Bob Hurst’s US forces are defending, Don Bailey’s Japanese are attacking. Another battle in the series of WW2 campaign efforts I’m umping for the two of them. General Hurst’s men are dug in on Saku Island, and the Bailey Japanese are to launch an amphibious assault. Cliff Sayr said he’d run the Japanese, and I took the defending American units. I drew up a map of the towns (4 of them) and wooded areas (5 of them) on the table, and noted where my units were placed, ready to pop up and shout “Ambush!” This was a small scale affair in terms of the gaming effort… we each had around a dozen stands, and for lack of better terminology, each stand was defined as a company. Cliff had 6 infantry companies, 4 heavy tanks (one stand each), 2 armored cars, and one anti-tank gun. In my defensive role, I had 5 infantry, 3 tanks, and 2 anti-tank guns. Several of our infantry companies had an attached MG, providing more fire power against infantry targets. We kept data sheets on all our units, recording their “Efficiency Levels” (EL). Each type of unit was graded in terms of its EL… the heavy tanks had an EL of 7, indicating that when 7 of its ELs were crossed out, it was destroyed. The weakest units on the field were the armored cars… they each had only 5 ELs… 5 boxes crossed out and they were gone. Infantry companies had an EL of 6. There was a provision in the rules for “repair” of a unit, i.e., you could add back an already-crossed-out EL box. But you couldn’t make a super-weapon out of a unit by continually adding on EL boxes. The maximum number of ELs a unit could have was the number of original levels. Thus a heavy tank could never have more than its original 7. Pre-Landing Bombardment Prior to Cliff’s Japanese forces landing on the island, he was permitted a series of off-shore naval blasts. He selected a piece of terrain within which he thought an enemy unit might be hiding, and tossed percentage dice. There was a 50 percent chance that he hit the hidden unit (if, indeed, there was one). In any case, we marked the area with a smoke puff, and when the unit decided to show itself, it was at that time that we evaluated the hit. Cliff’s pre-landing bombardment focused on the terrain near the beach areas. Which meant that most of them were wasted, since the majority of my defending units were placed inland. My thought was that any unit I placed to directly defend the beach areas was going to be swamped and over-run… and since I started out with fewer forces than Cliff’s, I couldn’t afford to lose my troops in a valiant, but doomed, beach defense. Out of my 10 units, only 2 were situated near the beach. As the Japanese came inland, my 2 units on the beach opened up in ambush. These were both infantry companies, with their rifles and MGs having a range of 20 inches. The weapons started out with a basic probability-of-hit (POH) of 70 percent, and this was modified according to the situation. First, if an MG was attached, it added a +10 to the POH, and second, if the target was in cover, we’d deduct a -10 for the POH. Note that the POHs were fairly high, in the neighborhood of 70 percent, and I had done so purposely. Not every hit resulted in a loss of an EL box… there was a ‘filter’ in the system. When hit, a unit received a casualty figure, and several times during the bound, the effect of these casualty figures, in terms of their impact on an EL loss, was evaluated. Each casualty figure was ‘rolled off’ separately as referenced to the following table. DICE RESULT 01 to 33 No effect 34 to 66 Cross off 1 EL 67 to 100 Cross off 2 ELs What the table shows is that, despite a number of attached casualty figures, a series of lucky, low tosses could result in the hits essentially being shrugged off. But this could also work in reverse. For example, consider Lieutenant Helm, one of my most able front line commanders. The Lieutenant was attached to a heavy tank company, which was 5 inches from a neighboring tank unit. This permitted him to coordinate the fire of both units during their fire phase, and he did so by my expending a ‘Coordinated Fire’ token. Both tank units then fired, and both hit. The regular impact on a target unit is to receive one casualty figure when it’s hit, and so here, the target (a Japanese tank) was given 2 casualty figures. But because of the ‘coordinated fire’ ploy, the casualty figures were doubled, hence the enemy tank took on a total of 4 casualty figures. This meant that on the next casualty-figure-evaluation phase, the tank had to dice 4 times on the above chart, once for each figure. And as the result of 4 successive lousy dice throws, the tank had to cross off 8 EL boxes… and since it only had 7 to start with, all we heard was KABLAM! Lieutenant Helm did this twice, successfully. I should note that the ‘coordinated fire’ ploy only worked if both firing units actually hit the target… if either one failed, the target didn’t receive additional casualties. Despite Helm’s good work, my American units were gradually being pushed back. Japanese infantry companies swept my boys away. In the early stages of the battle, I was saved, in part, by the Japanese infantry failing their ‘rough terrain’ test, trying to enter the wooded areas in which my troops were hidden. They had to toss a 70 or less on percentage dice, and Cliff continually failed to do so. This permitted me to keep on firing from cover at the unprotected enemy infantry in the open. While it’s true that the cover modifier of -10 to the POH when my own units were being fired on didn’t help much, I needed all the help I could get. In essence, the sequence for each half-bound consisted of a basic Side-A-move/Side-B-fire, so that as one side advanced, it was subject to enemy fire. But I sandwiched in a couple of “reaction” phases, permitting out-of-phase enemy fire during the opposing side’s half-bound. Each side had a number of ‘reaction points’… it could expend a point to see if the order to fire was issued, and then dice to see if the order was successfully received. The chance that the order was received and understood was 80 percent, so that most of the ‘reaction fire’ orders were carried out. I kept the number of reaction points available to each side to a bare minimum, usually less than 4. Sad to say, the Americans gave up the ghost when all their infantry was wiped out, leaving only some 3 badly damaged tank units. Back to PW Review August 2001 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com