularly huge stakes. It’s a late-model Panzer Grenadier game, which means it’s designed in the story-arc format, with 43 scenarios divided into six chapters. Each chapter also has historical background text (a fair amount of it in this game) and a “battle game” that ties the scenarios together.

The scenario set turned out exactly as I’d hoped, the story of the East African campaign unfolding through a series of scenarios. You can play through the entire campaign, or just pick out the scenarios that interest you and play those. This is the sort of game I want to design and publish, a mix of history and game play, and I’m both pleased and proud to have designed Africa Orientale Italiana. The problem would come, I believed, in trying to sell it.

To keep its budget low, we used the same map set asConquest of Ethiopia (it seemed silly to commission a whole new set of maps for the same damned place when we already had such a beautiful set of them). We scavenged pieces left over from several other, out-of-print games. That would, I figured, minimize our losses, and allow me to pursue the game design for the simple reason that I wanted to do it. As expected, it sold slowly. But then sales picked up, quickly, and soon we had no more spare parts to put together more of them. I didn’t expect it to sell that well, and to do so relatively quickly. It was a topic so odd that even its developers came to it reluctantly. It was supposed to be a quick and easy project, since we already had the map art and the pieces, so of course I poured way too much time and effort into it.

To follow up on that upward sales curve, we’re issuing a new Playbook edition of Africa Orientale Italiana with its own unique set of die-cut, silky-smooth pieces and a scenario book revised to match those beautiful pieces. Since the scenarios were no longer constrained by the pieces originally allotted to other games, I could revise their orders of battle. This is going to be the most colorful set in Panzer Grenadier, because games are supposed to be fun.

We already had Royal Italian Army, Italian Colonial, British Army, South African Army and Indian Army pieces in the first edition. They all appear again in the Playbook edition. I suppose we could have done the pretend-X-is-Y thing and saved a little on production costs, but that wouldn’t be as much fun.

On the Italian side, the Blackshirts, the Royal Carabinieri and the Savoia Division all get their own color schemes (we’ve seen the Blackshirts before). The Savoia Division is extra tough – these are the veterans who signed on for long-term enlistments after the 1935-36 invasion  of Ethiopia – and the pieces simply look good on the map. The division had six infantry battalions, like most other Italian divisions, but these consisted of four grenadier battalions, one Bersaglieri (light infantry) battalion and one Alpini (mountain) battalion. And now we have the proper pieces for all of those.

In the first edition, we only had sixteen Italian Colonial infantry, which constrained some of the scenarios. The new set has 28 of them, and that allowed me to re-cast those scenarios with the broader view I would have taken given the pieces. And now we have the pieces!

On the Allied side, the Black Watch get their own color scheme, based on the Black Watch tartan. There aren’t many of them (the 2nd Black Watch fought in British Somaliland) but they are quite tough themselves. The British Army doesn’t get a whole lot of love in wargame counter sets (that’s reserved for the Germans in many wargames) so I wanted to take the opportunity. And that allows them to have higher morale (which they deserve), since they have a separate color scheme and better firepower. I wasn’t sure how the tartan pattern would work but I think it looks good.

In the first edition, we used standard British pieces for the King’s African Rifles: African troops in British service. That was accurate, as far as things go, as the KAR was a British Army regiment and not a colonial or dominion force. But I wanted them to have their own color scheme, and now they get it.

We also used British or Indian Army pieces for two colonial formations, the Somaliland Camel Corps and the Sudan Defence Force, which really should have had their own pieces. That also allowed us to remove the special “these guys suck” rules from the scenarios where they appear.

The East African campaign breaks into three major segments. The primary British effort took place in the north, where a force built around two divisions (4th Indian and 5th Indian) fought some skirmishes along the border between Sudan and the Italian colony of Eritrea in January 1941, and then drove for the colony’s capital of Asmara and its major port and naval base at Massawa.

Barring their path was the very strong natural mountain fortress of Keren, eventually held by six Italian Colonial brigades including Orlando Lorenzini’s crack 2nd Eritrean Brigade of long-service regulars, and the tough 65th “Granatieri di Savoia” Infantry Division, the Royal Italian Army’s equivalent of a guard unit. For two months Nicolangelo Carnimeo, commander of the 4th Colonial Division, conducted a skillful defense against the two Indian divisions and their supporting forces before he was finally forced to give way. The Italians mounted a defense of Massawa, while most of their forces retreated southward, with the last of them finally surrendering at the end of November 1941.

On the southern frontier, the British invaded Italian Somaliland and southern Ethiopia with three divisions: 1st South African Division and 11th and 12th African Divisions, the latter each made up of two brigades of King’s African Rifles (recruits from Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya) and one of West African Frontier Force troops (Nigerian and Ghanaian soldiers). The Italians attempted to defend the line of the Juba River with two colonial divisions, 101st and 102nd, consisting of tough Somali troops. They could not hold back the Nigerian and South African advance, which soon turned north-west into the Ogaden region and eventually reached the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

The third front, which saw less action than the other two, covers British Somaliland, conquered by the Italians in August 1940 and taken back by the British during the following March. It’s a notable campaign for the Italian commitment of their small armored contingent (M11/39 tanks) and a fierce fight with the Black Watch at Tug Argan, but involved far fewer troops than the other two. By the time of the British counter-invasion the best Italian units had been withdrawn to face the other invading forces, and the 70th Colonial Brigade did not resist for long.

Those three fronts are the basis of the scenario set. To portray that variety, we needed to use all eight maps out of the Conquest set, because Ethiopia is a big country with varied terrain.

The northern front, with the battles at Agordat, Keren, Massawa and Gondar (no special leader piece for Aragorn), takes place in rough mountain terrain. It’s mountain warfare with all of the nasty close-range combat one would expect, the primacy of elevation and the unusual lines of sight. There’s a good bit of forest terrain here too; in 1941, the de-forestation that over-farming, over-logging and climate change have brought to Ethiopia with devastating effect had not yet taken hold. Both sides bring some pretty good troops to the battlefield: the Savoy Grenadiers are as good as any Italian unit to have shown up in Panzer Grenadier (and you know we like to highlight the good ones), while the Indians are very tough professionals as well.

The southern front is very different: the Italians make their stand along a river line, marked by very little vegetation beyond some banana plantations. The battles took place in desert and in rocky, extremely rough ground. The Italians’ Somali colonial troops fought well in the 1935-36 war and in police actions against rebels and bandits, but proved less capable in 1941 than their Eritrean counterparts. The South Africans were not operating at peak performance either, but managed an impressive advance against the over-stretched Italians.

The brief campaigns in British Somaliland are very definitely desert warfare. The Italians invade with some of their best colonial troops, and defend with some of their worst. The British defend with a mixed bag of small units but include the tough Black Watch and Sikhs; when they come back the invasion depends once again on the Sikhs.

I designed Panzer Grenadier as a tactical game system that could model any theater of World War II, from tank battles in the desert or on the steppe to intense jungle warfare. I wanted infantry combat to be front and center, not an adjunct to the tanks. Africa Orientale Italiana is an infantry game with a wide variety of battles, and one I’ve wanted to release since well before the beginnings of the Panzer Grenadier series.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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