A novice Chain of Command opponent for me this week; easy, right? Well you’d think that, wouldn’t you… This one turned into a bit of a duel and at times could have gone either way. The scene is laid out below – imagine a smallholding growing rice and other bits of light cover er…I mean foodstuffs. The combatants are a US armored rifle platoon starting on 8 Morale (me) hunting for an IJA unit and Type 95 tank they have heard is in the area starting on 10 (jammy git opponent).
Given I only have room at home for a small wargaming table we opted for Scenario One: The Patrol as we felt it would get us smacking into each other pretty quickly without much manoeuvring. Deploying at opposite corners I grabbed the heights early and my mate Duncan took a wider stance taking advantage of the superior Japanese Jump Off Point max range of 14″ apart.
Pretty quickly we got into a pattern of me being bombed by the grenade discharger squad hiding behind the hut while I tried to whittle away the couple of sections I could see with my MG Squad toting two .30 calibre Brownings.
The inevitable happened and the Japanese deployed the Ha Go that I noticed was now missing from my shelf in the front room. Luckily for me despite a double phase for the Japanese the tank was making very slow progress. Too much saké in the diesel tank, I reckon.
You can see in the below picture the main directions of the Japanese fire in the dashed lines; tank movement and limit of advance is shown in the solid arrow. The MG squad was not having a great time at this point and was starting to accrue shock points and had lost a man from each team. These casualties came mainly from long-range massed rifle and automatic fire from the two sections now deployed on the other side of the valley.
The Americans deployed two bazooka teams at this point to try and see off that tank by flanking around the heavy bush; I also got two rifle sections down intending to make a move on the grenade dischargers and put my mortar squad behind the machine guns. You can see this move in blue below as well as the principle target of my firing and mortaring
This is where it got quite exciting and I think probably where the battle was actually won in true Japanese BANZAIIIII !!!! style. Naturally, as this was the most tense and impactful part of the game we both completely failed to get any good photos.
Anyway, as my opponent realised the vulnerability of his right flank to my double bazooka and rifle section move he got a crucial last section down in a blocking position to the right of the hut. I double backed with the vulnerable bazooka teams and stood my ground with the infantry. He went straight in with the bayonet, no messing, and in two rounds of combat completely destroyed my section. Utterly brutal and utterly Japanese! I dropped three morale points overall in this phase putting me down to five. Ouch.
Not to be put off and now looking at the blood-soaked remnants of the Japanese section up the track I got stuck in with my other rifle section doing some marching fire and also got a 37mm gun down on the hill to cover the tank. I could just see it (obscured) through the hut veranda and got a couple of plinks on target to not much result.
This is really where it started going tits up for the Good Old Boys. I started to wheel the bazooka teams around as you’ll see in the next image but following this and during a second opponent double phase I used my CoC die to end the turn; I could not take any more! You can also see the other section making their move up the road. They did succeed in getting the Japanese section remnant off the table but lost their Sergeant in the process. That was me down to 4 Force Morale.
At this point the writing really was on the wall and I was feeling the pressure of Japanese weight of fire. Me piddling around behind a hedge wasn’t much of an effective response but I was hopeful that if I could grease the tank it might be enough of a shock that things would look a bit more even. Sadly at this point the two MG teams had had enough and decided to skedaddle, their junior leader was killed and that was that.
A truly great game and my opponent took to it like a bastard to water, apologies, a duck to water. No hard feelings at all. None. All credit to him, really. Really!
T.O.F.T.S. Wargaming 
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