“Launch aircraft!” said Admiral James ’40 knot’ Butters. And he picked up six 6-sided dice and tossed them, looking for either a 4, or a 5, or a 6. Each one of these numbers represented the launch of an aircraft squadron from Admiral Butters’ carrier. Each die permitted an aircraft squadron to range out to 36 inches (I had a yardstick, which came in handy). And if a second die was assigned to the unit, it could go out another 36 inches, 72 inches in all. Admiral Butters’ carrier was some 60 inches from the opposing fleet, and in order to attack, each of his launched aircraft squadrons had to be assigned two dice. The Butters’ dice showed a 2,2,3,5,5,6. The 2, 2, and 3 were useless. while the 5, 5, and 6 had potential, and so he combined one 5 and one 6 to strike out against the opposing ships. The remaining 5 was also unusable… all it did was allow a strike within 36 inches, and there were no enemy ships within that range. Off went the Butters’ squadron, denoted by a single aircraft token. And it focussed on Admiral Cliff Sayr’s battleship, the Sharp. During the aircraft phase, squadrons didn’t need to actually fly out to their targets… as long as they were within range, we simply placed an aircraft token on the targeted ship. After planes were launched and placed at their targets, the next phase involved anti-aircraft fire. I had drawn up a chart which gave each type of ship a number of dice to throw for its ack-ack capability. A battleship was given 5 dice, and Admiral Sayr tosses his 5 dice, looking for either a 4, or a 5, or a 6. In this set of rules, the higher numbers (4,5,6) always represented successful strikes. The Sayr dice read 2,3,4,6,6. This meant that the anti-aircraft fire had scored three times on the enemy aircraft squadron. And so the squadron commander had to take a morale test… did he carry on with his mission, or was he driven off by the enemy ack-ack? Each successful strike on the squadron produced one pip on the die tossed by the commander. Here, three hits produced 3 pips… which meant that if the commander’s die showed a 1, or 2, or 3, he’d abort the mission and go home. The squadron commander’s die was a 2… the ack-ack had driven him off. End of phase. The fleets of Admiral Butters and Sayr each contained 9 ships… one carrier, a couple of battle ships, a cruiser or two, and a buncha destroyers. At the outset, they were located approximately 60 inches apart, and slowly sailed toward each other. Progress was slow… the carrier and the battleships could only move 5 inches per bound, battleship gun-battery range reached out to 40 inches, and that’s why the long range striking power of the carrier was so important. Each ship had a certain number of hull boxes (i.e., hits scored on it) to be crossed out before it went under. Destroyers could take 15 hits, cruisers 20, while battleships and carriers could absorb 25 hits before they sank. We used a huge damage chart, in which we looked up the firing ship, the targeted ship, and picked off the number of inflicted hits. All deterministic… no dice throwing required. After the aircraft-launching phase, came the movement phase for the Butters’ fleet. With 9 ships, he tossed 10 6-sided dice (one more than the number of ships he had), and looked for the following numbers: 1,2,3 Assignment of one of these dice allowed a ship to move forward. As I indicated, the larger ships moved 5 inches, while destroyers moved 10. A ship could only be assigned one movement die. These dice also had another function… assignment of one of these dice also allowed a ship to turn 90 degrees…. and there was no limit to the number of ‘turn dice’. 4,5,6 Assignment of one of these dice to a ship allowed it to fire if a target was within range. I should note that after the battle, during our post-game discussion, both Cliff and Jim suggested to forget about the above movement dice business. Here we had, they said, two fleets purportedly sailing toward each other, and yet the movement dice restrictions prevented about half the ships in the fleet from moving each turn. While this type of dice tossing might be appropriate for land units, in effect representing whether or not a unit got its marching orders, it didn’t seem appropriate for fleet actions. I made a mental note of the suggestions, which will be incorporated in the second edition. It was interesting to me to see the contrasting tactics used by Jim Butters and Cliff Sayr. Cliff was the most aggressive, moving his ships forward whenever he could, so as to get them within gun-battery range. Neither did he hold back his carrier, but sent that forward, too. In contrast, Jim was very conservative. His carrier was held way, way back, out of harm’s way (except for the long range strike of aircraft). And he also clustered a couple of destroyers around his carrier, not to provide surface support, but to provide additional ack-ack support. Each ship’s anti-aircraft fire reached out to 5 inches… so Jim’s destroyers added their ack-ack dice to those of the carrier The Butters tactic paid off. Each time he sent out his aircraft squadrons, it was to focus on Cliff’s carrier. Each time a wave of aircraft came in, Cliff tossed his anti-aircraft dice… the carrier had 6 of them… and Cliff looked for a 4, or 5, or 6 to score hits on the planes. Bad dice for the Sayr ack-ack tosses… he scored few hits, and when he did, Jim’s squadron commanders always seemed to pass their morale tests, and never aborted their missions. If a squadron was not driven off, the damage chart indicated that the squadron placed 5 hits on the carrier. Since the carrier could only absorb 25 hits, it took only 5 successful strikes before the carrier went down… the Sayr fleet now had no airpower. Given that the loss of a carrier was fairly decisive, it appeared that a Butters victory was in the making. A second victory condition involved a loss of one other capital ship… if Jim could sink one of Cliff’s two battleships, that would result in a major disaster at sea for the Sayr fleet. Cliff tried to cluster his destroyers around his battleships to provide additional ack-ack capabilities, but the Butters air assault was unstoppable. Back to PW Review December 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