On Reconnaissance and Battlefield Intelligence in Valkyria Chronicles (Operation Cloudburst/Battle of the Bridge)

For today’s post, I’m going to take a trip down memory lane and talk about Valkyria Chronicles, a game I used to play — or to be strictly correct, one I mostly used to watch while other people played, though I played a fair amount of it myself. I’m choosing it because some of those gaming sessions sparked interesting discussions about military science and its representation in popular culture, and none more so than the fourth chapter in the game (titled Operation Cloudburst, with the actual combat mission being named Battle for the Bridge). And I’m not even going to discuss the entire chapter or mission here — one scene from the briefing alone should give us plenty of material to go by.

Let’s start with a little background information. The player takes the role of Welkin Gunther, a lieutenant in the militia forces of a fictional country called Gallia. For the most part Welkin commands Squad 7 of Captain Eleanor Varrot’s 3rd Militia Regiment. Readers with some familiarity might notice something odd here; why is a lieutenant commanding a squad, and why is he directly under the command of the regimental headquarters with several levels of command (most notably the platoon and the company, probably also the battalion) missing in between? On the other hand, what is a captain doing at the head of an entire regiment when it’s a command normally assigned to a much higher rank? I think some of the nuances involved might have been lost in translation from the original Japanese version of the game, and in practice it’s much easier to treat Welkin as a platoon leader (and his “squad” as more of an understrength platoon than a real squad) while Captain Varrot’s actual role in the game slots much more neatly into the billet of a company commander, which happens to be a good fit for her actual rank too.

At this point in the story, Gallia had been invaded by the neighbouring Empire, and the Imperial troops had seized large portions of Gallian territory in their drive towards the Gallian capital of Randgriz. The major Gallian city of Vasel lies along one of the principal avenues of approach towards Randgriz, and the Imperial invasion force had seized the Great Bridge of Vasel linking the two halves of the city before a counterattack by Squad 7 (in the previous chapter/mission) stopped them from expanding their bridgehead on the near bank. Now Squad 7 has been ordered to seize this momentum and launch a counterattack to retake the bridge. During the orders group with Captain Varrot, Lieutenant Faldio Landzaat — leader of Squad 1, Squad 7’s sister platoon in the “Regiment” — correctly remarks that the mission is suicidal since there’s no way that Welkin’s platoon would have enough mass to accomplish the task on its own. This then leads to the following exchange between Welkin and Varrot: