The Japanese army of World War II campaigned over territory as extensive and diverse as any other army in history, ranging from the tropical jungles and mountains of south-east Asia to the flat coral atolls of the Pacific and the freezing sub-Arctic Aleutian Islands.
I have approached the writing of this article with some trepidation. I know that there are plenty of wargamers who know a lot more about the Vietnam War than I do - and several of them have written some very good articles in this magazine.
In fact the title of this article comes from a club discussion in which it was established that this was the sum total of everything I knew about the Vietcong.
The greatest military achievements of the Sung came right at the beginning of the period, when they established their dynasty and reunified the empire in a series of campaigns which knocked out their Chinese rivals one by one.
In 960 Chao K'uang-yin, an officer of the palace guard in the relatively minor state of Chao, staged a coup and proclaimed his own regime - the Sung. He then embarked on an extraordinary series of conquests, with the aim of subduing the various kingdoms among whom China had been divided since the collapse of the T'ang in 907.
Modern wargaming has always been one of my big interests, but I realise that it is never going to be everybody's cup of tea. (I use "modern" here in the sense of "happening now", and not - as some wargamers are prone to do - for the whole post-1945 era.) A lot of today's technology is difficult to evaluate, as not only is it very complex but it is also as often as not untried in actual combat, so that all we have to go on are guesses and over-optimistic sales brochures.
