Vacation Staff Rides

 “There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.”

— John Stuart Mill

The author peers out over the wall along
Fredericksburg's Sunken Road.

Our family doesn’t care much for vacations where we lounge on the beach, relax at some lakeside cabin, or hike in the mountains; we much prefer to engage our minds visiting sites of historical interest across numerous periods and subjects. Whether we’re making a summertime day trip or planning a slightly more substantial journey, we make sure the itinerary includes some places of historical significance to explore. Sometimes we re-visit and re-discover past favorites, other times we venture forth to someplace new. Like the “staff rides” of the 19th century Prussian officer corps — and continued by military personnel to this day — we use them as opportunities to place the history we read about, view in movies, and play on the gaming tabletop in a real-world context we experience first hand.

Growing up my parents cultivated in us an interest in history, possibly more from the urge to keep us busy on day trips and family vacations than anything else. But it nurtured a spirit of curiosity to learn about our present and past world through books, media, and our experiences visiting historical sites. Sometimes we learned about historical sites beforehand, other times our trips inspired us to read more about a related subject later. It certainly informed much of my gaming over the years, sending me along to new eras and places in my roleplaying game and wargame misadventures. And it carried through to our family today, exploring the intersection of games and historical sites, both the actual places where history took place as well as museums that highlight artifacts from this past.

Overlooking the bend in the James River,
site of the Battle of Drewry's Bluff.

Our expeditions sometimes remind me of military “staff rides” to take in battlefield terrain, past and present, first hand (especially when I descend into loquacious, know-it-all “dad mode,” complete with probing questions and occasional bad dad jokes). The Prussian focus on Kriegsspielen in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars emerged in a military officer culture that emphasized the practicalities of warfare on real terrain. Beyond training and wargame exercises officers participated in staff rides to experience the topography and consider first-hand how one might fight an engagement over it in hypothetical scenarios. Such field trips have become a staple of military education across the world. In the “classic” form of staff ride officer teams survey the terrain and conduct hypothetical maneuvers and engagements across them, often as training for some near-future conflict. Some credit the German victory over Russian forces at Tannenberg in World War I to von Schlieffen’s staff rides there before the war, familiarizing officers with the terrain and the logistics of maneuvering and fighting over it. The “Leavenworth” model uses personal experience of a site to investigate a historical battle in a first-hand visual and physical immersion into the terrain.

Although my son doesn’t always care to read up on our historical site itinerary beforehand, I do my best to orient myself to the place and the events occurring there so I can more fully appreciate our time on location. Preservation institutions do their best to present and protect historical spaces, but they’re often limited by modern considerations. So it sometimes takes effort to envision how the terrain looked at the time momentous events passed across it. I’m constantly pestering my son (and occasionally others) challenging them to imagine what it was like at a particular site at a significant time. (Yes, I am that annoying dad….) It helps us engage with the history, those who were there, and their own experiences in those conditions.

Maybe think twice about bailing out of
the Dornier Do 335....

Visiting these sites and understanding the past events they witnessed can help engage our sense of empathy. What was it like standing here when this place played a pivotal role in history? How might those people have felt? What did they experience? Standing next to the Union artillery line on Henry Hill at the Manassas battlefield, staring across the field at the Confederate artillery batteries, we ask what crews felt as the smoke obscured their vision and the uncertainty of the enemy’s next move? You can stand on either side of the wall next to Fredericksburg battlefield’s infamous Sunken Road wondering what it was like to face an enemy, either entrenched behind the stone wall or desperately charging across the open field. How massively intimidating is a Sherman tank or an LVT-1 amphibious landing craft when it’s grinding its way toward you on some Pacific beach assault in World War II? How vast did the American frontier wilderness seem to a soldier keeping watch on the ramparts of Fort Ticonderoga, Fort Necessity, or Fort Ligonier, with French enemies and their Native American allies lurking somewhere in the dark forests? My favorite: do you really want to bail out of the twin engine Dornier Do 335 A-0 Pfeil (one nose engine, one tail engine in a drag-push configuration)? (Answer: please don’t.) Like wargames and roleplaying games, these first-hand experiences place us in a moment in time, providing us with a more personal perspective so we might better relate to people, events, and issues in the past.

View from Fort Ligonier into the
rough American wilderness.

I look back at some of our favorite “staff rides” and consider the things we see and the questions they raise while relating to the people who lived that history. The French and Indian War forts — Ticonderoga, Crown Point, Ligonier, Fort Necessity — all evoke various aspects of the wilderness war between the British colonies and French Canada; what was it like to fight with support far away, how do military forces relate to indigenous peoples, what can you build with enough manpower out in the middle of nowhere? American Civil War battlefield parks like Manassas and Fredericksburg (among numerous other period sites within day-trip driving distance of our backwoods Virginia home) challenge us to imagine what citizen soldiers faced in a brutal conflict across both good and bad ground, under commanders who didn’t always make the best decisions. The wonderful living history museum at Colonial Williamsburg, site of a personal and political battle at the start of the American Revolution, uses interpreters of ordinary people and notable personalities to engage the public in discussion about numerous issues dividing the British colonies in those days. Even museums help us envision what past history looked like through their interpretive exhibits and authentic artifacts. The Mariners’Museum puts visitors face-to-face with artifacts from the Battle of Hampton Roads as well as life-sized replicas of the CSS Virginia and USS Monitor ironclads. The aircraft displayed in the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center’s cavernous hangar space include milestones of aviation history as well as artifacts for more somber contemplation, like the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, first to deploy an atomic weapon against humans on Aug. 6, 1945, over Hiroshima, Japan. The National Museum of the Marine Corps includes several immersive exhibits to put visitors right in the middle of key battles, whether charging across the fields toward German machine guns at Belleau Wood in World War I or freezing at the Chosin reservoir during the Korean War.

All these “staff ride” experiences build on our past reading, movie watching, and related gaming...and they can inspire us to explore history through these formats even further. Researching beforehand can help enhance our understanding of the terrain and artifacts we visit. Further exploration draws on our personal perceptions of historical space and artifacts. It’s all part of a cycle of inspirational learning.

I know many people who don’t equate “vacation” or “leisure” with “engagement” or “learning.” And that’s fine; it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But for us, as gamers and history aficionados, this kind of tourism not only entertains us but helps expand our appreciation of the past...and informs our views of the present and future.

“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.”

— Auguste Rodin