Gung Ho- Along the Coral Road (1)

Followers of this blog will know that myself and Pierre-Yves have recently started a Saipan campaign. Since I hosted the Gembloux Gap campaign, it fell to P-Y to host our next campaign. He had been recently working on Jungle terrain, so this gave him a chance to put it on display. P-Y is a master terrain builder as well as a great photographer so this was something to look forward.

My gaming friends in Finland have put on several games in which I have participated and I felt I should return the favour. I also had some jungle terrain as well as USMC and IJA forces that I painted and built from 2017 through to 2018 but have yet to see the table. I let the Finns decide on which theatre they would like to try and they uniformly wanted to do some Jungle gaming. Coincidentally, at the same time a new Pacific campaign came out for Chain of Command so we all agreed why not. The other big thing for me is that I do shift work and many days in the week I am off, so this was something I could easily do while at the same time making it convenient for the players in Finland. Tuesday is the regular game night for their club so we selected Wednesdays for this campaign. We had our first game this past Wednesday. We start at 1200h EDT which is 1900h in Finland.

I had to do a bit of work on my terrain and I was short some Japanese figures, so over the last couple of weeks I put in some work. With P-Y's suggestions I was able to put together a fairly nice table for our first game. Here is an overview as well as some closeups. There are 4 tables in the campaign, and they are all 90% jungle, aside from some roads and the occasional structure.

But on to the actual campaign. I am not going to reveal everything here as I have kept the players in the dark about the specifics. Both sides started the first scenario without knowing the actual composition of the opposing force, the wild cards that were available etc etc. After the first turn the Japanese now know that they are facing a USMC Raider Platoon and since they were occupying the island, I made available to them the 4 scenarios maps.

The campaign was written by William Thorpe, I believe this is 3rd campaign for CoC, myself and P-Y had played his All American campaign which we quite enjoyed. The campaign itself is available on Wargamers Vault. The campaign follows the exploits of the USMC Raider platoon being dropped off by submarine on the remote Makin Island in the Pacific where they have been ordered to search and destroy Japanese installations.

A few housekeeping issues before I describe the game. I have been increasing frustrated with Zoom, they have a good system but they just can not deliver 720p video on my system despite me paying for it. My friend Eero in Finland uses Discord for all his games so I thought I would give it a try. It was a little intimidating at first but once I figured it out it really works well. I was able to integrate private audio chat channels for each side as well as a integrated dice roller. There invite system is seamless, and I can have multiple text channels on my server. I was able to deliver 3 video channels in our game yesterday with good quality and they also have an integrated share screen which is quite useful. I used 3 wireless iPhones for the Video feeds and aside from one phone that could deliver 4k, the other 2 phones delivered what appeared to be good quality 720p. I should say I bought the Nitro upgrade for $100 per year.

Enough chatting, we had 4 players in Finland set up to play, one had to bow out because of an acute illness but we are playing regular CoC so all we really need is 1 player aside. Eero and Petri are very experienced CoC players, I have learned a lot from them. We also have Mikko and Kyanor who have some CoC experience so I feel the campaign will be well balanced in respect to experience.

THE FORCES

USMC (FM 9)

2nd Marine Raider Battalion

2SL

3 Raider Squads with Superior JL's and 9 men

Supports (6)

Native Assistance (2)

? (4)

Japanese (FM 11)

62nd Garrison Force

Grenadier Section with JL and 8 men and 3 50mm Mortars

Otherwise unknown composition.

Supports (3)

?

THE GAME

So on to the Patrol Phase, we started off using P-Y's patrol ap but my skill set is not his, so I ran into a bit of a roadblock and half way through we had to transition to the table. This however was pretty smooth and we ended up withe the following.

As you can see the Raiders got the jump, as they had 4 free moves. There JOP's were well up the table, the IJA were about 18" in from there edge.

So I have to say it was a very short game, mostly because of the forward JOP's for the Raiders. They also played their "Lt Peatross" wild card which gave them a Pre-game Barrage for the first turn. This did make IJA deployment difficult. With the "Native Assistance" support they were able to deploy a Raider Squad 12" from a JOP rather than the usual 6" and with their "First to Fight" national charactersitic they were able to deploy this squad on just a 4 with a SL!

So suddenly the Japanese commander was faced with 3 Raider squads with an SL on the table within striking distance of all 3 of their JOP's and just a knee mortar squad on the table. The IJA prudently withdrew yielding the first table to the marines.

Here are the final positions at withdrawal.

Butcher's Bill

USMC (platoon 1)

Final FM 9

no dead

CO +3

MO +2

Platoon Leaders Outlook Happy

IJA (platoon 1)

Final FM 11

no dead

CO -1 

MO +2

Platoon Leaders Outlook Cheerful

Well, certainly a short game but the IJA now have quite a bit of intelligence about the Raiders while the Raiders have little about the Japanese. We are planning to play our next game on 20-10-21, so stay tuned.

USMC Part 2

I had planned to get these 3 USMC squads done for the recent Painting Challenge, but like my recent Epic Armageddon post I just ran out of time. I still have some AB Napoleonics as well as 2 more units of SAGA Revenants in the queue, but that is it.

These 3 squads complete my core USMC platoon with supports for Chain of Command, so another project completed. I will just now have to entice someone into a game as the terrain is also all set. I knew nothing of the WWII Pacific Theatre and it has been quite an interesting study, so interesting that I put the official list Early War USMC list together for Chain of Command. I did have a lot of help from the TFL forum. From what I learned the above photo puts this theatre together for me.

Anyway, I still needed 2 core squads for the platoon as well as a raider squad. Most of my initial figures came from BattleModels, these are nice sculpts and although I was guaranteed that when this company took over Warmodelling they had remade the molds, this was not the case. What I received were really poor casts, many had to be tossed. So I moved on to Eureka which are really first class. It is too bad that their 20mm WWII range is somewhat restricted as these are great figures and come highly recommended. You can review my other USMC forces, Jungle Terrain and my IJA forces here.

The painting scheme was pretty simple with VMC Khaki base coat with a Citadel Camoshade wash (very useful for many WWII uniforms), followed by the Warlord Games painting guide scheme for USMC. I believe they came out OK for wargaming.

3 squads

Rifle Squad 3

BAR Squad, the 2 BAR gunners are from BattleModels

The Raider Squad (list 6) with a JL, 3 shotguns, 3 SMG's and 3 BAR's

Platoon Guide (list 2)

The Jungle

I started putting this terrain together about 6 months ago, it certainly is the biggest terrain project I have taken on and the most difficult. I really am not a big planner, I wanted something that I could use for an early pacific island campaign (Guadalcanal) and also something maybe in Malaya in case I wanted to paint up some Australians. Aside from that general want, there was no plan. I see a piece of terrain and say that will work and I then have to fit it in.

I had a general sense that I wanted a beach, a jungle and something to attack. I knew that unlike Normandy or Finland this would have to be very dense. Line of sight would be continuously blocked, but I wanted winding pathways through the jungle. I also wanted lots of different types of terrain. Chain of Command is a terrific game and it caters well to varying terrain.  The TFL 2015 Xmas Special had a superb Malaya campaign. The author Len Tracey had done a fantastic job of putting together some special rules for fighting in jungles. Terrain types included were primary and secondary jungle, kunai grass, bamboo copses, swamps, plantations and jungle huts. For each of these types of terrain, he defines movement and LOS, as well as cover. This information gave me a general outline for planning as I went along.

6x4 terrain with beach in foreground and the start of some hills in the farground

I was tempted to put in some sea but resisted the urge

A lot of the terrain pieces were designed to be affixed to tiles of mdf. Unfortunately it is impossible to get thin mdf in the US, Simon of Big Red Bat Cave was great in suppling me with nice pieces from the UK.

The mat is the from Cigar Box and is their dessert  one. I used used liquid wood to give the tiles texture adding some small rocks and sand. The palm trees on the beach are from Pegasus but they are enormously expensive. After buying 6 of them, I decided to do some searching on the internet and found that you can get excellent trees from China on eBay at a fraction of the cost of suppliers in the US and Europe. Shipping is very inexpensive. I believe I used 2 different types of palm trees, bamboo trees, 3 different types of regular trees, swamp plants and bushes from Chinese suppliers.

The entrance to the bamboo forest. Holes were drilled into the mdf and I think I used 600 bamboo plants 

A jungle hut from Sarissa Precision. This hut is from their 15 mm line, a little small for 20 mm gaming but it will do. 

Coconut Plantation, this is one type of palm from China

The jungle grass behind the hut is from Gale Force Nine Battle Front line. In order to get the plastic look off all the trees and plants they were dipped in a brown wash and allowed to dry. I then would give a quick mist of a bright green spray followed by a dusting of a bright yellow spray. It worked well. The trunks of all the trees were dry brushed with an ivory

Another hut this time from Airfix. I am not sure where I got the sand bunker from. 

A watchtower also from Sarissa.

A hooch that came in the Airfix kit

The hill is dry brushed 2" styrofoam. The ground cover is of two types, some sort of moss rolls from a craft shop and then some lichen from Woodland Scenics. This worked well to blend the mdf terrain pieces into the mat

Three different tree types from China. The tree bases are from Adventure Terrain and are magnetized. Very clever. The tre bases will represent primary jungle for gaming. 

I wish I could have found some rubber trees as well, but a copra plantation is good.

This represents secondly jungle with heavy ground cover

Kunai grass from Products for Wargamers

The water features are from WorldSmith Industries

Two part epoxy resin was used for the water, maybe a little shiny

USMC Patrol

A Stuart

30 cal MMG

USMC Flamethrower team heading into the bamboo

Forward Observer

Mortar Team on the beach

50 cal HMG Team

Japanese MMG team with LMG squad heading off on patrol

Into the Jungle!

Chi-Ha

Well this was a lot of work, but I am happy how it came out. I still have to decide how I am going to terrain the paths, I will probably just lay down some reddish sand. Still have 2 more sections each of USMC and Japanese to paint as well.