Uprising:
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2025

In 1939, Slovakia would be the first nation to align itself with Adolf Hitler. A small, economically backward land in the heart of Central Europe, Slovakia declared independence from Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Slovakia immediately faced a challenge from neighboring Hungary, resulting in a brief war against Hungarian aggression that resulted in defeat and a substantial loss of territory. Seeking shelter from its neighbors, Slovakia entered into alliance with Germany

Five years later, that bond had begun to fray. Slovakia’s army marched into the Soviet Union in the wake of the German invasion, and though Slovak troops saw some front-line combat, mostly they were deployed against partisans and in rear-area security duties. Some 20,000 Slovaks became casualties (killed, wounded, or missing) in a vicious, dirty war as morale, never high for this unpopular war, plummeted. In August 1944, the Slovak Army finally rose against their hated ally, but failed to free their country of German dominance.

Fire & Sword: Uprising is a Panzer Grenadier Campaign Study, all about these two campaigns. We covered both of them many years ago in our old First Axis book, but First Axis fell out of print when the games from which its scenarios drew parts and maps likewise fell out of production and sank into the mists.

With the publication of Panzer Grenadier: Fire & Sword, we once again have the pieces we need for both campaigns, together with the Slovaks found in Fire in the Steppe: Puppet Brigade. The scenarios from the old First Axis needed maps that will never come back into print, so I re-designed them to use the beautiful new maps from Fire & Sword. You will need Fire & Sword, Broken Axis and Puppet Brigade to play all of the scenarios.

Chapter One is perhaps my favorite in the whole Panzer Grenadier oeuvre (yes, we have an oeuvre). It’s the Slovak-Hungarian War, a war that really happened waged by the incompetent armies of two poverty-stricken Central European autocracies (dictatorships pretending not to be dictatorships, a façade that’s found new favor in the same region in recent years).

The Slovaks are not very good. Slovakia’s economy and its school system lagged well behind those in the Czech half of the combined republic, resulting in a lack of educated young men who could become army officers, and a shortage of technicians and specialists (artillerymen, tank crews, engineers). They did inherit the arsenals left behind by the republic’s army, which had been quite well-armed. And so, they have very modern tanks (the LT35, pressed into service by the Germans as the PzKpfw 35t), modern Skoda 100mm light howitzers, and first-rate small arms and machine guns. They’re just not the most skilled at operating all this firepower.

A Slovak LT35, abandoned and captured by the Hungarians. March 1939.

The Hungarians aren’t that much better off. Where the Germans used their Versailles-restricted army to train the very best prospects for the future war they felt inevitable, the Hungarians treated their Trianon-restricted army as a font of graft and corruption. Only in 1938 did they begin a serious re-organization, introducing conscription (along with a raft of antisemitic measures) and beginning a major expansion.

Hungary was an international pariah, with only Fascist Italy willing to accept the near-worthless currency, the pengö, in lieu of hard cash for armaments. And even then, the Italians only sold the Hungarians the bottom-rung items no one else wanted.

The Royal Hungarian Army is left with the time-worn remnants of the proud old Imperial and Royal Army’s armaments. The haiduks carry the same Mannlicher single-pull ruckzuck that their fathers took to the trenches of 1914-1918, backed by the same Schwarzlose machine guns. Their artillery is chiefly well-worn pieces that soldiered in the Great War, and their tanks - and they do have tanks - are a mixture of aging Italian-made copies of the Great War-vintage Renault light tank, or worthless CV33 tankettes.

The ignorant armies clash in a series of five scenarios, and they do get to use those tanks. These play somewhat differently than the usual Panzer Grenadier scenario, as they’re infantry-oriented with low morale ratings and a paucity of leaders. You’re not going to smash your way through with a stack of high-morale uberelite shock troops backed by well-armored, mobile firepower. The scenarios aren’t very large, which means they play relative quickly - and there’s a battle game to link them all together in competitive play.

We’ve got a nice background piece about the Slovak-Hungarian War, just to refresh your memory of this pivotal conflict, and then the scenarios tell the story in their own way (what we call the story-arc format). This is one of the best examples of this approach, which is why I like it so much, and this is why I wanted it in print as soon as we had Fire & Sword available to provide the needed pieces.

We leap forward in time by four and a half years for the second chapter, to find the Slovaks fed up with both the war and the Germans. The Slovak Army led the uprising, or at least tried to do so - many of its best units (“best” being a relative term when describing the Slovak Army) had been betrayed and the Germans effectively blocked their participation. But the Germans failed to secure the Slovak Army’s armored school and its tank repair facility, and so a bizarre array of tanks and tank destroyers old and new confronted them. For their part, the Germans sent in what they could spare: training units, raw conscripts and the most sinister formation of a criminal organization, the SS militia’s Dirlewanger Brigade.

This chapter is built much like the first, with a background article, six scenarios, and a battle game to tie the scenarios together. The Slovaks are on the march, looking to join up with oncoming Soviet forces and link their own columns together. The Germans are out to block them. Neither side is very good, but they do have a lot of modern arms; they are well-matched foes.

Slovakia lost this war as well; the Germans crushed their uprising before the Red Army could ride to the rescue. It did allow the Slovaks to claim to have fought against Nazi evil, and that’s been a considerable point of national pride ever since. And fighting Nazis is never futile.

You can order Uprising right here.

Puppet Brigade
Nine scenarios and 88 new pieces bring the Slovak Army’s role in Operation Barbarossa to Fire in the Steppe. The Slovak Army was not very large, and not very good, but it was there! You’ll need Fire in the Steppe and Broken Axis to play all of the scenarios.

You can order Puppet Brigade right here.
Quantities are limited.

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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 an uncountable number of books, games and articles on historical subjects; a few of them were actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children. He misses his dog, Leopold. Leopold enjoyed gnawing his deer antler and editing Wikipedia pages.

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