There were four of us at Brian Dewitt's house, and out came Brian's supply of subs and surface ships, all in 1/1200 scale. The sea area displayed on the table top consisted of junctions placed on a rectangular grid of one foot squares. Ships sailed from junction to junction, and were permitted a 90 degree turn before movement. Jeff Wiltrout and I commanded a convoy of 20 merchantmen, and an assortment of escort vessels... one cruiser, one small carrier, and several destroyers. Our goal was to convoy the merchantmen off the table in any direction we chose to go. Fred Hubig was our enemy... he had two U-Boats under him, and he would score several victory points for every ship in the convoy he could sink. Fred directed his submarines via a hidden movement system... the junctions were labeled, and Fred would note on his own chart (unseen by us) the locations and facings of his subs. When submerged, the subs could move 1 junction per turn, and when on the surface, 2 junctions per turn. Sequence The sequence consisted of 8 phases: (1) Merchantmen move (2) Submarines move (3) Convoy escorts move (4) Search phase wherein each escort ship could toss a 10-sided die, looking for high tosses (its sonar ping), which would indicate a potential sub contact. Even if a contact was declared, however, it could be a spurious one, i.e., the sonar operator mistook a school of whales for a sub. In addition to the surface vessel search, we had two aircraft operating off the carrier which could search anywhere on the field. (5) Torpedo launch phase. Each sub could launch one torpedo forward or four from its stern, and a 10-sided die roll decided if a ship was hit. We, the convoy commanders, were told of the direction the torpedo came from, but not the exact location of the launching submarine. (6) Depth charge phase. Here, the escorts could drop their depth charges, hoping for a hit. (7) Gunnery. All escorts could pound away at contacts they thought they had seen during the search phase of step (4). (8) On this final phase, the submarine commander could move the entire table surface one junction in any direction he so deemed, i.e., he could 'slide the sea surface' wherever he wanted. This last phase, wherein the table top was moved, enabled the sub commander to keep the convoy ships on the table and negate their movement toward the table edges during the movement phase in step (1). As convoy commanders, we collected one victory point for every merchantman we could exit from the field. And here's where we all put on our silly hats. Since the objective was simply to "get off the table", said Jeff Wiltrout, why don't we just break up the convoy into several elements and have each element run for the nearest table edge? Brian, our host and game umpire, didn't make too much noise when this radical view of WW II convoy warfare was announced. In fact, he tried to rationalize it... if you break up the convoy, he said, there are fewer escorts per convoy element to shelter the ships. And so, around Turn #3, Jeff and I, convoy commanders extraordinaire, spread our ships all over the ocean, every which way, each of the ships making for the nearest table edge. Who cares if they had an escort to cover them? Run for your life! What this meant, in the real world, was that although the convoy of 20 ships had all been originally directed to, say, Southampton, England, some of the ships were now making directly for South America, some for Liberia, some for Nova Scotia, others for Vladivostok, and yet others for Buenes Aires. It was, indeed, a "sauve qui peut" situation, with each individual ship chugging along, hoping to avoid those dreaded submarines. I remember that around Turn #6, we had 3 of our merchantmen right on the western table edge, heading due west, and another 3 on the eastern edge, heading due east, when Step (8) in the sequence arrived. Here, Fred Hubig, our unhappy submarine commander, decided to move the table-top area toward the west... and the result was that the westernmost ships sailed right off the field to victory (giving us points), while he, the sub commander, had another go at the east-bound contingent of merchantmen. Aside from this extraordinary interpretation of convoy warfare, the game went well. When Step (4), the search phase, occurred, the searching ships could specify one of three types of searches... high reliability, medium reliability, or low reliability. With a high reliability search, there were few results, when the search die was rolled, that could indicate a false alarm. In contrast, when a low reliability search was called for, the 10-sided die roll could produce a number of potential contacts, and, on occasion, we convoy commanders were given a confusing array of contacts. My tactic was to call for low reliability searches, and simply blast away at all contacts, at everything and anything that showed up, and that appeared to move nearby, hoping for a lucky hit on a sub. There was one procedure in the sequence which I would change slightly... the one relating to the high reliability search. If, on the first search of a specific area, a contact was made and 'something' was apparently seen, and then a second or third search was made of the same area, there was no provision for any sort of confirmation of the first sighting. One would think that if three or four guys on different ships sighted - or thought they sighted - a sub at the same location, the convoy commanders would be able to zero in on the offending sub. But that's just my own 'druthers'... Back to PW Review November 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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