Tags
Cold War, dak to, John Tiller, kate bush, Seven Firefights in Vietnam, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Vietnam
This is the ninety-fourth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series or go back to the master post.
Shifting over now to Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, we find another view of the Battle of Dak To. We have seen that Tour of Duty likes the multipart scenarios and, here, presents the battle for Hill 724; a hill that I fought over when playing Campaign Series: Vietnam.
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/dakto14.jpg?w=1024)
Once again, my prior and more expansive experience casts a shadow on Tiller’s earlier version of the same. The above screenshot captures the game on the first turn of the first scenario. An infantry company must take the hilltop (victory point location, upper left) on foot and with only that which the men carry with them. There is no off-board (or on board) indirect fire and air support.
I’ve speculated before that the first of these multipart scenarios might be intended as an introduction or even a lesson as to why things happen in the later scenarios. That may also be the case here. The scenario is 12 turns long (although, in my case, it lasted 14, per the vagaries of the of the variable ending rule). Infantry, on foot through jungle terrain moves 1 hex per turn. Count 12 hexes from the above-pictured counters. See it? There is only enough time for some (some!) of the fire teams to take the objective if there are no defending units. Spoiler alert – there are!
So is this unwinnable? I took a minor loss and probably could have done better with some better tactics. Looking at the end screen, with each side initially holding one out of the two objectives, victory might well be determined purely as a result of loss ratio. Given this, might it not be more effective to play the U.S. side purely on the defensive? In real terms, once the field commander realizes that his objective is defended, perhaps the best plan for the next hour or two is to stay put, defend against counter attacks, and wait for the air support. Since, as I have said ad nauseam, that support is not provided in this scenario, practically speaking this means running out the clock while avoiding engagement. Is that the path to victory?
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/dakto15.jpg?w=1024)
One way or another, the U.S. did take the hilltop, it being the final objective tasked to 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry at the Battle of Dak To. Thus the second of the scenario pair can begin with the U.S. forces holding the hilltops and all of the victory point locations, therefore requiring the U.S. player to fight a defensive battle against an NVA counterattack.
In this way the scenario pair does provide, using more or less the historical situation, “both sides” of an operation – taking the objective and then holding it. Perhaps the two-parter was meant to use the first to give more meaning to the second? That is, does the defensive line feel more important knowing that how hard you fought to get there? Or maybe part two of the pair is just another lesson about discretion being the better part of valor. It is hard to see how the NVA can really retake the objectives when facing even a mildly competent opponent. The U.S. mostly has to stick to prepared defenses and prevent any subset of the command from being overrun.
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/dakto16.jpg?w=1024)
As ever, I wonder why the communist forces have artillery support and I do not. Perhaps the idea here is that, facing a surprise attack with poor awareness, there isn’t opportunity to bring in the big guns without risking friendly-fire casualties. Maybe it makes it all more historically accurate. There is something frustrating about watching the enemy pepper your forces with artillery while being unable to reply in kind.
Especially now that I have Campaign Series: Vietnam as a baseline, I really question whether this scenario pair is a reasonable representation of the battle. It lacks the scope and content of the former and, I suspect given the the nature of the intense, close-quarters fighting of this battle, the lack of that context will limit a game at this scale to mostly shooting back-and-forth from fixed, entrenched positions. These scenarios do have the player do just that through 12-turn snapshots of the larger action which made up a multi-day engagement. Zooming in so as to trade bullet-for-bullet doesn’t necessarily make it more fun, though.
To help with the historical context, I’ll include a link to a video I stumbled across which had movie footage collected from Hill 724 during the battle.
I also finally* got to reading the chapter in Seven Firefights in Vietnam. It is the first and only chapter written by, well, somebody** and while it relays the experience of multiple units engaged in the opening days at Dak To, it doesn’t get into this battle for Hill 724. When it comes my own sense of continuity, I guess I opened this book a little too late. Even still, the Hill 724 fight takes place over very similar terrain to what is described in Seven Firefights and thus provides an opportunity to distinguish between the game’s interpretation of events versus how it actually happened.
For example, I read a passage describing how a squad attempted to “suppress enemy fire with its M60 machine gun and M79 grenade launcher” to support a flanking maneuver by a second squad. Given such a statement, it becomes clear why a scenario at this scale would be a perfect match for the Squad Battles game engine and, yet, it is not.
Maybe I am doing it wrong, but Squad Battles almost never offers a battle of maneuver. Infantry, especially in the jungle, is too slow and it is too easy to get pinned down, or at forced to take cover, making the act of trading away firepower for position often seem like a bad bet. Wide flanking opportunities are defeated by the limited turn count as any choice but heading straight for the objective means running out of time. What I don’t think I could EVER do is “suppress” an enemy company (!) with a single M60 and an M79 and thus allow a squad to maneuver freely. Sorry John.
Assuming I AM missing something, I would think it is in the line-of-sight for the game. A detailed study of terrain features might produce covered approaches from which a unit could flank the enemy. The fact is, though, when I break open Squad Battles, I do it because I’m in the mood for a quick game given a historical battle. I am never in the mood for a “detailed study of terrain features” using a decades-out-of-date game engine. Again, sorry John.
Return to the master post or continue forward.
*I’ve got a long story about how the Motorola Xoom tablet which I have used for years as a portable reader finally gave up the ghost. Long after it expired and long after my ancient version of Android began rejecting nearly every “App,” I could still use the PDF Reader and (occasionally) some other formats to read electronic books and other documents.
**The PDF version of the document is consistent and sensible. It credits Allan W. Sandstrum as the author. The conversion of the scanned text offers variations on his name. In the index of chapters, he is called Alllan W. Sandstrum but in chapter itself he was Allay W. Sandstrum. I’ll go with Allan. This is another example of some trouble I’ve had with the Army’s historical documents – if I try to use an “ebook” format to get a smaller file size (see above), the text comes out pretty difficult to read. The PDFs, on the other hand, contain only scanned versions of the printed books with no text conversion. They’re not searchable but they are, at least, readable. As to Mr. Sandstrum – his is a nice writing style. I think I prefer him to John A. Cash, who wrote the majority of the chapters.