Tunnel Hill and Sixty Years

 

What people like doesn’t change all that much. At least for me. I still love the same woman after fifty-two years. I still wear button-down shirts. And I’ve had the same hobby for sixty years—collecting, painting, and playing tabletop wargames with lead soldiers. Here are two photos of me at the wargame boards in my house, the first one in 1962, the second one in 2022.

The military miniatures haven’t really been cast of lead for a long time now, all the makers having switched to pewter. Our tabletop terrain has vastly improved from chalk-drawn forests on bare plywood, but back then we spent every spare dime on soldiers, not model railroad terrain. My brother and I were poor young teenagers, after all.

Back in the ‘60’s I didn’t care about the history the toy soldiers represented, I just liked to buy them, paint them, and play tabletop games with simple home-grown rules. There was one guy in California named Jack Scruby who sculpted and produced military miniatures for tabletop wargaming. He advertised his catalog in Boys Life magazine, where we discovered him. Now, there are endless choices of companies sculpting and producing highly detailed miniatures of every imaginable historical army from the ancient Egyptians to modern armies, and fantasy figures from Tolkien’s elves and dwarves to post-apocalyptic mutants.

Of late, I’ve taken to playing solo games of specific Civil War battles, with lots of attention paid to replicating the historical terrain and regiments which fought, right down to the correct flags they carried. These photos are of my tabletop today, in the midst of the battle of Tunnel Hill at Chattanooga, Tennessee in November 1863. The tunnel entrance is still there, looking like it did in 1863. It was the challenge to use a paper template of the rock face of the entrance (downloaded from the website of the Fire & Fury game company). Drawing on the methods used in my junior high science fair days, I cut up a cardboard shoebox and shaped the humped tunnel you see in the photo.  

Here's the bigger picture of the game: 

I am perhaps drawn to this particular Civil War battle because I’ve walked the ground a couple of times—it’s now an urban, and neglected, National Park site. And Tunnel Hill is one of the key battles in my first Civil War novel, Whittled Away; And one of the Confederate regiments in the thick of the fighting was the 6^th Texas Infantry, which is the historical regiment chosen by our reenacting club for our name, the ‘Alamo Rifles’ since the men who formed one company of the 6^th Texas came from San Antonio. The photo is us in a sham battle in Tennessee, not Tunnel Hill, though. But our flag in the photo is the same one they carried at the battle of Tunnel Hill.

To close, here is a meme off the ‘net that reminds me of the heroic defense ongoing in Ukraine this week.
Bless those patriots. May God give them the strength to persevere and stay the course.