Thursday, 17 June 1943
Earlier in the month, the men of 25th regiment of the 93rd Infantry Division landed in New Galloway. After some initial setbacks (and personnel losses!) involving a new tropical disease and a Japanese air attack on their camp, the First Platoon of Company J finally saw some action.
They were tasked with snatching a prisoner for interrogation. In the initial month the were on the island, the men of the platoon made some good friends among some of the local villagers and rather than mounting an attack on the Japanese front lines to grab their prisoner, they enlisted the help of some of the locals who were able to lead them on some local pathways through the dense jungle around the Japanese front like to a small village in the mountains that were a much smaller force of Japanese were billeted.
The village.
The men of First Platoon, Company J, 25th Regiment, 93rd Infantry Division making their way through the jungle as they approached the village as the trail would certainly be watched!
Another group of men on the other side of the trail
The platoon approaching the village.
One of the BAR gunners - PFC Gonzalez - snuck up to the edge of the Jungle, and spotted the Japanese guard in entrenchments before the village and fired off an extended burst at the machine-gun team, causing the gunner considerable distress!
Private Jackson was the next to open fire, putting a bullet through the neck of one of the other guards!?
Other Japanese rushed from the buildings and dove into the trenches, returning fire!
One gunner on the machine-gun was killed, taking a bullet through the head as he looked up to fire his gun. The loader took over firing and one of the newly arrived riflemen aided the loader.
Another rifleman was hit and went down before he even made it to a trench!
Flanking Americans made it into the trenches on the extreme of the Japanese right flank.
A burst of machine-gun fire took down Platoon Sergeant "Hard" Avery Jackson!
Another of the machine-gun crew was killed, with a bulled in the shoulder that blew out his back as they swivelled to fire upon the Americans rushing the trench immediately to their right.
A burst from the machine-gun knocked down one of the Americans in the trench.
The commander of the Japanese forces leapt out of his trench to run and check on the downed soldier.
A grenade was tossed at the Americans at the edge of the jungle, but it bounced off a tree and fell behind them, startling and lightly wounding Private Masters who was still behind the front line!
After squad-mates lay down some suppressing fire, one of the Americans rushed the nearest trench and fought the Japanese soldier therein in hand-to-hand combat. They fought viciously and it was clear there was no stopping or subduing the Japanese soldier short of killing them, and so that is what he did...
More Americans moving up and preparing to rush the Japanese position!
The Japanese commander got to the downed soldier and got them up and moving again.
But they were about to be overrun!
The Japanese commander was shot. A trooper rushed the other one in the open and stabbed him through with a bayonet.
The machine-gun position was finally rushed.
Checking the Japanese casualties, two weren't yet dead... but severely injured and, lacking medical personnel, they did not survive the trip back to the American's positions...
How This All Came to Be....
I recently traded away a bunch of American World War Two forces to my friend Orion (like, last week!?). She wanted to try out Bolt Action that weekend - which we could have done, I have no shortage of forces that could be fought against each other... but she was getting a few of the Americans painted, very quickly, and I suggested trying out Five Men in Normandy, as only a handful of miniatures are required to play...
Five Men in Normany (.30 Calibre Edition) and Five Men at Kursk are from Nordic Weasel Games and written by the same designer as Five Parsecs from Home and Five Leagues from the Borderlands. The games are modular and can be played as a solo game, a competitive game (where both players have their own squad rolled up and face off against each other) or as a player versus Game Master. We did the latter.
Initially we planned to use Five Men at Normandy and she rolled up a force and ended up needing FOURTEEN!? She was painting them up as African-Americans of one of the segregated divisions and decided we'd play a WHAT IF scenario - What If the 93rd Division saw considerably more action than they did?! (Historically the division was mostly used for labour and guard duty and saw very little action) (also, historically, they would have been wearing tropical fatigues... alas...)
Orion rolled for backgrounds and motivations for two of the figures...
Background - Drifter - On the fringe of society, doing odd jobs and staying alive. At least the meals are regular now.
Motivation - Survival - You've known a lot of brave men who won't be coming home. You intend to make it.
Maybe that's the sarge...?
Rolling for the next character..
Background - Criminal - Small time crook, hardened gangster or an enemy of the state. Out here, no one cares. Roll a negative morale die.
Motivation - Political - You're a model democratic citizen/communist/fascist willing to die for freedom and the cause. If group morale is currently 0 or positive, roll a positive morale die.
Yikes!
I mean... a "criminal" with political motivations in the United States at the time, could simply be someone with socialist leanings that joined the army to escape prosecution. So we decided the officer could have been a Lawyer with the NAACP with associations with socialists and communists, that stirred up too much trouble and was falsely accused of some sort of treason or other trumped up charges and told; "hey why don't you join the army and go fight Japs or we gonna throw you in jail for a long, long time..."
So the Sergeant was the drifter that signed up for three square meals a day!
Initially, with the negative morale dice roll and he size of the force, we decided the force was what was left of a platoon. Fourteen of the original forty surviving (not ALL battlefield casualties, a fair amount of attrition could be due to sickness - put a large group of malnourished men in close proximity in less than entirely sanitary conditions and so many tropical diseases... PUBLIC HEALTH NIGHTMARE!) Some of those would have been battlefield casualties and maybe that was because higher-ups kept demanding that the Lieutenants platoon be assigned the lead platoon for ALL the actions and given the most dangerous missions... in an attempt to make sure he doesn't come home from the war!?
Rolling for the mission and enemy force, I got:
Mission type - Military mission - Your group is assigned a mission intended to further the war effort in some way.
Location - Urban area - A small hamlet, the outskirts of a village or the suburbs of a larger city.
Mission - CAPTURE - An enemy soldier needs to be captured to get information and intelligence. (good luck with THAT!)
Enemy Forces - Defensive Position
- 1x Machine-gun Team - two soldiers
- 4x Soldiers with bolt-action rifles
- 1x Commander with pistol and sword!
If I hadn't rolled a soldier with a sword, I totally would have put one in anyway... just... because...
It's a very small force... I rolled three times, I swapped one of the rolls (single rifleman) out for the Machine-gun team (which you are supposed to do for a Defensive Position if you have not ROLLED a Machine-gun of any type) and then, because I had significantly fewer than the attacking force, I rolled AGAIN... and STILL ended up with a total force of seven!?
Despite generating all this with Five Men in Normandy, we ended up using the Five Men at Kursk rules.
Normally taking prisoners can happen in melee combat, if you win and would normally kill the enemy, a player can decide to capture them instead. I suggested that, because the Japanese were notoriously hard to capture and more often than not would fight to the death, if a Japanese soldier was potentially captured due to a hand-to-hand combat result, I'd roll a d6 and on a 1 or 6 the soldier could not be captured alive and was immediately taken out of action.
In the end I was sick the weekend we were originally planning to play, so we played the following Sunday. In the interim, however, I had played another game of Five Men in Normandy and then read the rules for Five Men at Kursk, and decided to use the latter to play this game...
Seems like we'll probably be playing again this Sunday!
I've started a Campaign Page - that I will update with status of current members of the unit and links to all the actions so far:
Fourteen Men in the Solomons Campaign and Characters
Of course, this all got me excited enough that I started rebasing the small force of Marine Raiders I have!
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