My players were led to believe the game was going to be a British attack on an Italian convoy. When they arrived and opened their individual briefing packets, they discovered they either had one warship (Brits) or a pair of Motor Torpedo Boats (Italian MS or MAS boats, or German S boats) attacking a badly dispersed British convoy off Cape St. Bon during the Pedestal convoy, August 1942.

Further, the British players were led to believe they were in imminent danger from a major sortie by 6 Italian cruisers and 11 destroyer (historically they turned away from the convoy, only to encounter British subs later).

The game was set up with 1:2400 miniatures on tabletop, two 36~ X 96" tables side by side with a deep blue sheet over them, in a darkened room. Pen Flashlights were available as searchlights; along with glow-in-dark decorative stars to locate starshell bursts. As umpire I had a flashlight which was used to illuminate visible areas. Each player would give moves and standing orders; I would execute moves...major gunneq was irrelevant, since the General Quarters system we used, has AA only for use vs. MTB's. After each player had given orders for the turn, I as umpire executed them (I also controlled the British Merchants), moving the models. All players were asked to roll dice when an action was occurring, as part of concealing results. Thus, players did not know what ship - or country - anybody else had.

1:2400 models of S-booten and MAS boats are pretty darn hard to see in low light, when painted medium gray, on a dark blue cloth! We put white cotton behind them, light amounts for medium speeds, a notable amount (about an inch) for high speeds (but this was generally after the torpedo boats had fired and were fleeing).

The boats did about as well as historically) we played for about 1/2 hour game time and in three attacks the boats sank two merchants, got a torpedo hir on a British light cruiser, and damaged another merchant. In real life there were 15 attacks over 4 hours, the cruiser was hit by two torpedoes and sunlc, and three merchants sunk and one damaged.

In our game, however, the British were getting close to builting up a convoy formation again (to better face air attacks the next day) so that more escorts would have been available to set up an anti-MTB perimeter. This likely would have resulted in fairly historical final results. The poor British players were kind of in the role of victim in this game, but they said they had fun anyway, so I guess it worked. Our (needs updating) Club homepage is: http://klingon.iupucs.iupui.edu/~ateal/Wargames / Kampfgruppe.html

BT