Bolt Action - Great Britain: Armies of Great Britain

Disclaimer: This is not a physical product. You will receive a digital download of your eBook after your purchase.

This book is a supplement for the Bolt Action World War II tabletop wargame. It contains all the background, rules and Army List information needed to field a British or Commonwealth Army in the Bolt Action game. Inside you’ll find details of organisation and equipment covering British & Commonwealth forces from the beginning of the war (the British declaration of war in 1939) to the very end (the surrender of Japan in 1945).

The core of this book is the Army List. This includes all information you need to field a British or Commonwealth army in your games. All the major guns and vehicles are detailed, together with a selection of varying qualities of troop types. Alongside this main list are 14 Theatre Selectors, which give the force details for different periods and theatres of the war. Over six years of fighting, the British & Commonwealth armies changed a lot, and many vehicles and types of equipment that were common in 1939 had been abandoned by 1945. These sub-lists allow players to select forces suitable for the theatre they are playing in. To avoid a lot of repetition, the main list includes all the options and rules information, with the Theatre Selectors narrowing this down to the most appropriate elements.

The list of vehicles and equipment used by the British & Commonwealth armies is vast. The British tried to supply their armed forces with domestic weaponry, but the scale of war was simply too large for this to be viable. Even so, every domestic manufacturer that could possibly contribute did so, which led to a bewildering assortment of types and variations. Add to this the domestic designs and productions of many of the Commonwealth nations and you have a very large list indeed. On top of all this there was an abundance of equipment available under the lend-lease programme from the Americans and the British used this too. Whilst we have tried to include as much as we can, the sheer number of possible items means that there are unavoidable gaps in the listings. However, as well as the more familiar tanks, we have tried to include some of the interesting, less common and less well known vehicles in case you wish to expand your collection and play some ‘what if’ games. What would have happened if the Germans had launched their invasion of Britain in 1940? What if it had happened in 1941 instead of Barbarossa?

In a similar fashion, the Theatre Selectors are not an exhaustive list of all the types of unit that were fielded by the British and Commonwealth forces in World War II, nor does it necessarily include every single vehicle that was to be found in that area at that time. Again, this is too large a list to be practical. What we have aimed for is to give the flavour of a campaign and to offer a mixture of the famous and familiar campaigns (Market Garden and El Alamein) together with the less well known (Raiders and the East African campaign). With a little research, and agreement from your opponent, you can easily adapt one of the Theatre Selectors given here to fit any campaign that interests you.