EDITOR'S NOTE: Lately, Bill McHarg has been displaying an amazing amount of writing prolificacy with a series of inputs to the REVIEW. Spurred by sibling rivalry, Brother Geoff, refusing to be outdone by Brother Bill, submitted the following epic. I just received the latest PW review. Overall the issue looked great, except for some drivel written by one W.K. (Bill) McHarg. I figured that if you can print drivel by one McHarg brother, maybe you can print drivel from the other McHarg brother as well. Actually this is an article I've been working on since last summer when I went to "Little Wars" in Chicago. The game was put on by Bill Protz, the publisher of The Seven Years War Newsletter. Bill writes rules on the side, and our game was played with his "Drums Along the Mohawk" rules. He has recently published these rules under the new name" Drums of War Along the Mohawk." These are my kind of rules; you move, you shoot, lots of guys die. No silly modifications to the die roles, except for artillery and morale. His morale roles have lots of modifications. Each figure represents one or ten men. In this manner you can use the rules for skirmish or small unit actions. We used the rules with each figure representing ten men. The game was based upon a French and Indian War scenario. The British were advancing on Quebec (sounds familiar) via the lakes in upper New York. The French controlled an island fort at the top of the lake which the British had to take by invasion. The British had one sloop (commanded by my brother in fact), three regular units (one was artillery), Rogers Rangers, and two colonial militia units. The French had three gun emplacements on the fort, some Indians, some Canadian militia, and several units of French regulars. It seemed like there were millions of them. All figures were 25mm. British Organization First Wave Rogers Rangers and Colonial Militia 64 figures Second Wave British Regulars (Highlanders & Artillery) 48 + 2 guns Third Wave British Regulars (with Grenadiers) 68 figures Fourth Wave Colonial Militia (Jerseys Blues) in reserve 60 figures As you may have been able to tell. I was on the British side. My command was the two militia units and Rogers Rangers. The units had to come on in "waves". The umpire (Bill Prois ) had only brought enough whale boats for about two units to land at a time. This meant you couldn't bring on the next wave until all the first wave had landed. As you might guess, this made for headaches. Figure I shows the map at the beginning of the game, and the landing zones in order of assault. The landing zones were picked by our side commander, and, in retrospect, probably spelled disaster from the start. As well as being unsupportive of each other, the first zone was in the fire arc of two of the batteries. The plan was to get the French to come up to fight the colonials at the point of the island. We would then outflank with the British regulars and artillery, and the rest of the British plus the colonial militia would trap the Frogs between a hammer and anvil. As Sun Tzu said "So much for plans". Table I details the landing waves. I got to land first. The sloop track chart is shown on figure 1. It was to provide support for the invasion waves. It actually just got in the way, and made a bunch of noise. The rules for fortification made the guns of the sloop fairly ineffective against the emplacements. Thus we were never able to silence one of the emplacements. The operation went bad from the start. The sloop cut through the middle of whale boats to bombard the gun emplacements. This made Rogers Rangers land separate from the colonial militia. Thus the first landing didn't even support itself! All units landed in the teeth of bombardment by the gun emplacements. The guns were very effective against troops. My assignment was to take the trees shown in figure 1, and hold out there for reinforcements. The guns so badly pounded my poor militia they had to test for morale (I hate it when they do that). Naturally, I missed the morale role by one spot on the die. You can't advance in this game if your morale is bad. So I just hung around the beach and got cut to pieces by the French guns as the second wave went by. Oh well, not my fault, I just followed orders! Ah yes, the second wave. Remember the sloop? It had anchored off gun emplacement 3 so as to get a +1 on the "to hit" die role. This was actually ok since the gun was killing a lot of men on the whale boats. The second wave finally got ashore and started fighting the Indians that were behind the fortifications. The sloop cut its anchor cable, and came around to give some flanking Indians grape shot in their flank! As you might imagine this depressed the Indians who then ran away. Things were finally looking up. Unfortunately, the French regulars were flanking from the gun emplacement 3 side. The sloop tried to give them "a wif o'grape", but the gods ruled that the fire arc might cover some of the British, and the sloop would never fire if it might hit its own people. This flanking move went uncontested and the Regulars were finally overcome by sheer weight of numbers. At this point all seemed lost; the colonial commander counseled retreat, the naval commander went to look at some figures for sale, and was unavailable for comment. The British commander disagreed, and said that, since landing zone 3 was now open (all the frogs had gone off to kill the second wave), it was a perfect time to make an unopposed landing and teach these "frogs the meaning of a little massed firepower". So we landed with no artillery, 1/2 our force dead, making a frontal assault on a foe that had suffered only minimal losses. Military genius, sheer genius. The end was predictable, and I won't bore you anymore with details. The colonial militia commander (Washington of the Jersey Blues) decided not to even land, and went home to report the debacle. The court martial revealed the final grim cost to the British cause. Major Rogers: KIA.unit destroyed Colonial militia: broken, then routed, captured or killed. General Washington: found guilty of disobeying orders... commended for common sense British Commander: captured, found guilty in abstinence of being pig headed British regulars: all died valiantly British sloop: found guilty of meandering followed by dithering Comments from the observers agreed that the gun emplacements were probably a little too strong. The major cause of the defeat was the lack of a plan that was achievable. This combined with tactical errors spelled doom for the Brits. All seemed to like the rules. I thought the morale modifiers a bit much, it could have been made simpler. The game made me a firm enthusiast of the French and Indian War period. If any of your readers are interested, I recommend the Seven Years War Association as a place to find out more about this little gamed period and theater. Back to PW Review March 1987 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1987 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