With my Japanese all ready to go and my head full of roadblocks in Burma, I thought I’d knock together a Crossfire game. Chris took defending Japanese. Adam was the British trying to break through. I call this an experiment because very little thought went into it and we were just playing around with the concept of a Japanese ambush.
Scenario
The game happened while I was still drafting my posts on Japanese roadblocks in Burma and Roadblock Battles on the Retreat from Burma. So my thinking wasn’t fully formed and if I did this again it would be a bit different.
Map
There was no map. I put down the road then told Chris and Adam to add more terrain and make the table look pretty. They put on quite a lot of terrain, more than I was expecting. But it did look pretty.
Order of Battle
The Japanese had a company in defence, with a 75mm gun and a 37mm anti-tank gun.
The British had two companies and two Stuarts.
Deployment
I let the Japanese deploy hidden in their half of the table.
The British deployed visible roughly up to the 1/3rd line.
Special rules
6 hours on the moving clock.
Stuarts have a chance to bog off road in the open and bog worse off road in terrain.
Engineer has to spend an initiative removing the road block.
Victory Conditions
British had to get one or both Stuarts along the road and off table.
The Battle
The battle took less than an hour of game time. And not much longer in play time.
1200 Hours
The first part of the game was the British advance to contact.
British Advance
The game started with the British advancing through the forest, clearing out Japanese as they met them.
Stuart brews up
The first big dramatic moment was when the Stuarts advanced and the Japanese 75mm gun blew one of them up.
1230 Hours
The second half of the game saw a steady British advance along the road, interrupted briefly by a Japanese counter-attack.
British advance again
The British advanced behind the Japanese 75mm gun, took it, then continued on to the roadblock.
Banzai charge
Then all hell broke loose as a Japanese platoon went all Banzai. They killed four British stands before being halted by British fire.
British advance to roadblock
The British then advanced again, all the way to roadblock, again eliminating Japanese as they were encountered.
British clear road
Withe the roadblock under control, the British cleared the road and removed the block.
British take the game
With the British in control of the road, Adam drove his remaining Stuart off table. British win.
Observations and Conclusions
It was an alright game, fun to watch and play.
Having said that, in hindsight the scenario was a poor. I really didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it and this showed. If I did it again I’d leverage some of the thinking from my notes on Japanese roadblocks in Burma. Unfortunately the game was before I’d finished that post. The orders of battle were wrong, the jungle fighting was wrong, and the table was wrong.
The Game
Adam won by capturing and removed the roadblock, then getting a Stuart along the road and off the table.
The highlights for me were both by the Japanese the 75mm gun’s destruction of the lead Stuart and Chris’s Banzai charge.
We were using my revised Anti-tank rules and I gave the the 75mm gun a big number of dice (7d6). I might have been over generous even assuming the crew had Ta Dan Rounds available; I blame it on putting the scenario together, in my head, as the guys laid out the table. None the less, when the gun fired we all took note and the target Stuart blazed furiously. A big moment.
Later in the game, one of Chris’s platoons did a Banzai charge. Ignoring PINs they charged and killed four British stands in succession. Then got gunned down as they charged again. All and all it felt on period, with the right flavour.
Orders of Battle
The orders of battle were wrong. Basically there were too many British infantry compared to the Japanese.
There were also too few British tanks with too little incentive to use them. Having less infantry would force the British to use the tanks more. I have an overriding impression of the Roadblock battles was tanks ineffectually milling about in front of the roadblocks getting shot up. The scenario needs more of that.
Jungle fighting
We used standard Crossfire so both sides could move through terrain equally proficiently. However, at this time in WW2 in Burma, British were trained as a motorised troops and hence had poor off road fighting capability. The woods they encountered weren’t jungle as such, but still more heavily forested than they could easily cope with. So in this game the British had too many jungle skills for the period.
British troops disappearing into the jungle should have a chance to get lost. There are a few ways to tackle this but a couple are:
- Give the British even less infantry assuming the rest have got lost on the way
- Use one of the Fighting the 1000 Foot General rules e.g. the “Lost in the Woods” roll
The Table
Finally I’d change the table. Don’t get me wrong, I think the table looked grand. The palms and bamboo. The houses and rice paddies. Lovely.
But it was the wrong terrain for the retreat from Burma and the Japanese would not have selected this position for an ambush because there were insufficient fields of fire.
The forest near the road on the retreat from Burma was not jungle. There probably were palms. There definitely was bamboo. But the majority of vegetation would have been, well, trees. I need more trees, less palms, bamboo etc.
I also think the guys went overboard on the number of features. A 4’x4′ table should have about 50 features and this table had a lot more. More open terrain would give a small defending force more opportunities for reactive fire at distance. In this game the density of terrain meant the action quickly got to close quarters. And the Japanese didn’t have enough troops to fight such an attritional battle. The historical maps of roadblocks show the Japanese fought on the edge of the forest for just that reason; they had long fields of fire and could keep the Allies away.
A scenario of a Japanese roadblock in Burma needs a table the reflects these diagrams more closely …
I will also use a trick from my African Ambush Scenario and have the game start when the ambush is triggered. This means the British will not control their movements before the Japanese open fire. The game starts when a Stuart bursts into flames with other tanks in the field of ambush fire and insufficient infantry nearby to help. A much more dramatic start to the game.
Have you considered hiding the roadblocks to any extent?
The roadblock in the game was deployed hidden, like the rest of the Japanese force, and was only revealed when the British had line of sight.
Which simulates what happened historically. The British drive around a bend in the road and see a roadblock.