New Product Release: Tara Romaneasca (Romania)

[Tegyrius]

Originally Posted by shrike6

You'd think it would be the 173rd being used. While I am in the camp that the Herd is roaming the African Savanna that really doesnt bother me all that much.

Enh. User preference is user preference. For whatever it may be worth, we had some discussion on the 173rd in Romania a couple of years ago. You can see some of the seeds of this sourcebook in that conversation.

Originally Posted by shrike6

What does bother me is the history of one of its subunits the 2-555th. Seemed to me anyways, that it was not well thought out so you could make a cheap easy joke on politicians that seemed out of place. While I get your precedent on it would be the ship naming process in the US Navy in the present day. It is much easier to put a politically favorable name on a nameless ship then it is to replace a regiment with a long history with the state and 100s of veterans associated with that regiment for a more politically in vogue one. While it may be possible I can't see doing that as tenable if that politician wants another term. Let's face it to make the Airborne battalion to work numbers wise in a small state like WV you would have had to reorganize one of the combat arms battalions (1/150th Cav or 1/201st FA). I also get the meta joke that goes beyond the surface with using the WV NG given that one of the former IRL US Senators for WV during the 90s was a former Klansman.
What I would have done is place the battalion in IL with their historic African American regiment the 370th Infantry Regiment and changed that to Airborne. the IL NG is bigger and much more able to absorb an additional battalion. The 370th has a great history going back to the Spanish American War compared with the 555th which has no combat history at all. The Germans called the 370th die Schwarzen Teufel. Let's face it Black Devils sounds like the nickname of an Airborne regiment anyways.Call the battalion either the 2-370th Airborne to still honor the 2nd Ranger Company or 555-370th Airborne like the 100th-442nd to honor the 555th and that way you get your NG Airborne battalion and honor African Americans at the same time with an actual attachment to the state it is placed in and a combat history to be proud of in that way it would have been far less cringe worthy for me. In the end its author's choice and I enjoyed the rest of the module.

So... fair comments. I will say up front that I am not as up on Army heraldry and unit lineages as you are. This is one of the hazards of this line of work... there's always gonna be a SME out there, and I'm never gonna find a SME to consult with on every detail of a book.

It's a bit late and I'm a bit fried to reconstruct my precise reasoning, but my recollection is that we selected the 555th as a nod to its use in Frank Frey's original notes for the unpublished (and perhaps unwritten beyond notes/outline stage) Lions of Twilight.

Working from there, I needed to find a state in which to place our round-out battalion. My original thinking was Texas because of the ridiculous size of its National Guard component and because of its current real-world 1-143 Infantry. However, a couple of factors drove me away from that, chief among which was the desire to leave Texas alone in case another future author needs to reconstitute the 36th or 71st Airborne Brigade for another locale. I did leave myself an out for that in the writeup for 2-555, as well. I mentioned that three other states also received National Guard airborne battalions... so there's room for another author to use 1-555, 3-555, or 4-555.

(At any rate, I wouldn't have picked on the Illinois National Guard because someone might think I had it in for them. I already did a bunch of damage to their 66th Infantry Brigade as part of the 47th ID in Pacific Northwest.)

West Virginia appealed to me for a couple of reasons. First, because of its mountainous terrain, I felt like a unit coming from there would be vaguely suited to fighting a mountain insurgency in Romania. Second, when I was a kid, I read a factoid that West Virginia historically is the state with the highest per-capita rates of military volunteerism and Medal of Honor awards. I don't know if it's true, but that has always stuck with me.

The backhanded swipe at their congresscritter wasn't actually intentional, but I'll take it as a fortuitous coincidence because I'm snarky like that.

I agree with you 100% about the force strength of other WV NG components being affected by this, and I did note in 2-555's profile that it received a number of transfers from 1-150 Cav and 2-19 SFG. In an early draft, I did mention that those units had not yet recovered full manning and combat effectiveness by the time of the war, but I cut that during development. I trimmed a lot of unnecessary words to make the layout look good, and it wasn't really relevant to this sourcebook because they weren't in Romania.

It also was my intent - albeit never actually written down - that 2-555 was headquartered in WV but not 100% staffed by West Virginians. Again, that drew from real-world precedent (at least according to Wikipedia, which shows D Troop of 1-150 Cav based in North Carolina). As a Kentucky native, it was in the back of my head that 2-555 had one company drawn from the Ashland area, including some guys whose civilian jobs were at the Catlettsburg refinery, but that also was a level of minutiae that didn't make it into the manuscript.

Having said all of that, I like your analysis and selection, too. If I were going in that direction, I might go with the 369th because of Michael Longcor's Ballad of Esau's Sons, in which case I'd've made the battalion a NY NG unit headquartered somewhere in the Catskills.

- C.