WW2 Naval History in the News

A neat story from the CBC today

U Boat Found in Labrador?

Operation Menace - An Existing Wargame Scenario

As with many things in life, nothing I blog about is very original.   A quick google of "operation Menace wargame scenario" or reasonable facsimile pulls up a "what if" scenario of HMS Renown engaging a Vichy cruiser force as it passes Gibraltar.  It can be found at the Naval Wargames Society page in one of the All Guns Blazing issues here.

WWII Naval - Scenario Ideas

I managed to find a copy of Operation Menace by Arthur J. Marder at the University Library this week.  It's a very interesting and well written account of the failed British and Free French invasion of the Vichy French colony at Dakar, Senegal.  This was one of Mr. Churchill's pet projects and the theory was that the French would welcome De Gaulle with open arms (unfortunately no one seems to bother checking with the French on this one).

Churchill's productions like those of Shakespeare tend to be either tragedies or farces, and luckily for the Allies Dakar was much more of the farce variety being a comedies of errors and falls from Day 1.  It had many of the elements of the Shakespearean farce - assumed identities (at one point it was intended to dress the Royal Marines in french uniforms), mistaken identities, wild goose chases and mislaid messages (costing a British Admiral to be sacked as a scapegoat).  Unfortunately it didn't have the denouement of having the entire cast meet up by accident in the town square and working out all their difficulties!

The main event was a shore bombardment resisted by naval forces, shore batteries and land based air.  Unlike the attack at Mers-El-Klebir the Vichy (which is rather like shooting fish in a barrel), the Vichy were ready and gave a good account of themselves.  After several days the affair was called off when it became clear that it was going to take a full scale invasion which De Gaulle didn't want.  The most serious damage were likely the bruised egos, reputations and prestige of the British and De Gaulle.  However, HMS Resolution was damaged by a Vichy submarine and about half the air fleet was lost.

Here's a quick run down of the forces available

Royal Navy

• 2 battleships HMS Barham and HMS Resolution
• 1 carrier HMS Ark Royal
• 4 county class cruisers
• 2 WWI vintage D-class light cruisers
• 9+ destroyers

Vichy

• 1 battleship Richelieu incomplete, damaged and immobile
• 3 modern 6" gunned cruisers
• 3 super-destroyers plus one regular destroyer
• 3 submarines
• coast defence batteries

In the air the Ark flew 30 Swordfish and (wait for it) 21 Skuas the goofiest airplanes flown by the FAA during WW2.  Opposing them were about 20 P-40 Warhawks and the same number of Marylands.
I'm sure that Tim Gow can supply the air power in correct markings, and the naval toys are readily available from GQ.

Land forces were Royal Marines and Foreign Legionnaires vs Senegalese troops.  The allies had no artillery other than naval support, but apparently had French tanks on the transports.  As an aside I've always been amused by the term Free French.  Given that most of their soldiers were either FFL or colonial units, it seems to be that they were neither particularly free nor French!

GQIII - Game Aid Lesson Learned

During last weekends naval game, I found the the rules worked fine, the game aids I had used did not.  So lessons learned:

1. Tape measures and rulers.  I pulled an unintended fast one on my players and went with the half scaled version of GQ, 1cm=2000 yds versus the normal 1cm=1000 yds.  I don't think any one moved twice as fast as they should have , but it would be easier and cleaner to have scaled rulers.  Luckily these are available as PDFs from GQ and I've printed off a set of 12 on cardstock.
2. Turn gauges.  I used the original scale turn gauges instead of the correct scaled one.  The rulers from GQ include a cm=200 turn gauge, so that's what I'll used next time round. 
3. Ship Cards.  This is where I really messed up.  I tried to make some spiffy reusable ship cards using the Deluxe ship stats from GQ, a photo of the ship, file cards and those plastic sleeves that game stores sell for card games.  However, the combination of the size of card I chose, the printing and the cut and pasting from the GQ document to the card file resulted in Cards that looked great at first glance but only semi-readable.  I'm back to the mouse pad on this one.   I think I'll go back to Angus K's site to admire his cards.
4. Markers.  The sticky tab arrows I brought for torpedoes worked very well I thought.  Same for the plastic hit and fire makers provided by Curt (he of no childers and thus bigger war-games budget), but I'll stick to the homemade (and cheaper) versions.

Tarigo Convoy Part 3

With destroyers in melee at short range, it all happened pretty quickly.  Stacy's J-class DDs had some critical hits (fires, leaks and engineering hits) but superior damage control fixed them in fast order.  In return they shot up the convoy and two of the escorts Saetta and Dardo, once again evading torpedoes this time from the Dardo.  Chad's tribal class hit both the convoy and the Nicolo Zeno.  However, the Zeno got off a torpedo salvo that sank HMS Mohawk.

Jervis (far side) and Janus (near side)  shoot up the convoy.

HMS Mohawk goes down!

Long range shot for perspective.  Tribals at the top, escort to the right and J class hunting on the left.  Curt's plastic flames are very effective in these shots!

Zeno and Dardo pick up survivors from the tail end freighters.

We called it a wrap at this point.  The convoy escort had launched all their torpedoes and had lost almost all of their guns.  The raiders were down one ship, but had all their guns and Nubian still had full tubes.  We agreed that the escorts would high tail it and leave the convoy to its fate.  The British would stick to their objective (the convoy) and elect not to pursue.  It was a fun game, with a realistic outcome and Curt definitely did better than the historical result.  However, it was still a British strategic victory given that Rommel would have to make due without the reinforcements for the 15th Panzer Division.

In the "War of the Memoirs" the British would focus on the fact that the Italian fleet scampered off and left the convoy to their mercy.  The Italians would note that they fought until they had almost no weaponry left, and blame the fact that the convoy was intercepted on traitors (until ULTRA became declassified).

Tarigo Convoy - Thoughts on GQIII

The Tarigo convoy refight was the first GQ game I'd played (at least on a table with other players) in 20 years.  Since the third edition feature a lot of new material and my memory works like a sieve, I'd thought I put some thoughts down on virtual paper.

1. The rules work well.  The basic mechanisms are easy to use and teach to newbies.  It produced a fast paced game to a conclusion with a reasonable amount of rule checking and page flipping on my part (this will only get better with more games under my belt).  Reading the rules I had a lot of "yeah that's about I'd handling it if I was writing a set of rules" moments.
2. The new GQ features are an improvement.  The biggest change was in gunfire, which now features a D12 roll for every pair of barrels rather than the abstract gun: defense factors used in earlier GQ versions.
3. I definitely like the way the rules are structured with a simple set of common rules that work but abstract details, and the ability to bolt on more complex rules for torpedoes, aircraft etc.  My tendency would be to stick to the basic set for the most part since I favour a KISS approach.  For one thing, I like the admirals to focus on the big picture and let the torpedo and aircraft specialists work out the details on their end (the impact being abstracted into the results).  I'm also skeptical of additional complexity since I find in many places this leads to "spurious accuracy" - i.e. an implied level of precision in the estimates or rules that is much higher than what is actually possible.
4. I halved the game scale to 1"=200yds, which meant that we kept the action all on one table.  In the end, we probably could have used 1"=100 yes given the 10' table top but for larger actions I'd like to return to the halved scale.
5. We used the rules plotted movement system, common to many naval rules and personal bug bear of mine.   I personally like initiative based systems (like this used in David Manley's rules) or a sequential system (like the one in GWH Trafalgar or my own WWI naval rules).  However, I had to say that the plotted movement worked well and that GQIII had enough checks in place to prevent the truly unfortunate results that sometimes occur.
6. I need to make some improvements to the games aids I used.  More on this on another post.

Conclusion - it's a good set of rules that can be played right out off of the shelf with no need for mods or changes.

Tarigo Convoy Part 2

Once the Saetta got its first shot off, in the next turn just about everyone got firm spots.  Life got hairy for the next couple of turns and Curt and I forgot to take pictures!  The Saetta got up close and personal with HMS Jervis and HMS Janus.  Collisions were avoided, guns were fired at close range and torpedoes were launch.  The Saetta was very out matched in terms of gunnery, but had the edge in torpedoes once she knocked out the Jervis' tubes.  The British spit into two groups of 2 DDs each, the J class taking the left side (foreground in the pictures) and the Tribals taking the far side.

All photos came from Curt's camera.

The sticky tab arrows mark torpedo tracks.  All the initial fish missed due to successful but not before some anxious evasion roles from the Jervis and Janus.  Gunnery took a tole especially on the convoy with the rear two freighters stopped, on fire and abandoned (AFVs plus petrol and ammo burn well apparently)!

One of the freighters explodes!  That's the Saetta in the bottom right corner having passed between the British ships.  Nubian and Mohawk had to be careful to avoid Janus' torpedoes.